Introspective Cognizance
The “reality” constructed within your own mind.
By: David Deschesne
Editor/Publisher,
Fort Fairfield Journal July 5, 2017
Introspective Cognizance is a pretty fancy psychological term I have coined in order to describe the reality people create within their own consciousness. This reality is based upon information they receive from external sources—information which at times may not be complete, or accurate. Yet, they form their beliefs and ideas about that information within their minds and accept it as “real.”
Part of the process of populating the data sets that make up this artificial reality is called the “adaptive unconscious.” As described in the book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking the adaptive unconscious is “a part of the brain’s activity that quickly and quietly processes a lot of data we need to function as human beings.” (Blink, ©2005 Malcolm Gladwell, p. 11) For example, if an oncoming car swerves into your lane at a high rate of speed, you don’t consciously sit there and consider all your options. Presuming you’re not under the influence of alcohol or debilitating drugs, your adaptive unconscious instantly analyzes things like closing speed, width of road, the terrain on either side of the road, other traffic in the area and if there are any pedestrians or animals around. It then calculates the best possible response to the oncoming car and directs your consciousness to act accordingly. For many people this takes less than a second, for others it could take two seconds or longer. Guess which ones are more likely to evade car accidents.
It is this ability of the brain to amass data, make decisions and create a perception of the world that can at times really help in the survival of the human, or cause him or her to be severely deluded and misled resulting in either physical or psychological injury to themselves if not enough quality information is available. Understanding how Introspective Cognizance works and is used to con or mislead people can help to identify when it is being exploited in order to adjust the decision making process and modify the person’s perception of reality.
The effects of Introspective Cognizance are exploited in three major areas of life and by tailoring the amount and type of information a person receives, can affect the outcome of the reality that person experiences. The three major areas of exploitation are: 1.) entertainment; 2.) news media; and 3.) personal, online “dating” or various social networking schemes.
Entertainment
Psychological thrillers and Sci-fi adventures capitalize on the adaptive unconscious within Introspective Cognizance to make their movies more exciting. Take, for example, the movies; Signs, Super 8, Battle Los Angeles, Cloverfield and Zathura. In each of these movies, our hero’s adversary is slowly revealed throughout the movie. We never really see the space alien up front and in the face until near the end of the movie. Instead, the directors rely on a process called the “slow reveal” where various attributes of the alien are shown without actually showing the alien. For example, in Signs we hear the thuds and loud, scurrying footsteps of the alien without actually seeing it, then a part of its leg and finally its hand reaches under the door. In Battle: Los Angeles we see lots of destruction and carnage being wrought by a group of unseen malevolent aliens. In Super 8, Cloverfield and Zathura we catch only dark, shadowy, fraction of a second glimpses of the alien throughout the movie before meeting it in full view toward the end.
What the directors of those movies are doing by slowly revealing the malevolent actor is capitalizing on the brain’s adaptive unconscious in order to have the viewer create the image of the alien in their own mind. This interplay between the movie and the viewer’s subconscious creates a much more powerful psychological effect by having the viewer’s subconscious become a participant in the making of the movie by imagining and forming an image of the adversary within their own mind. This is a very personal effect since each person’s subconscious is going to perceive the movie cues a little differently—based upon their background, life experiences, and imagination— and form their own personal image of what the alien looks like. By the time the alien is actually revealed to full sight near the end of the movie, all of the attributes created and imagined by the viewer’s sub-conscious mind are then grafted onto that visual image and the two are merged within the mind of the viewer into his/her own personally-created movie character.
News Media
The news media is supposed to be the watchdog of government. But, over the past 100 years government-friendly advocates have silently positioned themselves as the head of major news media organizations and have morphed that industry into a government mouthpiece.
Adapting the movie industry’s tactic of the “slow reveal” into the news media’s selective “no reveal” has created some pretty convincing realities in the minds of news consumers in the public to the point that they are having little difficulty in crafting the government’s version of reality into the minds of the masses with little to no effort outside of a pre-scripted and psychologically designed press release. The acquiescent news media then simply delivers these press releases via a copy-and-paste protocol which leaves no room for objective analysis of the facts, or any questioning of the government’s “official” story.
With the “no reveal” method of crafting a press release it isn’t so much that the government or news media is lying, as much as it is they simply leave out certain pieces of information—or not reveal them—in order to craft a preconceived perception of reality in the mind of the news consumer.
For example, the statement; “The dog chewed the man’s arm off” by itself will create a certain image of the dog and the man within a person’s mind. For nearly every person who reads or hears that statement, an image of an evil, vicious dog overpowering a weak, powerless victim will be formed. However, when more information is given that imagery will change drastically. For example, when the sentence, “After the man incessantly beat the dog for hours” is added the victim then becomes the dog and the man is the evil one. Both sentences by themselves may be factual, but when the first one is presented without the qualifying information of the other, a false version of reality will be crafted within the mind of the person receiving it.
This technique has been used quite effectively throughout history to deceive the masses into perceiving a version of reality that is advantageous to the controllers of government in order to advance either a financial or political agenda against the people in society. In all cases it is detrimental to the people who are misled. I will give a couple of examples here.
First, let’s go back to the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. It was in fact a surprise to the military personnel stationed there—even to their commanding officers. That part of the story is what was parroted by the news media on behalf of the government. What wasn’t revealed was the fact that the government at top levels was fully aware six months prior to the attack, and—after having broken the Japanese code language—two weeks prior to the attack and the morning of the attack that the “surprise” attack was on (this is not a “conspiracy theory,” the government finally admitted it in 2000. see House Resolution HR4205, July 13, 2000, pp. 221-235. Our local television news media, WAGM TV, selectively decided not to report it even though I brought a copy of it to them and delivered it to their news staff in person). This crucial information was simply not revealed to the military commanders in Hawaii before the attack, or to the public afterwards, in order to generate a pro-war sentiment amongst a predominantly isolationist, anti-war American public. The result was—like the first sentence in our dog story—the public reacted to the artificial narrative and wholeheartedly supported the war effort to the financial windfall in the billions of dollars to the war manufacturing industry. The same kind of strings were pulled with the Lusitania that lured the U.S. into World War I and also in the Gulf of Tonkin attack, but I’m running out of space so you can look them up for yourself.
Another “no reveal” tactic happened in 9/11. This topic is too large to go into here but suffice it to say the government crafted a version of reality in the minds of news consumers that was friendly to its position and also quite lucrative financially and politically. Two extremely large buildings were imploded into their own basements on live TV using controlled demolitions and the government and their lapdogs in the media were able to convince a large number of gullible people that somehow burning jet fuel caused the buildings to collapse at free-fall speed—defying all laws of physics. The BBC even goofed by reading a pre-scripted news story of the implosion of World Trade Center building 7 while there was a live view of Building 7 on their own TV monitor behind their news readers showing the building was still standing. Oops, got to scrub that newscast from the archives!
It’s not that the media is actually lying—well, in many cases they are—but rather, it’s that they selectively choose to reveal facts and conceal facts in order to craft a version of reality that is conducive to advancing the government’s goals of domination and subjugation of society. Don’t hold the local reporterette responsible, she was simply trained to read copy and look pretty on camera. There’s no real, investigative journalism going on these days when government might be implicated in illegal activity. Instead, it’s management and ownership of major news outlets who actually control the information you receive in order to artificially craft your ideologies and beliefs. Books have been written on this topic and many more examples can be shown but are outside the confines of space of this editorial.
Social Networking
People have been meeting each other, becoming friends, getting married or otherwise networking as long as there have been people on Earth.
As described in the book, Blink, we all used a process called “thin slicing” when meeting a person, either for the first time or, meeting someone we already know for the first time that day. The subconscious uses thin slicing to collect multiple data sets in facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, words spoken, inflection of those words and eye contact to instantly determine what kind of mood this person is in, or what kind of intents they have at the present moment. This process of thin slicing is instantaneous and is continually being updated every second of the day as we interact with people. It helps us to determine the type of mood the person we are interacting with is in so we can alter or avoid our contact with them as necessary.
Social networking via digital interface has drastically changed how we thin slice new people we “meet.” When chatting with someone via e-mail or text the only information we have is the written words. Absent are the visual cues, body language, inflection of those words and eye contact. Acronyms like LOL (Laughing Out Loud) and happy face emoticons have tried to make up for the lack of visual cues in conversation, but they are sorely inadequate.
These are generally harmless shortcomings of online texting. But when someone “meets” a person via these methods and believes they are falling in love with them—even though they have never met in person—problems can, and often do, arise.
It’s incredibly easy to court someone online, or even on the phone, especially someone who you have never met. Con-artists are especially adept at figuring out what the other person lacks in their life emotionally and can craft their words and conversation to fill that void.
The same way the slow reveal in a movie allows the viewer to create an image of the adversary in their own mind, the slow reveal of the new person via electronic interfacing also allows a person to create an image of their new “friend” within their mind. This image is based on incomplete information about someone whom they have not only never met, but have received no independent background information on. Absent are the visual cues, eye contact, other body language, and the person’s back-story that could help determine if this is friend or foe.
The longer this type of artificial relationship goes on before the two people meet, the more of an artificial image of each is built in the other’s mind. Even if neither is a con-artist and both are entering into the electronic relationship with the best of intentions, the two will inevitably craft an image of the other that fills their own, personal needs and fantasies—an image that is in most cases unrealistic.
Another problem inherent in e-dating is the two people can never know how the other reacts to stressful situations or adversity. Do they get angry, do they remain calm, do they become abusive, are they problem-solvers? The only way one can really learn this information about the other is to be around that person in a controlled environment for a considerable length of time—by controlled I mean, a public scenario with the ability to leave if things become intolerable. You can never learn a person’s good or bait traits simply by chatting with them at a distance.
If and when these two electronic daters finally do meet, a couple of outcomes could occur depending on the intentions of one of the parties. First, if there is no con involved, they will simply find out the other is not the type of person that they constructed within their imagination and be horribly disappointed. Secondly, if there is a con then there will be a dominant/submissive relationship between the two where the submissive becomes a victim of abuse, rape, or worse. It is simply impossible to determine the outcome of such a relationship if the only information you have is derived from a history of text communications online or phone conversations. Even after a year of these types of conversations, this person is still a stranger you haven’t met yet.
The digital age certainly has made things more efficient, but it has concomitantly made them more muddled and complicated. While digital technology can allow a person to take a picture, process it and send it around the world in seconds, it also allows a greater ability to filter out or conceal information in order to mold and craft a perception of reality that is neither real or true.
In entertainment, the altered reality in Introspective Cognizance is mostly harmless fun. But when it’s deployed in the news media and social networking, it can cause people to make decisions that can adversely affect themselves and their families—sometime irreparably.
As the old maxim goes, “Stay Alert, Stay Alive.” Try to collect as much information as you can on a subject before rendering a final decision.
