Input for the 'new' brain focuses on intellect and creativity, ideas and logic are likely to form the most useful input here, which is stored in semantic memory.

All of these kinds of input when synchronized can give a very powerful effect, more so when enhanced by any other means. Movement, keywords, and association are a shortcut to establishing new patterns of thought and new network connections. And we can use allegorical language to set up an encryption scheme for self-protection (more later).

The basics: we form a habit of never allowing access to certain areas we do not wish to use again and which we do not wish to be controlled by others. We use a trigger to remind ourselves but that trigger is encrypted; nobody else can ever know what it means or what it is doing, even if they see it happen, because they can never see the part that is inside our mind. Our trigger is a multiple password, which interrupts a habitually associated train of memories and redirects input along an alternative route of our own designation. The acuity of the interruption is the vital part in successfully using this, and the actual keys remain out of sight, as do the contents of the doors we have locked.

Let's hack: Wonko the Sane's Anti Stupidity Software

Think of something you want to change, the rules will be the same, whatever it is...Just for the example, let's say we decide to permanently close a door leading to reactions/irrational arguments and strong negative emotion. For years, whenever somebody has said things we think are patently absurd, let's say we have thought, 'this is garbage', and said, 'that's a load of garbage', which statement has often led to us being punched in the teeth; plainly not an interaction unless we are a specific sort of masochist. Now, instead, we want to stay in 'overview' mode instead and look at the reality, untouched by anxiety, and not make that habitual response. Let's use a fast method to achieve that change.

The next time you find yourself thinking 'this is garbage', attach to that thought a multiple password consisting of a keyword, a movement and an image to remind you that something has gone wrong.

Keywords are important. The more memorable they are, the more likely they are to be effective. The more frequently they are used, the sooner they will become automatic, so in a way the more different mistakes you make, the faster you learn. (Tell that to your schoolteacher.) Used together with midbrain input and sensory motor input, they are pretty infallible.

Keywords should be kept secret not for reasons of deceit but for reasons of interaction. They help us remember something is important, private, and give it more emotional weighting. This is a concept most medical people find easier to grasp than most... because they have awareness of the 'placebo' effect.R34 If you pull a long face and tell someone they have almost no chance, you reduce their chances. If you tell them they're going to be fine, they stand more chance of getting better. (From intelligence's point of view, what could you say? You say the truth as you see it... The better their immune system is the better chance they stand, so it's important to stay optimistic and help the medication work better. And, there is always hope. The more positive they are, the more hope there is, so their fight now is to stay cool and light hearted and really enjoy our chance to kick that disease's ass, sister. That's what you say. You respect their ability to fight with you, and, if they're intelligent, they do. Not all patients can do this, not even most, but enough to make it worthwhile giving them a chance to.)

All that really matters about a keyphrase/word is that it jumps out at you, jumps you out of idly sitting back absorbing dodgy input without noticing. It may be that you are unable to interact, or that you are in danger from the examples of other's behavior (e.g. outnumbered by nutters), it may be that you are becoming confused about what to do, or distracted by gloomy thoughts, but a keyword should basically catch your conscious attention on purpose and be linked to a whole set of associated memories which change your perspective; make you aware of what is going on. Triggers are meant to give you a sudden access to overview. To make you aware that in reality, a virus is probably present and you had better beware. Firewalls up! Access denied.

These words, movements and images are your triggers to stopping dodgy input regardless of its origin. They turn on a genuine immune system against the virus. After a short time of practice, we are no longer so easily infected. And that gives us a heady sense of freedom so watch out. I've associated the triggers deeply with a switch of attention; suddenly, I focus on what's going on in my mind, in real time, here and now, and I take control and change my neurochemistry midflow. And I think that's absolutely marvelous. As we shall see, everything has its price, but I find that degree of control a worthwhile compensation.

Coping with an attack in real time

So far we've looked at some ways to protect ourselves, mainly from harmful input which is unwittingly spread around us in everyday society and by the majority of people. Dodgy input is not a deliberate evil in this context; it is almost always an accidental one.

Sometimes, though, it isn't.

If people are chronically anxious, they sometimes start being stupid on purpose. They don't call it stupidity of course, they call it any number of things, but whatever it is, it will be 'for your own good', to 'bring you to your senses', and the word 'should' will be used a lot. Some people quite deliberately try to manipulate your thoughts and your behavior, to make you more acceptable (to them).

All idiots are well meaning idiots, even the ones who want to stone you to death to save your soul, or wipe out half the population to save the other half. Such people may well think you are actually mentally disturbed if you disagree with them, and some can become more unbalanced and violent if you try overtly to resist.

Our aim here is not to get you to dodge bullets. Our aim is to enable you not to have to. The best way to avoid cot deaths is to avoid cots. Don't get into friendships with nutters. If it's happened already, get out as soon as you can. Just don't go there. Anybody trying deliberately to manipulate your mind without your informed consent is not an acceptable companion.

Unfortunately in our society things have gone a bit awry. Many people in anxiety use fear conditioning as an unconscious strategy without really knowing what they are doing, or through deliberate deceit. They'll use sex, drink, drugs or emotional blackmail to try to program you to behave as they wish you to behave. This means programming your will to serve their desires, usually for the pacification of their own anxiety. (Many people are, admittedly, sitting targets). It's amazing what some people will do for sex, for example, or indeed, what drink can do to an audience. Fear of losing something will drive people to extremes, including amateur or even subconscious neurohacking, so be aware of that.

Usually, the type of interference we encounter is not too serious, short term, and happens whenever we encounter someone stuck in M2 or 3 with an over-inflated idea of the validity of their world view as applied to others. Open disagreement with such people only causes them to assume you are mad or stupid or both. So if you have to encounter such dodgy types in your daily life, work etc., think seriously about changing your circumstances in order to exclude them. If you're stuck with it for now, you'll need to use security techniques. You don't want people of this nature messing with your mind. Therefore, you will have to get used to the fact that whenever someone you are talking to is too stupid to handle the truth, you will have to use these two techniques: You will have to translate your words into those of a map they can understand, and you will have to self-censor.

This latter isn't very easy for some people because it raises an ethical issue due to two considerations: (1) they believe in the right to free speech without censorship of any kind, and if their words upset others, tough. (2) They believe in creative freedom of expression of their truth as a part of overall freedom and justice, they don't want to upset anyone but are prepared to argue whatever it is out with logic. These considerations arise at some point for most people. ..."Why should I censor my words and actions?"... "Censorship sucks!" I can only agree. If we lived in a sane society and if everyone could handle the truth without 'throwing a wobbly', that would be great! And indeed you can talk openly like this with anyone in the same matrix as you. The thing is, if you're out there at either end, there aren't going to be many people in the same matrix as you. As far as is possible we should strive for free speech and open expression, but we use self-censorship as a means to control our external situation, in order to protect intelligence, not to restrain it. It means we have to be creative in order to find the right way to say things, but that's no problem for a working mind.

We are of course really capable of doing and saying anything we want to, including running through the streets of Nazi Germany shouting, 'Look at me, I'm Jewish, and Hitler is an asshole!' Some would go this far to protect their rights to freedom and I applaud their integrity, for we are all ultimately free to do as we please as long as we are prepared to accept the consequences. In a sane world the consequences of free speech would be an ongoing series of very interesting discussions and discoveries, but currently our society is not that sensible, and 'freedom of expression' usually results in arguments, anxiety, aggression, more stupidity and the odd gunshot wound.

Security is always for our own protection, but also for the protection of intelligence per se. You may not care if your words or actions upset somebody; serves them right for being stupid, you might think, or 'maybe they're just too sensitive'. This may well be true, but it is not the point. The point is, whenever you cause stupidity, things get worse and the virus proliferates. It is therefore part of the problem, not the solution. Remember that there is something wrong with most people's brains. Now if it were something like epilepsy, you wouldn't go showing your groovy psychedelic flashy-light video when they were around, for concern over causing a seizure. You can watch it yourself whenever you like, and you wouldn't moan about this restricting your freedom of expression, you'd be aware that your attempt to share it would probably result in illness, because the guy with epilepsy's brain cannot handle that sort of input. ... Now you're getting it. The same consideration applies to stupidity. If people's brains cannot handle some sorts of input without getting ill (and I count stupidity as illness) then you do not present that input when they are around.

But, you may think, that's just pandering to people's fears and insecurities; how on earth can that help to grow intelligence? This is only fair enough if the person involved has the potential to overcome their fear, and until you can judge that efficiently you don't risk being wrong. Every time you cause an attack of stupidity it affects your well being for as long as you have to stick around it, and the well being of everybody around that person for some time. By self-censoring you are protecting yourself from the effects of the stupidity of others, and you have to do this at first. You have to get 100% professionally competent at not upsetting people by accident, before you can move onto the much more complex pursuit of upsetting people on purpose (chapter 14).

Worst case scenarios

If people are trying to condition you and break your will and they are honest about it, (1) they're not amateurs, (2) they're going to be using something like a multi-input biofeedback system with subliminals, a selection of specific neuroactive drugs and something basic but expedient with an electric plug at one end and anything nasty on the other, and (3) run like hell.

Anybody trying to manipulate you against your will in any way is unacceptable, even if they don't really know what they're doing. Intelligence is still violated. 'Breaking the will' necessitates sensory and emotional overload, piling psychological stress onto physical stress, pushing the brain chemistry into such imbalance that eventually the mind escapes into insanity or retreats into a survival mode where we stop thinking and go through the motions of whatever is required of us like a robot. This is the required result for the programmer, of course, because in this state we can be programmed from a bottom-up, sensory motor set of basics, trained like an animal through fear and reward. What has been 'broken' (or rather, disengaged, abandoned and boycotted) are connections in the neural pathways between the hemispheres themselves, in favor of the old pathways of childhood being strengthened, back in the midbrain. You're regressed to the mentality of a seven-year-old. The change to different areas used shows up on fMRI. What happens to your personality when you 'break', is the abandoning of intelligence's morals and values in favor of biology. There are degrees of severity in this, obviously; most people experience brainwashing effects in school, which is the bottom end of the scale, or emotional blackmail at some time in their lives, but very few meet the professionals. At the top end of the scale, it gets quite spectacular. You snap into what you see unconsciously as 'reality'. You admit your fear both to yourself and anybody who wants to listen, and you admit, in your mind, your failure to overcome biology, You admit defeat, and consciously or otherwise you admit you'll do anything for release from facing that fear. Those who can't face admitting this go crazy or they die, usually from suicide. Which one you do depends on your current wiring. If you've got a healthily wired mind and a reasonably high pain threshold you won't die or go crazy, but you will still break under pressure. This pressure happens on a small scale any time that you allow yourself to be controlled by someone else's behavior. It happens on a larger scale with emotional blackmail and an even larger scale with emotional and physical abuse. You don't have to be a professional to drive a human to suicide, as we see so repeatedly in our news media.

That there are some people in the world who will cheerfully hurt others 'for their own good' is quite bad enough, but when it gets to the stage of being once removed from the personal and becomes 'for the good of the party', or 'god's will', I'd advise you to run your ass off.

Take a hard stand on this from the beginning. Remember what really matters and what doesn't. Set your boundaries clearly for what you find it acceptable to be around, and for how you expect to be treated. Don't allow them to be transgressed unless you want to know what it feels like to betray your own mind, and figure out why so many people choose suicide after the experience.

Once you figure out the places not to go and the people not to hang around with, things get a whole lot easier. In the meantime, and in new situations where you do not yet know people, you'll need to take precautions.

Finally, if you do have any information in your mind that people would kill each other for, I recommend you put a copy of it elsewhere and wipe the original. What you genuinely cannot recall, cannot be got out of you. Such extreme measures are rarely necessary, and they won't prevent people from causing you harm; they'll only protect the information. There is very little information worth dying for, in my opinion.