Джон Харгрейв - Mind Hacking [How to Change Your Mind for Good in 21 Days]

A fascinating study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 12shows that practicing this superuser mode can greatly improve our powers of “cognitive control,” or the ability to focus our mind—which is linked to success in school, work, and life. 13In the study, subjects were trained to focus on a specific target, to notice when their minds had wandered, then to return their attention back to the target. With practice, they were able to sustain attention and ignore distractions for progressively longer periods of time—actually rewiring their neural circuitry to be more efficient . (You’ll learn this technique shortly.)

Put another way, the test subjects practiced getting into superuser mode, noticing when they were logged out, then finding their way back to superuser mode. As you’ll soon see, getting logged out of the system is not the problem; the problem is noticing that you’ve been logged out of the system. In other words, the trick is becoming conscious of when you’re in control of the mind (superuser mode) and when you’re lost in the mind (user mode).

The takeaway is that, with time and training, you can learn to stay in superuser mode for longer periods of time. More important, you can learn to “interrupt” the usual user mode so you can quickly switch into superuser mode with a quick CTRL-M. If the “mind movie” idea doesn’t appeal to you, think about getting superuser access to your mind instead.

Thinking vs. Metathinking

In junior high school, I was on the chess team: it was the only sport I could play without getting winded. My father taught me the basics of chess, and I joined the team understanding how all the pieces moved, as well as the basic concept of the game.

Our chess coach was also the school guidance counselor, giving him double geek credentials. I first met him during the summer, where he gave me a thirty-page, badly Xeroxed packet of chess strategy : all the openings, tactics, and endgames that you could use to win. I spent the summer squinting at this arcane document as scholars once studied the Dead Sea Scrolls, learning terms like “en passant” and “Ruy Lopez.”

I gradually came to understand there was another level of playing chess—a higher level—where you focused on not just moving individual pieces to achieve the short-term objective of taking enemy pieces. Instead, you orchestrated the movement of all your pieces against your opponent’s weaknesses in order to checkmate the king.

What my chess coach taught me was “metachess.” He taught me how to work on my game, not just work in the game.

Work on your mind, not just in your mind.

Our modern word “meta” comes from the Greek preposition meta , which means “after.” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics was simply the book that came after Physics .) In the twentieth century, the prefix evolved into a term meaning “about its own category,” or “an X about X”—for example, a “metatheorem” is a theorem about theorems in general. We use this prefix all the time in modern technology, such as metadata (data that describes other data) or metatags (HTML tags that describe the content of the HTML page itself). We even use it as an adjective, saying “That’s meta” to describe concepts such as:

• Superman reading his own comic book

• Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, mathematical proofs showing that mathematics can never be fully proven 14

• Movies like The Grand Budapest Hotel , which is a movie about a girl reading a book written by an author who was told a story

• TV shows that break the fourth wall, like the Doctor Who episode entitled “The Mind Robber,” in which the Doctor and his companions face the threat of becoming fictional characters

• Metaemotion (for example, being sad about being sad, or “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”)

• Metaprogramming, or programs that write new code for themselves at runtime; a simple example is the JavaScript eval() statement

• A metajoke, such as: “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The bartender says, ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’ ”

Meta is, in fact, a sign of the times. We are gradually becoming capable, perhaps even evolving in our capability, of seeing things from the “meta” perspective. There is something transcendent and wonderful about this ability to analyze a thing from a higher level of abstraction, as if we are stepping into the next dimension.

In mind hacking, we are not just thinking: we are metathinking, or thinking about our thinking. The technical term for this is “metacognition.” We are analyzing how our thoughts form, the sequence of thoughts that follow each other, how those thoughts drive our emotions and actions, and how they ultimately impact our lives.

Thinking is good! Thinking is how we make decisions, get stuff done, and move our lives forward. It is right to spend most of our time in thinking mode (and too few people do even that). But metathinking is the critical skill to develop for mind hacking. Ultimately, we want to become proficient at moving between these two modes.

Three Models, One Idea

So now we have three useful models: the “mind movie,” “superuser mode,” and “metathinking.” These are three ways to think about one simple idea: viewing the mind objectively, not getting caught up in content. In other words, becoming aware of your own mind .

As I was getting sober, I cannot remember a specific moment where I became aware of my mind; it was a dawning realization, a skill I gradually developed through the exercises in the following chapters. But as that awareness grew, so did a sense of freedom and excitement. I had identified so strongly with my mind that I believed everything it told me. Now I realized that I had a choice .

At this point, you also have a choice. While you are certainly aware of your mind, the challenge in mind hacking is to increase your powers of awareness. From here on out, I encourage you to approach your mind with a spirit of openness and curiosity. Observe it. Imagine how it could be used differently. In other words, approach your mind like a hacker.

Learning to develop this awareness, to make it a habit , is the foundation of mind hacking. As we learn to recognize what is the mind and what is “us,” we can begin to observe how untamed the mind really is, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

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Our minds are like misbehaving dogs.

When my wife and I were dating, she had a fifty-pound German shepherd that was, to put it politely, insane. The dog’s name was Cassie, and while Cassie was supposedly purebred , she may have actually been inbred . We never asked questions about her family history; all we knew was that somehow Cassie’s DNA double-helix got wrapped around the central strand like a leash around a pole.

Cassie was unpredictable, exhausting, and dangerous. When the doorbell rang, she would greet visitors by jumping on top of them full force, barking, slobbering uncontrollably, and sometimes biting them. At night, she would fall into a deep slumber underneath a coffee table, only to suddenly bolt upright at 3:00 a.m., overturning furniture and everything on it.

Taking Cassie for a walk was a daily adventure. First, you’d have to get the leash on, chasing her through the house as she knocked over chairs and appliances. Once outside, you’d hang on for dear life as she lunged randomly at any object that caught her attention: fire hydrants, balloons, invisible phantoms. She would slam her head into trees and occasionally try to attack children. If we had brought in the Dog Whisperer, he would have become the Dog Screamer.