The Michelangelo Effect: Keys To Extraordinary Success For Ordinary People

By Nekesa Ouma-Namulu

This book’s mandate is simple. To tell you a simple truth:

Whatever your present difficulty, your brain can find a way out of it.

Whatever your current difficulty, there is a science to exactly how you ended up where you are.

If you’ve ever wondered why...

• dating and relationship advisors are so fixated on ‘make-overs’ (your online profile, your wardrobe, your face, your conversation skills)?
• prosperity gurus are so bent on you ‘fixing’ yourself?
• some of the most beautiful people never find love and some of the most intelligent ones never make good money?
• people with disadvantages identical to yours are so hugely successful?
• and finally, why ‘idiots’ do so well?

...you need to read this book.

There is a pattern to your inability to pay bills, live where you want to, find love or use your talents to your benefit. A mesmerising storyteller has pulled a pretty screen across the entire mess, shielding it from view. It is my hope that this book pushes that curtain so far back that you are never again pulled by anyone’s strings but your own.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hitherby Brookes Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501442452

Book preview

Introduction

Something's happened to the modern mind, and it's not good...

The take-over of our brains by modern conditioning is so total, we forget things were once very different. Most people are astonished to hear that they can think their way out of their problems. Even if they do believe it, do not know how. What passes for advice is often just a lot of advertising copy and attractive packaging for shifting product. It's persuasive, seems logical and ought to work. But is never does.

No-one is really taught how to use their brain. Most people think of it as a mechanical automaton they have no control over. Indeed, most are amazed that this underrated organ can be mastered to perform the near-miraculous in their lives. Rote-learning at school and pre-packaged 'information' have dulled this magnificent asset, resulting in defeated, miserable lives. We've got to a point where we don't even dare to hope for better.

Yet.

There are people who are able to cut through the glossy packaging, canned 'wisdom', and the inane smiles of toothy models to see what REALLY GOES ON and WORKS in real life.

To the rest of us, it is as though these people posses some kind of superpower. They are able to 'read' the stock market, make savvy investments, find and keep wonderful life partners or master multiple skills and languages. They have an uncanny ability to avoid costly emotional, monetary and physical mistakes, and are able recognise opportunity with eerie consistency. How they spend their mental currency, while you stew on trifles, running from pillar to post, is what makes the difference between their genius, and your despair.

Their secret is, to quote a much used phase, 'hidden in plain sight'. They have learnt how to GET OUT OF THE BRAIN'S WAY and let it do it's job.

Overlook this powerful ally and your life will feel like someone else is pulling all the strings.

This is the stuff of this book.

Foreword

This book's mandate is simple. To tell you a simple truth:

Whatever your present difficulty, your brain can find a way out of it.

Whatever your current difficulty, there is a science to it. A science that explains exactly how you ended up where you are. There is a pattern to your inability to pay bills, live where you want to, find love or use your talents to your benefit. A mesmerising storyteller has pulled a pretty screen across the entire mess, shielding it from view. It is my hope that this book pushes that curtain so far back that you are never again pulled by anyone's strings but your own.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Table of Contents

Section One: Nasty Mind Viruses

Mis-Information's Daughters

How 100 Years of Hollywood Completely Ruined Thinking

Using Your Eyes to See... The Most Difficult Thing to Do?

Masters of Mis-Direction

What's the Matter with Me?

The 'Fix Yourself' Myth

Mis-Education of the Modern Mind

Uncommon Knowledge

The Good Child

Section Two: The Genius Mind

You Can Rebuild Your Brain

The Plastic Brain

Rebuild Your Brain

Genius Thinking for Children

Think Like a Genius

How NOT to Think

The Power of Asking the Right Question

The Power of Imagination

Genius Thinking for Problem-Solving: the Method

The Extraordinary Power of Personal Congruence

Beyond the Brain

Section Three

A Whole New World

Recreate Your World

The Right to Walk This Earth on Your Own Terms

About the Author

References

________________

Section One: Nasty Mind Viruses

Mis-Information's Daughters

________________

How 100 Years of Hollywood Completely Ruined Thinking

Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530)

WHO IS IN YOUR BRAIN?

In 1984, Dr John E Sarno, Professor of Clinical Rehabilitation Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and Attending Physician at the Howard A Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical Center, published an extraordinary book, Mind Over Back Pain. The book had an unusual premise: healing serious back pain can be achieved without drugs, surgery, or exercise.

He clearly knew what he was talking about, having come to his conclusions after years of research, as well as first-hand observations from decades of clinical practice at his busy surgery in New York. His book outlines how an unusually high number of severe, debilitating cases of back pain have stress and other psychological factors at their root, rather than the usual suspects such as slipped discs, pinched nerves and such. Dr Sarno explains how most of these given causes are usually misdiagnoses, as his physical therapy-less, exercise-less and drug-less methods continue to relieve scores of patients of their back pain, for good.

However, that's not the most astonishing thing about his book. After its publication, Dr Sarno started to get very odd reports from his readers. People who'd suffered years of serious, disabling back pain, who'd given up after trying dozens of different treatments, including surgery and powerful pain management therapies, started to report that their back pain disappeared, simply from reading his book.

What.

Reading the book cured their back pain. Not managed it—cured it.

The word 'cure' is not one that easily rolls off the tongues of folks in the medical establishment. What was going on?

Well, it is almost as if the readers' brains, assimilating the compelling and powerful new information about the real cause of their illness, somehow automatically rewired themselves to rid the body of the disease. And the pain vanished, forever. Some patients admitted to not really understanding the technicalities of his method, and most, of course, were not experts on the neurology of the musculoskeletal system. Yet, years of very real, debilitating pain, often arising from an actual physical incident (where the back was 'thrown', for example), disappeared just by reading the book. No therapy, no counselling, nothing.

We'll return to Dr Sarno's gleeful ex-patients later in this book. It gets even more amazing. However, the question at the beginning of this chapter now takes on a sinister hue.

Who is in your brain?

There's no way of putting this nicely. Your brain has been hijacked. There's nothing left in there but grinning celebrities and bombs. Hollywood's gone and taken the most astonishing piece of thinking machinery the world has ever seen and turned it to rot.

For instance, you probably think you understand how success stories work. After all, you've read countless. You've been educated on what makes relationships work. Given a hypothetical scenario, you seriously believe you'd recognise what would bring about a romantic, happy ending. You are sure you'd know a crook if you saw one. You've got a pretty set idea of what kind of person would make a good boss, client, tenant, neighbour, or spouse, or be best suited to run a country. You are confident in your understanding of the wrongs of dictatorial leadership methods as opposed to the merits of consensus. You believe you've got a pretty good grasp of what the world will look like 50 years from now. You believe in a highly scripted world. You think your mind is your own. You are in big trouble.

Our brilliant thinking machines have been taken over and roped into service for crooked salesmen. It's a tragedy of epic proportions. Seen purely as a cognitive machine, the brain's capabilities are, quite literally, mind blowing. The history of human endeavour and achievement is a testament to its colossal ability. Architecture, music, art, engineering, abstract thought and technology all showcase what sheer human brainpower can do. Savants, people who display well above average ability in one area but usually have problems performing 'normal' tasks, particularly with regard to social and motor skills, give us a tantalising glimpse of the full capability of this thinking phenomenon. Kim Peek, who is famous for being the inspiration behind the movie Rain Man, is one such individual. Peek, who died in December 2009, aged 58, struggled to walk and could not button his shirt, but what he could do is amazing. Peek read more than 10,000 different books and accurately remembered every single detail about them.[1] He got so good at recalling facts from books that friends found they couldn't take him to watch Shakespeare productions because he'd stand up in the middle of a performance to point out errors the cast had made.[2] Amazingly, Kim could read two pages of a book at once, taking just three seconds to do so, with each eye working independently of the other.

The catalogue of savant abilities continues. Leslie Lemke can play any piece of music on piano flawlessly after hearing it just once. This includes complex pieces of classical music, in spite of him having had no classical music training. Stephen Wiltshire can reproduce accurate, detailed drawings of entire cities after a single visit or look. It took Wiltshire just seven days to draw a 10-metre-wide, astonishingly detailed panoramic mural of Tokyo after a helicopter ride over the city. The impossibly detailed piece of work, produced entirely from memory, includes accurate details of thousands of buildings, towers, highways, cars, buses, even down to the intricate detail of trees and windows.[3] The controversy surrounding Daniel Tammet's abilities only adds to the showcase of the astounding capabilities of the brain. It has been argued that Tammet, who holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits, might not be a savant in a technical sense, but might have somehow trained his (very clever) brain to have savant-like abilities. Tammet also speaks seven languages fluently, including Icelandic, which he learnt in a week for a television interview.[4]

So why, with the best cognitive instrument the world has ever seen, do we get things so wrong, so often? The question is made even more baffling with mounting evidence that, on a physiological level, there might not be that much difference between the brain of a genius and that of an ordinary person. The genius, apparently, is in the wiring, and the manner in which information is processed.[5] The brain of mathematical genius Shakuntala Devi, for example, who passed away in Bangalore, India in 2013, aged 83, was certainly wired differently from most. She was blisteringly good at processing maths. She once beat a computer in calculating the 23rd root of a 201-digit number,[6] arriving at the answer to this mind-boggling problem a whole 12 seconds faster than the machine. She made it into the Guinness Book of World Records when she multiplied two 13-digit numbers, and recited the answer in just 28 seconds.

Devi was a very gifted and intelligent woman. How Devi's brain got to be so good at what it did is still a matter of speculation, but more than one expert posits that her brain had somehow developed thinking pathways and channels that were extremely specialised towards calculating and solving complex problems.[7] However, Devi was no savant; her brain worked well in all other areas too, making her a successful cookbook author and novelist.

So the question remains: why, with the best cognitive instrument the world has ever seen, are so many of us stuck on stupid?

I blame Hollywood. And TV.

Only having a brain whose principal source of information regarding the temperament of elephants is children's Saturday morning TV fare, would explain why a couple, riding alone in a solitary VW would pursue a 15,000-pound bull elephant in the bush in order to videotape it. They ended up in hospital. The car was a wreck.[8] They were lucky. Such accounts usually end badly for both human and animal parties.

Hollywood is the devil. This story of a South African couple shows what happens when you think you've watched how elephants behave, while in reality, all you have in your brain's databank is a digital representation of carefully edited 'elephant footage' framed in syrupy narrative and music. In actual life, if you annoy an elephant enough, it will try to kill you.

Hollywood's phenomenal success in cornering the thinking market is completely unparalleled in history. No religion, ideology or culture has seized our collective minds in quite the way Hollywood has. Today, perfectly normal people think nothing of going on bended knee to propose. Where did they learn to behave like that? Every single way in which people think, behave and make choices, right down to how to talk to their children and neighbours, has been dictated by a screen. Walking down the street, you won't find friends holding hands anymore. Because that's Hollywood shorthand for 'gay.' And Hollywood shorthand for gay is followed by Hollywood narrative for You're about to get beaten up.

Schooled by Hollywood, an errant young parent sees no disconnect between hugging their young child with a teary I love you, before vanishing completely out of their life. As does an irresponsible spouse spouting the same before wreaking violence and havoc on their beloved. In Hollywood, love is a word whose power lies only in being said, not a commitment.

Hollywood primes, conditions, prepares and educates us for a reality that does not exist. Those of us dazzled by Hollywood's fantasy narrative are busy wasting time, money, and effort, while steadily getting poorer, sicker and sadder.

Your actions and decisions are based on your worldview and, having no direct contact with the outside world, your brain, which constructs this view, has to rely on data from the senses, as well as its interaction with the immediate environment to get an idea of what the blazes is going on out there. Babies, hair-raisingly, do not know that sharp objects can be dangerous, until they do. A complex interactive feedback loop between our environment and our brains teaches us how different stimuli impact upon our wellbeing. Far from interacting with, and learning from, our real environment, The Screens have our attention and are hard at work very effectively shaping our idea of the world we live in, reality be damned.

The science behind this takeover of the mind is in. Allow me to introduce you to the orienting reflex and its cousin, the startle reflex, the two Achilles' heels in our wiring that allow utter nonsense to get hardcoded into our thinking. With Hollywood's tinkering, they are the reason you can be so calm when handing over your life savings to an investment consultant (appropriate reaction: watch out!), yet feel your heart start to race when a group of hooded teenagers stroll by (appropriate reaction: calm down). Contrary to Hollywood conditioning, in real life you're statistically in a lot more danger from the former.

So how did Hollywood hijack our thinking to give us such a skewed view of reality? Let's take a closer look at those reflexes. The startle reflex is, as the name goes, the one that makes you jump out of your chair in fright. Handy when you need to duck quickly out of danger's way without thinking about it, but more about that in a bit.

The orienting reflex needs a little more explaining. It sits somewhere between the startle reflex and the ho-hum response we have to everyday events. It has been called the 'What is it?'[9] reflex and is essentially a cascade of physiological, and ultimately behavioural, reactions that are triggered when a 'novel' stimulus is detected. Put simply, the orienting reflex is what made your ancestor, skipping merrily across a prehistoric plain, suddenly pause, the hairs at the back of his head starting to rise, as he notices that the leaves of the bush just ahead of him are quivering suspiciously. This reflex is appropriate when the stimulus is not strong enough to make you jump, but odd enough to make you take wary notice. Without it, your historic relative would be in constant peril, unable to respond appropriately to potentially dangerous changes in his environment.

Stuff happens to you when the orienting reflex is triggered. Some you will feel; measurable changes, for example, in your skin and heart rate take place[10] as the brain braces itself for what's coming next. Other changes taking place in the brain are aimed at priming you to re-evaluate your environment in order to respond to it anew. Referring to these changes, one book elaborates:

Where this occurs, several changes will inevitably be required—these may be behavioural in order to prepare for responding to the new situation, or perceptual as in the case where information would be expected from the new stimulus, or cognitive where a new set of anticipated events will be constructed.[11]

In other words, your brain gears itself to react to the situation. Depending on what happens next, your beloved ancestor will be all set to either flee from, or ignore, the quivering bush. Very handy if you are an unsuspecting Early Man about to become someone's dinner.

Unfortunately for us, the orienting reflex is triggered just as effectively by pictures as by 'real' objects.[12] Our reflexes are today groomed not by hungry lions or tigers, but by the lights and sounds of mesmerising Hollywood productions, hair-raising TV news 'reports', or the attention-grabbing headlines of a newspaper. This means that after a constant diet of television, newspapers and movies, without realising why, your brain begins to reformat your perception of danger and normalcy, BASED ON A FICTITIOUS, SIMULATED ENVIRONMENT that has a narrative often at cross-purposes to real life.

It could be the reason cars 'feel' safer than planes, even though the number of fatalities from commercial airline crashes worldwide rarely exceeds a 1,000 per year. In fact, in 2013, the total number of fatalities from air crashes was 'just' 224.[13] Scarily, it turns out that, as a mode of transport, walking is infinitely more dangerous than flying. Traffic accidents kill more than a million people annually all over the world, many of them pedestrians.[14] A single plane crash, however, makes for a more attention-grabbing news story and more dramatic movie footage than a clip of a cyclist or pedestrian getting run over.

Although it kills more people annually than cancer, you'll rarely see a movie about someone bravely fighting heart disease, consequently giving it a much lower fear factor despite it being a lot deadlier.[15] It might explain our nonchalance at suspected agents of heart disease, matched only by our, admittedly understandable, hysteria at any suspected carcinogen. Talking of deadliness, the planet's most dangerous animal is... the mosquito. These little insects carry the malaria parasite that kills more than 600,000 people a year.[16] Sharks, which admittedly make better movies, kill just 10 people a year. Suicide, globally ranking among the top 20 leading causes of death,[17] has seen a sharp increase within a new demographic: Baby Boomers adversely affected by the recent economic downturn.[18],[19] However, because of our skewed sense of danger, you won't see anyone running away screaming from a mosquito or an unhealthy meal, or crossing the street when they see an investment consultant. It's all in the perception.

There's more. A hijacked orienting reflex is responsible for even more weird and wonky worldviews. Here's how. When a certain stimulus is repeated often enough, the orienting reflex reduces in intensity and eventually fades away, in a process called habituation.[20] This means that after being exposed to enough quivering bushes with no hungry lions (or mosquitoes) subsequently leaping out at him, your ancestor starts to become rather blasé about them. A consequence of this habituation is that when the media keeps hurling button-pushing stuff like extreme violence, ever more explicit sexual content and such at you, your brain increasingly responds as if it were ordinary. You start to feel it's normal. Today, we are so inundated with news of loss of life in conflicts all over the world, we hardly blink when we hear