Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 2 Identifying the Reptile

Task: Identify, and talk to, the reptile in your head

The Theory
French psychologist G Clotaire Rapaille claims that "most of our decisions are not determined rationally at all, but are taken surreptitiously in the twilight zone of the brain" or as he puts it, 'the reptile mind' "operating in the background, without us being aware of it".

The Practice
Jot down your associations for the following:
(Remember that these are not adjectives describing the thing but other things you link with it)
 
...

Coffee reminds me of:
1 pleasant aroma of Nescafe
2 hot, black, sweet and shiny with the brown deep-fried dough beloved of many (though not me) for breakfast
3 ceramic mugs, cups and saucers; and insomnia if I had one too many.

The Car reminds me of:
1  My Mother The Car in the 60s TV sitcom series. The protagonist's mother reincarnated as an antique model that spoke.
2  My father's Peugeot 403 with the lovely gear shift on the steering column that I once drove without a license haha.
3  Seenivasagam brothers' huge impressive Cadillacs (red and white respectively) parked next to Ipoh Padang in the 50s.

Cigarettes remind me of:
1  the stink in my shirt upon exiting the cinema after a show (before the ban)
2  discarded stubs everywhere, in plant pots, streets, public loos etc
3  Lucky Strike that my father smoked before and after his first heart attack which led to the second whereupon he quit cold turkey.

Depending on how you count, I 'hit' two of Rapaille's codes spot on and another one perhaps partially. 

...

Rapaille’s mantra is “the reptilian brain always wins.” 

Rapaille's technique of "archetype discovery" stems from the psychoanalytic methods pioneered by the Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter. This technique doesn't ask what people want, but why. These research methods focus on finding what he calls the “code”, the unconscious meaning people give to a particular product, service or relationship. Rapaille posits that sublimated emotional memories occupy a place between each individual's unconscious (Freud) and the collective unconscious of the entire human race (Jung).


Archetype Discoveries Worldwide was founded by Dr. G. C. Rapaille to provide answers to the question: Why do people do what they do?

Clotaire Rapaille - Reptilian Marketing, 10 min video from PBS and Crack This Code (GCR session in Bangalore, India) 
There are dissenting voices to be heard.

G Clotaire Rapaille (Wikipedia)

Download ebook of his best selling The Culture Code here

Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 1 Words

Task: Spend all day trying to think for yourself.

But already, we're off to a bad start! These words you are now reading, whose are they?

   Whose is that voice in your head? Yours or mine?

   When you hear someone speak, the words remain theirs - to be ignored or disagreed with as you choose. But somehow to read someone's thoughts is to allow them, however temporarily, to take over the language centres of your brain. For as long as you are caught up in what they say, the writer becomes your inner voice.

   Does that mean that, for a moment, the writer becomes the reader?

   

   Or does it mean instead that, for a moment, the reader becomes the writer?

...

I can imagine the go-getting Type A personalities spluttering over this question. 

"Of course I remain myself, what else could I be?" Su might well retort. "What a stupid question!"

My experience tells me that the everyday, familiar 'I, myself' is no more than a process upon what we now know as the Third Rock from the Sun. Here's what I mean.

I used to travel by 'mini-buses' in the Klang Valley 80s and 90s since they were cheap, convenient and ubiquitious. One ordinary morning I hopped on one to find that all the seats were taken, so I set myself upon the steel rail separating the driver from the passengers, facing the back of the bus as I did so.

For perhaps ten seconds or so, I had the curious realization that I was looking at 'versions of myself' even as I knew that the passengers were ordinary commuters like myself.

This strange experience turned up again at a mall a few days later, though the crowd this time was rather more dispersed and moving around. 

Perhaps I'm a little 'cuckoo' to use the popular term, but I do not think that I would plot deliberately to harm anyone, since I should then be harming myself.  

By sheer chance (again!) here's what turned up in today's StarTwo of Star: The people's paper:

"We actually are Earth. We really, really are just animated bits of the Earth's crust, so to talk about us and the Earth is wrong."

Mind Games: 31 Days to Rediscover Your Brain by Martin Cohen

It was by sheer chance that I stumbled upon the unwrapped volume on one of MPH Bookstore's book 'islands' in Kinta City. 

 
When I told See Foon about it later the next day, she emailed back within half-an-hour:

Do buy the book and do the exercises for the month and give me a blow by 

blow account......I'll be interested......might even make a lovely article in the (Ipoh) Echo.

Here are links to two reviews if you want to know more about the book's contents and organization.

The upshot is that readers of this book who already have a philosophical bent will enjoy engaging with it at a discursive level while the more general reader will gain a deeper sense of the diversity and quirkiness, the subtleties and complexities, of that infinite inner world which is the mind.

The second reviewer makes perhaps a valid complaint about the book's organization here.