How Your Brain is Processing COVID-19 – Part II

Last week I wrote about the way marketers predict your behaviour using the RFM (Recency | Frequency | Monetary Value) Principle – which is based on the way your associative brain works.

What is the associative brain?

Your associative brain is everything that purrs along without you knowing it. Alexander called it your unconscious.

It comprises of an ancient brain – in development for 550 million years – together with the latest innovation from the mammals. Mammals introduced the six-layer neocortex, which now occupies up a whopping 76% of your human brain. 

Within your neo-cortex is a small area in your frontal lobe known as your Executive brain function. This little area appears to be managing your response to COVID-19.

But is it?

It may not be, and that could be a problem.

The associative brain is fast, emotional and intuitive.

The executive brain is slow, logical and rational.

Who's running the show?

According to Alexander – and a majority of social scientists – your associative brain dominates. But it's clever. It makes you think you are in charge when you are not. Alexander put it rather rudely:

"All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing." FMA

Alexander's thesis – which is a theory still actively explored by psychologists, neuroscientists and religious scholars alike – is that a lot of what you call conscious decisions are nothing of the sort.

Choice is an illusion your brain creates to get away with its desired behaviour.

We are not thinking thoughts; thoughts are more often thinking us.

How much free will do you really have? 

It would take too long to cite all the social studies that illustrate this phenomenon, but  Robert Cialdini's "The Psychology of Persuasion" is an excellent place to start. Some of his stories are stunning. It is also the street-wise manual for Marketers out to take your money. You'd be wise to learn how Marketers are manipulating you.

Which leads me to ask you today's question:

How much of your response concerning the risks of COVID-19 do you believe is consciously chosen?

If your associative brain is running things, you are quick to decide, quick to worry, quick to do things. It is fast. 

Your executive brain is slow - and also lazy. It's easier to believe the latest post on Facebook than it is to deliberately and methodically gather information based on the most reliable sources you can find.

This is a version of Conscious Constructive Guidance – and it is at the heart of Alexander's Discovery. It can be applied to anything – even COVID-19. In ATSuccess Foundations course, you use CCC towards the creation of behaviour that supports your teaching practice – both educationally and monetarily.

ATSuccess Foundations is more than a course on how to market and sell, although it is that too. It's also a course that examines how your teaching is a form of marketing; and how marketing is a form of teaching.

You will be asked to reassess deep-help ideas in the context of the modern world, and figure out where your future most fruitfully lies.

You can start for free – in fact, I don't want you on my course until you have read about my 12 Steps, and done a little constructive thinking of your own.

After you have done some of that, ask me if you can join or not.

The page to read more – and sign up for my free series on the 12 steps – is on this page:

https://atsuccess.com/foundations