You Can Play Sudoku Just About Anywhere, Really

I had already said that I would be moving away from sociopolitical blogging. But looking back over my blog entries for the past month, I'm quite surprised to see how complete the transformation has been. I had imagined a more gradual transition, not something as total as what actually happened.

Part of the reason for the rapid change is that ever since I started on my new job, I've been reading less and less of the Straits Times, and more and more of the news from Bloomberg. Nowadays, several days can go by without my reading the Straits Times at all.

My previous job was already quite regional in its scope. My new job is even more international. I find it more important to focus on international news than local news. And by default, the news that shows up on my Bloomberg is "top news" from around the world. Singapore is never "top news". I guess that on a worldwide scale, the little red dot is just too little.

Whenever I can, I still pick up a free copy of Today. I often find that the articles in Today are more thought-provoking and insightful than those in the Straits Times. Also, I like Sudoku. There's one Sudoku puzzle in every issue of Today. Anyway, in today's Today, I found this editorial:

How to deal with media double whammy
Monday • July 9, 2007
P N Balji

VARIOUS reasons have been given for the unabashedly pro-government stand of the Singapore media: Restrictive media and libel laws, journalists who have surrendered to the Government or been convinced by its argument that an unbridled press is not for Singapore, general public support for the Government by readers who believe Mr Lee Kuan Yew and his team are always right because
they have delivered an economic miracle.

Another reason, not well-documented and hardly articulated in public discussions, is how the media has benefitted from the Government's delivery of economic growth. Like nearly everything else here, it is money that drives this place. Minister Mentor Lee said as much over the weekend.

"Once you have growth, all problems can be managed," he said in his pragmatic and straight-talking style about Singapore's success.

Good economic growth means more advertising dollars for media companies, which means higher salaries for editors and journalists, which means don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg. And which means support a government that delivers.

So far, so good. But last year, something happened that might put a strain on this cosy relationship between economic and advertising growth. For the first time, a yawning gap between economic and advertising growth has got media owners worried.

A double whammy is at work here. Some of the top advertisers, such as SingTel and Asia Pacific Breweries, are getting more and more of their revenue from outside Singapore.

Advertising dollars are being channelled to countries where these companies are opening up new operations. Why should such companies continue to put all their ad dollars in Singapore?

Then, the new businesses that are coming here are very different in nature, using Singapore as a launching pad to the region.

One example is Olam International, an agricultural commodities firm which is listed here. However, its revenue — 100 per cent of it — comes from outside Singapore.

Why should such outfits advertise in our media?

Throw the slow but pervasive influence of alternative news and information-on-the-go, though not so pronounced and immediate yet, into the pot and you have a media meltdown in the making.

So, what are the media managers doing? Opening up new revenue streams by investing overseas, kick-starting alternative media ventures and wooing expatriate readers who are surging into Singapore now that the floodgates have been thrown wide open.

But these are slow-burn measures, risky and tentative.

What is more important is to relook the kind of news in our media ....

I guess that if I were still the old Mr Wang, this is the kind of article that I would dissect and analyse at length. Frankly, now I can't be bothered. See, I chopped off the article even before the editor got to his main point (if you'd like to know what the main point is, click on the link above).

All I feel like doing is draw a few analogies between my current job, and some of the examples mentioned in this Today editorial.

In a way, my work feels like the businesses of Singtel, Asia Pacific Breweries and Olam. I'm located here in Singapore, but at work, I've barely touched a "Singapore" transaction since I started work three months ago. I'm working on deals where the assets and clients are in China, India, Taiwan, Indonesia, New York, Hong Kong, the Middle East .... almost anywhere, but not Singapore.

It feels kinda strange, really. It's like Singapore isn't real. It's just a construct of my imagination, an abstract puzzle with its own peculiar rules. Intellectually, it can be fun to try to work out those rules, but they don't necessarily mean anything in real life. Singapore is just a place where I can situate my butt on an office chair, and from which I can make telephone calls and send emails to people in other countries. Apart from that, it doesn't seem to have much relevance.

Today is trying to revamp its approach to news reporting, so as to stay relevant to readers in Singapore. Meanwhile, I, as a reader in Singapore, grow less and less interested in Singapore, and more and more interested in the rest of the world. And for news about the rest of the world, I don't need Today. I just need my Bloomberg. Which is REALLY relevant to my work.

Increasingly, my best reason for picking up a copy of Today is its Sudoku puzzle. Now if Today had two Sudoku puzzles every day, I would definitely want to get my copy.

Strangely, nowadays my foreign colleagues take a bigger interest in local news, than I do. And I have many foreign colleagues. I think at least half of my colleagues are foreigners or PRs. I often hear them talking about local news - the current hot topic being the property market.

But then they also make funny jokes about PAP ministers. One of them, an Indian national, was cracking father-&-son political jokes today, about LKY and LHL. In some vague way, as a Singaporean citizen, I suspect that I ought to feel mildly offended. But I don't. The jokes are quite hilarious, really. Even more fun than Sudoku.

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Oh Look, More Crazy Scientists!

In more recent posts, we've started to leave quantum physics and Buddhism behind (yes, Quek, I still owe you one more post on your Buddhist question - I will get around to that), and venture into neuroscience. See my post - "The RAS at Work".

Today we'll continue our interesting adventure by investigating some interesting theories thrown up by neuroscientists and neuro-psychiatrists:

"Thu 11 Sep 2003
Study into near-death experiences supports theory of a 'sixth sense'
RICHARD SADLER

BRITISH scientists say there is convincing evidence that a significant proportion of the population possess psychic powers.

The British Association for the Advancement of Science was told an increasing number of experiments support the theory of a human "sixth sense" - an ability which may have its roots in our past, when the ability to sense the presence of a predator was a matter of life or death.

The view that people are capable of paranormal feats, such as premonitions, telepathy, and out-of-body experiences, is supported by new research by the Institute of Psychiatry, which suggests the human mind may exist outside the body like an invisible magnetic field.

The research is being led by Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuro-psychiatrist at London University, who has just completed a survey of heart patients claiming to have had "near-death experiences" after their hearts had stopped beating.

"There is now convincing evidence to challenge the current theory that consciousness can only exist inside the brain - and if you can have consciousness without associated brain function, that is enormously important for our understanding of the mind," he said.

For his latest research, 60 patients at Southampton General Hospital’s coronary care unit were interviewed after heart attacks had left them temporarily brain-dead. Seven reported near-death experiences - defined by characteristic features such as a feeling of leaving your body, going through a tunnel and entering an area of "love, bliss and consciousness".

"The significance of this is that after a cardiac arrest you lose consciousness within eight seconds; within 11 seconds the brain’s rhythms become flat, and within 18 seconds there is no possibility of the brain creating a model of the world - so the brain is down," said Dr Fenwick.

"Yet whenever we asked people when their near-death experiences occurred, they said it was during unconsciousness. If that’s true, their experience was occurring when there was no blood flowing through the brain - and consciousness would appear to exist outside the brain." ...

For the full article, click here.

A quick point about near-death experiences. They're pretty interesting. Apparently they are also getting easier and easier to research. That's because ever since the development of cardiac resuscitation techniques in modern times, many more people have been successfully saved in medical emergencies and have come back with accounts of what happened "on the other side".

The really interesting point raised by Dr Peter Fenwick is the possibility that consciousness can exist outside, or without, the brain. If this is true, then ..... heheh, well, I can see lots of intriguing possibilities that could follow (disembodied consciousness? Something like souls? ghosts? telepathy? God without a physical body? Voices in your head?). But why should I invite a new lynch mob of angry readers. Perhaps it's better to provoke them into drawing their own conclusions.

I shall only add that completely different kinds of scientific research and experiments have been done, to investigate the possible effects of a person's consciousness (or thoughts) on physical phenomena situated in an entirely different location. I see such research as somewhat related to Fenwick's (if consciousness doesn't need a physical brain, where might it travel to, on its own, and what might it do there ...?).

In the near future, I will discuss one such interesting experiment. It was done by a Stanford professor emeritus and physicist, and the results suggest that consciousness can not only affect physical phenomena (in this case, the rate of development of fruit fly larvae), but can affect it over long distances (in other words, the person thinking thoughts about the fruit fly eggs need not even be in their physical proximity).

Stay tuned, for more TAR adventures with Mr Wang!

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A Quote for the Day

“Consciousness is a phenomenon that is part of the physical world, although some people don’t like to think of it as physical at all.” - Sir Roger Penrose, mathematical physicist at Oxford.

Ah, yes, I think you're right, Roger. They don't like it at all. It makes them nervous. ;)

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A Letter From A Reader

From one Mr Lin:

Hi Mr Wang,

Thanks for your reply, and sorry for taking so long to continue correspondence.

About NLP, mindhacking, etc. The more I think about the subject, the more I realise it's one of those "facts of life" that is quietly moved into the metaphorical closet, along with all the other skeletons that mankind hid because they are too "irrational" or too "unscientific".

From young, we are told that we can accomplish anything we set our minds to, which is a very primitive version of mindhacking. However, much like how we eventually grow to learn that Santa Claus does not exist, our experiences tell us that we "can't" accomplish everything we want, because we're very much limited by supposedly natural laws imposed on everyone. We try to rationalize our inadequencies, if only to make ourselves feel better and accept the situation that we are in.

Eventually, humans reach a stage in their growth that they cease to believe. They sneer at those who choose to continue to believe, instead choosing to be cynical (or as they claim, scientific).

Which leads to your current predicament, if I may call it that. While you are trying to expose and expound on a "truth" you've discovered, a truth that many successful people use to reach their current positions in life, people are calling heresy because it sounds about as concrete as castles on clouds.

It leads me to think that maybe humans are just not ready. The Jews supposedly condemned Jesus to be a heretic because He claimed to be the Son of God (because the concept is just too far out from their mainstream ideology). Galileo was called a nutcase for suggesting that the Earth was round (again, because they weren't ready yet).

A hypothetical wager, maybe? If mindhacking had been repackaged into self-motivation, if a couple of other auxiliary concepts such as hard work and perseverence were thrown in to smoothen the rough edges, I dare say that there would be less people who would contest you, but more who would say that this is old news.

Interesting that humans would believe that success needs to be exchanged, but fail to grasp the idea that the key is not hard work, but the simple belief (true, unwavering belief) in oneself's success.

When one has true unwavering belief of something, one has a direction and a goal. If it is a real true unwavering belief, that person needs no other motivation to act on that belief. If so, that person would naturally put in the hard work required, and succeed.

Even in the past, Leonardo da Vinci wanted man to fly. He put in hard work, worked around our physiological issues, and created the first flying machine (based on design, anyway). The Wright Brothers too had that dream, and put their determination into action and made it work.

We can't fly, not by our own bodies anyway. We are highly doubtful of psychics and mind reading now, because it seems so implausible. But if someone had enough motivation to dig into flying and work around problems to result in the jumbo jets of today, who's to say it's impossible for us to work around our current problems to reach psychic mastery?

I doubt my interpretation of mindhacking and NLP is accurate, but I feel that it's a stepping stone. A middle ground, if you will. I just feel that what's happening to you right now is the reason why hermits stay far away from other human contact - because only those who can accept will approach them for advice, while the rest will simply ridicule or slander him.

............

A question: people claim that many people go through life without ever knowing their direction, and end up doing fine still. How true is that? I find the idea of aimlessly floating through life both wasteful and scary... :(

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The RAS at Work

In my earlier post on goal-writing, I had provided various links. One of them was to an article which mentioned the reticular activating system (RAS) in the human brain. In the present post I will discuss the RAS.

The RAS is the part of the human brain that deals with motivations. Although there is no scientific consensus on this point yet, some people believe that one of the functions of the RAS is to direct a person’s attention towards things in his environment that are relevant to his motivations and interests. Simultaneously, the RAS will filter out things in his environment which are judged not to be relevant.

For example, suppose a man enters into a big room full of strangers, walks around for ten seconds, and then leaves the room. If you then ask him to describe all the people he just saw, he may be able to describe just a few of them. But there’s a very high chance that he will remember the sexy young lady with the big breasts and the long legs. In fact, he probably noticed her almost immediately upon entering the room, instinctively picking her out from a big crowd of faceless strangers. This is his RAS at work.

Here is another example. You take your time to read the newspapers on a leisurely Sunday. When you're done, you would have read, say, fifteen full articles in detail (because these articles were interesting to you). However, there could be another twenty articles which you had skipped completely, because they were not interesting to you and you did not want to read them at all.

Now, if you were then asked to put aside your newspaper and say something about those 20 articles, you would struggle. You would not even know what it is that you cannot remember. The funny thing is that when you were going through the newspapers, at some unconscious level you MUST have noticed these 20 articles. Otherwise how were you able to judge that they were uninteresting and should be skipped?

What happened here is that your RAS automatically filtered those 20 articles away and out of your field of perception. Your unconscious / subconscious mind took note of those 20 articles, decided that you shouldn’t waste your time on them and directed your attention elsewhere. Your conscious mind played no part in this. In effect, you had no choice. Therefore you can neither remember anything about the 20 articles you skipped nor understand why you had skipped them.

Most of us know what we like, and what we are interested in – therefore we know what are the kind of things we notice. What we don’t know is what we don’t notice. What we don’t notice is probably a heck of a lot of things. But that’s mostly unconscious to us.

That’s because our RAS works on the basis of our subconscious / unconscious mind. A heterosexual man does not have to tell his RAS, “Please direct my attention to sexy young ladies in my physical proximity.” A newspaper reader interested in professional golf and Australian politics does not have to tell his RAS, “Please direct my attention to newspaper articles about professional golf and Australian politics.” It all happens automatically.

Since the RAS operates on the basis of our subconscious / unconscious mind, the beliefs and thoughts that we hold at these levels in effect decide what we perceive about the world - every minute, every hour, day after day, month after month, year after year.

So for instance, if you subconsciously believe that you are a useless idiot, your RAS will constantly direct your attention towards all available evidence and events in your physical environment that indicate or suggest that you are a useless idiot.

If you subconsciously believe that hard work is the only way to succeed (and you want to succeed), your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that the only route to success that you can perceive is through hard work.

If you subconsciously believe that it is very possible to make lots of money, your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that you keep perceiving many possible opportunities to make a lot of money.

If you subconsciously believe that you are great at solving difficult problems, then your RAS will constantly direct your attention such that you keep perceiving difficult problems, AND keep perceiving great ways to solve them.

If you subconsciously believe that you are too young / too old / too weak / too poor / too lazy / too unlucky / too disadvantaged / too busy to do _____________, then your RAS will constantly direct your attention towards perceiving evidence that you are indeed too young / too old / too weak / too poor / too lazy / too unlucky / too disadvantaged / too busy to do _____________.

Visit Mark Joyner for more of his
personal development brain puzzle cartoons.

As I’ve said before, your reality is basically (a) what you perceive about reality, and (b) your interpretation of your perceptions. In the end, your reality is totally constructed out of your thoughts. Things which are deeply against your deepest beliefs will simply not be perceptible by you.

For example, the staunch atheist will look around the universe, the stars, the sun, the seas and the moon and say, “I cannot see any evidence at all of the existence of God!”. While the religious believer will look around the same universe, the stars, the sun, the seas and the moon and say, “I see God everywhere! What kind of fool one must be, not to be able to see this!”. Both of them are absolutely correct, within their respective realities.

There is no escape! Your mind is your universe. Change your mind, and you change your __________.

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Well, This is Unfortunate

I actually welcome disagreement and vigorous discussion about my posts - I always have, it is one of my charming characteristics as a blogger.

But unfortunately two or three particular individuals have degenerated into passing insulting remarks of an ad hominen nature and making personal attacks etc etc.

Such remarks (1) don't add any value to the discussion, (2) adversely affect the quality of the overall exchange between readers in the comment section and (3) also create an unfriendly atmosphere that intimidates other readers who genuinely want to post questions or comments.

So I'll have to turn on the comment moderation function.

Readers who sincerely disagree with me on any point should feel free to post comments indicating their disagreement. I give my assurance that these comments will continue to be published if they are genuine comments addressing the subject matter of my posts (as opposed to comments calling me a "fork-tongued lawyer"; a "retard" etc).

Oh, that includes those two or three individuals as well (or rather, the two individuals, one of whom has been masquerading as two separate individuals). You're still welcome to post comments if you refrain from bad behaviour.

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How to Write Down Your Goals

For background, first read this and this. My present post is written for three categories of people:

(1) those who believe that thoughts do affect reality, and wish to experiment with goal-writing as a specific means to alter their reality in specific ways;

(2) those who do not believe that thoughts can affect reality in any "magical" way, but want to experiment with positive affirmations as a possible method to motivate themselves, generate creative ideas or focus their energy; and

(3) those who feel unsure or undecided about whether thoughts affect reality, and just want to experiment and investigate this possibility.

Depending on which aspects of mindhacking you prefer to emphasise, there are several ways to go about writing down your goals. Bear in mind that the common principle is to plant the desired goals as deeply as possible into your subconscious mind. In future, I will describe some of those different ways. For now, let's stick with one simple exercise.

1. The best times to do this exercise are early in the morning, soon after you've woken up, or late at night, shortly before you go to bed. (This has something to do with your brain wave functions, but let's not get too technical). Otherwise, just pick a place and time that's quiet and peaceful and where you know you won't be interrupted or distracted for the next 10 to 15 minutes.

2. It's important to do the exercise with a clear mind. In other words, don't do this when you're angry or upset or busy or worrying about other things. Your writing exercise will last only 10 to 15 minutes, so during this short time, focus properly on it.

3. You'll need a single, blank piece of A4 paper and a pen. Personally, along the lines of Tony Buzan's mindmapping principles, I like to use pens of different colours, but these are frills, moderately useful but not strictly necessary.

4. Once you start writing your goals, do not stop until you finish the exercise. You do not need to write fast, but you simply must not stop. Keep writing steadily. The reason is that if you pause, you will start to analyse logically, and doubt will creep in. In other words, your conscious mind will have time to kick in, and you will start thinking, "Hey, this goal is not realistic. How could I really double my salary? Maybe I'll just aim for a 30% or 40% increase." Do not allow this to happen - just keep writing steadily, without pausing to analyse whether your goals are plausible or not.

5. State each goal in a single sentence. Write down whatever goal comes into your mind - it could relate, for instance, to your studies; your career; your family; your health; your personal habits; your hobbies; your sex life, and so on. Choose goals that are personally important to you and which would really make a difference to your life if they were achieved. As soon as you've finished stating one goal, move on to stating the next one.

6. Overstate all your goals. Make them very ambitious. If your goals are modest, then there is a strong likelihood that they could be achieved even without any special mindhacking methods. As a rough rule of thumb, just take what you think is a "realistic" target and then give it a significant bump upwards. For example, if you "realistically" think that you will score about 2 A's and 2 B's in your next exams, just bump it up into 4 straight A's.

7. If you face mental resistance towards writing down huge, ambitious goals (eg mental doubts such as "How am I possibly going to be able to achieve this?"), just tell yourself, "I permit myself to imagine and daydream. For the next 10-15 minutes, I will just let myself be foolish and pretend this is possible."

8. Wherever possible, state your goal in the present tense, as if it had already happened. For instance, do not write: "My goal is to earn $120,000 a year, by next year". Simply write "I am earning $120,000 a year" as if this goal had already come true. By tricking your unconscious mind in this way, you will cause your reality to bend more rapidly to make your false, unconscious belief true.

9. As far as possible, be clear and specific. Do not say: "I lose weight and become slim." Say "I lose 5 kg and weigh 50 kg, my ideal weight." Frame your goal in positive terms. Do not say: "I learn not to be so shy." Say: "I am a confident, sociable person, comfortable around other people."

10. End the exercise when you've finished filling up one A4 page, or when you've listed at least about 20 goals.

11. Put away the piece of paper in a folder. Do not throw it away. Retain it for your future records.

12. In the initial stages of this experiment (eg the first three weeks), do this exercise about twice a day, every day. It also works if you do it less frequently, but it will take more time before you see the results. Later on, as you become more experienced with how this works, you can cut down on the frequency.

13. Each time you do this exercise, do not look at the previous pages of goals that you've already written. Just do the exercise afresh. Most of the goals that you wrote about previously will therefore be repeated again and again (in slightly different wording), Each time you do this exercise, it's perfectly ok to omit a few previous goals or add a few new ones.

Through constant repetition by writing, you're programming your unconscious mind to accept that your goals are possible, or likely, or realistic, or even already fulfilled. Then your unconscious mind will start bending reality to make your goals come true.

After doing the exercise, you can just get on with your normal routine. If you suddenly feel new motivation to take personal action towards your goals, by all means go ahead. If you do not, just carry on with your usual daily life. Do whatever feels right. You don't have to put any unnatural pressure on yourself to behave in any particular way.

If you want to compare the goal-writing exercise to the Rosenthal experiment, it is as if the teachers are being told twice a day, every day, that Student A is smart, and Student B is stupid, and Student C is average, and Student D is smart, and Student E is stupid ...... . The teachers are told these things so often that at some unconscious level, the teachers start believing those things about those students.

And you know the rest, about what happened in the Rosenthal experiment. Whatever the teachers believed just started coming true. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Whoever is believed to be smart, becomes smart. Whoever is believed to be stupid, becomes stupid. No extra effort or action needed by the teachers, even if they had actually had any concrete ideas on what they should do.

The 13-step process I've outlined above is shaped by my personal experience. Others, like Scott Adams, will have slightly different takes. For example, he will write the same goal 15 times a day, but I would prefer writing a list of many different goals in many different areas of life, just once a day. To some extent, these are just differences in personal preferences. My preference simply reflects my personal view of the meaning of success in life.

Some other people's takes on goal-writing exercises are here, here, here and here.

If you really want to thoroughly investigate whether thoughts affect reality, then quite apart from doing the writing exercises every day, you should also keep a diary to record significant daily events or occurrences in your life. Pay attention especially to synchronicities that crop up in response to your written goals.

The term synchronicity was coined by Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of modern psychology. It refers to the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them. Jung's own definition was the "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."

For example, suppose you write these goals - "I have very good friends" and "I find a new job that I really love, in interior design." Two days later, you bump into an good old friend whom you had lost touch with and hadn't seen for 10 years. While you're happily chatting with him, he suddenly says, "Hey, I'm now working in an interior design firm. We are looking to hire a new person. Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested?"

This would be an example of how reality reacts synchronistically to your thoughts. You will, of course, be inclined to dismiss it as a strange but random coincidence ... until you see it happening again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Record all these down, so that you can review them later and analyse the probability that in fact it was all random.

If you do your recording faithfully, I believe that you will soon realise that reality is constantly shifting and bending to make your thoughts to come true. If your thoughts are focused on your goals, then reality will constantly shift and bend to make your goals come true.

This is related to what Buddhism calls karma, and that's why Buddhism emphasises the importance of thinking good thoughts. Whatever you think will translate back into your personal reality. More on this Buddhist angle, another time. Meanwhile, go on, try the goal-writing exercise. Don't be shy now.

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This post is dedicated to Mr G Singh. All the best!

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