How do conmen convince you to part with your money? Who are they? And how do they choose their victims? Learn their secrets from someone who has studied their dark arts. Magician Nick Johnson has some interesting insights into psychology of scams…and some suggestions on how to stop your money from going up in smoke!
Psychology
The Psychology of Conmen
Why Things Cost $19.95: Scientific American
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s most enduring bits of cinematic comedy is the auction scene in the espionage thriller North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a businessman who has been mistaken for a CIA agent by the ruthless Phillip Vandamm. At a critical juncture, Thornhill is cornered by his enemies inside a Chicago auction house, and the only way he can escape is by drawing attention to himself. When the bidding on an antique reaches $2,250, Thornhill yells out, “Fifteen hundred!” When the auctioneer gently chides him, he loudly changes his bid: “Twelve hundred!” When the bidding on a Louis XIV chaise longue reaches $1,200, Thornhill blurts outs, “Thirteen dollars!” The genteel crowd is outraged, but Thornhill gets precisely what he wants: the auctioneer summons the police, who “escort” him past Vandamm’s henchmen to safety.
Clever thinking and good comedy. It is funny for a lot of reasons, and one is that Thornhill violates every psychological “rule” for how we negotiate price and value with one another. So much of life involves “auctions,” whether it is buying a used car or making health care choices or even choosing a mate. But, unlike Roger Thornhill, most of us are motivated by the desire for a fair deal, and we employ some sophisticated cognitive tools to weigh offers, fashion responses, and so forth—all the to-and-fro in getting to an agreement.
But how does life’s dickering play out in the brain? And is it a trustworthy tool for getting what we want?
Self-Actualization: The Peak of Human Achievement
Dr. Abraham Maslow coined the term “Self-Actualization” as the
pinnacle in the hierarchy of human needs. Dr. Maslow summed up the concept as:“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write,
if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.
This is the need we may call self-actualization … It refers to mans
desire for fulfillment, namely to the tendency for him to become
actually in what he is potentially: to become everything that one
is capable of becoming …”
Joe Rogan – Floatation Tank
Silent Lucidity
A nice article on Lucid Dreaming.
There was a time that I could fly. I jutted my right fist into the air, and launched into the sky. My stomach dropped with the sensation of breaking gravity’s bond, and the summer air cooled as I reached higher. When the roads were so far below as to be an indistinct ashen blur, I halted and curled my legs under me as I was pelted by icy crystals of clouds, and surveyed all below. There was a moment of idle indecision, but in the end it mattered not at all. I picked a direction and dove.
The experience was one of my many brushes with Lucid Dreaming. It is a phenomenon that many discredit, naming it a hoax and naturalist mythology despite the fact that it has strong scientific evidence supporting it as a real occurrence. With a devoted training regimen, most anyone can learn to harness their own subconscious to experience surrealistic events and places. In a controlled dream, one can pursue anything from the cessation of nightmares, to investigating problems, to engaging in sexual fantasies, to my personal choice—jetting around the skies like Superman.
NLP 101
NLP seems to be some seriously powerful stuff and is also one of the techniques that Derren Brown will use to perform his magic.
In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder set out to answer the questions: ‘how do wildly successful people create their success?’ and ‘can these methods of success be replicated?’.
They studied the best therapists of their time, and through observation, testing and trail and error, codified what they found into sets of prinicples and techniques. When they taught and used these strategies and found that they could reproduce the success these therapists had, they knew they were on to something.
Now more than 30 years later, the results of their work has been built on and refined through the new art and science of achievement known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. And the beliefs that they found these master therapists and achievers had in common to produce the results they did were codified into the master beliefs for success; the NLP presuppositions.
