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Issue 5: |
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| Article 2: |
Peter Kline's Comments on Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero's article: "The Raw Truth About Persuasion and Copywriting!" |
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Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero's article, "The Raw Truth About Persuasion and
Copywriting!" is so outstandingly brilliant, that I suspect she won't mind
my disagreeing with her on a matter that's rather trivial in the context
of all that she's saying. As I understand it, the left brain deals with language, logic, sequential thinking, and other skills that are usually associated with the academic world, whereas the right brain deals with the overview, the visual, the aesthetic, the world of maps, and the sense of overall direction about where you're headed. Of course these matters are debated rather widely among neurologists, and there's plenty of evidence to show that the plasticity of the brain is such that left-right brain differences may vary in individuals (partly based on experience or even brain injury) as well as in whole cultures. |
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The emotional involvement that Lorie is writing about happens, I think, in the limbic system and is best accessed by whole brain thinking in which the left brain and the right brain strike up a friendship and communicate comfortably with each other. The corpus collosum that links them so they can do this runs down through the limbic system, and that's where the hippocampus and the amygdala provide the gateways to long term memory storage. That's why it's so much easier to remember things that have a strong emotional context, and why if you can dramatize a subject by expressing it in emotional terms, your students will remember it so much better. None of this matters as far as Lorrie's message is concerned, though. Her main point seems to be to build an emotional harmony with your reader, your client, your customer or any other aspect of your "TARKET". Then you can lead the other that you're communicating with to new ground where you can both agree to agree about something. Now for another aspect of the context in which this occurs. We all think in terms of Gestalts. That is, we see the world as made up of complete pictures of things. That's why all cats, to a certain extent, look alike, as do all chairs, all trees, and most of the rest of the things we deal with on a daily basis, or even occasionally. One of the greatest miracles of the human mind is not how much it remembers, but how much it forgets, and not how much it can see, but how much it can overlook. It's the narrowing down function of the mind that enables us to select from the chaos around us a through line of action towards a particular goal, even if it's as "simple" as picking up a glass of orange juice and conveying it to the mouth for swallowing purposes. I deliberately made that sound mechanical, because there's a measure of automatism about all this. We seek to become robots about almost everything almost all of the time. Retiring almost all of our thinking to an unconscious level enables us to focus on some particular aspect of thinking, and it's the uniqueness of each person's collection of aspects of thinking that makes all of us different from one another, sometimes so spectacularly different that genius emerges in a form in which it has never appeared before, and may never appear again. That is the greatest of all wonders in the miracle of the human being--the ability to introduce something new that the universe has never known, or even thought about, before. This is the main miracle that Gestalt psychologists have studied. However, this miracle carries with it a liability. Our very ability to focus so specifically and exclusively on one thing means that we delude ourselves into thinking that we have a complete picture of what we're dealing with. Most of the time this is a plus. It makes no sense while you're dialing a particular phone number to wonder about the efficacy of phone numbers in general, and whether there shouldn't be some other, more efficient system to replace them so you can get in touch with people more easily. Or, to be more specific, while you're typing on the QWERTY system, which was invented to slow you down, you're not the least bit interested in trying to master a new system that would enable you to type faster. Therein lies our salvation. And therein also lies our potential damnation. We abhor change, because that makes us have to dig up all the hidden structures, subtexts, and what have you that underlie every thought we have. The "complete" picture that we have of life and the universe is uniquely our own, and it accounts for everything--EVERYTHING--in our own unique and specific way. For most of the history of the universe this has been the key to survival. All the species ever developed have had to bring with them into life a master plan for negotiating the environment. Even if this plan works only one percent of the time, that means a species can survive. 99% of its members may die, but the one percent that survive live to reproduce. Human beings, however, seek to keep 100% of themselves alive, if morally possible. This means that human beings, more than any other species must be adaptable to changing situations, and the whole chain of our Darwinian ancestry rebels against this. We want to remain comfortably cradled in the certainty of what we know to be true. Since the year 2000, however, it has become abundantly clear that that strategy is no longer going to work. Society is changing at a dizzying pace. What was true three weeks ago may be challenged today and seems to become ancient history three weeks in the future. Never before (so far as we know) has any species had to deal with a situation like this. The whole structure of beliefs and practices you have regarding some particular aspect of life is called a paradigm. This is a kind of giant Gestalt that ties all of your ideas and beliefs together in a package that you may label "fundamental truth" or "scientific certainty". For example, the U. S. medical paradigm is based on the notion that when you get sick you take a pill or have an operation. But the Chinese medical paradigm tells you that when you get sick you should move around the energy in your body (called "chi") so you can get well. These two paradigms can work together extremely well; but for many, they are mutually exclusive. Tell your doctor you're having acupuncture to get over your arthritis, and your doctor may fire you as a patient. As far as your doctor is concerned, that's outside the paradigm. It's based on faulty science, and therefore is nothing but quackery that can't possibly help you. This is all well and good, as long as all we're considering is the possible death by terminal cancer of someone who might otherwise have been saved. After all, everybody dies. If it be not now, it will come. The readiness is all. So what does that matter, really? Everything changes, however, when the survival of the human species is what's at stake. At the present moment the world is divided between those who think that global warming is the greatest problem ever to face humanity, and those who think that it is only so much junk science. The trouble is that while the first of these two groups can afford to be wrong, the second cannot. If the people who think it is junk science are wrong, we may all be dead as a result. This kind of problem didn't exist until sometime after 1950. Until then it was generally true that paradigms didn't need shifting. You could be born, grow up and die in a world that, for you, remained essentially the same. This would be true even if you lived in a country that was conquered by a foreign power and your whole way of life was destroyed. You could experience this without revising your basic ideas about the truths that you believed were eternal. Today, eternal truths are no longer any guarantee of survival. We all need to develop a new skill that can be called paradigm shifting. We all need to learn how to question our own most basic assumptions and consider alternative possibilities. We need to be able to juggle two or more paradigms side by side, even though they may be logically incompatible, and adopt enough ambiguity tolerance to be able to move back and forth between them in search of more basic kinds of truth than it has ever before been necessary to search for. That is why we need an entirely new kind of education, one that will teach us how to challenge and question our own most basic beliefs, as well as those of others. We need this new kind of education--which no one has yet proposed--because we may not be able to survive as a species if we don't invent it now. Though it may seem a very long stretch, I suggest that the article by Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero is a first step toward this kind of educational experience. While "leading" someone in the way she suggests could be simply a sophisticated way of manipulating a customer, it opens the door to an exchange of empathy that allows two people with very different perspectives and paradigms to begin to communicate with one another. In other words, if the communication about being in the same place with some question or need is carried out deeply enough, the two different paradigms may begin to open up and become flexible so that new paradigms can emerge. Once this process starts happening, a whole new world can open up. Solutions to problems that seemed impossible to solve may become evident. It may be, in fact, that we are at the beginning of a new kind of life adventure that has never been possible in quite the same way before.
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