Words are powerful things indeed.
By using them we, as human beings, are able to create into another human being’s mind a representation of what we have in our own mind.
Many times we are even able to secure with another human being comprehension, cooperation and compliance. This process starts when we share a number of common abstractions of reality with somebody else, metaphors of the physical world, psychological and emotional states and purely intellectual concepts and associate those abstraction with words. Then by uttering those common words we are able to force the other party to recall that abstraction.
That’s natures version of mind control right there! Don’t believe me? Try not to think of a pink elephant after you’ve read these words.
But as with any powerful tool, using it does not come without it’s dangers.
I will avoid going into the intricacies of neurophysiology that explain this, but fundamentally we can say that our brain is a pattern recognition associative thinking machine. In other words, we build an hierarchy of concepts, anchoring each new concept in a number of somehow related concepts we already have.
To give you one example, when you see a new animal you have never seen before, like an Okapi, your brain will immediately compare it to a number of related concepts (4 legs, so probably a mammal… back looks like a zebra, neck looks like a giraffe) and create an abstract model that roughly describes any Okapi in the world regardless of the characteristics that make any individual Okapi unique (like the pattern of stripes), doing so by relating this model to a number of other concepts you already have.
Problem is what happens when we then have a model of an Okapi and we recall one.
Want an example?
Take a pen and paper. Or just open a notebook app of some sort. Really, do it now.
Are you ready? What I need you to do is to visualize a scene I am going to describe, really see it in your mind, and then perform a small task that involves noting something down. It shouldn’t take more than 7 or 8 seconds.
Ready now?
So what I want you to imagine is a dwarf. A very happy dwarf. He is walking home, all dressed in green, coming home from work and whistling of pure joy, because he is a lucky dwarf, drinking some soda as he walks by. Yes, picture in your mind a joyful, lucky, whistling, soda drinking, green draped dwarf.
Now very quickly think of a number from one to ten and write it down in the notebook.
Did it already?
Ok. Chances are, as in "about 70%” chance, that you wrote down the number 7. Yes, 7 out of 10 people will have written the number 7, although pure chance and statistics tells us that there should only be a 10% chance.
What happened here?
When I mentioned the word “dwarf”, consciously or subconsciously your brain retrieved a number of related concepts to your model of a “dwarf”:
- Small human being;
- Miners and gold diggers in folklore;
- A whistling dwarf, one of SEVEN of the fairy tale “Snow white and the SEVEN dwarfs”, if you are a westerner born in an anglo-saxonic friendly culture (the fact that I am writing this in English increases the probabilities).
That activated the concept “7” in your mind.
Then I pile it on with other details that activate the same common “7” concept:
- Lucky, as in lucky number SEVEN.
- Green and soda , concepts which in many people associate with a particular beverage, 7up.
So, unconsciously, the common concept of the number “7" got lit up from a number of different sources, and although you think I didn't mention it explicitly. Indeed, I actually did before, to prime you, mention “7 or 8 seconds”.
This is how our brain works, we subconsciously activate related concepts without being aware of it.
Why is this important?
Because every word carries a number of related, associated concepts every time it is uttered or written. This applies not only to the person who reads it or hears it but also to the person that produces it. So every time we use a word, a large number of related concepts “light up” and our brains become primed to find more easily those concepts in the world around it.
Therefore if you are using negative words often, like “bad”, “ugly”, “detestable”, “hate”, “anger”, you will be priming yourself and others around you to see whatever is presented by life in a worse light. Conversely, by using words as “positive”, “good”, “like”, “love”, you will be priming people around you to see the world with a more positive view.
A number of studies have shown this to be the case, with people dramatically changing their physiological responses to positive or stressful stimuli when primed accordingly.
And if you doubt how prone your brain is to priming, how good we are at finding what we are unconsciously looking for and overlooking everything else, why don’t you take the basketball test? Try it now at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
Amazing, isn’t it?
Be aware of the power of words. Pay attention to the words you use everyday, not only with others but also in your inner dialogues.
Sometimes changing the way you describe the world is all it takes to make it a little better.
Afterword: All that has been written above has been extensively described in many ancient texts of various cultures and philosophies around the world, but using a different set of phenomena to model it. In may Eastern philosophies, for example, words have their own vibration frequency that causes everyone exposed to them to resonate with that frequency, thus conveying it’s explicit and implicit sense. This has led some cultures to take extreme care with their writing systems to make sure that words are not uttered with the wrong sound or frequency, as is the case with Sanskrit, in which each letter corresponds to a specific sound carrying a specific frequency, and words are combinations of such.
