The Influential Mind What the Brain Reveals About Our Power to Change Others

It's not enough to have the data. ... it has to be communicated in a way that would really tap into people's needs, their desires.

What really helped is that I understood what was happening to me. ... I knew how it was going to affect me. And I think that awareness helped me to put it aside and say, okay I know that I am anxious for the wrong reasons and this is the action that I should take.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to take in any kind of data that confirms our prior convictions and to disregard data that does not conform to what we already believe.

Fear works in two situations. It works when people are ready, stressed out, and it also works when what you're trying to do is get someone not to do something, an inaction.

So by eliciting emotion, what you're able to do is change the perception of everything that comes after, to perceive information as the person who's giving the speech wants you to perceive it.

In her upcoming book, The Influential Mind, she explores how our minds work, why we ignore the facts, and how you can get people to actually listen to the truth.

So I give an example in my book where if someone comes in and says, I just saw pink elephants flying in the sky, and I have a very strong belief obviously that no pink elephants fly in the sky,

And the further away the piece of data is from what you already believe, the less likely it is to change your belief.

it also means that it's really hard to change false beliefs.

If there's, you know, an apple that looks bad, I don't eat it. Fear is actually not such a good motivator for inducing action.

In your book, The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power To Change Others, there's so many practical things in here that I think are very useful and I was pleasantly surprised by that because often you read a book from a scientist or somebody in academia and you end up with a lot of information that you can't use at all anywhere other than maybe elsewhere in academia or if you're taking copious notes to regurgitate for an exam.

One of the principles in the book that really struck me, that you'd written most of the ways in which we think we change our minds is wrong.

So the book title is the influential mind, what the brain reveals about our power to change others, of course that'll be linked up in the show notes.

Lots of stuff that we could have gone on to talk about in the influential mind, what the brain reveals about our power to change others, there are a lot of really useful practicals in here, there were a lot of interesting studies as well.

Also in the influential mind, you've written that when... when trying to persuade it's better to seed a new belief than to contradict an old belief.

In your book, The Influential Mind, What the Brain Reveals About Our Power To Change Others, there's so many practical things in here that I think are very useful and I was pleasantly surprised by that because often you read a book from a scientist or somebody in academia and you end up with a lot of information that you can't use at all anywhere other than maybe elsewhere in academia or if you're taking copious notes to regurgitate for an exam.

One of the principles in the book that really struck me, that you'd written most of the ways in which we think we change our minds is wrong.

So I really appreciated that about the book because I have a ton of places where I think we can deliver practical exercises.

Also in the influential mind you discuss a lot of principles such as using emotions and speeches for example to synchronize the brains of people listening and I'm oversimplifying that obviously synchronizing brains is kind of a sort of sounds like zombies but you gave the moon speech from President Kennedy as an example.

In the influential mind, you've written that when and I'm paraphrasing here but when trying to persuade it's better to seed a new belief than to contradict an old belief.