I've Made My Mind Up Now

Foreword

This book is a selection of evidence-based information for the practical application of neurohacking techniques. It has the same goals as our minds themselves: ongoing development through fulfilling biological imperatives.

Just as a powerful physical body can only be developed by providing the triggers for physical development that biology requires in order to develop it, a powerful intelligence can only be developed by providing the triggers for intelligence development that biology requires in order to develop it. All developmental triggers work by affecting our genes; they all use our neurochemistry to affect changes, and they can all be ultimately initiated by following the behavioral and psychological processes for reprogramming developmental biological pathways. 

Put simply, only input and the operations performed upon it can change output. NH requires DOING things, rather than knowing about things. No matter how well we understand the biological hardware, no amount of technical, intellectual anatomical or technological expertise will enable us to comprehend how to USE the programs that organize our thought processes and enable successful change through neural plasticity. Only real life experience of doing stuff can do that. When we miss out the information-as-experience factor, progress in any domain is at best slow and at worst doesn't work at all. We forget that intelligence-developing processes were designed by biology and refined by evolution and have been continually fine-tuned by adaptation only THROUGH real life experience.

Our minds are the products of feedback from eons of evolutionary experience; creating, adapting and refining biological programs. Understanding and using biological programs gives us a whole new bottom-up way to control, repair, or direct mental processes; we can learn how to interact with biology on a programming level and consequently to deliberately improve our abilities and behavior, and develop our minds' inherent potential. We don't need complex technology or 20 years of meditation or expensive 'self development' courses. We need to get the neurohacking equivalent of novice pilots' flight miles. What you know (intellectually) is meant to complement what you do (experientially); not replace it.

There are two ways to share information - 'biology's way' (meaning how you naturally educate yourself, so you would call this 'my way'); or, 'the highway' (our mainstream academic way, in which we are accustomed to learning about things in a certain linear order; for example we 'do' physics, then we do chemistry, then biochemistry, then neurochemistry and so on).

Of necessity for academia, we classify information in this hierarchical fashion, but real brains do not learn in an hierarchical fashion because real life experience is not hierarchical. In real life we don't experience the laws of physics 'before' any chemistry happens; we don't experience thoughts before we experience feelings; we are thrown in at the deep end experiencing all of it at once. In real life, we decide what to explore first, as our biology (our nature) imposes on our learning the natural hierarchy of personal interest. Learning 'biology's way', is achieved by exploring something you're interested in from any starting point and tackling each new related concept of interest as it arises by necessity, regardless of what new fields or subjects it introduces, following the natural flow of thought and inquiry and playing with ideas.

Of course, there are some things we have to learn to do in order to do other things; such as walking before running. This is the way we learn as babies, and it imposes its own natural order based on human interests and necessities. We go where the information landscape leads us, directed by our own motivation. We make our own map, rather than following someone else's map. This is 'off road' learning. That's how we learn naturally. That's how memory most easily expands its database. That's how I've put this book together.

To use a popular analogy, if you really want to succeed in a computer game, you play it. Because playing it – knowledge as experience - is what puts you in the state of mind that makes you receptive to learning, and motivated to learn more - knowledge as information.

Comprehending a game by playing with it and enjoying it leads to learning how to use 'cheats', hacks, shortcuts or getarounds because you REALLY fucking need to get to level two, (rather than proceeding mechanically through reading the manual). Playing is the way most of us proceed in real life because it's a lot more fun and gives us motivation to learn more. 'Response to necessity' is also the way our minds learn and remember things best, the only way to affect genetic changes, and thus learning is a side-effect of play. This way, we learn much more from a game than just the content of the game; we learn skills that may be used in all games, and skills that are just as effective in real life.

How many of us learned to type 'incidentally' by playing computer games? We didn't play with computers in order to learn to type, improve our attention and strategy skills, or upgrade our response speed. Yet all of these improvements have occurred, courtesy of biology and natural learning. All we had to do was play. Learning to type, pay attention, respond really fast and strategize were just responses to necessity.

This book is, therefore, about doing stuff with 'system mind'; its processes, the biological imperatives that trigger those processes and some of the approaches we can use to fulfil them, in order to navigate our way through difficulties and upgrade or improve the health and performance of our powerful embedded software.

I shouldn't have to repeat here that the map is not the territory, brains are not computers, and minds are not gaming software, but we are bound to encounter some critic who reviews this book before reading it, so I have.

THANKS
proofreading: LeScal, Lito, Neu McCoy
cover art photography: MigZ
author photo: LeScal

ISBN: 09548344-9-6
This work is creative commons IPMA*
May 2021

*Intellectual Property My Ass