I have a little test for you this week as I enter Blog 7. Off the bat let me say you are at a disadvantage if you have not been regularly exposed to British television commercials, but there in lays my point.
• A “Good with Food”
• B “I’m loving it”
• C “The Ultimate Driving Machine”
• D “Believe in Better”
• E “Vorsprung Durch Tecknik”
Link the phrases above with the multimillion pound Brands below, answer to be revealed at the bottom of the post.
1. Sky TV
2. Mac Donalds
3. BMW
4. Audi
5. Cooperative Society
Like many people I often have the television on in the corner of the house; not because I am watching it but as part of the background ambience. It was only after the third of fourth time I heard myself saying, “Believe in Better” that I realised I had taken on board the subliminal messaging from Sky TV. What had started out with a rather beauty female voice underplayed with a humming tune extolling the virtues of Sky HD ready TV then ending by emphasizing the words “SKY…believe in better”. Six months later I just needed the words “SKY” in the familiar tone to get me to give the pay off and I realised right there how pernicious and pervasive this form of advertising is, how easy it is to brain wash or indoctrinate the human mind.
It is easy to see then how even the most independent thinker is able to be engineered or guided to a particular way of thinking. I will never forget in my first class of principles of correct thinking how the visiting professor taught us that “simple logic is anything but simple”. He then went on to give us this example: an archaeologist finds evidence of human remains, some rudimentary eating utensils and a roaring fire and then postulates, it is logical to assume that this scenario shows that our ancestors had learnt to cook their food on a fire and eat in a civilised manner. Of course, the whole class nodded in approval, it was simply logical to assume the hypothesis of the professor as correct. That was until he then pointed out that it was possible that the human was cooked on the fire and eaten by something else 
On average our five senses are being bombarded with a million random stimuli per day, and it is the job of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) to decipher the “things that matter most from the things that matter least” but it is not fool proof.
Some twenty years ago at an international athletic event I entered into a full stadium of an expectant British Public, these where heady days, the athletics team of our country was on a high, winning medals or making finals in all events. I was focused, prepared to do battle in the arena, the ambience of the crowd part of the energising process to release the coil of highly strung energy. It is important to stay focused, wear the sound as a cloak for intensity but block out the noise to avoid distraction when all of a sudden as I was getting my track suit off and heading to my blocks I heard, “Papa” shrieking through the night air. My RAS the automatic mechanism inside my brain that brings relevant information to your attention made me alert to the voice of my daughter.
When I hear the words, “everybody knows that” or “it “stands to reason” I have to ask myself “do they?” and “does it?” or is it just a bandwagon effect of lazy thinking or has my RAS linked random pieces of information over eons of time.
Let me know forget the quiz if you got:-
A5
B2
C3
D1
E4
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