Invisible Influence: The Power to Persuade Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere

4

Your Self and Others

Ever see someone … well … you know … pinch her butt?

Right now you’re probably laughing, smiling, cringing, or remembering when you pinched her butt.

I remember when I’ve had my butt pinched, and I can tell you that every time I was thrilled someone found me pinchable.

Now, let’s take a look inside the brain because a great deal has just transpired in the last three lines of text.

Your brain almost certainly saw him pinch her butt. That is the stereotypical or “most likely” picture stored in your brain. It’s more than a prediction; it’s an “instant dub in” to an ambiguous picture. But alas, you are mistaken. The culprit wasn’t a he. It was actually a “she.”

Someone pinched her butt.

Wow.

The brain engages in all kinds of cool processes to actually give you a movie or picture of something that you think you just saw. But this was more than a simple case of mistaken identity. Your brain created a man out of thin air and placed his two fingers at her butt then constructed the man to go with the fingers, after which a judgment was placed upon said man.

Yet there was no man to judge.

The brain performs all of this in a fraction of a second. It fills in all the gaps out there in life with whatever it selects out of the brain’s clip art file.

That’s the world you and I walk around in every single day. Reality plus clip art filler. And everyone has a different clip art file that matches his or her prior experiences.

When you saw “someone” pinch the girl’s butt, ...