photo credit: Eddie~S

I was recently in Zurich Switzerland and had the good fortune to be taken to The Blindekuh (Blind Cow) Restaurant.

The Blindekuh is a restaurant where everything inside the dinning room is totally pitch black. There is no light in there what so ever. Basically by walking into the dinning room you loose your sense of sight. You become blind. Totally.

At first myself and others at my table had the illusion that we could still see our own hands moving in front of our faces, even though we couldn’t see anything else. I put this to the test by getting a friend’s hand in front of my face (an inch away), only to find that I couldn’t see it at all. It had been a trick that my mind was playing on me by making me think I could see my hands.

The experience for me was amazing. After the few initial minutes of feeling wary and concern about where my hands were and if I was going to knock over my glass etc wore off, I began to relax in to the realization that I no longer had my sight to rely on.

Listening to people’s voices took on a whole new level of awareness. The tables are shared and seat 6-8 people, so our small group of three joined a table by another group of 3 Americans. During the whole lunch I never got to see these people at all, I only had the sense of sound and topics of our conversation from which to evaluate them.

The Obsession of Passion – What you gives you OCD, will often give you your success.

People often ask me at my seminars, about how they find can find their true passion and often my answer is something along the lines ‘you will know it when you find it, so keep trying new things till you find it’.

While this may often seem a short and succinct reply to a truly in depth question, the simple fact is that most people don’t try many new activities once they become an adult.

Adam Savage is known to many of you as one of the presenters from the Myth-Busters show on the discovery channel. I am a fan of the show and the fundamental ways they test assumptions to see what actually is myth and what is plausible.

The ultimate mind trick is to accurately read someone’s mind and know what they are thinking, with out any fancy card forces or magic tricks. This is often achieved by frauds and scam artists using a technique called ‘Cold Reading’. When I first learnt NLP I modeled ‘Cold Reading’ from two sources and found it to be extremely effective at making people think that you could read their mind and tell their future.

At one party I went to I took out a normal deck of cards and used them as prop while I used cold reading to read all my girlfriend’s friends. Later in the night many people came up to me and professed that I had been the best fortune-teller they had ever met (this was in an Asian culture where people going to a fortune teller, was quite common).

For me I did it as fun exercise to check the ability that I had modeled and I deliberately set up an empowering future for all of the people I worked with, yet unfortunately many people use it, to claim to speak to the dead, talk of magic abilities and generally to get large sums of money out of people.

While we can read many of the things in peoples minds (such as they way they are thinking and style of their thinking), we are still unable to read their exact and precise thoughts. UNTIL NOW that is.

As science gets better and better at learning how our brains work we are starting to see some truly amazing milestones in the technology of brain scanning.

This story from CBS 60 Minutes shows exactly how far technology has come to being able to make this simple little feat available to computers and perhaps in the future everyone, including the government.

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What is really interesting in this story is the whole concept of reading people’s intentions. Will the future be something like the movie ‘Minority Report’? Will people be scanned before getting on a plane to see if they have the intention to blow up that plane?

As the rate of our technology advances, I wonder if we are advancing at the same rate as a society to handle the many ethical issues related to this kind of technology.

The future is always interesting.