The Game

A friend of mine lent me The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

The book is bound to look like a Bible, as if it is the definitive guide to picking up women. It isn't. But it is an entertaining and popular-selling collection of stories about how the author (Neil Strauss) became a guru on the subject.

There isn't really any secret society, or even any secrets. You can find similar info in the self-help section of your bookstore, or in seminars, or on the internet for free. If you are interested, you can start at this site. Here are some of the main ideas:

Confidence. You need confidence to approach and date attractive women, and they like men who know what they are doing. With practice, you can acquire the confidence.

Numbers. If you approach a lot of women, then your chances of finding mutual attraction are vastly improved.

Avoiding being a chump. Frequently a man get fixated on some woman, and expend a lot of energy trying to figure out why she is rejecting him. He may never figure it out. The books say to just forget her and move on.

Learning to flirt. There are a lot of flirting tips. The experts suggest everything from corny lines and jokes to magic tricks. You can tell stories, make conversation, or entertain the women any way you can. If she likes you, then she may go out on a date with you. Besides learning how to indicate interest in a woman, it is also important to read her signals so you can assess how interested she is in you.

Advanced techniques. Some experts promote NLP and other techniques. One of the ideas is that people often communicate their feelings in very subtle ways. These things seem to come naturally to some people. I suppose that they can be learned as well. I am not sure whether there is really much payoff to these methods.

One counter-intuitive tip is playing hard-to-get. I don't know whether women learn to play hard-to-get from their parents, friends, magazines, or what, but they all seem to know how to do it. Men don't. Apparently playing hard-to-get works for women and men. It is a little tricky, as you can also lose dates that way.

The book is amusing. Maybe I'll get some dating tips.

Introvert brains

Introverts use their brains more:

Introverted children enjoy the internal world of thoughts, feelings and fantasies, and there's a physiological reason for this. Researchers using brain scans have found introverts have more brain activity in general, and specifically in the frontal lobes. When these areas are activated, introverts are energized by retrieving long-term memories, problem solving, introspection, complex thinking and planning.

Marti Olsen Laney will soon have a book on introverted kids.

Illusions

Here are optical Illusions and Paradoxes. For geeks, I also recommend How To Write Unmaintainable Code and World's Worst Website.

Clint Eastwood movie clip

Sidney Crosby in action

This picture is amazing. Normally a hockey player doesn't get thru like that.

Low latent inhibition

I just saw a (fictional) TV show that talked about a wacky psychological condition called low latent inhibition, and how it can affect people with high IQ. I thought that it was gobbledegook, but actually there is similar research. Weird.

Animal experiments in the 1950s led to this:

In the latent inhibition (LI) paradigm, nonreinforced preexposure to a stimulus retards subsequent conditioning to that stimulus.

This means that if you observe something and decide that it is not important, then you tend to ignore it the next time you see it. But high IQ folks may not ignore it:

"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."

On the TV show, the guy with the low latent inhibition had the floor plans to his prison tattooed on his body so that he could devise an escape.