The Disaster Reaction

[tyrannosaurus vex]

People in America who are old enough will tell you that they remember exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment they learned that JFK had been assassinated. The same is true of the time they heard about the attacks on 9/11. These events were powerful disasters in many ways that affected millions of people on a deeply personal level, but a similar reaction occurs in just about anyone who experiences any sufficiently powerful event.

It isn't just that they encode specific memories about what they are doing, but that these moments become important reference points in their minds. Beyond that, when something like that happens, people immediately evaluate what they are doing. Some events will force people out of themselves and to take a starkly objective view of what is happening. When, for example, a person is notified of the death or impending death of someone close to him, everything else spontaneously melts away and becomes extremely unimportant. It no longer matters that he/she is at work, or shopping, or whatever else. It becomes clear to them what exactly they are doing, and they see themselves dawdling with nonsense and bullshit when there is something much more important to be done.

So, I'm just wondering if there is any way to trigger this response without resorting to horrific acts of violence or other destructive mayhem.

[Elder Iptuous]

I presume you also mean without lying about horrific acts of violence or mayhem?....

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I presume you also mean without lying about horrific acts of violence or mayhem?....

not necessarily.

[Elder Iptuous]

I presume you also mean without lying about horrific acts of violence or mayhem?....

not necessarily.

Then there's your answer....
tell 'em their mother just died.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I presume you also mean without lying about horrific acts of violence or mayhem?....

not necessarily.

Then there's your answer....
tell 'em their mother just died.

Anyway, Vex, I'm currently at a loss for how one might trigger this response for O:MF of TFYS,S! purposes, but I suppose it's possible. It's certainly a phenomenon that many belief systems make use of, by inducing a state of spiritual mania and making the physical world seem mundane and unimportant compared to religious pursuits.

However, this reaction tends to cause people to revert to sheep mode. After big disasters people want to hand over authority to someone whom they believe can keep them safe (9/11 and the Bush administration), and after powerful spiritual moments people look for someone to guide them. What we should look for is a way to induce the response that stresses individual freedom/responsibility.

To some extent, we already seek to achieve this through memebombs and the like: things that make one stop thinking for a moment about the upcoming meeting and realize, holy shit, there's still weird and cool stuff going on in the world that has nothing to do with whatever you're currently involved in.

[Cramulus]

actually, there's a lot of research on this specific type of memory

when I sober up I'll look up some references

[rong]

in a sense, doesn't sobering up trigger this response?

[Telarus]

RAW calls these 'moments of imprint vulnerability', although I'm pretty sure Vex already knew this.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I know this feeling, it's one of those "whooosh!" things which feels like it's there's a big endorphin flood involved.

Find out how to trigger the endorphin release and you'll be well on the way.

Thing is it's probably happening in response to the stressor so the most likely approach will involve introducing a shock somehow.

To re-create second-brain imprint vulnerability in an adult, the subject must be made to feel like a clumsy infant. The subject's neurological Scoreboard must clearly register the message, "I am one foot tall, ignorant, inept, frightened and wrong. They are six feet tall, wise, clever, powerful and right."

Helplessness can be escalated to panic by means of terror tactics. In Costa-Gavras' film The Confession, the Communist brainwashers take the subject from his cell, put a noose around his neck and lead him to a place where he expects to be hanged; some African tribes take candidates for "initiation" and bury them alive for hours. Basic imprint vulnerability occurs when the subject comes to believe, "I have no choice; they can do anything they want with me." At this point, the emotional brain hooks into the victim internalizes a rank in the pecking order under the protection of the most powerful figure available.

http://rawilson.wordpress.com/2007/09/06/how-to-wash-brains/

[Verbal Mike]

When, for example, a person is notified of the death or impending death of someone close to him, everything else spontaneously melts away and becomes extremely unimportant.

This is a surprisingly powerful effect. My cousin dropped dead in her mother's home in Vermont at the ripe old age of 19, two years ago. In Israel, the Second Lebanon War was raging at that time. We were all completely preoccupied with the war for weeks - but then when my cousin's father found her, the war basically ceased to exist for us. I have almost no recollection of anything relating to the war after August 4, 2006. I still couldn't for the life of me recall when the war ended. After that morning, the war, very actively threatening the lives of many people I know, ceased to be seen as a threat.

So yes, this phenomena is a really powerful thing.

[/irrelevant personal tangent]

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Based on what evidence do people evaluate what they are doing though?

It seems to me that they make note of what they are doing, but not necessarily invest any critical energy into it.

Salience ≠ introspection.

[Reginald Ret]

Interestingly enough i remember not caring about the whole 9/11 thing, but i also strongly remember where i was and what i was doing. This second memory has been imprinted by the expectations of those around me. Their constant talking about the subject.

[AFK]

I remember what I was doing on 9/11.  I was in Retail Hell, but I don't think it made me do any real evaluations or anything.  I figured, unless WWIII is triggered, I'm relatively safe in the wastes of Maine.

However, when the Challenger exploded, not only do I remember where I was when I heard the news, I remember the thoughts I had.  I was only 11 years old at the time, and I had determined when I grew up I wanted to be an Astronomer.  So, as I was coming home from school, my Mom greeted me at the door to tell me.  At that moment I knew I had to find a new career to aspire to. 

So, I think if you wanted to trigger this kind of thing, you have to figure out what kind of event would actually matter to people.  And that it mattered to the people you want it to matter to. 

I have a feeling this economic upheaval is already causing a lot of re-evaluation for a lot of people.  Some of it forced. 

[East Coast Hustle]

I was watching the Challenger launch live on TV in my 3rd grade classroom when it blew up. We all thought it was fireworks to accompany the launch and we were all really puzzled when our teacher (who was quite vicariously proud of a civilian female schoolteacher being onboard) burst into hysterical tears.

Needless to say, the rest of the week brought an onslaught of Christa McAuliffe jokes.

as for 9/11, I didn't care (still don't) other than to be quite angry with my neighbors for waking me up 4 hours after I had passed out after a hard night of bouncing.

Neighbors (pounding on my door): "Dude! J! Wake up! We're under attack, man! They blew up New York!"

Me: "You're gonna be under attack right the fuck here and now if you don't go away and let me sleep."

[Cramulus]

okay I finally sobered up...


So I can't find my old notes on this specific type of memory, but it is an observable phenomenon. I ran into this kind of memory during my college thesis on False Memories. Basically this type of memory is generated by an extremely emotional event. One of the event's side-effects are that the person gets imprinted with all sorts of irrelevant details which would normally escape long-term encoding. For example, a lot of people that were alive when JFK was assassinated can remember
a) what clothes they were wearing
b) what they had to eat that morning
c) what was on TV that night

This is an illusion though - it's been found that these memories, while significantly more accurate than normal memories, but they're not snapshot-perfect. Misinformation can highly contribute to what people think they remember. (that's what my research primarily was about)


Anyway, so to understand this kind of memory, it's best if I explain the model that memory scientsts are using right now.

Old Model: We used to think that memory was like a library. You create memories through experience, and then those memories stay in your brain like files in a computer. Over time they may decay. This is the "memory as an computer archive" model.



New Model: Currently, the model looks more like a network. Each memory in your head is "about" something, and that record is connected to other records. The relationship between the memories (or "nodes", to borrow a term from the Art of Memetics) has a few properties

• The relationship has a strength
• "activating" (remembering) a node will reenforce that node and activate the others it is connected to

For example, you have a birthday party, and someone shoots you in the stomach with a rifle. From now on when you think about "birthdays", it will also activate the "shot in the stomach" memory, because those memories are very closely related. Their nodes are tightly related due to intense emotions at the time of encoding.

Under this model, memories DO NOT DECAY. The relationship between records can decay, and this accounts for difficulty in remembering things. It's not that you've lost the memory, you're just having trouble activating it. And that's why remembering something else that happened that day might trigger the recall.

This is why sometimes you remember something and it triggers a cascade of other memories. You'll hear a song you were into as a teenager, and it reactivates all those old associations.


So under this model, the type of memory we're talking about (The Disaster Reaction) might have such an introspection-inducing effect because the emotional event touches on so many other unrelated nodes.

The reason you can remember all sorts of extraneous details about your headspace on the morning of 9/11 is because you had this really strong emotional reaction to something, and it established a relationship between the event and all those other records which were "active" at the time. Now when you think about 9/11, you can't help but reactivate those other nodes.

So I think the intent of the thread was to find a useful way to use this knowledge........

Without generating an emotional event (which is difficult without being overly destructive), maybe we can piggyback on existing moments of introspection? Maybe a good pairing of a meme bomb and an emotionally evocative image could trigger a similar "whole self reevaluation"? Like a picture of the twin towers and a line like "Look at yourself"