Priming

John taught our family home evening lesson on how we prime our minds. First he gave us a list of nonsense sentences and asked us to make a sentence from each group:

Him was worried she forever
From are Florida oranges temperature
Ball the throw toss slowly
Shoes give replace old the
He observeses occasionally people watches
Be will sweat lonely they
Sky the seamless gray is
Should now withdraw forgetful we
Us bingo sing play let
Sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins


Then he told us about a study discussed in the book "BLINK: The Power of Thinking without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell.

The above scrambled-sentence test list made people walk away slower, hunched, acting like old people. Why? They were primed by the words, things that made them think of old people...


Another study using words of patience, kindness, politeness, waiting, rest, yield, considerate, courteous, peace, etc influenced a group to wait without interrupting while the group primed with aggressive, bold, rude, bother, disturb, intrude, infringe. "The people primed to be rude eventually interrupted-on an average after about five minutes....but the people primed to be polite, the overwhelming majority-82-never interrupted at all. If the experiment hadn't ended after ten minutes, who knows how long they would have stood in the hallway, a polite and patient smile on their faces?"





"Priming is not, it should be said, like brainwhashing." and "once you become conscious of being primed, it doesn't work" but how we think matters!

Another experiment in the book takes two groups of students to answer 42 demanding questions from Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take 5 minutes to think beforehand about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6% of questions right. The other half of the studnest were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up with 42.6% right. The professor group didn't know more than the soccer group, they weren't smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a smart frame of mind, and clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier, in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked, to blurt out the right answer.

John asked us about the words in our home. He asked us about the words in the dinning room. I told him there weren't any, they were in the kitchen! I had forgotten about the table.

Recipe for table:
bleach wood, taking out stain color (packages at Home Depot for this purpose. Wood Bleach)
use white school glue to write words
re-stain table
scrape off remaining glue that acted as a resist
polyurethane, or experiment with resin (but tape edges of table first--I didn't know to and it was disastrous. I should have just polyurethaned like I know how)