Today, I’d like to tell you the most mindblowing and unsettling idea I’ve been exposed to over the past six years… and how you can use the insight gained from this in copywriting and persuasion.
The idea comes from neuroscientist Donald Hoffman.
Hoffman studies vision and is convinced — based on all the research he’s done at his lab at UCI — that what we “see” in our minds is nothing at all like the world out there.
In other words, what you think of as reality is anything but. Schrodinger’s cat is neither dead nor alive. Instead, there is no cat.
This conclusion of Hoffman’s work is not a new idea. There are thousands of years of philosophy and about a century of hard science that say much the same thing.
But even with all the science and logic, most people still find this idea pretty hard to accept, or even absurd.
Hoffman knew this. And he knew that if he wrote his pop science book, The Case Against Reality, relying on science and logic, his message wouldn’t get through. So instead, he argued like this:
Imagine a blue rectangular file icon in the lower right corner of your computer desktop.
This icon allows you to interact with the file in a way that matters to you.
But does this mean the file itself is blue, rectangular, and lives in the lower right corner of your desktop? Of course not.
You can probably accept that the innards of your computer aren’t just slightly different from what you see on the screen.
Instead, the reality is completely different… immensely more complex… and pretty much unknowable if all you do is interact with the desktop interface.
But that’s just how it is with human consciousness, Hoffman argues.
The fact that you see letters on a screen right now doesn’t mean there are really letters on a screen in front of your eyes. What’s more, it doesn’t even mean that there are such things as a screen… or your eyes… anywhere, outside of your own consciousness. Your “reality” doesn’t “really” exist.
Like I said, I found this unsettling and yet mindblowing. Perhaps you do too. If so, let the feeling linger for a moment. And in the meantime, let me get to the copywriting and persuasion:
Thanks to a reader named Lester, I found out a cool new term, “guided apophenia.” It was coined by Reed Berkowitz, who is an augmented reality game designer.
Apophenia, by the way, is “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.”
And guided apophenia is how Berkowitz described the similarity between augmented reality games and the phenomenon of QAnon.
This similarity is also not a new idea. But the following bit in Berkowitz’s article was new to me:
Recently, a report published in 2018 in the journal Human Brain Mapping found that Aha! moments also activate the brain’s reward systems.
Basically, that “A Ha!” moment when puzzle solving (even when incorrect) is extremely pleasurable and also may help encode what we learn in a new way.
In other words, solving puzzles is extremely rewarding from a biochemical standpoint and the thoughts we gain from them are special to us.
In case it’s not clear:
This is scientific proof for something I’ve believed for a while – that insight is a feeling, much like desire, fear, or curiosity. And the same way that desire, fear, or curiosity can put us in a trance and make us susceptible to suggestion… so can the feeling of insight.
This newish science is really all I wanted to tell you today.
But had I said just that, then like Donald Hoffman, I doubted my message would get through.
So instead, I tried to flood you with the feeling of insight, by telling you the most powerful analogy I could think of.
Because, like other feelings, insight is transferable. If you feel insight because you successfully connected two unrelated things in your mind — say, computer desktops and human consciousness — then that feeling rubs off on other things nearby.
In my email newsletter, I spelled out exactly what this means for copywriting and persuasion. But unfortunately, you missed out on that, because you’re not signed up for my email newsletter.
So let me make a suggestion:
Consider signing up. Your marketing savvy — and perhaps your consciousness — might open up as a result.