Our good friend (and Britain’s most gorgeous psychologist) Professor Richard Wiseman has published another masterpiece. I caught Derren reading a copy and got quite upset I was the last to know it was finally available:
In “59 Seconds”, psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman presents a fresh approach to change that helps people achieve their aims and ambitions in minutes, not months. From mood to memory, persuasion to procrastination, and resilience to relationships, Wiseman outlines the research supporting this new science of rapid change, and describes how these quick and quirky techniques can be incorporated into everyday life. Think a little, change a lot.
This title helps to: discover why even thinking about going to the gym can help you keep in shape; learn how pot plants make you more creative; and, find out why putting a pencil between your teeth instantly makes you happier.
‘At last, a self-help guide that is based on proper research. Perfect for busy, curious, smart people’ – Simon Singh
‘A triumph of scientifically proven advice over misleading myths of self-help. Challenging, uplifting and long overdue’ – Derren Brown.
Available now and recommended by DB himself.
i want to know some of DB mind control
[...] This post was Twitted by BrownTowers [...]
I love Richard Wiseman, he gives us puzzles and writes books that make everyone happy. He does Twitter experiments, and is not even remotely frightening.
Yes, i want this book too!
I’ve collected a huge stack of self help books designed to get my crappy pointless life back on track, and I’m finding it increasingly demanding to ignore all of them at once.
I guess I’m just going to have to break through all my ‘ignoring good advice’ comfort zones.
Now, who moved my cheese?
Flapjack you don’t need self help crap, you’re KING OF PUNS. That counts for something!
you’d be happy too if there were lead in yer pencil!
Meaning: get your but out of your sofa and do it. Ehehe …
I’m sure it’s very helpfull to those who read it, and need it. Be happy that Wiseman did not keep it a secret .. and described his superb way of living as MAGIC ….
I beat Wiseman though .. wont take me 59 sec … but I\’ll keep my techniques a secret … I leave people flabbergasted all the time …. HOW ?? …
Do we wont to do it in 59 secs? That\’s the real question ofcourse. Do we wont to be happy due to a pencil between our teeth??? I myself prefer a cigaret or chips or such. People who stopped smoking def. did not get happier due to the pencil .. I\’ve felt the danger zone around those …
And it\’s not about ending any form of thinking … nah, Wiseman, you got it all wrong this time … it\’s about another form of thinking .. using your mind .. the toolkit. May not make sense in the eyes of others all he time when you start to use all it\’s tool but yea man, how it can serve yourself!
Precaution though … the entire enlightening may not be what you expect it to be … once in the light … you at times want the dark back on the inside … For which there are tools upstairs as well. Quite handy indeed.
The manual though .. that\’s the only lacking thing .. otherwise it had been a superb example of intelligent design/development. Now it is .. as giving something wonderfull to complete morrons (us entering this planet) … and on top of that .. the guiding angels among us (parents) .. not sure where they got those from … but .. there must be different levels in angel education I guess then …
Yes, we write our own manual .. but in some cases they got it without a writer or diagnostic tools … therefor .. huuray for Wiseman et al. Everybody is entitled to read the manual. But what if it is not compatible with your version ? i mean, how old is Wiseman? And how old are you? And erm .. are you going to write self help books as well? Lot of competition on its way Wiseman!
Not me ofcourse, I’ll krib with the main keepers of the real manual …..
Oh, and it might be fair to warn those who already live like that but did not know … if you place wiseman’s stuff on top of such a person …. my god, a real zone of disaster will follow this people … they theirselves probably dont even notice … for a while ..
And in the come the men in the white coats ………
did you mean “pot plants” or “potted plants”? important distinction there. a legal one.
Hey, how come Jesus gets the undivided attention of 3 Wisemen and us mere mortals only get one Wiseman? Doesn’t seem fair.
Just goes to show, if you’ve got connections…
I WANT that book..
I personally am done with buying anything else in the self-help category. The two people I study from are probably more than enough for me (if they even technically count as ’self-help’).
However, I have good expectations for the stuff in this book. But PLEASE bear in mind if you are reading not to treat anything as ‘the whole truth’ or ‘the magical formula’ that somehow fixes everything in your life. Because if you do, you’ll end up saying it doesn’t work at all. THAT’S the biggest problem with the self-help industry as it reinforces the myth of ‘the magical formula’.
Experiment with it. Don’t worship it.
Hee hee, I agree flapjack but then threre’s Len and Frederick too apparently. But Richard is the wisest of the Wisemans I’m sure…
Can’t wait to read 59 Seconds. Exciting stuff!
I too despise self-help books, because they seem to spend ages teling us all how we suck and therefore need them and they depress me. But come on, this is by the guy who wrote Quirkology, it HAS to be good.
SGC: For every one person who knows what they are talking about in the industry, there are a thousand people who don’t.
What I’ll say is believing that you’ve learned something and ACTUALLY learning something are two completely different things. People often expect these ‘life seminars’ and self-improvement books to instantly make them professionals at, well… everything. I reitterate: instantly! That, of course, is ridiculous.
Jameshogg – Totally with you on that one, about 80% of the self-helps I’ve read are a waste of space, but you only find out which ones are chock full of BS by reading them, which unless you hang around bookshops till closing time often involves buying them.
Of the remaining 20% which most likely would help if I bothered to put them into practice, my top 3 are “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective people”, “Feel the fear and do it anyway” and “Overcoming Procrastination” (I’m all too painfully aware of the irony).
Anything by Deepak Chopra (yes, someone did give me one of his) goes straight to Oxfam!
But as you say, there’s no magic formula. That’s why I read Derren!
SGC – Reminds me of z-list actor and presenter Troy McClure from the Simpsons – “You may remember me from such self-help programmes as ‘Get Confidence, Stupid!’”
Flapjack: good for you, for daring to read them. I have to admit, I don’t know if I’ve actually read a self help book all the way through. The smug, smarmy gits grinning pityingly at me from the covers put me right off. I did once read a book about NLP, I remember it mainly for its soothing blue colouring. I normally remember books for their content, so that says a lot.
Seriously, though, there is nothing that gets me more depressed than walking into that section of the book store. It’s like you’re suddenly assaulted by a thousand gurus telling you that you’re depressed, you have no direction in life, your relationships suck, basically you can’t get anything right. It’s worse than the new-age bit. I think if I went to a life-improvement seminar I would bite someone.
i think derren is britains most gorgeous phsychologistover richard wiseman!
that wasn’t supposed t be random – just on the quote above!
SGC- I was dragged to one of those overpriced 4 day life improvement seminars against my better judgement by my serial guru worshipper mate who wouldn’t let up nagging me about it for 2 whole years until I eventually caved in, in a last ditch attempt to shut him up.
I was sorely tempted to bite somebody by the end of it. It was self-help, but with a cultish twist. After some basic sensory disorientation, such as not being allowed to take perscribed medication without their say so and having the curtains drawn all day and being told to leave our watches at the door so we wouldn’t know what time of day it was, we were subjected to a mixture of self improvement techniques I’d already got from my self help books at a fraction of the cost and scary culty shite.
We were pared off with strangers so we’d be guilt tripped into compliance “if you let yourself down, you also let your buddy down”. We were told when to wake up in the morning, 6am, not one minute sooner or later. If under cross examination we hadn’t followed this instruction to the letter we were mocked by someone at the back of the room playing Sinatra’s “I did it my way” on a stereo. We were told that they’d hand out our mobile phone numbers to everyone unless “anyone here has any objections to that… nobody does… good” [god help anyone who dared put their hands up in front of the crowd and say "actually no!"].
There would be dancing, followed by mandatory revealing your darkest secrets to a room full of total strangers, dressed up as self-empowerment. When one teenage girl in the group of 200 people failed to go up in front of the group and reveal her inmost secrets, the cult leader singled her out and laid into her in front of the entire group, calling her an ungrateful bitch, and saying “after all your mother has done for you by bringing you here” amongst other things.
We were told not to reveal anything that went on there to outsiders, but nonetheless to try and persuade 5 people to join “because we can’t afford to advertise” [bullshit, there were 150 people paying £260 each... do the calculation!]. In order to progress further (to what was ironically called the ‘GIT’ stage) we had to start finding converts amongst friends and family members.
The biggest irony was it was supposed to help you with your self-esteem issues by systematically breaking down all your basic personal boundaries one at a time.
I can’t tell you what they were called (the ISA experience) but it took my mate 2 years to ask me “do you think it was a cult?”
Hrrrm, let’s see, is the Pope catholic? Do bears defecate in the woods? Was it a total mindf**king ripoff? What do you think?
Flapjack: these guys?
http://www.isaexperience.com/index.html
What you went through sounds like something out of Scientology. It also sounds absolutely terrifying.
SGC – I’m not allowed to confirm that, but it was.
The significant difference between the ISA experience and Scientology is that the latter has the bogus folklore about space aliens, but in all other respects they operated very much like a cult.
It would have been terrifying, but for the fact Derren’s ‘Heist’ had already made me fully aware what to expect and I was merely going through the motions, although the peer pressure to divulge your deepest darkest secrets was considerable “everyone else in the group has been brave enough to open up, why can’t you” etc. I know this is standard cult procedure now.
My mate was so far gone at one point that he was lead to believe that to achieve self-worth, he had to do menial housekeeping chores at the house the cult leader for free. And he still insisted the leaders weren’t in it for profit. They have ‘assisting’, which means everyone in the seminar has your phone number and can check up on you any time to see if you’re sticking to the regime.
At one stage a friend he brought to the experience said, “it’s not for me, I want to leave” and he was persuaded not to by being segregated from people in the group he knew. He insisted, “I still want to leave” and it eventually got to the point where mere persuasion wasn’t working and the cult members were instructed to bolt and guard the door so he couldn’t get out. He still left during a toiletbreak, as security wasn’t that tight at the conference suite! I would have left on the first day too, but as my mate had provided me with a lift, it would’ve made an already expensive weekend an extortionate one.
You’re pretty hardcore, Flapjack. If I got stuck in a group like that and they tried to prevent me from leaving I think I would have an actual nervous breakdown on the spot. I would probably vomit on their shoes.
SGC – actually, your ploy of projectile vomiting might have been a great excuse to leave, and if it wasn’t for extravagent gestures drawing further unwanted attention from all those “concerned individuals” with my mobile number I would’ve tried it.
Did people actually call you once you got out of the place, since they had your number?
SCG – Yes they did, and after just hoping they’d get bored, I eventually had to resort to telling them straight up I thought it was intrusive and cult like, that the person running the experience had no academically recognised psychotherapist qualifications [though he acted as though he did] and was way to overbearing and could they stop calling me please.
I did learn two valuable lessons, that the passive approach to hoping people will leave you alone doesn’t really work for cults, and if you ever get caught up in a cult, always give them a bogus mobile number!
Actually it is not very good and rather disappointing. Much of it is a rehash of material from his other books plus endless stuff about research conducted by other psycholgists. Wiseman’s best book is The Luck Factor and he has never really bettered it. A better read for you if you like this sort of thing is Derren Brown’s Tricks of the Mind…a GREAT bedside book (whereas “59 Seconds” isn’t)
I had the similar creepy ISA experience ….it was very surreal, you know it’s completely dodgy, but for the first little while I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe any organisation could be opperating in such a blatantly cultish way, and everyone seemed to be buying it!!! I When I went to leave early one of the “assistants” really agressively tried to make me stay, first through pleading with me nicely, then trying to guilt trip me (“what about the person who brought you here, what about your buddy? you’re letting them down!”) then telling me that it was just my “programme” talking because my programme doesn’t want to change and grow (your programme is basically your mind btw) and then pointing out in a vaguely threatening way that the organisers and everyone in the room have my contact details and if I leave they’re going to get in touch and wonder why I left. And then as if all that wasn’t enough, in an extraordinarily spiteful tone of voice she launched in to a description of how sad and depressed I would be if I left early, how terrible I would feel about myself , how much I’d regret it, forever. There are other organisations like this apparently, Landmark Forum is one, they’re known as LGATs (large group awareness training) this link has a pretty good description of them and what to look out for http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=965&Itemid=12.
I wouldn’t recommend going along to them out of curiousity by the way, even though I was aware of what was going on I still found it to be a really stressful experience, I was thinking of staying until the end myself but I decided to get out because it was all getting a bit too weird. Other LGATs to watch out for are
- Lifespring Basic Training
- est
- The Forum (Landmark Forum)
- ManKind Project
- Context Associated program
- Sterling Institute of Relationship
- Momentus
- Silva Mind Control
And that’s just some of them!
ISA Experience
Institute For Self Actualization
There doesnt seem to be much on internet about this. Surprised there hasntg been more serious investigation into tyhis. Almost all posts seem to be people who have been and were uncomfortavble and disturbed but had strength ofg mind to resist the emotional and character disintegration tactics OR ISA member refuting and saying come along its great. I have come across a guy who is always trying to get people to go along, using same lines with everyone and being quite aggressive and harrassing people when they say no. Some of the evidence from people who have been probably seems to explain why. Also seem to prey on people who are emotionally vulnerable