Reality Reconstruction

Changing Memories

If you have any phobias, here’s a quick and easy way to get rid of them. Actually a couple of quick and easy ways. Sometimes called the “swish” technique (although I think this term may actually be proprietary), and sometimes called something else, it can be very helpful in removing a non-resourceful response to an external event or trigger.

What is an external event or a trigger? Anything that you perceive in the world around you. A certain coffee cup, a person, a certain tone of voice. Anything that happens in the outside world, that gets into your brain through your ears, eyes, nose, mouth, or sense of touch.

The brain is an amazing computational device. Despite the incredible speed with which the Internet has been expanding recently, with any number of ways to connect and communicate, the entirety of the Internet is nowhere near the complexity and computational abilities of one human brain. Anybody who is worried that the Internet, or machines in general will somehow become “aware,” like “Skynet,” don’t’ fret. Our simple human brains which have been used by humans to throw rocks at moving animals for hundreds of thousands of years are much more advanced that any computer now, or in the future.

However, there are tradeoffs. It can’t do everything at once. Many times it sacrifices accuracy for speed. This crops up whenever we generalize, distort, or delete information between the outside world and our brains.

On the one hand, that is a great leap of evolution. You only need to learn how to open one door, and every other door in the universe (or at least on earth) is easy to figure out. Just look for the handle, and give it a turn, or a click, and you’re in.

However, sometimes, this works against you. If you are a little kid out for a morning stroll, exploring the wonderful world around your home, and a strange dog comes out of nowhere and starts barking, it can have the effect of making you terrified of dogs your entire life.

Or if you have to get up in front of your third grade class to give a book report, and you interpret the laughter from a couple of students as directed at you, rather than the nervous laughter that it likely is, it can have a profound impact on your ability to speak in public for the rest of your life.

The great promise of human development is to take all of these automatic processes, and raise them up into your conscious awareness long enough to tinker with them, so that when they sink down into unconsciousness, they no longer hinder you. In fact, it’s possible to tinker with them enough so that they support you, and make what used to be fearful, compelling and sought after.

Here’s how. The structure is to take an event, and relive it, but give the events different meanings than you originally gave them. There are many tricks and “procedures” that you can use to do this. One is the swish pattern. It goes like this. (For the sake of illustration, we’ll use the barking dog from some imaginary childhood.)

Go back into your past, until you see the dog. Run through events, slowly, right up until the dog came into your awareness. Either a sound, or a smell, or visualization. Find the trigger. Imagine you are some time traveler, and you are in that little kids head. What is the first thing that let you know there was a dog there, before you felt the fear? Was it a smell, a noise, a rustling off in the distance?

Ok, freeze that. Now come up with another picture, one that makes you feel as good as you can. A big bowl of ice cream, a Friday afternoon after school, going over to your best friends house for a sleepover, whatever you can think of.

Now take that previous memory, leading up to the barking dog, and right when you get to that “trigger,” immediately switch over to the positive, happy memory.

If you’ve seen the movie “Butterfly Effect,” this can be a good way to hallucinate this. Imagine yourself as a little kid, just about to get scared by the dog, but not quite, then suddenly switch to the other memory. If you do this enough times, it will start to happen every time you think of a dog, or see a dog.

Before, this is what happened in your brain. You heard a dog; your brain quickly scanned your memory to figure out how to respond, and found the original barking dog incident, and came back with a feeling of fear.

But if you do the swish pattern enough, with enough emotion, you’ll “short circuit” that process. Now when you hear a dog, you will search through your memory, and either come up with nothing, giving you a neutral response, or you’ll come up with the new positive, happy response. Naturally, the more you practice “replacing” the original response, the more of an effect it will have. Many people make the mistake of only doing this once, and wondering why it doesn’t “stick.”

That’s akin to practicing a new golf swing once and wondering why you can’t hit it perfectly every time. You need to put in several practice swings on the driving range before it becomes a habit.

As to how you actually do the “swish” where you replace one memory with the next, there are several ways.

One is to make a picture of the trigger memory, and then shrink it quickly and replace it with a picture of the new memory.

Another is to imagine the trigger memory as a picture, and then somebody pulling it from your head, as if it’s wrapped around your head with rubber bands, and then just before snapping it back into your brain, replace it with the new memory.

Another is to imagine Yoda standing behind you with a light saber, and every time the trigger memory pops up, he demolishes it and makes the new memory appear.

The more creative you get with this, and the more fun you have doing this, the better and quicker it will work.

Have fun.

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