How To Be Psychic – A Manual

I’ve just ordered a rather hard-to-get-hold of book by a chap called Ian Rowland on the subject of Cold Reading. I first heard about him years ago from one of Derren Brown’s books, and always meant to get it, but never did until now (apparently, Derren Brown learned quite a bit from this book).

For the uninitiated, Cold Reading is a psychological technique to appear to be psychic (amongst other things). And no, before you ask, I’m not planning on setting up as a clairvoyant – the outfit wouldn’t suit me.

So why buy a book on Cold Reading? My interest is two-fold:

First off, it seems the psychology behind cold reading can be effectively applied to sales, marketing and general business situations – such as quickly building rapport, which is always handy in my profession, as well as for my clients.

Secondly, I’ve always been fascinated by “non-local” phenomena in the scientific sense. I’ve studied the work of Russel Targ, Dean Radin & co – as well as diving into quantum physics (and even understanding bits of it) and ancient mysticism to work out if/how some people appear to receive non-local information. So studying cold reading should make an interesting read for the materialist skeptic in me.

Anyway, when I’ve read it, I’ll post my thoughts (if I understand it!).

Here’s Ian Rowland’s website if you’re curious.

Posted via email from George Lane’s Findings and Ramblings

Couple of Cool Things…

Well, my last post was about a nifty little gadget called Dragon Naturally Speaking, so I thought I’d continue the theme with another handy little service I’ve discovered.

It’s a wonderfully simple service called Posterous. It’s hard to describe the service unless you use it, but I’ll give it a go…

It allows you to share and create stuff over different areas of the web – for example: your blog(s), twitter, friendfeed, youtube, flickr etc. just by sending an email. The rest is taken care of at their end, which is great.

For me, it’s made blogging a little easier, but the main thing I’ve got from Posterous so far is speed. I can share something, put a few paragraphs of my thoughts next to it, and it appears as a blog post, on twitter and friendfeed as soon as I hit send. Marvellous stuff.

Link to it is www.Posterous.com

Here are a couple of handy tutorial videos courtesy of www.thirtydaychallenge.com

And this one talks about integrating it with Google Reader. Powerful stuff.

It’s a great time saver so far, but I’ll keep you posted on how things work out long-term.

Cheers,

~George

Posted via email from George Lane’s Findings and Ramblings