Re:Obama's Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches
by psyklic on Wednesday November 05, 2008 @08:23PM
(#355255)
In other words, the paper should be titled: "How To Be A Great Public Speaker"
Re:Obama's Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches
by Alex3917 on Wednesday November 05, 2008 @09:29PM
(#355286)
This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry"
To be fair, I think NLP would be better described as extrascientific rather than discredited. A couple ideas have been tested without finding any support, but most of the ideas are either untested or untestable. Also, the ideas from NLP that are discredited aren't the same as the ideas that the pickup artists promote.
That said, people who pay for NLP books and seminars are probably wasting their money.
[I'm sorry for insulting your intelligence by wasting time addressing this paper, which among other things suggests Obama is transferring positive feelings about JFK to himself using "secret hand gestures", but NLP annoys the hell out of me]
This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry", a school of thought that says guys can hypnotize girls in bars by touching them on the hand and echoing back whatever they say. Yeah, good luck with that.
This paper presupposes:
* that much of what Obama has to say is overtly dishonest (always a great sign in an academic publication)
* that basic techniques of rhetoric written about since the Greeks like alliteration and call-and-response are, in Obama's hands, devastating psychological weapons (want to learn "rhetoric hacking"? start: http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html)
* that cadence and word selection can be used hypnotically to "bypass" the decision centers of the brain and implant thoughts
* that capabilities not ascribed to any form of hypnosis in any therapeutic setting can be accomplished on a mass scale with a microphone and a podium
Homework assignments:
* Find citations in the actual scientific peer-reviewed literature for terms like "non-dominant hemisphere programming" or "pre-programmed response adaptation".
* Read a well-regarded Obama speech and see if it suddenly becomes less compelling when not read by Obama (last night's speech, for instance, reads even better than it sounds).
This paper is right about one thing: speakers who have mastered rhetoric and oration are capable of making disproportionately compelling arguments. Yep, they're right: that is in fact one of the major reasons we elected Obama. Most of us --- the sane ones, at least --- consider this a fucking feature, not a defect.
[Adding: here's the (uniformly excellent) Language Log on the same topic; I guess if it's worth his blog, it's worth a comment here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=778]