CHEER
What if you could optimize your thoughts and emotions for maximum performance and enjoyment, in the same way that you now optimize your website, social media, and blogposts for SEO, and for the most appeal to your audience? That’s what AI Mindset Mastery aims to do. Your success-- personal, relational, financial, and otherwise— is significantly enhanced when you are participating in the most transformational core human experiences.
The Internet, social media, online videos and AI are vast resources which have the capacity to acquaint you with new and beneficial feeling-states, if you use them intelligently. It may be true that most people waste a lot of time on valueless things online, but that's no different than saying that some people use fire to burn down buildings, while wiser people use it to cook food or warm their homes.
What does that mean, how does it work, who are we, and what do these jellyfish have to do with it? We have discovered that most people benefit from fulfilling what we sometimes call an emotional RDA. You are already familiar with RDA, or recommended daily allowance, when it comes to nutrition. You need so much protein, so much Vitamin C, riboflavin and iron every day. The same can apply to your psychological well-being. At some point you will devise a simple checklist you can refer to daily to determine which core emotional experiences would benefit you most this minute. The rest of this video explains how.
Our work involves invoking in you the most optimal forms of what we call Core Human Experiences. These are things like Gratitude, Awe, Laughter, the Hero’s Adventure, Storytellling, Swarm Intelligence, and AI-led group mind mapping. Each practice combines the best of human intelligence with the best of artificial intelligence, hence the name AI Mind Mastery. When you undergo peak forms of these feeling-states, you are more prepared for achieving success in any realm, including in your financial, personal, and psychological life. AI, the Internet, and online group calls have the capacity to find the best of these, as you will see when you join us. And there are a lot of features in this Network that allow you to share your discoveries and grow with others on the same quest.
The Jellyfish are here because they tend to inculcate a sense of Awe, which is one of the important Core Human Experiences. They won a contest. Or rather, this livestream video won a weekly contest for which video inculcated the most awe in the greatest number of our participants. It defeated 1300 other candidates. This is an example of how we work: members vote on which content or experience evokes the most of a certain feeling-state. These jellies have no brains, hearts, or nervous systems, and yet they astound us with their endlessly synchronized dance!
We are a group of coaches and consultants who have been working together for 9 years on a unique idea: can we improve individual lives in all aspects through finding which of these core human experiences are most growth-inducing and transformative for each person when planned and undergone on a regular basis, and how can they be enjoyed in a group?
Gratitude is another critically valuable and growth-inducing practice we indulge in. Doing gratitude together is more powerful than doing it alone.
What you're seeing here is a scroll of the most popular graphics and posts on gratitude this week, abstracted from millions on the web. In our groups we scan hundreds of these in a few minutes, but more importantly at the same time we scan the faces of the people in the Zoom room, to watch them change. That's what we mean by doing Gratitude together.
Here is one of our favorite ways to evoke gratitude. We are privileged to be able to go back in time and see what it was like 75,000 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zEhxkPgN4E
These are the Tau’t Batu people of Palawan in the Philippines, who have pursued a basic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the same place for thousands of years. Here the hunters have caught 5 very tiny birds and brought them back to the volcanic cave where these people live. What’s amazing is that these small birds are going to be shared by 15 or 20 people, and yet they’re so grateful!
As we watch this stone age tribe we are in a way watching our own past. 75,000 years ago your ancestors lived in a similar way. We look at hundreds of videos of neolithic tribes when we design AIMM protocols, because we want to see which core experiences have remained constant throughout the miillennia. Usually we share 2 or 3 of these on every Zoom call. When you watch these consistently you often feel a sort of kinship with these ancient peoples. Something in you resonates with their experience.
Before we present the next core experience, let's ask: How much time does this take? In the beginning there is a learning curve, because no one ever told you that you could evince favored affectual mental states at will, and in whatever quantity you want. But with some practice you'll get to the point where it all happens automatically, without taking time from your daily activities.
We cannot overemphasize the importance of the group experience, which generally takes place during Zoom calls. It's one thing to experience peak emotions by yourself. But when you are on a group call with people who understand the process and are all invoking the same feeling-states in themselves, you connect with others' faces. After a while you notice that each person's manifestation of joy, or laughter, or wonder, or curiosity, is unique. And feedback loops are created whereby your emotions are intensified because you are intently taking in others' experiences.
Another important core experience is Laughter.
We follow the practice of Laughter Yoga, founded by cardiologist Dr. Madan Kataria. Everyone on the Zoom calls gets a chance to catch the contagion of uncaused laughter. Once again, we choose video clips that get upvoted during a weekly contest, so as to have the best chance of invoking the behavior in the maximum number of participants.
As an added bonus, we often recommend that members attend laughter yoga sessions held every weekday online. These calls are valuable because each one features participants from many countries around the globe, so there's a real sense that you are laughing together with the whole world. As with all the other feeling states, the effect is cumulative. You will find that your body-mind really WANTS to laugh, just as it really wants to feel peak instances of wonder, gratitude, community, and the others. It just didn't know how. And it wasn't given permission by society at large. But in our groups, there are no filters. We can all be silly, courageous, awestruck, grateful together.
There's a difference between uncaused laughter, which you see here, and laughter brought about by humor. We played with combining these, but at some point we found it can work best as a sequence: when you start with uncaused laughter and get the crowd really rolliing, then at a certain point EVERYTHING is funny. Now you can introduce the stupidest jokes, and everyone will laugh.
Here’s a secret which we had no conception of when we started this work 9 years ago: The physical and emotional reactions of your fellow participants on Zoom calls can be the most valuable parts of these happenings. We begin to feel and know that we are all the same underneath, even though our individual expressions of feeling-states vary widely.
Here’s a video we use to introduce another Core Experience: the Hero’s Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell. These men are tribesmen from the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. They are meeting a white man, who happens to be a Belgian anthropologist, for the first time. We are witnessing their sense of wonderment in first meeting someone they could never even envision. Both the tribesmen and the scientist are undergoing their own form of a Hero’s Journey.
But because this is the 21st century, we want to create our own Hero's quest. Technology and imagination allow us to do it within the scope of an online group call.
We often have bigger requirements for our Hero’s journeys than the classic mythological ones. With the old adventures, you COULD return as a Hero having only helped yourself or your family in some way, without affecting your Society. With ours, there MUST be a measurable effect on some agreed-upon societal or cultural, or scientific problem.
Let's look at some examples.
The condition of women and girls in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover in August of 2021 has gone from bad to worse. Women are not allowed to attend universities or secondary schools, and are forbidden from serving in the government. In several areas they are discouraged from leaving home at all.
Meanwhile, Taliban officials, who write and enforce these restrictions, have been legitimizing themselves by purchasing blue checkmarks for their Twitter accounts. According to Abdirahim Saeed of BBC News:
"The Taliban have started using Twitter's paid-for verification feature, meaning some now have blue ticks on their accounts.
Previously, the blue tick indicated "active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest" verified by Twitter, and could not be purchased.
But now, users can buy them through the new Twitter Blue service.
And the people who buy them in Afghanistan are the Taliban.
In response to this, we at AI Mind Mastery started the Afghan Women's project.
A popular pastime in Afghanistan is the 'Sher Jangi', or 'Poetry Battle'. One person writes a verse, and the opponent, or second player, must respond by writing a poem which begins with the last letter of the first verse.
We are in the midst of an online 'Sher Jangi'. We use ChatGPT to write a traditional Afghan verse about the virtues of Afghan women. Then we have the program translate it into Pashto, Farsi, and Uzbek.
Here is our first submission, from Fatima H. from Herat:
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Because of the power of AI, we get better and better at making Hero’s Journeys more impactful and easier to set up. Here’s a pretty new example. A group of Inuit tribes in the Canadian Arctic created a social network called Siku, which is at siku.org.
You will see here that unlike social media sites like Facebook, a huge portion of what people post here is about their trips across the ice where they live. They go on goose reporting trips, fishing trips, and what is most interesting, ice reporting trips. These Inuit are on the leading edge of climate change, because they are witnessing their way of life being threatened by melting ice in the Arctic. So when they go on these treks to gauge the depth of the ice, they are literally going on real Hero’s Journeys!
So eventually we want to do what we did with the Afghan women, which is to celebrate their heroic deeds in sagas and odes. But for now, what we’re doing is this: When some tribal member completes a journey, we commemorate their accomplishment by using AI to create a new image of an Inuit God or Goddess who is congratulating them on their accomplishment, just as Virgil honored the Roman hero Aeneas, or the ancient Indian writers celebrated the exploits of Rama.
Our efforts are directed at getting the Inuit kids excited about their history and mythology by depicting these legendary figures, but also about AI itself, since it’s intruding into their world whether they like it or not.
Another Hero's project is called Keitai Shosetsu.
You may know that not many people in Japan want to have children nowadays. It’s become an issue, because if people don’t have kids, they don’t grow up to have jobs and pay taxes to support the social welfare system that supports Seniors. Japan is becoming a country of old people who are retired.
https://sites.google.com/site/keitaishosetsu/home
So we held a group AI brainstorming session with this program and it suggested that we have a contest using Keitai Shosetsu. These are cellphone novels which are a big fad in Japan. People write them on cellphones and read them on cellphones, often during their long commutes on trains.
Our Japanese cohort proposed a contest for cellphone novels which explore questions like “who should have children? Why? Is it selfish to remain single, as a lot of young people do now in Japan?
And gradually the keitai shosetsu started asking deeper questions, like what is the value of a human being? Can people arrive at a consensus as to whether there should be MORE humans? And if so does it matter if this or that nationality produces more or fewer people?
SWARM INTELLIGENCE
Let’s look at Swarm Intelligence, another of our core experiences. This refers to the well known phenomenon whereby birds and fish and insects perform in ways that seem as if they have the decision making power of one smart individual.
Here are some starlings. Note how they all turn at once and do these complicated maneuvers. There is no time for a leader of the flock to give directions; they all move at once.
There's a feeling that's hard to describe when a group on an online call works on the same problem together. If it is an emotion, we don't have a name for it.
One way we use Swarm Intelligence is called Galaxy Zoo. Years ago, Oxford University astrophysicists were using space telescopes to take millions of photos of distant galaxies. They wanted to classify the galaxies by type so as to determine all sorts of things about our universe like its mass and rate of expansion.. The problem was, they don’t have enough grad students to spend time classifying the galaxy photos, so they created a crowd-sourced research project called galaxy zoo. The exciting thing about this is, only the robotic camera in the space telescope has seen these images. In most cases, when you look at one of these galaxy photos, you are the first human to set eyes on this galaxy. When we study these on a Zoom call, we have everyone say or put in chat their answer to the questions the program asks about the galaxies. We find the answers are definitely different than the ones generated by one researcher alone.
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/
Let's look at an earlier example of swarm intelligence: 1.7 million years earlier, to be exact.
These are the Hadza people of Tanzania in East Africa. They have followed a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the same area for at least 75,000 years. They are unique because their current lands are only 30 miles from Olduvai Gorge, where hominid ancestor fossils from millions of years ago were found by Anthropologists like Mary and Louis Leakey.
What I want you to notice is that they’re making fire. And as you watch this, consider that the way they are doing this was duplicated by OUR ancestors, perhaps 700,000 years ago. It’s the exact same way of making fire by rubbing a stick into a wooden base. So it’s very moving that in watching this we are taking a time machine trip back 700,000 or more years and witnessing the beginnings of what would one day become civilization.
But notice that everyone is involved. It's a team effort. One guy is twirling the stick, but the others are all advising. There's no reason not to believe that this is how it was done for hundreds of thousands of years. It's a primitive form of swarm intelligence.
Which leads us to AI-informed group mind mapping, which is related to Swarm Intelligence.
Before I describe this let me tell you a story that has always been an inspiration to our group mind mapping. Years ago a group of NASA scientists in the Apollo program were working on how to land people on the moon. But when the program was first announced in the early sixties, there were whole new technologies that had to be developed, because no one had done anything like this before. So there were devilishly complex problems that these scientists and engineers had to solve.
There was one group that had brainstorming sessions that looked like this: A bunch of scientists sat in a conference room and were presented with a complex problem. And for a while there was complete silence. Then they would start chattering about rather inconsequential things, like sports, the weather, what movies they’d seen. Then the chatter would die down, and there would be 20 minutes of pure silence. Then– some scientist would yell Aha! I have the answer! And others would chime in and improve whatever he or she had said. And before you know it they would have solved this difficult challenge.
We want to re-create that kind of group brainstorming. It’s much easier when you have a shared onscreen focus group, all creating and expanding a mind map together.
We’ve had similar experiences with generateideas.ai. We also use ChatGPT, meta.ai, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, and others.
But UNLIKE other AIs generateideas.ai lends itself to a group mind mapping experience, which is what you'll see now.
Let's open up the program and go to Create.
The question we'll ask is "Would it be reasonable to say that the three hormones Oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine, when their functions in the brain are considered, correspond approximately (in order) to love, emotional stability, and accomplishment?"
Can you see how using a mind map like this allows you to see the wide picture, the 10,000 meter view, while at the same time allowing you to focus microscopically on a sub-topic? Compared to the way most people use something like ChatGPT, which leads you on a path, but doesn't let you see all the other possible paths at the same time.
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Let's look at a project that came directly from one of these AI-assisted group Mind Mapping sessions. This is what we call the Tigray protocol. In 2022 there was a Civil War in Ethiopia between the national government and the Tigray region. Both sides suffered atrocities, and this photo by Eduardo Soteras of AFP is evidence of one of them.
These are women whose husbands have just been killed by the Ethiopian army. Our group was considering using this photo as a way to share the plight of these people and raise money for refugees through UNHCR.
Then we asked generateideas.ai for the best way to to this.
Here's what it suggested. We found that by applying various filters to this photo, we could evoke different moods. And even more fascinating, some versions brought in more donations when used in public appeals.
As I scroll through these, can you guess which versions moved people the most, so that they gave more?
Actually, the images are displayed in descending order, with the ones that garnered the most donations at the top, and then as we go down each brought in less.
So there you have six primary core human experiences. In our weekly zoom calls, which last between 30 and 60 minutes, we try to go through examples of all of them. The power of the group is massive, because while you go through an adventure with others there's a feedback loop whereby everyone reinforces everyone else's journey.
There are no doubt many other valuable core experiences, and you can recognize or even create your own,
The six we use are something like the 5 mother sauces of French cuisine. When you seriously study how to be a French chef you start with mastering these and then branch out into the so-called daughter sauces.
Or it's like the 4 gentlemen of Japanese sumi-e ink brush painting. You learn to paint these first, and by then you've mastered the basic strokes and can go on to paint other things.
The six we use today are chosen because they are accessible, not culture-specific, easy to grasp and amenable to the rules of a Zoom session.
You may come up with a core experience that resonates with others, in which case we'll celebrate and share it on our online livestreams. OR, it might be unique to you forever. In either case, we will archive it in our academia.edu account, and also in the AI Mindset Mastery Google Drive and MS OneDrive. We do this because we want to preserve these so that future generations can discover them.
If the new experience you develop is unique enough, we will also mention it in our press releases.
As mentioned earlier, if you want to really benefit from this work it's useful to have a checklist of your personal valuable core experiences.
The best way to begin is to notice which emotions your body-mind would like to have in a given moment. You can use the ones mentioned here, and come up with your own. You may well have core experiences that no one else does. So make a list of the 6 or 8 or 10 key ones. You might use a written list in the beginning, but eventually this becomes second nature, and the questions arise spontaneously. You go down the list one at a time, asking, “Is THIS the feeling-state I would benefit most from right now?”
It might seem awkward at first, but if you persist you will find that your psyche will let you know what it would most benefit from at this moment, just as your body tells you when it's thirsty.
Would it be more beneficial for you to experience more Gratitude? more Awe? more Laughter?” Soon you’ll learn new ways to evoke these, both by yourself and with others through this community. When you regularly attend the group calls, you can often produce an intense feeling just by recalling a memory of someone's peak emotion in the last call. Rely on the resources here, and contact us in the chat when you have questions.
We hope you've enjoyed this introduction to AI Mindset Mastery. Experiment with the protocols and, if you are so inclined, develop your own. Be sure to join the forums and chat, and most importantly, if you are drawn to this, join us on the Zoom calls. We'd love to share our discoveries and learn from yours.