The Literal Mind??

Jake LeMotta

The Literal mind:
Just wanting to get views on what peoples understanding of what exactly this is, or what it means to be literally minded.

My understanding is that it is where a persons approach as such, or tack, if you will; must be consciously triggered.
That is, say you meet someone, and you wish to speak with them - the most fluid or congenial manner in which you can approach them is to be laid back/mellow/cool - these mannerisms lend themselves to easy going chat and what not.

The "key word" as such - for very literally minded people..? - cool, it triggers the subconscious to effectively behave in this way.
Thus signals, gestures, eye contact, so on, will all follow this mellow or laid back tack.

As oppose to, I dunno, someone less literally minded - these things happen naturally.
In other words, when they meet someone, they don't have consciously implement their desired mannerism - it happens naturally, right?

So to summarize - the literal mind - IMO, requires a conscious implementation of the subconscious, effectively.

What are your views?

**
Upon looking this up on google the two main results I found were:
1)Being able to see clearly the motive behind someones actions.
e.g. your wife gets angry with you for not cleaning up, but you see very clearly she's only using that as an excuse to vent frustration over the fact she saw you looking at another woman earlier.

2) Taking things or words very much at face value;
e.g. It's raining cats and dogs outside...
(a bit extreme, but you get the idea)

The two seem contradictory to me in a sense - but this is what google is telling me..

**
Lastly - again - big boxing fan.
I recently met a famous Dutch kick boxer.
He's known for his power and accuracy and also very precise movement and timing, range etc.

I asked him how he developed this.
He said, that during training, he constantly repeats to himself - to keep himself focused on this area - the word "movement".
For everything he does, when he throws and punch, when he's circling his opponent, finding his range etc. he just repeats the word "movement" to himself.
And seemingly, this keeps him focused on this aspect, as oppose to power or something - which he claims is key to the stand up art (as oppose to wrestling or something).

With the most correct movement, he explained, comes the most efficient use of momentum (and thus the best power), the most accuracy, the best timing.

**
This, IMO, is a demonstration of applying a literal frame of mind - the word movement - keeping the subconscious focused on this aspect, and thus the body generates the correct "gestures" if you will - the most applicable movements, according to the situation:
Much the same as a person conversing, applying the above but the focus now being on "cool/mellow etc", their body and signals follow that tack - and thus, what their achieving is what they're consciously applying - but being implemented subconsciously.

JuliusCaesar

Jake, do PLEASE do us all a favour and either
a. study psychology and discover how much more complicated it is than the layperson imagines
OR
b. ask for a Pop Psychology (aka my-opinion-is-as-valid-as-any-amount-of-properly-researched-psychology-topics, and-doesn't-take-half-as-much-work!) to be set up.

Too tired to deal with any of this.

albeit

I think this is interesting, and there is nothing wrong with discussing complex issues such as this on a forum, without going into the whole complexity and describing it in a simple way.

hotspur

Notwithstanding the frustratingly idiosyncratic nomenclature that Jake uses and the barely concealed purpose of misogynistic manipulation underpinning it he is asking a legitimate question (albeit, as usual, in the form of 90% lecture on his own thinking).

At its essence Jake you are talking about is cue-controlled responses which are produced by classical conditioning. Have ever heard of Pavlov's dog? Put simply, every time food was brought the dog would salivate. Then bringing the food was paired with the ringing of a bell. The dog associated the sound of the bell with the food. So after a while the dog would start to salivate when it heard the bell in the absence of the food. This form of learning is called classical conditioning.

In respect of your example about deciding consciously to become laid back in certain situations in which such a response is not natural to that person, this is called cue-controlled relaxation. Relaxation is something which can be trained and within that training the act of relaxing can be paired with a keyword such as "relax" or "cool" or whatever, such that after a while saying that word to oneself will naturally elicit the relaxation.

It may not be your usual pick up artist reading material but you may like to read this paper by an important Swedish behavioural psychologist who works with anxiety, particularly phobias, called Lars Goran Ost on training in relaxation:
http://www.cb1.com/~john/misc/relax.html

Off topic, but there's a Youtube 3 part 3 minute each video series showing him in America (with Barlow I think) demonstrating his 3 hour in vivo desenitisation procedure for curing small animal phobias, this time with a snake, it's very interesting to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eepQ9disDCs