How to Reprogram the Mind for Success: An AI Approach
It has not been long since we got into a heated discussion about the possibility of programming the mind with my fellow friend Onur Solmaz slash Co-Founder at Manifest. According to him, the human brain is very much like an Artificial Neural Network, and you can retrain it with an approach similar to supervised learning. He claims that anything in the mind can be changed given enough time with the right approach — even core beliefs. Suffering from social anxiety? No problem — just repeat some affirmations every day for 10 minutes, and soon enough, you will be a different person…
When he first explained how it all works, I was totally skeptical. It sounded implausible that it should be that easy to hack your mind and change your beliefs. In the end, many people spend a good amount of money and their time going to therapy and solving their issues with little success. If he is right, this has to potential to change millions of people’s lives, all the while without costing anything…
So, I wanted to give it a try and understand if it really works. I also had a perfect target for myself. I wanted to solve my impostor syndrome, which hindered my career in a big way, once and for all. (It was so bad at times that I used to skip the part about my achievements at interviews since I thought it wasn’t right to talk about them. I mean, how can you get the job without talking about yourself. Right? 😄)
I volunteered to be a test subject for Self Repetition Therapy (SRT). Applying it was easy. Basically, I filled out a worksheet with affirmations of the positive beliefs I wanted to nurture, to neutralise my impostor syndrome. After filling it out, I repeated these affirmations out loud every day for 10 minutes. In the first days, it was kind of weird to say these sentences which I don’t believe in out loud to myself. I learned that this is called cognitive dissonance. A term from psychology, it comes up as a stressful feeling when you do something which contradicts your beliefs.
Cognitive dissonance can be a good sign of moving in the right direction.
It is solid proof that you are moving against your deeply embedded beliefs. A couple of days into the SRT, I realized that the cognitive dissonance was evaporated and I started to feel much comfortable in situations that would otherwise trigger the imposter syndrome. That was the time I had my “Holy sh.t, it works!” moment :)
If you wanna give it a try have a look at Self Repetition Therapy. You can:
- download the worksheet PDF,
- add it as a Notion doc (if you prefer it digital),
- and ask for help from the instructors at the Repetition Works Discord channel.
Why does it work? Human vs. Machine
Using supervised learning to change beliefs is something that makes sense since as humans we are learning new skills using trial and error. Think back to the first time you have learned how to ride a bicycle. You rode a bit, fell down, used the feedback, and then got better over time with iteration. Now that I think about it, learning was always about repetition. To get better at anything, you need to repeat the training over and over again so that the neural connections strengthen and transmit information with a lower error rate.
The same thing also goes for programming. You try out some algorithms, write them down in a programming language, and hope it works the way it should work. If there is a bug, the compiler gives feedback and tells you what might have gone wrong — then you try again. Over and over, making the program bulletproof.
That is by definition, a feedback loop. It is what makes learning possible. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to learn and computers wouldn’t function.
When it comes to our beliefs and actions, we are actually closer to machines than we can imagine.
The first perceptron, a.k.a a ‘digital’ neuron, was designed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in their 1943 paper, “A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”. In essence, the paper was about simulating biological neurons using mathematical axioms. They took neuroscience experiments performed on animal nerve cells as a basis to create functions that predict the output of a neuron from a different set of inputs with different signal strength.
Human and machine learning are very similar. Take Google Translate as an example. It was a mediocre product that was able to do okay-ish translations when it was first released in 2008.
In 2016, Google announced that it will move its translation backend from the Statistical Translation Engine to a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) technology. Since that date, we have seen an exponential increase in the quality of the translations. The new backend was able to learn from the vast knowledge on the web and constantly re-train itself, adapting itself to the changing environment.
When I first started learning German, my highest achievement was saying ‘Einen schönen Abend’ which meant ‘have a good evening’. From that point on, I immersed myself into the language by talking with my German colleagues at OC3 AG where I worked as a Director of Technology. I made lots and lots of errors in the first few months but they were super nice and patient with me. Eventually, I got better at it and I was able to talk to them without using a Translate app. There was only one problem though…
Since I spoke with my colleagues mostly during working hours, my German was good, but only when we were talking about semiconductor production :) When we switched the subject to small talk, I was miserable, since I didn’t have enough training in the small talk domain of the language.
Beliefs about one’s self are not so different from a learned foreign language. Similar to language, a belief is a complex circuit in the brain formed through interactions with the outer world. Each person we encounter during our lives has a little bit of impact on these beliefs. If you think through it hard, you can actually pinpoint the exact moment a certain belief about yourself came into existence. You think that you are socially awkward? Most probably, you will find a memory from childhood of some kid making a hurtful comment about your social skills, which you then internalized. Children are very suggestible, and even the slightest comment about their shortcomings can create very strong self-fulfilling prophecies.
It takes a good amount of effort to change beliefs about one’s self. The main reason for that is not because it is a lot of new knowledge to learn, but because these beliefs about ourselves were formed at a very early age. And those don’t change in one day.
One of the important reasons for this is the biological side of things. Neurons are much more malleable during childhood, compared to adulthood, so kids learn faster compared to grown-ups. Unlearning and re-learning is also an important part of self-development, since if you want to strengthen a new belief, you need to unlearn the old one.
Let’s take the example of riding a bike again. Did you ever try to unlearn how to ride a bike? Apparently, someone on the internet already tried to do that and it was harder than expected 😄. Youtube’s famous Smarter Every Day Destin, built himself a “backward” bike to unlearn his bike riding skills. According to him, it was a brain-bending experience:
As simple as it sounds, unlearning already established habits and replacing them with new ones don’t happen overnight. You can also see that in Dustin’s experiment. He gets totally frustrated in the first few tries, but over time he gets so good at it, he actually cannot ride a normal bike!
With enough effort, you can also deconstruct unpleasant beliefs about yourself, and replace them with pleasant ones. This would create a bootstrapping effect with the potential of changing every aspect of your life, and help you to become a happier version of yourself.
Belief is the driving force of actions.
The connection between belief and actions is also a central theme in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:
However, unlike CBT, Self Repetition Therapy is much easier to learn, easier to apply, and most importantly — free (as in freedom). Repetition Works is an evolving online community, and all of the intellectual property is released to public domain, for the betterment of mankind.
If you are a software developer who has mastered programming computers — why not have a try at your own mind? If you are not a software developer, don’t worry — our doors are open to everyone 😄.
I hope you enjoyed the article. Here are some resources for starting SRT:
- visit Repetition Works to read more,
- download the worksheet PDF,
- add it as a Notion doc (if you prefer it digital),
- and ask for help from the instructors at the Repetition Works Discord channel.
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