Broadcasting Brain

Catch the Brainwaves is our ongoing series of interviews with a variety of folks participating in blogging and social media. I ask them ten questions and they respond with their brilliant answers and insights! Today we are featuring Patricia Mayo of Comhacker.org and Nowsourcing.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let’s begin!

1. When you read, do you prefer paper or are you an on-line, electronic reader?

I prefer the best of both worlds - PDF downloaded to my Blackberry. That way I’m not chained to my desk and I’m not contributing to paper waste

2. “Live free or die” – does that motto resonate with you?

Absolutely, otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed in New Hampshire for 6 years, joined the Free State Project, and associate with mostly Libertarians. I have a great big button on my purse - I mean huge 5″ diameter - with the famous Benjamin Franklin quote “Those willing to forfeit liberty for security will have neither.”

Although, it goes much deeper than that. My father, who passed in 2003, spent the large majority of his teens and early twenties in and out of jail for charges like “threatening the life of the President,” “vandalizing government property,” and other similarly patriotic acts The apple did not fall far from the tree. Daddy was my favorite, after all.

Nowadays I toil away at exposing media lies and working for media reform. This June, in fact, I’m going to the Free Press conference on media reform. It’s much better to bark up one tree and figure out how to fix that one, than to just bark up them all.

3. Are we getting to the point where words alone are not enough? Put differently, have we become dependant upon images to complement our words, especially online?

If you are targeting the general public, absolutely yes. The attention span of the casual Internet user is too short to be captivated by any kind of even truly useful headline. You have to give the general public something cutesy to focus on and draw them in - and unfortunately, that will only get worse as more websites are created and thusly demand our limited time.

However, if you are targeting academics, scientists or other technical groups, pretty pictures actually get in the way more often than not. The fundamental difference between these two groups is they inherently want information, they want to learn, and will spend days on end hunting for the right thing. The general public, on the other hand, is mostly just seeking entertainment or “something” useful.

4. Ever think about writing a book? If so, what would be the topic?

I am actually writing a free ebook right now on getting the most with virtual assistants through effective communication. This will eventually be turned into a full-on series about specific areas of effective communication - such as in management, marketing, relationships, etc. There’s a mailing list for anyone wishing to keep up to date and ask any specific questions they need answered - the signup form is on every page of ComHacker.

As far as actual physical in-print books with an ISBN and PITA distribution agreements, I have quite a few in mind. One is on my existential philosophies (like Uniform Social Standards), another on my discoveries within cognitive psychology and mass media, and I’ve been thinking about a remix of swarm theory.

Gosh, put that way I sound like such a stuffed shirt. Then again, anyone who knows me through Twitter or even in person would probably think of all that as being out of left field. Which brings me to the idea of writing my memoirs. I have been through quite an interesting life, and some of the lessons I have learned - such as keeping to myself the fact I analyze every single word anyone ever utters or scribbles - would be best if put to use by others too.

5. Let’s talk about social media for a moment. Do you think that large organizations are starting to understand the potential value of social media (blogs and more)? Or does social media really have an impact on a large corporation?

In the United States, definitely yes. The fact that Wal-Mat, Sony, and Microsoft have all had their fair share of fake blogger and social media bribery scandals stands as testament to both accounts.

Remember the Kryptonite bicycle locks? The company that made those was literally brought to its knees by one person posting one YouTube video on breaking into their locks with a ballpoint pen. And let’s not forget the special number sequence for hacking the HD DVD encryption key. Someone thought it important enough to write a cease and desist letter - social media therefore must have an impact on companies that can afford to lose a few hundred thousand dollars without even so much as a flinch.

However, remember that I specified the U.S.A. (we’re not the world, we just haven’t realized it yet). South Africa is actually fairly closed to the idea of using or even watching their reputation on social media. And who can blame them, really? The vast majority of Internet users are in developed countries - but it would be wise of them to at least tap into this market and encourage importing their goods.

6. Where do you think ideas come from? Pete Townshend (the Who) used to think that his song ideas were a divine gift or otherwise were created by a higher power. Others think otherwise. How about you?

Oh dear. Now you’ve just gone and set me up to be contradictory.

As much as I admire and appreciate Pete Townshend, Van Morrison, and The Grateful Dead, I have to say ideas come from subliminal connections. Taking drugs (as just about every musician does, famous or otherwise) often helps subliminal thought processes to move more into the cognitive realm, and thus new ideas can happen more rapidly - but there are less risky ways to encourage subliminal and cognitive mergers.

One of the most recognized and common ways is meditation. I use that in combination with sleep deprivation and polyphasic sleep to feed my idea machine as well as boost productivity, metabolism, memory, and lucid thought.

But to elaborate on the “subliminal connections” I mentioned before - absolutely everything within the range of your five senses, whether you consciously register it or not, is remembered. In the case of whatever you are doing at any particular point in time, everything within the range of your five senses at that moment is linked together into one cohesive bubble in your subliminal and cognitive mind-spaces.

Later on you can recall that entire bubble if the most unique input is re-triggered. That “input” could have been stored in your subliminal or cognitive mind-space, doesn’t matter - so long as it was the first of its kind.

Take for instance scents trigger the most vivid memories because our sense of smell becomes tolerant so quickly - eventually, you just don’t smell your perfume or cologne, so you don’t realize you’ve bathed in it. Unlike any of the other senses, not only are you not cognitively registering that scent, you’re not subliminally registering it either. Therefore, scents are most commonly the most unique input and thus trigger more vivid memories than any other sensory inputs - because only one thing smells like bacon, and that’s bacon.

Back to my point - obviously, not a whole lot is unique. If a memory doesn’t have a unique sensory marker, it just gets jumbled into a larger bubble with a few loose links to some cognitive thoughts - think of it as a tag cloud, except every bit of information is a tag. When you think or see something that contains some of the same information from that tag cloud, you mind kinda “clicks” on that tag, quickly digests the information to see if it’s relevant, and just might give you a subliminal connection - an idea.

How quickly you can come up with ideas is entirely reliant on how much you use your brain and how much you encourage your brain to “index” subliminal information through drug use, meditation, and sleep techniques.

Simple, isn’t it?

7. Can you list five things that you couldn’t live without?

Can I? Almost certainly. Will I? No.

…

…ok, you win.

1. The bare essentials for survival - food, water, air. Didn’t want to be a smart alec and use up three for something so obvious and trivial.
2. Humor - because I’m not good at being dull. That would mean I’d have to be perfect too, because without humor, nobody could laugh at me either… and being perfect is just way too much work.
3. Access to more information than I could ever digest in an entire lifetime. If there’s nothing left to learn, what’s the point? I don’t care if I don’t have Internet access - so long as I can travel, new experiences count as information too.
4. Some way of expressing myself and sharing information. I don’t care if I have to stand on a soap box in the middle of Timbuktu and holler my message while the Pamplona bull run is in town… so long as they can listen and run.
5. And last but not least - Liberty.

If you’re wondering why all of the above are more like concepts rather than things - I’m against materialism and senseless consumerism.

8. Do you feel that you are accomplishing the things that you want to have accomplished at this phase in your life? Do you have a schedule, conscious or unconscious, that you are following?

If you had asked me that when I was 12, doing graphic design for anyone that didn’t mind my age (or didn’t ask) - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 14, the general manager of a cybercafe and computer build and repair shop who single handedly took the company out of the red and positioned it to sell for a few million dollars, only to get booted by the new owners because I was too young - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 16, married and technically a legal adult but nobody believed me - I would have told you “hell no, it’s moving way too slow.”

If you had asked me that when I was 18, stupidly trying to start my own magazine (I had no clue what I was doing!) - I would have told you “ack! I can’t keep up!”

If you had asked me that when I was 20, deer-in-headlights lost, following anything with some kind of promise, desperate and hopelessly flip flopping from job to job - I would have told you “F off, I gave up.”

If you had asked me that when I was 22, finally having found my spot in the world working my way up the copywriting ladder from the bottom up - I would have told you “I think I can make it. This isn’t a pipe dream anymore.”

And now that you’re asking me just 1 month before my 24th birthday, I can safely say I’m doing better than I thought I would be by now (once I got my head screwed on straight). I would have been content making maybe $1,000 a month for the next year, but the fact I’m doing more than double that and hardly breaking a sweat has actually caught me by surprise.

9. Pretend the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next morning?

Celebrate and focus on direct mail and “old fashioned” B2B networking for my clients, and get out more often ;D

10. What one piece of knowledge, advice, or wisdom do you have to share with our readers?

Don’t just drink one person’s kool-aid. Always always research and find out more before you buy something (especially anything to do with making money online), hire someone, start a business, or accept some bite of information into your psyche - opinion, fact, or otherwise. In simpler terms - don’t accept anything at face value.

After all, the face is merely a cover around a very interesting book.

Thanks to Patricia Mayo for sharing her brainwaves!

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