So there’s this virus now and we all have to stay in our houses, avoid contact and wash our hands a lot or we’ ll die. Get it?

Ok I just put about a million hours worth of media exposure in one sentence. Every news channel / paper/ website in the world goes on and on about it 24/7.

news on Repeat

Funny thing is; it doesn’t sounds like news to me anymore. It sounds like advertising.

The idea behind repetition is that when the consumer goes to buy a particular product, the name of your brand is the first one that comes to mind. There are several different types of advertising repetition. One is simply to repeat the same advertisement, such as a television commercial, over and over.

So, brain training: repeat something over and over again and it creates this huge link in your brain. The moment any reference to the subject pops up, the brain immediately presents you with the information that has been repeated, forgetting about all the other solutions it might have learned about this question.

This is actually one of the ways we learn. As a child we repeat things in school in order to memorize them. The brain creates cross references to a lot of information. The path that is used the most becomes the biggest highway to a specific answer to a question. It’s a basic monkey brain thing. When you need something the brain gives you the most obvious answer first. This saves time thinking about it and if you’re a monkey chased by a lion you need decisions fast.

This can be called brain training or, if used in a bad way, brainwashing.

It’s clear to me that this goes beyond ‘news’, and when it is advertising, someone’s selling something.
In this case an idea. The message is clear: The virus is REAL, you have to be AFRAID, you have to TRUST US.

Stress and fear

The fear message also gives you stress and when in stress you are less likely to think about things and go a different path.

The combination repeat / stress is used in the army. The ‘drill sergeant’ (think about the word 😉 lets you repeat things, threatens, shouts and punishes if you do it wrong/too slow/ talk back.

Another thing they do in the army is make the whole group responsible. So if one person doesn’t play along, the whole group gets punished. This has the effect of now not only the drill sergeant but the entire group urging you to obey.

So stress/fear + repeat = making people do what you want.

 

  • noticed they tell the dead toll every day but tell little or nothing about people recovering? You must know how BAD it is, not hear the good news.
  • noticed the regular people around you starting to act like missionaries and spreading ‘the word’? It’s not enough that they listened. YOU should listen too (or they might be punished). The group thing is in action.
  • what else you noticed?

So whatever else about this virus is true or false, we are being trained, trained to obey and follow orders.