Regular readers of this blog may remember my last, long ago post, How Do You Define “Love”?. Close to the end of that post I promised the next post — that would be this one — would be about the NextStage LoveJones Tool.

That name, LoveJones, comes from a friend. We are forever in her debt. She is assured someone she knows will claim “NextStage LoveJones proves what I’ve been telling my wife for years!” We’ve already heard much the same from a user in Texas.

Anyway…

So how does one determine if you, right at this moment sitting there at your computer or reading this off your mobile, perhaps while you’re commuting via train, subway, bus or taxi, maybe in a plane waiting for it to take-off or even if you’re in-flight and you’re reading this stored on your tablet, are a good lover?

Turns out it’s pretty easy once you understand what’s involved, and what’s involved in a love based relationship was described (for our purposes) in How Do You Define “Love”?.

Defining Love

To recap, it’s much more than physical (something most people immediately think of and rarely admit that it’s the first thing they think of). There’s the attention before and after, the emotional energy that is subtly based on physicality and is often spawned by a simple touch, look or smile, the psychological energy that comes from familial, social, cultural and tribal alliances and the spiritual energy that comes from all of these things blending together. As one early reader of this post offered, “Love is doing things together and allowing things to be done separately.”

I wrote that love in any form starts in the head before it’s demonstrated by the heart, the hands, the words, et cetera, in How Do You Define “Love”?. This “head before heart, et cetera” is true for all of the higher emotions.

What are ‘higher emotions’?

Higher emotions are more easily described by starting at the bottom — or at least lower end — of the emotional spectrum.

Lower (or “Primitive”) emotions tend to work along survival axes. Probably the best known of these axes is Flight or Fight and all of these axes deal with the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous systems.

Lower emotions are housed in our primitive (what some call “reptilian”) brain regions and if you’ve ever jumped at a loud noise or felt your heart pound after a boom of thunder or leapt out of the way when you’ve seen a teenager driving a car, you’ve experienced a primal response and have your lower emotions to thank. Animals demonstrate lower emotions all the time. We may want to believe our pets love us and the behavioral ethology of it is that they recognize us as part of their pack, their pride, their flock, their mate, whatever, and even when we’re the alphas in the pride, pack or flock their behavior towards us has more to do with group harmony than individual affection.

The higher emotions are a bit more complex and involved, and the obvious axes get a little convoluted. For example, ask most people what the opposite of Love is and they’ll answer Hate and that’s not accurate. Both Love and Hate are strong emotions and are usually directed at something. The opposite of a strong emotion is neutrality, indifference, a lack of concern, interest or caring, so the opposite of both love and hate is apathy.

But the interesting thing about lower and higher emotions is that the latter are built on the former. That’s how our brains evolved, both figuratively and literally, both in our own lives from children to adults and as a species from pampas to homeowner.

Love, it turns out, is an excellent example of that evolvement from lower/primitive to higher as indicated in How Do You Define “Love”?

How Love Evolved

What we now recognize as “love” started out as quite primitive, quite low, and through eons of evolution that low, primitive emotion has become what we now call Eros or erotic love. Yes, that heart thumping, gland morphing, secondary sexual attribute defining I-gotta-get-me-some sweat-involving thang is the latest incarnation of one of biology’s greatest triumphs, survival of the species.

Survival of the species is so important to us that evolution rewards erotic love with intense pleasure (for most of us. One of my favorite quotes is “Sex, done right, is very, very good. And even when done poorly it can still be very, very good”).

That survival-of-the-species love took a step up the evolutionary ladder due to our ancestors developing social brains. That step up the ladder is Philios. We still want to insure survival of our species, we’re simply diversifying our investment. The lion’s share still goes to our own progeny and thanks to Philios we’ll now give some of our share to those in our group, tribe, society, culture, nation, race, … Philios or “Brotherly Love” is why we’ll stick up for us and go to war against them. We, as a group, tribe, society, et cetera, survive thanks to philios.

The next step up the evolutionary ladder was literally a step upward and is Agape love, the love we feel for nation, for diety, for those things recognizably larger than ourselves.

Once our social brain caused us to seek out others of our kind, the next step was to recognize the strongest unifying form of Philios was philios for a specific One rather than philios for each other. This enabled us to become further philiatic by deciding our One was better than their One. Philios becoming Agape results in the most horrible wars because the bloodiest, most devastating, genocidal crimes and conflicts are religious and/or belief-based in nature.

Love Fascinates Me

“Love” has fascinated me since I was a child, literally. I asked my grandparents why they loved each other, I asked my parents what love was and how did they know they were in love. I asked my cousin the night before his wedding how he knew this she was the right she and have asked friends how they met, fell in love and what keeps them in love.

So NextStage, thanks to my early interest in such matters, has more than forty years’ research conducted all over the world, in societies primitive and modern and all those in between, regarding love.

We compared the results of that research to what our technology had determined previously (see How Do You Define “Love”?) and made adjustments to the definitions as necessary.

And thanks to some breakthroughs made over the past two years, we created a tool to determine how good a lover (more generically, a “partner”) someone was likely to be. All we had to do was trigger a signal along the aforementioned emotional evolutionary trail and follow where it led.

Then we tested. That was the fun part.

We had to test with people who could be objective about themselves, people who didn’t let their desires, their egos, their own wants and needs, their self-concepts, … get in the way of considering if the results were valid.

Or if the results indicated ways they could improve.

The Most Important Sex Organ

Regina Brett said “The most important sex organ is the brain.” That statement is a specific example of the much broader statement “What happens in the brain is echoed in the body and what happens in the body is echoed in the brain.” That evolutionary trail that goes from body to brain is where all the different nervous systems (there’s quite a few, really) get involved and climbing up and down the emotional evolutionary ladder becomes obvious.

Let me give you an example of something happening in the brain and being echoed in the body. Imagine you’re sitting comfortably in your home watching a documentary on warcrimes and see something extremely disturbing. You may look away and some people might change the channel. But what is “disturbing” is learned from our culture of origin. What’s disturbing to a native New Englander might be completely ignored by a Sudanese and vice versa. Thus the turning away or changing channels — the physical demonstration — occurs because the brain/mind have made a decision about how to respond.

Now let’s consider something happening in the body and being echoed in the mind. Have you ever had a bad cold? You’ve got the shivers and shakes, you’re coughing and sneezing, and it’s difficult to concentrate on anything more involved than game shows and soap operas. The stresses on the body affect the brain/mind’s ability to function optimally and we want nothing more than to sit under a blanket in front of a blazing fire.

Thus what happens in the body is echoed in the brain, what happens in the brain is echoed in the body. People observe these little echoes all the time and respond to them accordingly. It’s how we know someone is depressed just by looking at them, that someone else is having a good or bad day, that someone’s probably lying to us while someone else is telling us the truth and so on. Usually we don’t directly comment on these observations. By adulthood most people have experienced enough social interactions to observe and respond to these little echoes nonconsciously. Adults essentially forget about these echoes and simply act upon them.

Ah, But We Are NextStage…

…and we take great advantage of such things, especially the non-conscious things, the little things people do that they’re unaware they’re doing. NextStage observes these behaviors consciously and with intention (just so you’ll know, we’re doing it now) and has developed a patented technology to observe and report on them.

So don’t be surprised when I share that we — or at least our technology. We call it Evolution Technology, or ET — has been observing you while you’ve been reading this post.

Breadcrumbs

Let me give you an example of what’s been going on starting with this post’s title, “What Kind of Lover Are You?”

The human psyche (under normal circumstances) will answer a question when asked one. There may be no verbal response and there will be a response, one perhaps spoken only to one’s self in one’s mind.

Asking such a question is an example of priming. The response to the question is actually demonstrated in the body and ET detects that response.

This post has posed several questions. The core question, “How do you define ‘love’?”, is asked six times before this line you’re currently reading. The rest of the questions are embedded in text that will cause specific brain areas — memory, cognitive brain regions, emotional brain regions, visual centers, … the list is pretty long. We designed this material to hit a lot of things — to fire at different times.

Each firing causes subtle, not easily recognizable yet easily recordable changes in the body and because your body is attached — you’re using a mouse, a keyboard, a touchscreen, some kind of pointing device, correct? — to whatever device you’re using to read this material (and if you’re connected to the internet) you’re telling us what love means to you and how you respond to love emotionally, spiritually, psychologically and (to some extent) physically.

Sooo…want to know what kind of lover/partner you are? Perhaps even get a few suggestions how to demonstrate that love/partnership more effectively? Without getting out of your chair or anything like that? Click on the image below and find out.

And remember, by clicking on that link you recognize that the NextStage LoveJones is for entertainment purposes only. Ask your partner how accurate the results are if you don’t like them (and provided you trust your partner to tell you the truth), or come back in a few hours and give it another go. There’s every chance the change in your emotional energy will bring about a different result.

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Long, long ago in internet time (okay, back in 2005 or so), a personals/online dating company came to NextStage and asked if we could create a tool — a Love Gauge — that would tell if people were a good match for each other, ie, would fall in love. Even better, could the tool determine how long lasting that relationship would be. We responded, “How do you define Love?”

There are three basic kinds of Love

Humans are capable of three basic forms of love; Agape, Philios and Eros. Most people can figure out Eros pretty quickly; it’s the ritualization of reproductive sex. I write “ritualization” from a cultural anthropology perspective. Our brains’ most powerful circuitry, the neuroanatomical pieces that will win every argument every time, still rule our lives in this order:

1. Can I survive?
2. Can I mate?
3. Can I eat?

People are amazed at how much time our non-conscious minds devote to insuring those three things can happen. All that talk about altruism and giving one’s life for another? Those are easily explained by behavioral ethology. All that talk about fidelity? Look to cultural anthropology. Making sure everyone has enough and the right things to eat? Watch the Food Channel.

So Eros, erotic love, is pretty much physical in demonstration and mental in causation. Humans need to think sexually in order to perform sexually and the former, the thinking, must always take place first.

Philios is the “higher” form of love and the term from which Philadelphia, “The City of Brotherly Love”, gets its name. Philios is the love we have for our family, our friends, our neighbors and so on. On a cognitive level, are there things you’d do for your friends that you wouldn’t do for your lovers or vice versa? If yes, those differences are demonstrations of how you consciously and non-consciously segment Eros from Philios.

Agape is the love “God has for man” and is actually recognized in two forms, top down — God to us — and bottom up. The love we have for our chosen deities is the “bottom up” form of agape love. Not only that, but the “love” we have for country, for causes, for institutions, for groups, et cetera, all fall into the agape category. Whenever we believe there’s a “love” relationship between us and something we recognize as “greater” than us, it is coming from the parts of the brain that register and respond to agape love. The emotions a toddler has for their parent, recognizably older siblings and adult near-family members (grandmas and grandpas, aunts and uncles, etc) is agape in nature, growing into philios (we hope) as they mature.

Part of human neural design is that we are capable of experiencing these three loves separately, simultaneously and in all mixtures possible.

It’s wonderful, how we’re designed.

Back to Making Tools

The company that wanted a Love Gauge was, it turned out, primarily interested in Eros and Philios, and they weren’t particular which one dominated at what point in the relationship so long as people were satisfied with their partnerings long enough not to blame this company should a relationship turn sour.

Our tools’ technology base currently is capable of recognizing agape and philios, but not eros.

Darn, huh?

So we told them that. We shook hands and walked away.

But not before we developed a Compatibility Gauge. We developed the Compatibility Gauge because we thought going through the motions would help us figure out how to recognize and measure eros.

Well, it didn’t.

But then I got a call from a friend who’s also a regular client in a completely unrelated industry, one that builds on and offline communities. We got to talking about recent projects and I mentioned NextStage’s Compatibility Gauge (”NSCG” for short). I explained philios and agape to him and he said, “So it can determine if two people will get along, just not if they’ll fall in love, right?”

Yep.

“Can it determine if two groups will get along?” Yep.

“How about someone coming into an existing workgroup. Could it determine if they’ll fit in and contribute?” Definitely.

“How about if someone would be a good manager for an existing team?” Yup.

“Can it determine if two companies should merge?” To a point, yes.

“How about if someone would be a good CEO for an existing company?” Ayup.

“Brands and fans?” Yes. “Brand persona and Consumer Persona?” Yes.

“So it can figure out who should be accepted into a particular branded community for testing purposes?” Yep, sure can.

Not to mention who’d make good political running mates. Or who’d be good friends.

And thus a tool was born.

But wait, there’s more…

A while later (a long while later in internet terms) I was talking with someone else and they made an offhand comment that got me to thinking about a way to modify one of our existing tools, NextStage OnSite, NSOS. NSOS traditionally reported on website visitor en masse, not individually. It could determine group behavior and response but wasn’t designed to report on individuals.

But what they said gave me an idea of how to modify the math inside that tool so that it could report on certain elements of individual behaviors. The results of that can be seen on NextStage’s Facebook page (and please beFriend and Like us while you’re there).

Modifying NSOS brought me again to a Love Gauge concept. There had to be a way to do it, I simply wasn’t understanding the problem correctly.

So I asked our technology “What is Love between two people?”

First, yes, we can actually ask our technology such things and get an understandable response. Second, because our technology currently “thinks” like a child albeit a child with a vast knowledge of how humans interact, it responded with

• Eros: Pleasurable compassionate attention to another’s person
• Philios: Consistent demonstrations that another’s peace and understanding have equal value to the self’s peace and understanding
• Agape: Trust beyond knowledge, understanding and experience

We’ve gotten use to our technology being Zen-like and Koanish. For example, “Pleasureable compassionate attention to another’s person” makes quite a bit of sense when one breaks the phrase up a bit; “Be aware of their physical, emotional and psychological pleasure/pain thresholds and move between them as they wish. Focus more on them than on yourself.”

That “Be aware of their physical, emotional and psychological pleasure/pain thresholds and move between them as they wish. Focus more on them than on yourself” is actually something our technology can measure and report on because love, regardless of the form, is more about the mind than the body and a lot of what’s in that definition is mind-based, not body-based.

We’ve gotten use to our technology being smarter than us.

And by the time my next That Think You Do post is published, that Love determining tool should be available. We’ll be making it available here for your…um…pleasure.

So stay tuned.

And in the meantime, go play with The NextStage Compatibility Gauge. It might save you some headaches before you go out on that first date.

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People are impressed when I mention that NextStage is completing a ten or fifteen year study. They’re more impressed when I reference studies of ten to twenty years as “good starts”.

An example of a study with enough basis to provide reliable results to me is The Longevity Project. It’s an eighty — that’s “8″ “0″ — year study of what contributes to a long, happy life.

Eighty years in the making? I’ve known people who didn’t live that long. Maybe there’s some things in here we should pay attention to?

Like men having a tougher time during and after a divorce than women do. Not surprising as male and female support networks are based on different interaction models. Males will have more challenges finding social happiness than women will, and that’s just for starters.

How about working long and hard is more healthful than playing all the time. There are two take aways for yours truly in this; I’m going to live a very long life and I wonder how being a professional games-player or sportsperson works in. I’ve known some professionals in sports and gaming and at their level it is work, often long and hard, so I guess it balances out.

And exercise isn’t the cure all many think it is. Does this mean I can give up Pilates? My instructor, who we lovingly call “The Empress Brutalia of the Pilates People”, will disagree and I know I fit into my clothes better than before, so I’ll continue.

Do you know conscientious, meticulous, thoughtful people? Are they in better, happier marriages, have stronger and more friendships and more pleasant and rewarding work situations? They should be, according to this study.

Are you a woman in a traditionally masculine occupation? Chances are you’re going to take a few years off your life. Ditto for males.

But if you’re a male in a traditionally female occupation, you’ll live longer. And women doing “women’s work” will, too.

But wait a second

This study was eighty years in the taking. Add another five or so in the making. That means the people studied lived remarkably different lives from us. Up to half their lives were without TV, probably a quarter without radio or telephone and most likely they didn’t use the internet, email, mobiles, etc., until their last years.

Women didn’t have occupation options similar to — not identical to, that hasn’t happened yet, me thinks — men’s until…oh…mid-1980s, maybe? Again, that was later in the lives of lots of these people.

And any study started that long ago probably involved selection prejudices — I know, hard to believe that studies started 90+ years ago would be subject to racial, ethnic, etc., prejudices — that definitely skew the results.

All the above is true. Still, there’s stuff to be learned. Or investigated further.

And it’s still a fascinating read.
Read the rest of this entry »

I play my piano and one of my guitars every day now. Usually several times during the day. Even so, it’s maintenance, not mastery, as a friend described it. I play primarily because there’s so much I enjoy about the experience — the music itself, definitely. Also sightreading, the equivalent of instantaneously translating between languages. Play an incorrect note or mess up the timing? You’ve used an incorrect word or confused the tenses. The feeling of the music in all its forms; I can feel myself bathed in the sounds, literally washing away whatever pains and confusions I’ve had in the day. There’s the feeling of my hands on the instrument (piano) or it in my hands (guitar), there’s how I feel when I play, the psycho-acoustic response to both the sounds and the emotional response the sounds trigger and the feeling of the music moving through me.

I shared a story on LinkedIn (if you’re not a Friend of NextStage you should be) and in I dun ben edjakaytid about a friend’s daughter and music and repeat it here

A friend’s daughter is a concert oboist. No one else in the family ever demonstrated any penchant for music. One day he asked her what caused her to pursue music with such determination.

She said that when she was a child — she thought maybe three or four years old — the family went on a trip and met a friend of her father’s in a restaurant. She remembers that she was fidgeting because her mother kept telling her to sit still while her father and his friend talked.

This friend asked the waitress for an extra straw. He took out a pocketknife and made a few cuts in it, then put it to his lips and started playing music with it like it was a flute.

Real music. Tunes you could recognize.

He then gave her the straw and said, “Here you go. Play me some music so I can go to sleep when I get back to my hotel.”

She said she didn’t remember who the friend was but did remember that his ability to take a common soda straw and turn it into a musical instrument was magic to her. True magic and she never forgot it.

It’s also what caused her to pursue music the way she did, because she wanted to give others that kind of magic.

That friend was me. I’d been making musical instruments out of straws since I was a bored kid in a restaurant and had to ask my dad to borrow his pocketknife.

But what her story taught me is that we can never know how much the slightest act of kindness — or cruelty — will affect another’s life.

When I sit and play the piano I sometimes remember two people I knew in my youth, Andy and Danny.

Andy had all the benefits and had been playing piano since Kindergarten, perhaps earlier. Danny had some of the benefits, a loving family and a father who could bend quarters in his hands.

One day in junior high, in music class, Andy sat at the piano and played straight for 45 minutes. Such a repertoire. And he played beautifully. Truly. Melissa asked me what I thought and I said it was very nice but not very interesting. Andy played the standard music pieces that all piano students were taught to play and he played them well. Melissa snickered, “Can you do better?”

Well, I had no idea. I hadn’t the musical training Andy had. But I did love Bach, the sound, the feel. Also Buxtehude. And Beethoven. Rachmaninoff. CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, Three Dog Night. So I sat and played what I loved, Bach, Two Part Invention #8, #4, Jesu and then an excerpt from one of the Brandenburghs.

The bell rang and people started to shuffle out. Except Andy. He was watching me, his face red, his breathing high and shallow. I realized then that in Andy’s 45 minutes of playing he hadn’t played any Bach. He’d played beautifully but technically and nothing that required a stretch.

I looked at him. His face was tight, his lips pulled together, his eyelids closed so that he saw through slits and his jaw quivering.

I said it with wonder, amazement, at first not understanding what I was saying, merely understanding it was true, “Your teacher…he won’t let you play Bach. He doesn’t think you’re ready. He doesn’t think you can do it.”

Andy whispered, “Shut up!” He went to his desk and gathered his books, his back bent and his body pinched as if some great weight threatened him. I watched him as he walked to the door. He turned to me again and shrieked, “Shut up…Shut up Shut Up SHUTUP!”

Sometimes, when I play piano, I remember that and see and hear Andy all over again.

Danny’s family loved music and I remember hearing him play organ once or twice. Incredibly gifted and incredibly talented, he would often play in dance halls and such with his mother who was a music teacher. Danny could think in music. He smiled and laughed when he played. Mistakes were invitations to experiment and once or twice he’d flub something and go off on these amazing improvisations that left me breathless with wonder and amazement. He sat beside me as I played on more than one occasion and when I flubbed something and was about to start over he’d whisper, “Keep playing and see where it takes you.”

I learned from both of them. From Andy I learned to stretch myself regardless of what others believe my abilities to be. Now in my mid-50s, when a business associate tells me “You’re not ready” when I ask for an introduction I know it’s Andy’s music teacher talking; they don’t want to be embarrassed by what they perceive to be a lack of something “in their student”. More likely (as I’ve learned the ways of business) they’re not sure they’ll receive some kind of remuneration for their effort.

From Danny I learned to make introductions when they’re asked of me, then stand with the asker during the introduction and for a while thereafter, helping them to keep playing when they fumble and see where things take them.

All three are comparisons of myself to others. We learn a little bit of who we are by comparing ourselves to others. Learning early on if you’re going to be an Andy or a Danny will help you figure out who your sons and daughters will compare themselves to.

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I recently met a fellow who admitted he’s spent better than half his life comparing himself to people, some he knew, others simply public figures.

I never found that a useful exercise so I asked him about it. Was making comparisons pleasurable? Did it make him happy? Basically, what was his gain?

He confided that it wasn’t always a pleasant exercise for him. There were two types of comparisons he made. One was where he recognized traits or abilities others had that he lacked and set about acquiring those traits or abilities in the belief his life would be better. Such endeavors could be painful but were ultimately beneficial to him and those around him. Psychology recognizes these types of comparisons as benign envy.

The other type came in his “black” times, when he was depressed or inconsolable, and mainly consisted of thinking others’ positions or status were due to benefits he never had and none of the troubles he did have. These types of comparisons are known as malicious envy in psychological circles.

Here, in one person, the two primary types of “comparing oneself to others” were demonstrated, the former benign and usually beneficial, the latter malicious and usually crippling.

Research on this phenomenon goes back to the mid 1950s and is known as Social Comparison Theory. There are lots of excellent resources on the ‘net dealing with overcoming the crippling side of this issue and if you’re someone who has this challenge, please take a look. I didn’t know these resources existed until I sat down to write this post.

First, I shared with this fellow that I, too, compare myself to others. I’ve even documented this in Mistaken Identities, Part 3 and the other posts in that series. There are lots of people whom I meet or learn about and note some qualities they have — more charitable, more loving, more generous, for example — that I want to increase or simply want, period. Often I’ll seek them out via email, phone or in person and ask their guidance (I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager).

But people are the sum of their parts. One of the first things I learned was that I’m sometimes mistaken about people. The qualities I want they don’t actually possess. People can demonstrate qualities that aren’t part of their core, a case of “squeeze an orange and you’ll get orange juice“.

But what about that specific quality. Do I still want that quality I thought they had? Then go for it on my own. My experience is that eventually a mentor shows up who can guide me through the learning and acquisition process.

Back to oranges and orange juice for a moment. Learning that people’s public and private personae could be deeply incongruous taught me to observe better, to pay more attention, to watch for the subtle demonstrations of incongruity — that’s actually what it’s called, “incongruity” — between the conscious and non-conscious minds, to isolate the qualities from the individual demonstrating them and model that quality alone.

I asked this fellow if he could do something similar.

Yes, he thought he could. We spent a little time training him on how to put such a mental “tool” in place. We spent a much longer time training him in its use because people are complex and whole.

Single qualities — generosity, for example — usually don’t manifest overnight. Most people who easily demonstrate a single quality gain that ability from lots of practice. It’s really no different than Michael Jordan at basketball or John Mellencamp writing songs. True, they may have a natural inclination for such things, a gift of genetics, but natural gifts can only go so far and then both the individual, their life, their past and present surroundings all play a role.

Benign envy is working for you, I said, so let’s look at malicious envy because it’s not working you. You have to make a choice:

• You get to have all the advantages, all the breaks and all the luck that person you’re comparing yourself to has had.
• But this means you must take on all the disadvantages, all the brickwalls and all the bad luck that person has had. The person you’re comparing yourself to is the sum of all their parts, so if they have something you want and you envy them for having it, you must first be willing to take on everything that’s happened to them up to the point that they got what you want.
• This also means you must give up everything in your life that’s caused you to be the “who” who you are today.
• Yes, you get to give up all the pains, all the injustices, all the trauma you’ve suffered. You must also give up any joys, any happinesses, any love, any children, any friends, any lovers you’ve experienced because these also caused you to be the “who” who you are.

Decide carefully, I said. Your life, both joys and sorrows, got you to a place where you could have this conversation. Are you willing to give it all up? I’ve known people who’ve had the most hellish lives imaginable yet state freely that if it weren’t for people they met along the way, they wouldn’t be alive today. Others (myself included) have said “I wouldn’t want to repeat my life, nor would I want to change it.”

So decide carefully.

You get to have all their joys but you must give up all your joys. You get to give up all your sorrows but you must take on all their sorrows.

How will you decide?

Upcoming Trainings:

• Know How Someone Is Thinking in Ten Seconds or Less

Upcoming Conferences:

• “Driving Consumer Behavior: Marketing and the Power of the Unconscious Mind” at the 29 March 2011 AMA Boston
• Reading Customer’s Minds (presentation, booksigning, etc) at the 11-13 Apr 2011 Ad:Tech San Francisco
• “ANALYTICS SCHMANALYTICS: How Neuromarketing Will Change the Future of Marketing Analytics” at the 1-3 May 2011 IIR Chicago Conference
• “Case Study: Analyze The Mind Using Text” at the 17-18 May 2011 Text Analytics Conference, Boston, MA

Come on by and say hello.

Sign up for The NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
You can follow me and my research on Twitter. I don’t twit often but when I do, it’s with gusto!
Have you read my latest book, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History? It’s a whoppin’ good read.

Learn the latest regarding NextStage blog posts, conference sightings,
whitepapers, tools, presentations and more via The NextStage RSS feed .

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

Everyone except the wonderful women I had the pleasure of lunching with late last week. A good size group of them, ages from late thirties to middle fifties, all either business owners or executives in business, mixed ethnic backgrounds although predominantly white.

And to a T they all scrooged Valentine’s Day with a resounding “Bah, humbug!”

The rallying cry could be summed up in a single thought, “If my partner needs a special day to show me I’m loved, that love doesn’t mean much.”

Universally was a denouncing of flowers, champagne, cards, candy, jewelry, definitely negligee and things got even more explicit from there.

High on the list was impromptu time together. “My husband sometimes comes running up to me and kisses me, then runs back to finish what he’s doing. I love that.” Cuddling under a blanket on a chilly winter’s night watching a favorite show, movie, reading, etc., was up there. A quiet dinner with mobiles off where they talked scores lots of points. “One thing I really hate is his damn iPhone. I want to grab it out of his hands and say ‘You’re talking to me. Let’s finish our conversation first’.”

I questioned that. Each person in the room had some kind of mobile device and a good number had more than one. Does technology get in the way of relationship?

“It can but only if you let it.”

Preventing that takes two partners, doesn’t it?

That was the slippery slope. The women in this group didn’t want peaks of attention on special days so much as equal amounts of attention on all days with reasonable peaks and troughs as life allows. But once attention was lost, that slippery slide began and reclaiming it required definite effort.

So, guys, send a card or flowers or candy or jewelry if you must, but put down your phone first. Send the kids out to a movie for the evening. Surprise her with an evening of genuine sincerity and appreciation for her as your life-partner.

She is, after all, much more than your “wife”.

Upcoming Trainings:

• Know How Someone Is Thinking in Ten Seconds or Less

Upcoming Conferences:

• I’ll be part of a panel on new marketing paradigms and another panel on neuromarketing at the March 2011 AMA Boston
• Reading Customer’s Minds (presentation, booksigning, etc) at the 11-13 Apr 2011 Ad:Tech San Francisco
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing at the 1-3 May 2011 IIR Chicago Conference
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing as it applies to other analytics at the 17-18 May 2011 Text Analytics Conference, Boston, MA

Come on by and say hello.

Sign up for The NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
You can follow me and my research on Twitter. I don’t twit often but when I do, it’s with gusto!
Have you read my latest book, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History? It’s a whoppin’ good read.

Learn the latest regarding NextStage blog posts, conference sightings,
whitepapers, tools, presentations and more via The NextStage RSS feed .

A good portion of my time is spent predicting the future.

Now prepare to be shocked — a good portion of everybody’s time is spent predicting the future. If (If!) I do it better than most it could be due to my studies of history, evolution, economics, anthropology, probability, things like that. The more you know about how things have happened the easier it is to figure out what will happen.

Case in point, I’m very confident that more and more female-oriented drugs will come onto the market. I’m not the only one who believes this will happen. The facts go like this:

1. Women of all ages are gaining economic power (controlling more dollars).
2. Historically women controlled household (family) dollars, now they’re increasingly controlling larger volumes of personal, discretionary dollars.
3. This economic power was obvious during WWII.
4. This economic power was obvious and continuing starting in the mid 1960s when women gained reproductive freedom.
5. Economic anthropology has shown a shift in advertising dollars towards an increasingly female oriented audience.

To me, this is fascinating stuff. It should also be obvious to people in the marketing world; there’s been increasing demand for Mommy-marketers, increasing requests for female-persona expertise, increasing use of women in creative marketing roles, …

What’s also fascinating is the shift that’s occurred in what is being marketed. Originally goods and services marketed to women primarily dealt with reproductive fitness (making oneself more attractive to males), now it’s focused on personal achievement, comfort, self-recognition and worth, … I was recently observing a panel of men and women, 24-65yo, cross-ethnic and culture, watching an advertisement for a new line of sports bras.

The male comments were embarrassing in their ignorance (”I don’t see the point of the commercial.”, “How does wearing that make you more confident?” “I didn’t know you were suppose to feel comfortable in those things.”).

What very much caught my attention was the women’s responses. As little as five years ago and definitely ten years ago there would have been patient explaining by the women regarding what the commercial was really selling. This time there were open looks of disgust, dismay and intolerance.

Women, gaining power in society (most recently and as mentioned in Men, The Stimulus Package and Fear of Commitment) are demonstrating that power in non-buying social settings. More plainly, “confidence here equals confidence there”.

One of the ways this increasing economic control is demonstrated is in drug manufacture and marketing. A sad truth of our society is that more is known about treating the male body than the female body and much of that is due to historical male economic control of western society. There was no economic advantage to making sick women well, so why investigate it?

Of course, at first this surge in pharmaceutical research and marketing will be driven by men. Anybody remember, a few years back, advertisements for a pill for women to help you through the “in-between” days? Yep, a pill to get you through those days when there was no bloating, no swelling, no pain, no cramps, no discomfort, no moodiness, no nothing and by golly, we’re going to treat you for it.

Or how about when Viagra was marketed to women?

Those didn’t last long.

And remember Rice-a-Roni? Or any commercials where the wife stayed at home to serve and await her husband?

Now we have commercials showing women in power. We target car commercials to women. Today’s woman’s day isn’t ruined because her fried chicken didn’t turn out the way her husband wanted it. Today’s woman is just as likely to pick up a bucket o’ Colonel Sanders as she is to cook up the latest Rachel Ray chicken recipe.

Some of you may know that June Cleaver/Barbara Billingsley died last year. She’s been replaced by an athletic, independent mother with a career, children, a husband who’s an equal if in the picture at all, and her portrayal has gone from pearls and petticoats to jogging shorts and sports bras.

So my prediction is that more and more drugs will be female oriented and marketed for things that women genuinely care about.

Like getting rid of men who think they know what they’re doing.

Happy new year, everybody.

{Many thanks to the Women of NextStage (Susan, Sandra, Seana, Janice, B, and Jennifer) for their comments on this post}

Upcoming Conferences:

• I’ll be part of a panel on new marketing paradigms at the March 2011 AMA Boston
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing as it applies to other analytics at the 17-18 May 2011 Text Analytics Conference, Boston, MA
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing at the 1-3 May 2011 IIR Chicago Conference

Come on by and say hello.

Sign up for The NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
You can follow me and my research on Twitter. I don’t twit often but when I do, it’s with gusto!
Have you read my latest book, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History? It’s a whoppin’ good read.

Learn the latest regarding NextStage blog posts, conference sightings,
whitepapers, tools, presentations and more via The NextStage RSS feed .

During some recent travels we stayed at a B&B and spent some time having tea and cookies with the other guests and Innkeepers.

The Innkeeper, a wonderfully brassy woman who’s led a varied life, asked if we’d mind if she made her weekly call to some friends in France (we were in Nova Scotia) and we said of course, go ahead, not a problem at all.

She then put her laptop on the coffee table, opened up a video-conference call package, and we heard a familiar “ring-ring” followed by a child’s delighted laughter.

The innkeeper made some funny faces and clapped her hands and cried out “Bonjour!”.

We heard more childish laughter, tiny hands clapping and a giddily happy shriek of “Mama, Mama, la dame sur la table!”

“I’ve watched that child grow from belly to birth to that babe on the screen.” She turned the laptop so we could all see the family gather an ocean away. Some of us waved. The child and mother so far away waved back.

They spent about ten minutes catching up on life and then the call was over.

“How did you folks meet?” I asked.

The woman and her husband had toured Canada and spent a night at the B&B. When they got home she realized she was pregnant and that their night at this B&B had been the night, so she emailed the innkeeper with the news.

“Wow. Neat.”

They made an agreement to stay in touch so the innkeepers could watch the child grow.

We smiled.

“Does the little girl know who you are?” I asked.

Of course she does. What a silly question. “I’m the lady on the table.” So named because once a week a laptop is placed on a coffee table in a home somewhere in France and a video chat client is opened and the miles melt into smiles and children’s laughter.

Happy holidays, everyone. Here’s to hoping there are only smiles in childrens’ futures.

Upcoming Conferences:

• I’ll be part of a panel on new marketing paradigms at the March 2011 AMA Boston
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing as it applies to other analytics at the 17-18 May 2011 Text Analytics Conference, Boston, MA
• NeuroAnalytics and NeuroMarketing at the 1-3 May 2011 IIR Chicago Conference

Come on by and say hello.

Sign up for The NextStage Irregular, our very irregular, definitely frequency-wise and probably topic-wise newsletter.
You can follow me and my research on Twitter. I don’t twit often but when I do, it’s with gusto!
Have you read my latest book, Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History? It’s a whoppin’ good read.

Learn the latest regarding NextStage blog posts, conference sightings,
whitepapers, tools, presentations and more via The NextStage RSS feed .

The phone rang at 3AM and even as I rose from slumber, I knew a casual conversation would not ensue. Phone calls at odd hours are indicative of great emotions, usually. So it was with this one. Someone was calling because they were in emotional crisis. They called me because they knew me — sort of — and had read what I’d written about being overwhelmed (see Five Simple Ways to Take Back Your Life and A More Serious Look at “Setting Unreasonable Goals”) and felt I was someone they could reach out to.

First, give them credit that they knew the problem was a massive feeling of incapability, of being unable to do, to perform, of not being able to meet expectations.

Second, give them credit that they reached out for help. Feeling overwhelmed is often a prelude to depression, so good for them. They caught things in time.

With any such challenge, having these two elements means you’re better than 90% of the way to a solution, so congratulations to you. What I offer here is a path to going the other ten percent. Remember, I’m not a professional therapist and you should seek out a professional therapist if feeling overwhelmed habitually plagues you.
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DishyMix host and PersonalLifeMedia CEO Susan Bratton will be interviewing me on 2 Dec 10 regarding Reading Virtual Minds Volume I: Science and History. She interviewed me once before. You can get details at DishyMix’s Susan Bratton interviews Joseph Carrabis on “Why People Do What They Do - Brain Science”.

She sent me a list of questions in order to prepare for the upcoming interview and I found them fascinating. Those who’ve already read Reading Virtual Minds may understand that questions are usually more important than the answers, especially in communications because the questions reveal a great deal about the mind of the quester.

And as I know from emails, skypes and a wonderful Twittucopia I took part in yesterday with Dr. Nora Barnes and her Center for Marketing Research students at UMD, people find me curious, hence I’m sharing both the questions and answers with you, dear readers, for our mutual enlightenment.

The questions are in normal font, my responses are in italics.

We Begin

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