“And the Connect did something else at the beginning that was interesting and new. It helped us check that our words and phrases were stated in the positive. We all know now that the poor little human brain finds it impossible to process a negative. Don’t think of a pink elephant. Hey, I said don’t think of a pink elephant! Hahahaha. You’ve heard that one, yes?” Jonathan nodded, still thinking about the elephant and doing his best NOT to.
“Hahahaha. Drives you bonkers! That was always the example, but heaven knows how the poor elephants got roped into it. To the lumps of cauliflower under the human skull, it’s impossible to NOT think, NOT imagine, NOT forget, NOT do something.
“It may have been one of the reasons why changes were stalled or happened slowly for years and years. So many of us wanted to improve the conditions in the world, but we were full of phrases like ‘No more war’, ‘Say no to corruption’, ‘Stop the pollution’, ‘End child sex exploitation’, ‘War against global hunger’.
“It was all expressed as a negative, so in fact, we reinforced exactly what we wanted to stop. ‘Don’t forget your umbrella’, that was a good one. Thousands of brollies left on public transport every year. We were only obeying instructions, hahahaha!
“To get it to work in the blob of jelly in the head, it needed to be ‘Remember your umbrella’, ‘Protest for peace’, ‘Keep our governments honest’, ‘Save the bees’, ‘Clean up our environment’, ‘Keep our children safe’, ‘Enough food for all’, that kind of thing. You do it all naturally now of course, Jono. You’ve been raised that way. But years ago, most of us had no idea.
“So the Connect founders helped us along on this one. They added a clever little gadget that checked. A little reminder would pop up if, let’s say, you sent someone a message with ‘Don’t forget to pick up the laundry’. The little gadget would say ‘Do you want to change this to Remember to pick up the laundry?’ That kind of thing. Didn’t take us long before we changed. The number of umbrellas and bags of laundry that got saved, hahahaha.”