SCAVETTA VITO <e0fq50ae@mail.erin.utoronto.ca> writes: > But this doesn't explain how he can pretend to be a doctor. You can > memorize a medical textbook and not be a doctor; doctors (as do > all experts) actually think differently than normal people. (I can > elaborate on this, but it gets complicated.) My guess is that Jarod's > brain is so plastic (flexible) that he can consciously change the way he > thinks and really become a doctor, lawyer, or whatever. Just curious, are you familiar with neuro-linguistic programming? For anyone who hasn't heard of it, NLP could be loosely described as a discipline that is concerned with how the brain codes experience. (It is also a self-help franchise, but it's actually far more interesting than that, IMHO) One of the goals of the originators of NLP was to model expertise -- to find out what "expertise" really consisted of, and teach it to others more effectively than the usual method (i.e. hanging around experts for years on end). To this end, NLP has concerned itself with numerous techniques for exposing and modeling subconscious thought processes, nonverbal communication, hypnosis, and other such stuff. This ability to model the subtle thought processes and behaviors of others seems to me to be the essential feature of a Pretender... you can have intelligence and an excellent memory, but without the behavior and thought processes, you're just pretending with a small 'p' :-) If NLP actually works, though, there are many fascinating implications, including the possibility that the skill of rapid modeling can itself be modeled. (Note, for example, that NLP practice is usually taught in person, with the trainer using NLP techniques to bootstrap the learner into the proper mode of thinking and behavior required to quickly learn the rest.) So, if you already had a Pretender, you might be able to make more, given appropriately intelligent subjects. (Much of "intelligence" might possibly be modelable, too.) I wonder how well it would work if you could start with a young, pliable child, and give him lots of opportunity to practice... Another way of creating a Pretender, perhaps, might be to find a kid with a lot of creativity and a natural tendency toward dissociation, and force him to use those abilities to the max during every waking minute, with no consistency at all (except the inevitability of having to become someone else tomorrow), after removing any shred of identity he already had. After years of this, you'd probably have a person devoid of any identity of their own, with the ability to creatively and intuitively invent the proper behavior and thought processes for almost any situation... vaguely like a multiple personality, but with no fixed identities at all. >So what do you guys think? I think I shoud stop reading so much into [10 lines left ... full text available at <url:http://www.reference.com/cgi-bin/pn/go?choice=message&table=05_1997&mid=2998432&hilit=HYPNOSIS> ] -------------------------------- Article-ID: 05_1997&2997523 Score: 78 Subject: NLPTALK: Re: qh process?