Let’s assume that there exists a purpose to make a spare part than can be self-installed to be bought by certain individual and that spare part will break down precisely at 11 AM next Wednesday. For such to become possible skillsets of multiple participants are required to be utilized. Expertise is a big plus.

Safety reasons are the main concern why it takes longer for some commodities to get within reach of customers, but quality assurance methods, which manufacturer applies to manufacturing processes can not absolutely guarantee that an end product couldn’t still be different from what customer thought he ordered/bought, if product’s chains of manufacturing, transporting and other logistics related matters aren’t secured well enough. Additionally, reports derived from quality control (e.g. durability, usability and risks) might get into the hands of non-authorized persons.

Spare part’s travel from designer’s mind to the shelves of a retail store contains multiple phases wherein even trainees might be allowed to become aware of the circumstances that contribute to the erronous operation or breaking down of a product — it could be just a simulation that they get to see, but nevertheless it reveals product’s condition under the circumstances, how long it takes for it to become non-usable, what kind of risks gets caused and maybe most importantly, how can it be aided for the product to become non-usable in certain time range.

Many commodity products are easy to swap from product package to another and that allows someone to replace perfectly good product with a defective one in the retail store or even earlier (e.g. when transporting products despite of seals of some kind as those could be forged). If the swapping is done in the retail store, then the one who does it probably knows how to move without getting caught in the act because of surveillance cameras.

More refined abilities are required from participating persons in phases, wherein it is crucial that a target person must choose certain product from the shelves by himself without anyone visibly guiding him. Experts and students of neuromarketing are one of those, who could be useful in this phase, without underestimating abilities or knowledge of practioners of traditional marketing. Interior and service designers might also be able to give useful tips as well as those working in the lightning business. Students of psychology, who explore concepts like perception, cognition, attention, emotion, intelligence, phenomenology, motivation, brain functioning, personality, behavior etc. might find it interesting to ponder what contributes to making certain choice and how someone can invisibly be guided to make that choice. And as humans’ abilities are affected by what they have eaten, it might be useful to observe target person’s eating habits as under certain circumstances and states of his body and mind, he might be more vulnerable to suggestions of various kinds.

As humans are generally social creatures, who like to participate to happenings, events, games etc. in which they can demonstrate their usefulness, it doesn’t take much to tempt them to participate to something that is closely related to what they would do in their studies or work anyway. If more temptation is required, target person could be choosen based on his non-popularity and how fun it would be to irritate him. Participants could be from anywhere around the world.

You have probably felt a connection between why you sometimes choose to use an uncommon word—for you—and with what you think a moment later. You might intuitively sense that there might be a logical explanation behind it—on contrary of being mystical—but it doesn’t seem to be within your grasp.

In conversations understanding that connection will highly probably take longer than finishing current sentence as in those situations there is usually lot of other things to think about. Understanding that connection is probably easiest, when the mind is warming up to the idea that something certain will happen to oneself and which differs from what has recently happened to oneself and what he tends to think about. Such happening might e.g. be about taking a car and go to some place which hasn’t been visited by him for a long time: subconsciousness gets activated from relevant parts like those related to stopping at certain gas station after driving on the certain road for about certain time. Before that leads to any kind of mental images for the conscious mind to deal with, subconsciousness have already began producing ideas that turn into words in the speech. What gets said will probably sound as sensible as it normally would, but direction of a conversation might get shifted, because of what just happened—if one didn’t bother to stop himself from saying what he feels he is about to say. It could be said that thoughts began their travel to the consciouss mind, but it’ll take a moment or few moments until they get there. Explaining what is happening and why gets a lot more complicated, when choosen words—and maybe even gestures and microexpressions—differ a lot from a typical day, but still do fit rather nicely to the flow of conversation.

It would be justifiable, from security aspect, to ask can such be included in a social manipulation toolbox (social engineering); could one by accident slip something like a password to some computer system consisting of two words, even when he wouldn’t say it in full or even partially? It is very difficult to prevent oneself from saying too much, if nothing that has already been said seems to imply that there would be any danger from it. It is not so difficult to foresee what will get discussed, if one is having a conversation with someone familiar to him, but if he doesn’t know the interlocutor very well, but he seems nice, it is practically impossible to prevent one’s working memory from burdening by trying to reflect one’s own thoughts in realtime and that discussion may flow to almost any direction.

Receipt for ruining someone’s changes for using an ability they yet don’t haveIt is quite typical for some people to improve their chances by undermining those of others. It is less burdening for one’s own mind than learning something completely new and becoming better that way, isn’t it? One way to distinguish some other from oneself is to ”fill the area” in that someone’s mind that is ”reserved” for something that he is about to become familiar with or might be interested about later in the future with rubbish.

Practically this requires that

a) target person must actively deal with choosen subject in a way that creates new thoughts and connects with earlier ones andb) deal with the subject in a situation, which wouldn’t be suitable for learning it andc) something irritating would occur in that situation — which would lead to a possibility that later recall of related memories, concepts etc. would be harder, slower or even gross.

Because brain is normally rather plastic (neuroplastiticity) throughout the life, effects will not be permanent, but damage done might affect the navigability of target person’s life especially if effects are maintained by those others. It might also be laborious to reorganize one’s mind, if it comes to that.

Massacres are often explained by referring to copycatting and mental problems, but never is such possibility presented that massacres could actually be caused by people, who have systemically re-programmed someone’s mind and irritated him so badly that he decided that massacre is what he wants to do. At that point he might not be fully able to consider his actions and there might have been underlying reasons for why he has been more affectable than some others, but nevertheless his mental state certainly wouldn’t explain everything.

Re-programming of mind doesn’t refer to any kind of cliche in the movies like to the word ’rosebud’, which would trigger a target person to act in some strange, scripted ways when he hears it e.g. via phone. Instead it is something that is very much connected to ”hard” (natural) and ”soft” (social) sciences. Think e.g. a possibility that other people keep one’s thoughs away from certain things and strengthen certain other thoughs, schemas and scripts, and how it could lead to synaptic pruning according to the ”use or loose” principle:

Certain terminal arbors are pruned by competition. The selection of the pruned terminal arbors follow the “use it or lose it” principle seen in synaptic plasticity. This means synapses that are frequently used have strong connections while the rarely used synapses are eliminated.

Lots of cognitive burden is caused to the mind, when it is forced to try to distinguish similar traits containing thoughs from each other and sometimes one just isn’t good enough at keeping them separate enough. That could lead to sharing of related neural networks in amounts that isn’t preferred and if competition principle is taken granted, it would also, eventually, lead to partial pruning in some parts of related (*) neural network.

Information technology terminology contains lots of words, which could be associated to something occurring in real life and which would have almost nothing else in common but e.g. visually similarly presented relationship of some sort, ambiguous word, iconicity and toggleable state (e.g. inheritance, Hibernate, message-icon looking like an envelope and visibility state).

Those thoughs which target person isn’t using often enough, aren’t momentarily able to produce electric signals in his brain because of e.g. lack of potassium or aren’t well enough interconnected to other thoughs are more vulnerable to frequent bombarding with suggestions that in some sense strenghten competing parts of his neural networks. This could be seen as eventually leading to personality changes. Maybe.

Wouldn’t it be rightfully to ask if Sanna Sillanpää (Finnish shooting range killer, who had Master’s degree in computer science) and James Holmes (American movie theater killer, who had “undergraduate degree in neuroscience”) were harassed and re-programmed by others?

Some regularities, patterns and templates are never learned ”accidently”. It is required to give oneself some time to really understand them and in some cases even notice their existence. E.g. Sudoku game becomes a lot faster to finish after its rules get learned well as that allows one to know how to look at the numbers to see patterns and opportunities. Just by living out there in the world glancing sceneries, walking in the street and having conversations about other matters wouldn’t aid much in learning Sudoku.

Even when it takes only few minutes to understand the basic ideas behind a game, related rules, regularities and patterns might not be teached in school, heard from TV or seen in magazine, so most of the people don’t know about them.

Regularities and patterns related to solving some games aren’t similarly logical than in the Sudoku and even after understanding the basics it could still be very difficult to comprehend how the game works as there might be so many patterns in play at the same time that only a computer could really ”understand” what is going on. Social games related to harassment having a purpose of forcing someone to be constantly or frequently exposed to perceptions and thoughts, which lead to increased usage of glucose (brains require it), stress, even immune deficiency, momentarily weakening of mental/cognitive capabilities, draining of dopamine reserves and other long-lasting effects to the mind/brain often fit to such category.

Person choosen as a target for game-like harassment might not even notice or atleast can not comprehend the game very well so that he could explain it clearly to someone else, because the game would largely be customized against certain person’s mind and thus just explaining basics of the game would actually tell almost nothing. As such games wouldn’t be teached in any school nor explained in detail in a magazine of some sort, others wouldn’t even be prepared for hearing what target person might have to explain to them. That adds a requirement for a target person to ”reverse engineer” the rules of the game and continue the explanation from there.

Some regularities, patterns and templates are more easily exploited, if a target person is using similar regularities, patterns or templates in his normal life. E.g. he might have familiarized himself with semantic web, relational databases, choosing of suitable words for some purpose (e.g. user interfaces, if he is a webdesigner or similar), describing of items and seeing parts/components/features/traits of them in his mind, concept maps etc. Those do affect the way he stores information in his mind, finds information from his mind, how he in his mind processes something quicker than something else, sees how something is similar to dissimilar to something else, describes what he feels with words or visually.

Anti-harassment could be represented by books containing words, mental images arousing symbols, photograps etc. designed in such a way that they have an effect to make one e.g. feel good.