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.

Nowadays harassment (from sophisticated to rough) that requires certain constant effort from participants is often about learning how a target person react to certain kind of harassment, how does it affect to his future behaviour and especially, getting doubtless know-how about what methods and techniques most certainly produce certain results.

Target person might intuitively notice that he is being harassed:

- his body and mind get burdened daily or almost daily in unpleasant ways causing his short memory and other executive functions to become momentarily defective

- he gets less enjoyment from daily activities (when walking outside, when having conversations with others, when studing, when visiting some places etc.)

- his feelings of success are suppressed in areas related to education, work or personal development

- more money gets spend because of situations he ends up in, but not because of his own choices or alternatively his belongings / personal items brake down, get wrecked, become compromised or go missing

- the feeling that someone is partly controlling his life become constantly proven (e.g. arrival times of emails from multiple senders get delayed for hours or even days for no good reason and emails which he send himself aren’t reaching their receivers)

- learned concepts get corrupted by others, who are assosicating them to something disguisting or rubbish

- keeping his mind well enough organized becomes tedious task as some people frequently force him to create associative connections between things that he usually prefers to keep separate (figures 1 and 2 illustrate this)

However, yet he might not realize that purpose of all that harassment is about something that can not be guessed easily, but if tries to cogitate what really might be going on and why, he might notice that:

- he is been learned to feel (partially on subconscious level) that e.g. a person, an object or a phenomena is meaningful to him and it is also attributed to certain exact thoughs, and this is been achieved by reminding him about that something and its attributes very often and only in certain situations and under certain circumstances

- certain symbols (words are also symbols) appear in suspicious amounts as well as their subcomponents and their associations, same being applied to connotations, denotations and thoughts behind association hop or two

- priming-effect seems to be utilized very often (those using suggestions seem to be aware what suggestions have been used earlier)

- he is tempted to keep certain thinking patterns active in his mind, providing the possibility to see and think something visually (e.g. semantic web network, relationship of words in class-diagrams, best choice by discarding less good choices and grouping)

That is all for building base for what is actually going and that is.. predictability of behaviour. Certain kind of predictability requires quite a lot of effort from some participants and they utilize any kind of suitable computer systems that allow them to become better at predicting what someone does next. More about this later.

It also shouldn’t be seen as uncommon, nowadays, that even when nobody is recording a target person with a video camera, the radiation from his WiFi network could reveal what kind of creature is moving in which room and that information could be used to make even better predictions. Add to this realtime monitoring of target person’s computer and mobile device usage, supplemented with GPS- or RFID-based tracking and it becomes rather difficult for a target person to vanish from "them".

a) He is in constant "rebellion" against language (is alert for clumsiness and preciseness of usage of words and used expressions).

b) Is constantly exposed to incoherance of things on high conceptual level (e.g. "beautiful people aren’t mean.. no, wait.. they are.. no, wait.. they aren’t).

c) People, who are authoritative to him ruin impression of their trustfulness (e.g. parents and experts providing therapy-like services).

d) He can’t keep his different roles "clean" as other people intentionally produce similar, irritating stimulation no matter what role he is currently using and what is the current context.

e) It often happens that he have to confront a situation, wherein he has to choose between two choices, which are uncomparably important and elicit strong emotional responses, but only one of them can be choosen (e.g. should he help epileptical person, who is having a seizure or rush to the meeting where from he is almost late already).

f) His days begin with something irritating.

g) He feels it a tedious task to define himself with different kind of personality tests as descriptions in them don’t feel like something that would apply to him all the time or even most of the time (who really is constantly spontaneous or cogitates about everything).

h) He don’t have enough recovering time for self-reflection and for calming his inner "bustle".

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?

What happens to all that information and observations, what e.g. journalists and photographers gather and store? Will the most usable material always become perceivable by readers and viewers? What here means "the most usable material"? Does it mean that reader/viewer gets to sneer or smile even once or that he will think that "broadness and level of details is exactly what I would have asked them to aim at so that I can make up my own opinion about the subject"?

If phone conversation lasted for almost 20 minutes and eventually there is only a short comment like "In my opinion.. no.", then it probably means that some parts of the phone conversation didn’t get released to the public. Sometimes space or time related restrictions affect largely what fits in and there still seems to be enough for a general reader to consume, but that doesn’t erase the possibility that the producing organization or individual journalists etc. could just keep "best parts" to themselves.

By interviewing and talking to people belonging to multiple demographic, psychographic and behavioral segments (marketing terms), it is possible to gather lots of information and certainly not all of that can be published, because the potentially huge amount of information doesn’t fit to any kind publication other than to a book. Will journalists, producing organizations etc. throw away everything that isn’t relatively immediately used? Will they also ask questions from interviewees that aren’t related to a main subject and what happens to those answers? Will they sell the leftovers and "extra material" or exchange them to something else?

Finnish publication Taloussanomat showed an example of how to not tell what is relevant and keep many of their readers from bothering to dig deeper by publishing a news piece about research conducted by researchers of the Cornwell university. The researchers had been analyzing mood changes of people, who tweet (send Twitter messages). Taloussanomat handled telling about the research by using amusing comment (translated): "Do we really need researcher to tell us that in the mornings our mood is better?" Taloussanomat didn’t tell how sophisticated researchers’ methods were even when it would probably have been very interesting to many of its readers. They could have told about the following in layman’s terms, but usual to them they didn’t bother to make their readers "too wise":

"We measured PA and NA using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a prominent lexicon for text analysis (17). The LIWC lexicon was designed to analyze diverse genres of text, such as e mails, speeches, poems, or transcribed daily speech. LIWC contains lists of words or word stems that measure 64 behavioral and psychological dimensions, including PA and NA, as well as anxiousness, anger, and inhibition. These lists were created using emotion rating scales and thesauruses and validated by independent judges."

Sure it might be so that journalist, who wrote about the research didn’t even bother to take a look at the full text and decided to read just the abstract text – how lazy should that be seen? – but it is also possible that more meaningful information was stored to some computer system of its parent company (Sanoma, a media group with operations in over 10 European countries).

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 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.

Two amygdalas in brains’ temporal lobes don’t react just to "real" danger like cars in an asphalt jungle as they can also get activated via stress by

• generally rather meaningless sound in low volume, which has earlier been conditioned to pain and
• stimulus that is related to past emotional meaning. Amygdalas react to stress leading effectively to raising of the levels of neurotransmitter glutamine and – via subprocesses – releasing of cortisol hormone to the blood circulation for spreading to organs and tissues of the body.

Cortisol releasing process:

• neurons of hypothalamus make pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone
• adrenocorticotropic hormone makes pituitary gland to release corticotropin (ACTH)
• corticotropin travels in the blood circulation and makes cortisol to get released from adrenal glands
• cortisol travels also to many other places in the body like to receptors of the hippocampus and salivary gland (where from it could also be measured)

Normally hippocampus regulates stress response caused by amygdala and keeps release of cortisol in certain limits, but in long-lasting stress ability of hippocampus to control stress weakens.

Stress response controlled by hippocampus gets actually damaged from long-lasting stress and that is because its neurons die. That is because stress hormones (cortisol being just one of them) consume glucose, which is also required as an energy source by hippocampuses’ neurons, and that lead hippocampuses’ neurons becoming vulnerable to excessive amounts of neurotransmitter glutamate (neurotoxicity). Normally neurotransmitter GABA would be used to regulate amounts of glutamate, but even feelings of depression cause GABAergic systems to become less effective.

Stress causes lots of trouble for the operation of hippocampus as among others it disturbs usage of episodical memory, declarative memory and cognitive map. Also, raising cortisol levels affect negatively to front part of the frontal lobe (prefrontal cortex), which has been seen to be related to deduction, emotional control etc.

It 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

• target person must actively deal with choosen subject in a way that creates new thoughts and connects with earlier ones and
• deal with the subject in a situation, which wouldn’t be suitable for learning it and
• 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.

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.

It is possible to build artificial relationships to someone’s mind targeting anything living or non-living without that he himself would have pursued such. It is easiest to arrange this, if that something don’t became more familiar with time and one can’t or won’t understand it profoundly. E.g. relationship to a teacher can stay similar for years, but when he finally tells a joke of some sort, everything suddenly changes. Building customized impression, which would be meant for one person’s mind only and which would arise strong emotions and would be done by multiple participants, may stay as some kind of foray or experiment. E.g. it had one-time, well-defined purpose like undirectly forcing some, non-suitable guy to leave his current job, but when tens or even hundreds of things are made to feel not-so-natural, then it is probably harassment or some kind of research.

It isn’t new to humans that they tend to be choosy about when and where they want to be seen and at what moment it makes most sense to say something for keeping their imago intact or enhancing it in preferred ways, but when they begin to understand better what kind of psychological theories and (neuro)biological facts creating impressions is based on, many might want to direct/control, how some others feel about certain things. Soon it becomes supplemented with social dimension and sharing of small tasks to multiple participants, so that they can affect some person in coordinated fashion. When they begin using computers systems for being more efficient and precise, they arrive to the point where from there’s no end to be seen for what they are doing, because it is just too much fun and they can also benefit from what they learn in their actual job, business etc.

When talking about relationships, stances and feelings connected to certain thing, one might too easily think that it would be about something that is independent of context like how people tend to think about associations. However, this is not the case. E.g. it might be so that in someone’s mind a name of a city arises certain kind of thoughts, which could be visualized with named circles connected to a larger circle having the name of a city inside it, if that person thinks that city from distance and in certain kind of context, but when that same person is driving toward that city, he feels it differently, because approaching that city warms up his thoughts differently than when he is still in the city where he left from. And while certains thoughs get warmed up (preactived) other gets displaced from "vicinity of consciousness".

Assuming that purpose of affecting would be targeted toward a person, who is not continuously separating from his daily thoughts, someone could design a plan containing set of well-defined things, which would be made known (and felt) to the target person by frequently combining surpriseness, strangeness, irritativeness, suggestions, timings etc. with appearing of a thing in his daily life, meaning that they could be brought back to his conscious mind in certain form. E.g. colors, gestures, words, symbols, landmarks, expressions, objects and sounds. Let’s imagine that Figure 1 illustrates those things (or atleast aids thinking). Words "could be brought back" are essential here as target person could experience these things normally, if he doesn’t feel that right now someone is trying to make him experience them in certain way. With time traces of affecting would fade away, but if he isn’t given enough time to relax, memories stay longer.

It is worth mentioning that e.g. some color like orange can not be understood much better unlike a human could be understood better, meaning that orange color is always just orange color, even with different surface or when seen together with different shadows, or when an orange item is seen to be consisted of atoms.

Figure 1 can be thought as some kind pool where from it can be choosen which of them would be attributed to certain participating person, who a target person perceives in a way that he never really becomes to know him any better (e.g. because of lack courage or physical distance). This part of the operation is typically carefully coordinated so that attributing could leave deep dopamine-based traces to target person’s mind. It is typical that they use surpriseness, strangeness, irritativeness, suggestions and timings, and all kinds of stuff scooped from learning theories. Context might be e.g. street, home, working place or shopping centre, but probably something that seems natural place for a participant to appear in. Amount of affecting times may be anything from few times to tens and hundreds. Also, it shouldn’t be seen as uncommon that they let target person to became aware how certain attributes and timing are used together so many times that target person begins to see them as stupid. But if only results matter, quality of operation wouldn’t matter that much. Making target person feel stressed is quite common way to upset target person’s ability to think flexibly (cognitive flexibility), which leads to him being more easily affected.

Undirect affecting happens when target person is e.g. in Internet and and unauthorized remote user (hacker with bad intentions) causes computer to act strangely at the moment, when there is something special to be seen on the screen (something from the mentioned pool of defined things that leads thoughts toward certain person). Consider pondering this: how can an unauthorized remote user watch in realtime what happens in fast-paced 3D-actionadventure game, knowing what happens next in the game and what lurks behind some corner.

More sophisticated the operation is, more certain it is that participants have different types of computer systems in their use beginning from databases for storing information to neural network based anylysis and from semiautomatic instructing of participants to predictive analytics. Web conferencing software? Sure. Data from sensors? Easy. Realtime video feed from local grocery? Negotiable. By reading Solved: how well-planned exposure sets affect thinking of a target person and If planted shortcut to a memory isn’t available, one’s thinking can be directed in phases it is possible to understand better, how customized impressions and feelings can be utilized for eliciting exact subsequent thoughts and feelings. More efficient the affecting is, greater the risk to the target person that his identity becomes brittle.

When someone makes a target person to begin recalling something, it doesn’t necessarily lead straight to certain though, but after few hours or maybe after a day or two — depending on the purpose — target person is more ready to recall details from a past event, moment, situation, happening, task, picture, concept etc with additional suggeestions. The fact that by "warming up" target person’s mind, he becomes more ready to recall something easier (consciously or subconsciously), can be utilized by taking target person’s mind toward a memory for which there weren’t "shortcutting" (triggering) memory. It could be possible that someone had planted such shortcuts to target person’s mind, assuming that they would be beneficial later, years later.

If shortcuts aren’t available and it could be possible that giving initial "directions" to target person’s mind, his mind might start to wander to directions, which wouldn’t lead to what was meant to be reached, he must prepared either with rather straightforwarded suggestions or something more finetuned.

Even when Facebook claims that the artificial intelligence they are using is "too stupid" to make good assumptions/conclusions, they highly probably actually lie and thus they kind of "buy time" for everyone working on the AI-related fields, so that they could keep working "under the scope of the media" (hundreds of newssites have mentioned how (influencer-like) Facebook’s AI is not ready even for simple tasks, which humans handle easily). At the same time trials and research related to the brain is getting very hot and is producing better knowledge about what a human is as a creature.

If it is wished that it is imperative that certain sentence, which happened at certain moment of time and the context where it happened is limitedly rememberable starting from certain points of thoughts, must be remembered by certain person, it might be required to control target person’s mind by directing it to go reversedly along the following route:

Silently spoken sentence (7) ment to a lady, who couldn’t be seen (6), by a man (5), who spend a moment at (4) the kiosk (3) that near the casino (2), which resided in Monaco (1).

If it is meant that such directing happens without a target person becoming aware that he is been affected and there can be seen a possibility that target person’s mind might get cluttered from too many details/memories , he will be affected in phases: first he is lead to think about the Monaco and before he has time to see a world map in his mind for too long he must be lead to think about the casino residing there. Then maybe after a delay of some sort, just to give his mind a period of time to warm up by its certain parts: more suggestions. After thinking about those two buildings, he will remember more related details and just to be more sure that he will think something certain first, he has been affected in adcance in a way that certain memories will "popup" easily. Possible techniques include activating words, objects, situations etc. which have similar features to those in target person’s memories related to certain point of time in Monaco. Suggestions may have been straighforward or something more finetuned (exposure sets, see Text 1). The ones implementing this trick have probably practised usage of their methods for a long time against different individuals, so that they could be able to confirm that target person did think about something certain. The confirmation techniques aren’t explained here.

Sometimes purpose is not neutral or filled with good intentions, but merely to hurt someone’s mind. In those cases target person’s mind is kept overly active for certain kind of non-wanted memories. It would get worse, if these non-needed memories connect to each other as such or someshow artificially as that would lead to related neural circuits getting stronger and thus those thoughts might appear in conscious mind more frequently. Thoughts can create strong emotional responses and thus produce possibly totally unneeded overloading sympathetic nervous system (its primary process is to stimulate the body's fight-or-flight response).

More clever/nasty though controllers may try to benefit from the fact that someone might not want to think about something at the moment, when he has just began to consciously recall a memory of some sort. For example, he might try to avoid it like presented here:

deeper -> deeper -> closer -> a detail -> wasn’t a nice detail at all, prefers to remember something else -> scans the room he sees in his mind -> there’s something, which feels better

And that something he sees in his mind would be exactly the one that someone wanted him to remember. Maybe because that something had originally high potential to be remembered from very few possible even relatively interesting/strange/whatever things. If the remembered thing was a human being, the next though might be related to other similar, rememberable people, who tend to be around that place. And that wouldn’t have happened, if he didn’t avoid to think something. Here we are close to the reasons, why someone’s behaviour is partially characterized as neurotic or OCD-like, even when it would be caused by other people and their affecting methods, and thus wouldn’t be derived from his own normal thinking. Really nasty people might sometimes try to distract target person in a way that momentarily lessens his ability to use executive functions (a set of cognitive processes like attention control, working memory and cognitive flexibility) as that limits the possible (probable) thoughts to which target person mind end up to.

Even criminals known it. Connection between an association and the thing eliciting is easy to visualize straightforwardly (literally), but trying to comprehend how a set of exposures (perceptions and thoughts) can repeatably lead to same thoughts is complicated. However, it is actually about something quite simple, once you realize what it is based on. Advertising agencies, politicians, disturbing people, even kids and youngsters know how thinking of other people can affected even in a crowd without anyone else noticing. Dirty-minded might use the explained technique to produce changes in how hormones operate as thoughts also arise feelings and emotions; continuous stress might weaken immunity defences and lessen quality of thinking.

Let’s begin with the figure 1, which presents how skillful users of exposure sets could build and implement their attempts in a way that subsets of individual providers of thoughts (e.g. objects, smells, rememberable memories, viewable words) produce certain thought that participates in some other subset. After target person’s mind has been prepared with all the exposure sets, goal gets reached.

You are probably wondering, why would it be so that certain exposure set elicits certain thought with high reliability. Short answer to this is that when something is sensed/thought enough times, that prepares with different probabilities the arousal of more than one thought. In figure 2 there’s for the sake of clarity a rule that even two exposures is enough for a signal to go forward and thus 27T, 34U and 37V would be enough for the top green node (a thought) to get activated. Incoming signals’ large amount can be seen to mean that that thought won’t get forgotten easily that day and it will "inject" itself to daily thinking without further incoming exposures.

For sure you aren’t satisfied yet and for learning purposes it would be more beneficial to see an interactive animation about this and be witnessing how someone gets affected. Read on. You’ll learn the basics to what this kind of technique is based on.

You might also ponder, how can it be known what kind of assosiations there are in someone’s mind and the answer to this is that it is often because

a) target person has been prepared for exposure sets hundreds of times, so that someones could be more sure about what kind of associative connections there are in someone’s mind and what kind of signaling produces what (implemention of that isn’t explained here) or then it is because

b) individual providers of thoughts (e.g. objects, smells, memories and words) have one or more traits in common, which might not be obvious, but as a brain is a energy-saving machine, thoughts expressing similar traits use partially same neural circuits and thus it is often enough to utilize producers of thoughts, which have been teached similarly to just about everyone (e.g. paperplane has wings, but so does a butterfly, both symmetric).

In the figure 3 there is one way to present probabilities of expressions of different assosiations and probabilities of subsequent assosiations (large circle can be seen as an initilialising thought at a certain moment of time). Target person can’t remove connections that he/she wants to be removed from his mind with just will-power. A risk for the people trying to affect him is that everytime when brain gets used, something changes, but with suitable affecting strategy target person’s mind will maintain certain signaling routes without continuous renewing affection.

By combining presenting probabilities and exposure sets, we get something like what is seen in the figure 4. Colored nodes Q1 and C1 are participating in activating K1-node seen in the figure 5. Basically Q1, C1 and from elsewhere signaling F1 act like AND-operator’s input signals (all of them must be active for an output to happen). B1-node that is activated by K1 get its incoming signal also from L1 meaning that probability for B1 staying active even after its input signals have faded/silenced, increases. There are other things that could be taken in consideration like fading speed of a signal, length of cooldown-periods after too much signaling etc., but let’s keep this as minimalistic as possible.

Affection level between L1 and A1 in the figure 5 is described with the value 0.7 (probability value, max 1.0), which can be explained to fade in certain amount of time according to some equation. As long as L1 has affection power, assosiations derived from A1, B1 and C1 can become active or if there are other participating nodes like what is the case with the B1-node for which L1 isn’t so critical after certain phase. If it is of any use, figure 6 is a reduced version of figure 5.

There are ofcourse all kinds of differences between individuals like quality of blood circulation, earlier learning experiences, delays between similar exposures, ability to keep happenings in different contexts separate in the mind and possible mental issues.

Word ’probability’ was mentioned multiple times, which is related to the fact that as it is not possible for a human to think everything at the same time, there must be a logic of some sort for explaining probabilities of possible next thoughts and thoughts after that. It is possible to make this a philosophical dilemma by claiming that a human is not a determistic creature, but that is not the route we are taking here. Exposures don’t always lead to mental images or even to a feeling that an association got expressed, meaning that they were merely preparing activities. And from that we’ll get to the priming-phenomena, which by definition means: "earlier thought makes probability of expression of subsequent thoughts higher". This is all actually about priming-phenomena, but usually it is never explained in such a detail.

The one who gets affected in described ways can’t in most cases guess, what he/she will think in a moment or later as that would burden his/hers working memory. Those, who gets to activate certain initialising signals, often know also what kind of feelings and reactions they are about to arise. They might even be able to kill somebody by just causing thinking, without ever being even near the target person.