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.