Science Proves the Wizard Right Again

Okay, let's be clear about this: I'm proud of myself today. So proud, in fact, that you might want to skip reading this memo because all I'm going to do is strut. It could become sickening. Seriously.

Frankly, I can't believe you're still reading after a warning like that.

First it was Dr. Burkhardt Maess of the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience who proved my longstanding assertion that Broca's area of the brain anticipates the predictable. (This is important to you and me because Predictability is the killer of attention. If we want to gain and hold human attention, we must know how to stimulate Broca.)

Now neurologist Friedemann Pulvermuller of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge has shocked the scientific community by announcing that Wernicke's area and Broca's area gather sensory data from other brain areas and then compile it into complex mental images. According to the article, “These results challenge the theory that isolated, language-specific brain structures discern word meanings. Instead, they propose word understanding hinges on activation of interconnected brain areas that pull together knowledge about that particular word and its associated actions and sensations.”

Anyone who has attended one of my public seminars since 1996 has heard me explain this whole “pulling sensory data from associated areas” process in detail. I wrote about it in a series of Monday Morning Memos in 2001 and 2002 and then finally laid the matter to rest with the April, 2003 publication of the audiobook with transcript, Thought Particles: Binary Code of the Mind. Its description says, “This limited-edition insight contains one audio CD and one illustration CD unveiling the Wizard's theories on how thoughts are assembled in the mind from stored sensory associations.”

Why does any of this matter? Because the purpose of Wizard Academy is to forward the expansion of the communication arts.Our goal is to teach you how to more effectively change:

1. what people think, and

2. how they feel.

To do this, we must study how thoughts and feelings are gathered, stored, processed, and retrieved from memory.

Last week I wrote, “Wizard Academy is a school of the communication arts. We study all the languages of the mind, including shape, color, position, ratio, pitch, key, tempo, contour, musical interval, rhythm and architecture. But words have been the highest form of communication since Genesis chapter one, when God spoke a universe into existence and then created us in his image.”

But that is not to say that words are the only language of the mind. Wizard Academy is in the process of expanding its curricula to include investigations into the languages of:

1. music

2. color

3. shapes and symbols

4. ritual (as the language of a sports or business tribe)

5. phonemes

6. schema and worldview (as boundaries to understanding)

7. meter

8. mathematics (as a language of business, with emphasis on the ratios mentioned on pages 144-145 of Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads.

If you're an academy grad and would like to be considered as a possible instructor for one of these or another new curricula, please let Pennie@wizardacademy.org know of your field of interest and your current depth of research into it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to march around the room and sing the Poky Little Puppy song at the top of my lungs (pages 192-193 of Secret Formulas.)

Roy H. Williams