


#18 What Surprises One Person, May Not Surprise Another
Learn how being surprised is a personal event based on your personal beliefs. What passes as a mundane expression to one person may shock another.

#17 Surprise is a Two Stage Process
Learn how surprise is a two-stage process that creates an opportunity for a strategically crafted experience.

#16 Solving Our Curiosity
Learn how our need to solve our curiosity is so deeply ingrained in our genetic architecture that we’ll accept anything that reduces this discomfort.

#15 Sense-Making During a Surprise
Learn how the brain instantly goes through a surprise-discernment-reflection process during a moment of surprise. It then instinctively settles on the first solution.

#14 Agents of Influence
Learn why asking WHO is most powerful as an agent of influence is not necessarily the best question to ask. The question WHEN appears more enlightening.

#13 Much of What We Do is Driven By Unconscious Processes, Part 2.
Learn how our brains are essentially prediction machines and their primary function is to reduce surprises by developing an increasingly nuanced model of the world.

# 12 – Unconscious Processing Makes Evolutionary Sense
Learn why much of what we do is driven by unconscious processes. Part 1.

11 – Beliefs About Ourselves are Self-Affirming
Learn how beliefs about the external world are easily verified, but beliefs about ourselves are self-affirming.

10 - Surprise Creates an Opportunity to Change the Experience of an Emotion
Learn how the experience of emotional arousal is adaptable. Heightened emotion is the brain telling us that something important is happening. On occasion, this allows us to label that emotion to create the experience.

9 - Seemingly Simple Comments May Create Self-Perpetuating Mindsets
Learn how seemingly simple comments, especially when surprising, may create self-perpetuating mindsets. Once we accept an explanation of our behavior, that explanation continues, and fortifies. It’s one more reason to always focus on positive attributes.

8- How Advertisers Use Surprise to Create Brands and Beliefs
Learn how advertisers use surprise strategically to impress us with their brands and trigger new belief formation. This all takes place instantly, and outside conscious awareness.

#7 Episode: Surprises About Our Self Concept Can Be Life Changing
Our self-concept serves as a basis for screening, categorizing, and interpreting our experiences. Surprises that disrupt our self-concept differ from surprises about the external world. Self-concept surprises may trigger life-changing beliefs.

6- Traditional Uses of Surprise
Learn how movie directors and television shows use surprise strategically to manipulate our emotions, enhance our excitement, and create spontaneous belief transformation.

5- Strategic Procrastination
Learn how a portion of Adam Grant's TED talk surprised me, triggering an instant belief revision. I used to feel lazy and unproductive when I procrastinated. Now I do it strategically.

4- Surprise Triggers One-Shot Learning
Learn how One-Shot learning triggered by surprise involves a different brain system than gradual learning. One-Shot learning works like a switch. Our emotions trigger this complex cognitive process during moments of high uncertainty such as surprise.

3- How Surprise Changes Your Behavior
Learn how information, received after a surprise, predisposes you to apply that new information instinctively in subsequent situations.

2- The Importance of Surprise
Learn how comedians use surprise in punchlines to create dissonance with our expectations. A surprise alarms us that our expectations are out of whack and need a spontaneous adjustment.

1- Surprise: The Belief Revision Reflex
Learn how the element of surprise evolved as a survival mechanism to trigger an instant belief formation or transformation.