Anonymous. Alcoholics Anonymous, Second Edition. New York: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1962. "Highly competent psychiatrists who have dealt with us have found it sometimes impossible to persuade an alcoholic to discuss his situation without reserve. - - But the ex-problem drinker who has found this solution, who is properly armed with facts about himself, can generally win the entire confidence of another alcoholic in a few hours. Until such an understanding is reached, little or nothing can be accomplished." - p. 18. DCI has worked with several "Employee Assistance Programs", mostly established in organizations by recovering alcoholics to deal with other alcoholics, and very effective for recouping employees from this illness. The Institute has experienced several instances of such programs "going professional" and thus becoming much less effective for the alcoholic. "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable." The First Step, p. 59. The DCP identifies such surrender as the necessary first step in any extensive kind of behavior change. The power of the Automatic Function and its billion bits of information processed every second versus (and it often is "against") the mere sixteen of the Aware Function's resolve to change, end or eliminate an unwanted behavior results in the mobilization of and the increased incidence of the very behavior which is unwanted. All you need do is pay attention to an unwanted emotion or action, and there it is!

Arkes, H.R. and Garske, J.P. Psychological theories of motivation. Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole, 1977. Compares the Zeigarnik and Marrow experiments in which tasks associated with stress were found more easily recalled, mobilized and motivated than tasks not so associated. In learning a task, the DCP indicates that errors will be more dominant than the correct response if the trainer or class members recriminate the subject for the error, or if the subject himself hears internal messages of recrimination the incorrect response will be recorded as the dominant (most likely to be observed) behavior. Punishment achieves the same result, that of marking the undesirable behavior, which then is more likely to be observed than the desired behavior.

Atkinson, R.C. and Shiffrin, R.M. Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K.W. Spence and J.T. Spence (Eds), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 2). New York: Academic Press, 1968. Presents a dual system of human information processing consisting of: (a) labile aware processes and (b) learned structural components. They demonstrated aware processing by choosing a particular aware process (rehearsal) and designing numerous tasks that would vary the rehearsal demands and extend the rehearsal capabilities to the limits. They found the aware process to be tightly capacity limited and the learned or automatic processing capable of managing massive quantities of information with little effort.

Benner, A.W. Intradepartmental memorandum of the San Francisco Police Department, 15 August 1980. In this memo, which was written to recommend DCI training for the police trainers, Benner cites a case study of a California Highway Patrol shoot-out. The officers automatically took time to pocket the brass while they were being shot at. This action was a dominant learned behavior from their instructions at the practice range.

Bettleheim, B. Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 1943, 38, 417-452. Reports the regression of concentration camp inmates to childhood social styles as a result of high stress conditions.

Blum, R. B. An annotated bibliography of Human behavior in the extremes of stress. Hartford: The Designed Change Institute, Inc., l982. Now Virginia City, Montana. (A few copies still available)

Blum, R.B. A Bimodal Model of Cognitive Functioning: Theoretical and Practical Implications of the Construct of Cognitive State Rigidity. Saybrook Institute of San Francisco Doctoral Dissertation. Hartford: Designed Change Institute, 1984.

Card, S. K. and Moran, T.P. The human information processor in The psychology of human-computer interaction. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, l983.

Cowen, E.L. (a) The influence of varying degrees of psychological stress on problem-solving rigidity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, l952, 47, 5l2-5l9. The research demonstrated an increased tendency to cling to inappropriate learned responses under stress conditions. The experimenter measured the loss of cognitive flexibility.

Cowen, E. L. (b) Stress reduction and problem solving rigidity. Journal of Consulting Psychology, l952, l6, 425-428. In this study, similar to Cowan a, the experimenter demonstrates a reduction in cognitive rigidity as a result of steps taken to reduce the stress.

Furst, C. Origins of the mind: Mind-brain connections. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, l979. The text includes material on the reticular activating system (RAS), very important to an understanding of the nature of attention, mind set and rigidity. Attention (an Aware Function activity) is stimulated by novel aspects of the environment. Other events are dealt with automatically, without the attention of the Aware Function.

Howard, R. Performance in a world of change. Washington: University Press, 1979. Refers to the one "bit" of sensory input per second which can be stored in long term memory, and to the small "channel capacity" of aware human information processing.

Janis, I. L. Groupthink. Psychology Today, November, 1971. The author discusses the effects of group pressure to increase the cognitive rigidity of the members, leading to automatic, unaware conformity ["grouptracking"]. Note that this requires dynamic thinking to grasp, and note that it can be employed as a way of managing a group rather than single members of the group at one time, and note further that the single individual management approach cannot be effective in light of this study.

Katz, D., and Kahn, R.L. The social psychology of organizations. New York: Wiley, 1966. Systems filter out information to which they are not attuned. The filtering is performed unawarely and reliably. Systems develop their own mechanisms to filter out alien influence.

Kupfmuller, K. Informationsverarbeitung durch den Menschen. Nachrichtentechn, 1959, 12, 68-74. The author reviews studies in humans concerning the small proportion of information processed awarely. The studies were done primarily on activities such as typing and computation. The number of bits processed awarely was measured to be between 12 and 45 bits per second.

Lewin, K. Resolving Social Conflicts. New York: Harper, 1948. In pages 72-73, Lewin describes a relationship as something more than the sum of its parts. Lewin, a Gestalt psychologist, developed the laboratory "sensitivity training" in New Britain, Connecticut in 1946. He offers what demands dynamic thinking to fully grasp.

Linton, Ralph. The Cultural Background of Personality, Appleton-Century- Crofts, N.Y., 1945. Behavior is learned from experience in the form of cultural configurations. Linton likens the process of training the [Automatic Function, says the DCP] to the replacement of a single board in the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor. The individual is already trained to replicate his family of origin and his society of origin, and mindlessly does what is expected, and fits the slot perfectly. The DCP understands that any individual change one seeks to make has this family and cultural array of behaviors to oppose it, and that new behavior must be designed and integrated before it can be easily used.

Lloyd, P. E. & Dicken, P. Location in Space: A Theoretical Approach to Economic Geography. New York: Harper & Row (1972). Describes the perceptual filter through which objective facts about the environment are filtered. It is only upon this filtered information that a person can act. The input is filtered, sorted and endowed with meaning by this perceptual filtering process. Thereafter, the individual must act upon what this process has provided. The DCP further identifies that an internal dynamic results in which a feedback system purifies and imbeds the perception. In alcoholism, for example, this can actually block the perception of drinking at all!

Mandler, G. Thought processes, consciousness and stress. In V. Hamilton and D.M. Warburton, Human stress and cognition: an information processing approach. New York: Wiley, 1979. This review of research on stress and cognition includes the interaction between aware and automatic responses, the narrow filtering of perception during stress, and the habitual repetition of responses during stress. It interprets this according to an "interruption" theory of the effects of stressful emotion on cognition, a kind of debilitating cognitive "noise". DCP demands a more exact definition of these phenomena because, as in the case of regressed behavior, it needs to be identified, interrupted and eliminated, which is what we do.

Marrow, A.J. Goal tension and recall. II. Journal of General Psychology, 1938, 19, 37-69. In this performance of the Zeigarnik (1927) experiment the experimenters told some subjects that they were doing well and need not finish the task, while others were informed they were doing badly and to try to finish. In this case the completed tasks were associated with stress and were more easily recalled in the later phase of the study. The DCP identifies various forms of "marking" learned responses to make them more dominant (hence likely to appear when attention is absorbed by stress or diverted to another point of focus). Since the effect is largely unknown by educators, psychologists, consultants and trainers, errors are often caused to become dominant in the behavior of the subject.

Mayo, E. The human problems of an industrial civilization. London: Macmillan, 1933. This important early study draws conclusions from the Hawthorne studies about the effects of group climate on the performance of employees. DCP points out that even the overwhelming evidence of the "surprising discoveries" by Peters and others about corporate climate and excellence, managers would still prefer the ineffective but personally rewarding struggles with individual employees, rather than effectively dealing with the whole group through the management of group climate.

McCormick, E.J. Human factors in engineering and design. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. This standard text in human factors engineering includes the information that the brain processes approximately one billion bits of information each second through the Automatic Function, in contrast with the minute amount of about 16 bits per second by the Aware Function.

Pally, S. Cognitive rigidity as a function of threat. Journal of Personality, 1955, 23, 346-355. This experiment replicates the findings of Cowen (1952) in producing cognitive rigidity as a psychological state as a result of high stress.

Postman, L. & Bruner, J. S. "Perception Under Stress". Psychological Review, 1948, 55, 314-323. Under high stress subjects became rigid in perceptual responses and were apparently unaware of these effects.

Romen, A.S. Self suggestion and its influence on the human organism. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharp, Inc. 1981. This work describes methods of using autogenic training such as the DCP has used since 1970. (See Sargent, T.O., 1980 a)

Samelson, F. J. B. Watson's Little Albert, Cyril Burt's twins, and the need for a critical science. American Psychologist, 1980, 35, 619-625. In the Little Albert research it was recorded that when Little Albert was upset he would put his thumb in his mouth. He would then fail to demonstrate the conditioned response. To elicit the response, his thumb had to first be removed, and then he could be stimulated with fear and the response would be observed. This was observed as early as 1916. It makes no sense without a bimodal understanding of human information processing. This information was presented to the American Nuclear Society trainers thusly: "If you think that this means we [DCI] are going to teach your operators to suck their thumbs, the answer is 'Yes'". We use autogenic training for relaxation, thus providing cognitive flexibility for stressful conditions.

Sargent, T. O. (a) Celebrating differences. Self and Society, 1975, 3, 3, 19-21. A typical DCP strategy in which the act of celebrating integrates differences which can't be integrated.

Sargent, T. O. (b) Distress distorts. Self and Society, 1975, 3, 6, 11-12. The distorting effects of stress are described from clinical observation and prior to any appreciable input from the literature other than A.A.

Sargent, T. O. Client directed recovery. Self and Society, 1978, 6, 8. Links the origins of psychosis to stress and reports clinical results with diagnosed schizophrenics. Clients are able to reduce or eliminate psychosis in the same way psychosis is reduced on a hospital ward by an attendant: by shifting attention to a calming focus.

Sargent, T. O. (a) Conditioned meditation. Self and Society, 1980, VIII, 8, 242-245. For a decade prior to this publication the DCP used autogenic training to produce instant and immediate availability of a meditative state within which cognitive flexibility can be used. The article also describes how a high intensity state can be similarly produced, from which it is usually easier to move to clarity and cognitive flexibility in a high stress situation.

Sargent, T. O. (d) A study of human behavior in adverse stress. Hartford: The Sargent Group, Inc., 1981. This is an engineering text on human factors engineering and industrial psychology framed for engineers. It presents the DCP.

Sargent, T. O. The behavioral and medical effects of stress. Hartford: Designed Change Institute, Inc., 1984. Now Virginia City, Montana. (A few copies still available). This text includes all of Sargent, 1981 d plus information about the specific effects of different forms of stress on health and methods by which treatment can be supported and illness reduced by managing the correct kind and level of feelings state.

Schmall, T.M. Conference record for the 1979 IEEE Standards Workshop on Human Factors and Nuclear Safety. New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 1980. Cites research and experiences that have shown that humor injected into a stressful situation often enables the individuals to regain the ability to think calmly and clearly.

Schneider, W. and Shiffrin, R.M. Controlled and automatic human information processing: I detection, search and attention. Psychological Review, 1977, Vol. 84 (1), 1-66.

These two references were found long after the federally funded DCI search of the literature had been completed. It was surprising to find that, in spite of the fact that the authors did considerable research related to situations where individuals were under various stress conditions, they did not consider the effects of stress on human information processing, much less the different effects various types and intensities of stress have on the two functions.

The authors define a bimodal information processing capacity in the human being. One of the two systems they refer to as "automatic processing", and we at the Designed Change Institute adopted the term "Automatic Function" from their work. The other process they call "controlled", meaning that it is controlled consciously by the individual. In the Designed Change Process "controlled" suggests automatic and rigid direction, while the authors use it to mean aware direction. In order to make the references fit more easily into the DCP we have changed the term "controlled" to "aware" in this annotation without any textual indication.

The authors make the following points: Automatic sequences do not require attention, though they may attract it, and they do not use up aware channel capacity. They can be used after aware processing has linked the selected elements in sequence. Automatic processing is learned in long-term store, is triggered by appropriate inputs, and then operates independently of the subject's control. An automatic sequence can contain components that control information flow, attract attention, or govern overt responses. It proceeds automatically without subject control without stressing the capacity limitations of the system, and without necessarily demanding attention. The subject may be quite unaware that the process took place.

Once learned, an automatic process is difficult to suppress, to modify, or to ignore. [Since the automatic process is evidently stored permanently and indelibly, it will interfere with behavior according to the laws of automatic response and the hierarchy of dominance, whether appropriate or not. The DCP includes specific methods through which these indelible patterns or configurations of response can be suppressed or eliminated. The individual learns to add something which will alter the behavior pattern and which is so tightly associated to the undesirable behavior that it occurs with it and automatically blocks it in ways which effectively eliminate it.]

Aware processing is a temporary and intentional linking of elements in a sequence that has not yet been learned. It is relatively easy to set up, modify and utilize in new situations. It requires attention and uses up short-term capacity. Aware processing is used to facilitate long-term learning of all kinds including automatic processing.

Aware processing is a temporary activation of a new sequence of elements that can be set up quickly and easily but which requires attention, is capacity-limited, and is controlled by the subject. These aware processes include decisions of all sorts, rehearsal, coding, and search of short and long term store. Aware processes are tightly capacity limited, but the cost of capacity limitations is balanced by the benefits deriving from the ease with which such processes may be set up, altered, and applied in novel situations for which automatic sequences have never been learned.

Because active attention of the subject is required for the aware process, only one such sequence at a time may be controlled without interference. [From incidents and case histories, DCI has shown that the limit of aware attention probably is three items at once, such as three alarms on a control panel and three parts of your own body. Attending more than three usually requires scanning from one object of attention to the next.] They note that the phenomenological feeling of consciousness may lie in a subset of STS, particularly in a subset that is attended and given aware processing.

Humans learn to integrate the two processes. A type of automatic sequence can be developed which will attract attention (awareness) to a specified locus or node. These inputs acquire the ability to initiate automatic-attention responses. These attention responses then direct attention (i.e. will direct aware processing) automatically to the target.

The authors state that a number of anomalous or paradoxical findings in the field of behavioral science are shown to be consistent with and predictable from the two process theory, something that we who use the DCP have also experienced.

Selye, H. Stress in health and disease. Boston: Butterworths, 1976. "The" book on the medical effects of stress. Although Selye quotes many of the sources which report serious studies on the effects of stress on cognition, he offers none of that information!

Sherif, M. The Psychology of Social Norms. New York: Harper, 1936. This work describes how the human being replicates what is learned in the family and society of origin. Psychologists fail to understand how behaviors including all kinds of illness, are learned responses to the family and society of origin.

Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual Learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review, 1977, 84, 127-190. See Schneider, W. and Shiffrin, R.M., 1977 (above), for all comments about this material.

Spence, K.W. Behavior theory and conditioningNew Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Spence develops and supports the theory that activation, motivation by stress, enhances the performance of dominant learned responses, regardless of their appropriateness in the present situation. DCP teaches that both punishment and errors which are criticized both make the behavior associated with the assault more dominant and more likely to appear.

Skinner, B.F. Science and human behavior. New York: Macmillan, 1953. This basic book on behavioristic psychology is a focus on that part of human information processing which is carried out by the Automatic Function described by the Bimodal Theory. Statistically, the Aware Function, managing 16 bits of information per second in contrast with the billion bits managed by the Automatic Function, is insignificant. How research is conducted (in relation to stress) will determine how much influence the Aware Function can have. Its power can be great when it manages an automatic behavior. Humanistic psychology carries out its studies under conditions which maximize the availability of the Aware Function and its unpredictable results. The Little Albert study as reported in Samelson (1980) clearly shows the change in behavioral response when the Aware Function is available, and then when it is not. The removal of Little Albert's thumb from his mouth made Little Albert no longer "free", after which the universally predominant automatic behavior could be demonstrated in him. In this present reference, Skinner says, "The hypothesis that man is not free is essential to the application of scientific method to the study of human behavior."

Steinbuch, Karl. Automat und Mensch. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1971.

This author reports the research in Germany in the early 1950s of a large number of behavioral scientists and artificial intelligence scientists in widely separated research settings. They were loosely integrated in that they had one overall purpose: to provide data upon which it could be decided when a human brain would be preferable in space exploration, and when it should be a computer. Additionally, many corresponded across the lines of discipline, so that computers got the benefit of new ideas about how the brain works, and psychologists redesigned their understanding of human information processing from what was being learned in computer science.

These researchers came to agree that the human brain processes information in two different ways, one flexible and aware, and the other automatic and rigid. In widely separated research, they concluded that the aware capacity was limited to between twelve and forty six bits per second. This was in marked contrast with the automatic capacity. While the human being is capable of receiving about three billion bits of information each second, only about a third of that input is processed. This is the collection of studies which stands behind the DCP assertion that we process 16 bits per second awarely and one billion bits per second automatically. If the two systems are opposed, as they often are, it is simple to guess which will be the winner.

Schlusselreiz. Perhaps the most important gift that this text gave to the DCP is the scientific description of what we referred to as "restimulation", the response to a particular configuration of stimuli with a whole new mind set or behavior pattern, as when someone reminds you of another person and you automatically respond as though it were that person. The effects of this "key stimulus", which unlocks an entire repertoire of behavior, reach from the different set of responses you can observe in others as they act within one social setting, and then in another, or how "how to drive a Volkswagen" comes back to you (if you have driven one before) when you sit in the familiar seat. "Schlusselreiz" (plural Schlusselreize) means "key stimulus". Operating similarly to the well known stimulus-response behavior, the Schlusselreiz acts to significantly change the responder so that the same stimulus now will produce a different response.

A Schlusselreiz can act totally unawarely, so that an employee, boss or intimate partner responds unaccountably as a result of something said, a tone used or something observed in the environment, be that the internal or external environment. The behavior following the change will be inexplicable from the state of affairs before the key stimulus, the Schlusselreiz. In a recovering alcoholic, the label "alcoholic" becomes a key stimulus for pride in that discovery and in the work on the path to sobriety, while in the still drinking alcoholic, "alcoholic" is a key stimulus for a complete repertoire of denial.

It is unfortunate that these scientists failed to study what happens to the two different functions, the aware and the automatic, under stress. It is unaccountable, considering that part of their work was to prepare for human beings in the stressful settings of space exploration.

Finally, we need to state here, LOUDLY, that although we have paid three different translators to help us make this book available in English, our results are quite inadequate. Please, if you know of a way, make it possible to translate this work into English.

Thomas, Alexander. Current trends in developmental theory. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 1981, 51(4), 580-609. Within the context of research on conditioning in humans, the author notes (p. 583): "In a three year old boy a water phobia may start, as it might in a dog or other animal, as a simple conditioned reflex after a frightening experience at the beach. But very quickly the anxiety symptoms create reactions in parents, siblings, and other children and adults, which modify the original conditioned reflex and give it symbolic meaning. A sequential interactional process is set in motion". DCP uses the fact that it is easy to add onto the indelible behavior patterns anything that one chooses, such as a diversion from an unwanted behavior pattern. Furthermore, the interaction would rarely be "sequential". Rather, it would be dynamic and synergistic, and basically incomprehensible unless dynamic thinking is used.

Wolpe, J. Psychotherapy by reciprocal inhibition. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1958. Presents evidence for the effects of pleasure and relaxation to reduce the effects of anxiety. He notes that a proud demonstration of anxiety defeats itself and anxiety is reduced.

Young, J.Z. A model of the brain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. This neurophysiological study of how the human brain receives input and processes the information presents two interesting findings for our purposes. First it concludes that neurological dampening effects limit the flow of information to ten million bits per second, considerably less than the estimates which we have accepted for the Designed Change Process. It also states that the processing is done through two separate systems, the aware and the automatic, and that the aware processes variably with a maximum capacity of 25 bits per second, and usually much less. This work was done on the eyes and ears, both of which have known dampening effects (that is, attention, without moving your eye, to one area of what you are seeing will dampen what you are not attending, and attention to one conversation will dampen others) and then the estimates were given for the rest of the body. For the purposes of the DCP, only the astounding contrast between aware processing and automatic processing is important. It is this fact, whether it is millions or billions, that requires change to be designed, and which makes it impossible to "just change".

Zeigarnik, B. Uber das Dehaten von erledigten und Unerledigten. Handlungen Psychologische Forschung, 1927, 9, 1-85. In this famous experiment, done under Lewin, the subjects were put under stress when their goals were not reached, and no stress when they were achieved. Later, when asked to recall the tasks, those associated with the stress of incompletion were dominant, that is, easier to recall. The DCP teaches that the dominant automatic response will be observed when a person is under stress and cannot choose clearly. One of the marks of dominance is any intensity which is recorded with the behavior (such as punishment, or doing the incorrect behavior during training).

Zimring, F.E. and Hawkins, G.J. Deterrence: The Legal Threat in Crime Control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Describes how efforts at deterrence do not work. He comes close to how the DCP would describe the use of synergy as a means of showing how the steps of deterrence enter a dynamic feedback system with predictable but complex results similar to how a gyroscope at rest differs from a spinning one.

This material is continually in preparation. References and annotations will be added as prepared and as requested by users.

Last updated 20-x-97