As well as our current posture, we have an (imagined) equilibreum posture that our current posture is a deviation from.
Two ways to perform an action:
- Transient: disturb your current equilibreum posture temporarily. Muscles are tightened in opposition to those muscles maintaining your posture. When those muscles are released, you will naturally fall back into that original posture.
- New equilibreum: imagine that your current posture is a disturbed state of some different posture that you are actively maintining, then let go of it. (a chain of such imaginings may be memorized, when recalled in sequence they will result in an action of arbitrary complexity)
The first method being overwhelmingly employed when we decide consciously to do some thing, even where the second would be more efficient. Even where we start out doing the second, the moment we start to worry whether we got an action right we fall back to the first.
On the other hand, if we are waiting impatiently to do something then we are imagining some new equilibreum and actively restraining it, which is also inefficient. Or if we are doing something we do not want to be doing, we may be actively keeping ourselves at that activity while our imagined equilibreum is something quite different.
And if you tell someone not to do something, they will immediately imagine doing it and start actively restraining themselves from it.
Try not to give me all your money. Try very, very hard. :-P
Hmm, and if we expand this to two people, it starts looking like cats and dogs. Especially the way that the roles may be exploited seems similar to the trick of telling someone not to do something. Agenda setting and all that. And it also links in with overclocking, in explaining how expectations can be harmful. Ok, this looks like it will simplify things greatly.