Scientology Reflections (9) Too Much Information!!!

 Scientology Reflections (9) Too Much Information!!!

This is the ninth post in a series that I am publishing in 2024. The series is on the journey I have been on AFTER leaving Scientology and Dianetics and what my experiences were, and mistakes I made, and things that I learned, some shortly after leaving Scientology and others further along the way, even up to the present day. Some of this involves Scientology and Dianetics. Some involves the process of leaving a cult. Some is just knowledge that I could have benefited from knowing sooner, that may even be unrelated to the cultic topic entirely. 

For anyone who is unaware, I was in Scientology for twenty five years, between 1989 and 2014. I left in 2014 and discovered that Scientology is a harmful fraud and jam packed with lies and further it is composed of techniques plagiarized from other practices and sources. Ronald Hubbard had the ability to take a practice, file off the serial numbers and repackage it as his own in first Dianetics and later Scientology. 

From Study.Com:

"The recency effect states that individuals best remember the last items on a list. The primacy effect states that an individual will also likely remember the first item on that list. The middle items on the list are the least remembered."

I have written over six hundred posts on Scientology at Mockingbird's Nest blog on Scientology and between my blog, Quora and the Ex Scientologist Message Board (ESMB) my posts have reached over one million views online. 

This has taken ten years (2014-2024) and many, many hundreds of hours of reading books and articles and watching videos and writing to achieve.

One of my favorite authors in this journey has been Adam Grant. Adam Grant is a professor at Wharton business school who specializes in organizational psychology. 

He has written several excellent books including Give and Take. I wrote a blog post based on that book detailing my realization that the oversimplifications in Scientology regarding people just being either pure good OR pure evil are incorrect.  These ideas are presented in The Scientology Introduction to Scientology Ethics Book.

I recently saw a video in which Adam Grant described the primacy effect (we tend to remember the first piece of information in a series) and the recency effect (we tend to remember the last piece of information in a series). He described how we tend to forget the information we get in the middle when there are three or more pieces of information. 

It is kind of funny, because I have been writing and writing for a decade and now I get to see that people have probably forgotten more than they have remembered out of the many tens of thousands of words I have written.

Oh well, such is life. Might as well try to laugh instead of cry at the sheer absurdity of life. 

Well, if you have read my posts in the past, thanks, and if you have retained the information somehow, thanks even more. My intention was that the information be understood, retained, considered and to whatever extent it could help people on an individual basis, that it did. 

I hope that the fact that people may not retain more than two pieces of information is mitigated by the fact that written information can be looked at multiple times over time and hopefully different things can be learned and retained upon multiple readings. 

I hope that in the future I can limit my posts to two points and have a better result. Don't hold me to that religiously though. 

This is definitely food for thought. 

Here's a link to my blog archive by topic

• Blog Archive by Topic

Here's a post on My Road Out of Scientology

• My Road Out of Scientology

Here's a blog post on the book Give and Take by Adam Grant, entitled The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Scientology Reflections (9) Too Much Information!!!