Being Free of the Deepest Conditioning

The first science-based method to reverse social and cultural conditioning

Leah Zitter, PhD

Abstract

The As-Is theory is about seeing things as they really are, without being influenced by past beliefs or biases. It helps you replace old, distorted ways of thinking with new, clearer ones by changing how your brain processes information. This leads to better, more accurate decisions and a deeper understanding of the world.

Introduction

It all started with those nine months in my grandmother’s attic when, as nine years-old, I was stuffed in that small room to suppress my curiosity about that big outside non-Orthodox Jewish world. Looking out of the attic window, I watched as children from different cultures, with their different styles of clothing, passed by and I thought:

Where they go to school, who their friends are, whom they’ll marry, what jobs they’ll have, and how they spend their money all depends on their community or Group. That’s how how they’re going to live until they die.

And then I thought:

I’m also brought up in a Group. My Group makes me think, believe and behave as it wants me to. It makes me into It rather than Me. What if Group’s wrong? What if I die wasting my life…

See, my life is a brand, no different than a business. Just as business success depends on the accuracy and reliability of the information its computer systems feed it, our success in life depends on the accuracy and reliability of the information pumped into us.

For the next two decades, as community married me off, as I got to know the Outside world, as I bore three children, divorced, changed my name, lived in five different countries, educated myself and got my PhD, I looked for ways to break free from my conditioning, so I could live my one life well.

Over time, I realized that my irritability, social awkwardness, and self-loathing— all my impulsive, harmful decisions — came from how my brain had been shaped by my social and cultural experiences. More research showed me my culture’s ideology had physically embedded itself into my brain, changing the way my mind processed information. This meant I could be making important life decisions without ever realizing they might be wrong.

For the next two decades, I researched whatever I could on how to decondition myself. I visited libraries, read peer-reviewed journal articles, took notes from academic and non-academic books, watched documentaries, attended conventions, listened to podcasts, and interviewed professionals. I used my PhD training in research science to test my ideas on different groups of people, including 16 parolees in San Jose, 27 “Amazing Apostates” for my dissertation, and more recently, Reddit users from 16 ex-religious and ex-cult subreddits. I, also, refined my ideas through podcasts and articles.

I explored mindfulness, approaches to self-knowledge, empiricism, formal and informal logic, general semantics, semiotics, modern math, and other subjects. I tested how the brain handles inference, perception, decision-making, and reasoning, and delved into the philosophies of truth, science, and epistemology. I, also, studied neuroplasticity and how the brain self-regulates.

All paths tracked back to a concept I called As-Is, where we perceive phenomena outside our heads precisely as they are. In 2023, I chanced upon an obscure journal paper with the first precise technical account I’d seen on how new brain neurons are created and old ones die. Neurons embody information from the world outside our brains.

It seemed to me that by focusing on things as they are, I could feed my brain accurate messages, which would retrain it to see the world more clearly. Over time, through upward and downward neuroplasticity, these new neural pathways would replace the old ones embedded by family, teachers, and the environment, leading me to make healthier, better decisions.

For survivors of cults and cult-like groups — maybe for all of us — we’re all embedded with how our society wanted us to see the world, what to believe, and who to become. Some of those embedded ideas are healthy; others are not. For a successful life, we need accurate ideas. That means literally replacing skewed mental pictures with accurate, things-as-they-are perceptions. It takes time and practice. It’s an ongoing effort. It’s one where I become myself and grow.

Part I. Problem

ChatGPT & I

Think of large learning models (LLM) like Gemini. They’re trained on certain databases that affect how they answer your queries. That’s similar to how our brains perceive the outside world and process how we reason, judge, and make decisions. As neuroscientist Brian Wexler explains in his book Brain and Culture (2008), our brains are literally shaped by the “food” (teachings and experiences) they get from our cultures, especially during the first 25 years of our lives.

According to Van der Veken and Aopstel (2008), we’re embrained to process the world through the following filters:

• Is there a purpose to life? If so, what is it?
• If there’s a god, what s/he wants from me
• My duties as a woman or man and at each stage of my life
• What’s good and what’s bad
• What’s true and what’s false

Here’s how the different children I saw from the attic window are embrained:

Our brains are also shaped by our emotional experiences in those environments, which explains why some people defy their socializations. According to Zmigrod (2021), it also explains why individuals raised in cultures characterized by dogmatic beliefs, moral rigidity, and strong group cohesion, typically swap one authoritarian perspective for another. Their all-or-nothing conditioned brains lead them to adopt similarly rigid and inflexible worldviews.

Brain CEO

Data from our environments seeps into our brains through cultural and social rituals, stories, symbols, and traditions, shaping our beliefs and values. All of these data convert into electrical impulses that make and create paths as they course through our brains. (These paths are called neural channels). The more frequent and intense the messages, the more embedded these habits, or paths. Eventually, all these signals stream down to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), central processor in our brain, that analyzes all that information and helps us decide how to react under the following situations:

• Events. PFC consults brain data and tells us how to respond to regular and irregular situations. Example: I see a dog. PFC prompts me to cross the street. (Message comes from grandfather´s Holocaust trauma).
• The reason behind certain events or situations. Example: Houthis are killing Israelis. That’s because my shirt collar is open. (Message comes from my school teachers).
• How to view people I meet “out there”, usually seen through the lens of race, gender, age and class. Example: I see a man with a tattoo. PFC reminds me to avoid him. (Message comes from community´s books).
• How to handle morally tricky situations. Example: Should I cheat on this test? Yes, if it makes the person religious. (PFC may have retrieved this answer from something I experienced in my community or from family instructions).

What if some of my brain messages happen to be not true — doesn’t match reality — and I’d never know it? What if some of that information happens to be biased — distorts reality — but I’d never know it? Does it matter?

Well yes, since if I don’t see “out there” as it is, I’m in real danger of making poor decisions, misunderstanding situations, and misjudging others, which can lead to conflict, missed opportunities, an unhappy life and unnecessary stress.

From Zmigrod (2021): Neurocognitive model of ideological behavior

Incorrect beliefs about people, goals, truths, or morals can lead to decisions that don’t match reality or our best interests, causing problems. Wrong ideas about what’s true or right can waste our potentials. Being misinformed about others can keep us back from precious friendships and may result in unnecessary stress and conflict. Inaccurate ideas can keep us back from true information that could expand our potentials and make our life worth living. Believing in wrong values can lead us to hurt others or do things we may later regret, making us waste many years of our life and feeling we’ve been cheated.

Example: An ex-Muslim told me:

Recently I left Islam but I just can’t seem to shake the view of the world I had. I’d see some woman without a hijab. I’d just be put off by her… I can’t even notice the mental block I had developed towards other people especially non-Muslims. It was always a them vs. us situation where I either wanted nothing to do with them or just felt wrong being around them.

These deeply embedded societal and cultural messages, they get in the way of how the former Muslim hopes to interact with women and non-Muslims. His embrained past, he told me, blocks him from progressing.

Summary

Similar to internet algorithms, my brain has been culturally developed to filter information, profoundly shaping how I live my life. I can never know the whole picture out there, since I can never see the whole picture. Worst of all, I think I am seeing everything and that any person who contradicts my perceptions is wrong.

What if I’m the one who’s wrong, living my life on programmed directions, and, like ChatGPT, unaware that I’ve been programmed and unable to extricate myself from that control? How can I step out of my matrix while trapped within, so I can invest all my energies, time, talents on what really matters to make my one life count?

Part II. Popular Suggestions on how to Rid Myself of Harmful Cultural Conditioning

General ideas on how to excavate our deeply burrowed self-sabotages are:

• Therapy, which can help us see out of our blindspots but can be costly and time-consuming, among other limitations
• Exposing ourselves to diverse perspectives
• Methodically investigating our core beliefs (Model: Descartes)
• Practicing meditation and/or mindful awareness (Think: Krishnamurti. Popular books: The Four Agreements (Ruiz), The Mountain Is You (Wiest)).
• Reshaping our brains through neuroplasticity, namely through deliberately creating new patterns and behaviors to overwrite the old conditioning through repeated practice.

I tried each of those methods but realized that all knowledge-gathering, reasoning, and judgment had to go through my flawed brain. I couldn’t break free from its bias.

Among other ideas, I also tried unsuccessfully:

• Improving my decision-making through formal and informal logic
• Using my senses as a base for reliable inferences.
• Jailbreaking ChatGPT so it could tell me how it would defy its own conditioning.
• Using the natural ways my brain reasons — a combination of images and formulas (called mental models and mental logic) — to make better judgments about Reality than what I had been conditioned to believe.

After exploring various ideas on how to free myself from my conditioning, I realized that the "I" doing the thinking and my programmed brain were essentially one and the same. There was no one untouched corner of the brain that I could use to objectively deconstruct my conditioning. This is why some thinkers believe there’s no way out of the matrix.

According to Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, for instance:

This is a very important point to understand, it is the crux of the matter, because a conditioned mind can never find out what is true, a conditioned mind can never discover what awareness is. It can project its own images, dogmas and beliefs, thinking it has found awareness, but that is still the action of a limited, conditioned mind.

Part III. The As-Is Way

I mostly arrived at the As-Is concept through three different channels:

1. An old book in a castle in Budapest by a 19th century Polish-American count and engineer (Alfred Korzybski) on his method of General Semantics. It was his “Ladder of Abstraction” that most influenced me. If I see the other person in all their nuances, I can make a more accurate judgment about them based on their true nature rather than my biases. For example, instead of categorizing strangers as “Gypsy,” I could see them more accurately by notating them as Gypsy (1), Gypsy (2), Gypsy (3) — or I could objectify strangers by day and time, like some hypothetical person called ¨Sam¨, whom I notate as “Sam (Tuesday, 9:00 am)” or “Sam (Wednesday, 10:00 am),” assessing this individual according to his actions in the moment. (There’s more to this General Semantics, but that’s the gist).
2. Reducing people to shapes. Brain research on how to regulate emotions indicates I could flip my emotions from high to low depending on what I focused on. There’s the amygdala that gets activated when I focus on my emotions, flooding my brain with signals and making it hard to think clearly. (This is how indoctrination works, affecting my emotional responses). On the other hand, the prefrontal cortex helps me analyze and break down these emotional triggers into their factual components.

Example: A man with a black hat and beard could trigger me. But if I ¨flipped the switch down¨ to the shape of his eyes, shape of his mouth, shape of his beard, I’d be able to see him more objectively (As-Is), which would mute my agitation. The more I turn emotional triggers into factual observations, the better I can see things as they are and make healthier decisions.

1. For my dissertation, I surveyed 27 so-called Amazing Apostates across 65 fundamentalist religions, sects, conspiracy groups, new religious movements (NRM), and cults. My research questions were these: What are the real-life experiences of these people as they move from faith to apostasy? And what makes these people reverse their conditionings? Is there some common experience they underwent that I could employ to reverse my own conditioning?

In an obscure paper titled Laws of Neuroplasticity (2000), neuroscientist and clinician Dr. Chirag Jain of Mumbai detailed how new neurons are created and old ones die, drawing from neurophysics, neuroscience, and neuropsychology. Neurons are the cells that embody our experiences, emotions, and thoughts. This information is used by the PFC to influence how we make decisions. That’s why I was particularly interested in learning how to replace biased neurons from my conditioned past with neurons that more accurately reflect reality.

I simplified Dr. Jain’s ten rules into three:

1. Change your environment to free yourself to see things as they are
2. See all things just as they are, without letting your cultural beliefs or biases affect your perception
3. Focus on this phenomenological stance to generate neurons and to maintain and strengthen neural pathways

Neuroplasticity tells us we can create new neural pathways — instill new behaviors and skills — through repeated practice and exposure to new experiences. Dr Jain’s paper goes a step further, being the first and only source I found on how to actually create the neurons that populate these pathways. It also introduced me to the concept of upward and downward neuroplasticity, which means that as new neurons are formed, they can replace old neural pathways, as long as we don’t continue practicing our old ways of thinking.

Here, I finally found a way to rid my brain of harmful conditioning, even while trapped within.

As-Is in Practice

In practice, As-Is means focusing on seeing each person, event, object precisely as it is and precisely as it occurs, rather than how it appears in our brains. Think of it like playing Picture Lotto. To win at Lotto, the pictures on the cards have to precisely match the pictures on the board, right? It seems to me that to win at life, our mental images of specific people, events, and other phenomena must perfectly match the pictures on the “Gameboard of Reality” in every detail.

For example, we need to hear what the person’s REALLY saying (not what the culture-trained ¨voice in our head¨ says they’re saying). We need to see what the person REALLY is, not just based on culturally-embedded impressions of their color, race, or appearance. And so forth.

.

There can’t be the slightest discrepancy between our mental model — the Lotto picture in our mind — and the Real thing as it is “out there”

Example:
Our brain’s been taught to see this picture as ¨house¨

Would you really buy such a house?
Or want to birth such a person?

There’s the difference between how the brain sometimes visualizes reality and how it really is.

For successful decisions, we need to see reality as it really is!

In the same way, our brain automatically “pictures” things outside of it in ways that may not reflect reality, simply because of how it has been conditioned over the years.

That’s how brain instinctively “sees” the situation. That’s how brain instinctively explains the reason for the situation. That’s how brain instinctively “feels” whether something is right or wrong or true or false — and how it automatically judges anyone it meets. And meanwhile — the real Lotto cards out there — they could be utterly different….

Story

My Jordanian friend, Pro-Palestantian and Sunni by the way, recently told me the story of his Moroccan boyfriend who defends the Azeris against the Armenians. “Turns out,” my friend said, “Ali knows nothing of Armenia or Azerbaijan. He defends Azerbaijan only because of the crescent and star on their flag.” (The crescent and star are a symbol of Islam).

This is what Ali sees:

Neural messages, embedded so deeply they’re called deep culture, link this image with the concept of “Islam.” (Deep culture consists of values, beliefs, and norms passed down through generations and deeply ingrained in the self). Other elements of deep culture fuse the concept of “Islam” with his concept of self.

Were Ali to practice As-Is, here’s how he’d see the image on the flag:

1) A crescent:

(2) Three stars:

Now Ali is less likely to waste money and time on emotional mistakes triggered by this image.

As Ali continues practicing this As-Is way of perception in all areas of his life, it could help him uncover and reverse even unconscious distortions in how his mind has been viewing the world.

How is As-Is different from mindfulness?

Isn’t mindfulness an attitude of full and non-judgemental attention to stimulus? So how is the As-Is phenomenological stance different?

See, I’d tested these symbols through mindfulness

• A swastika
• Man with MAGA Covid mask
• Dollar bill

With mindfulness, I was “at one” with the referrent.

In contrast, with As-Is, I broke the referent into shapes and focused on its discrete elements:

Two lines crossing each other in perpendicular ways

A line slanting across the letter s.

Difficulties with Practicing this Method

To practice this As-Is stance is not always easy. There’s the possible loneliness and rejection that could come from doing things different to your community or to those you live among. The first condition of trying to see things in a new non-judgemental way is to migrate to a new environment, but this can’t always be accomplished. Deeply ingrained conditioning may resist change, making it difficult to replace old neural pathways with new. Also, I’m unsure whether this method can be applied to complex emotions and situations.

One person who reviewed my idea opined that “potential issues with this method include the time and effort required to consistently apply As-Is thinking, which may be challenging for some individuals.” Personally, for me, it’s become second nature, like a game I play. I do it while waiting in line at the post office or even as I type right now — it’s just another, closer way of seeing things as I go about my life.

On the other hand, as I told one ex-Jehovah Witness:

Focusing on things as they are has helped me with my PTSD. It’s helped liberate me from a toxic past and, by helping me see reality as-is, helps me make better, calmer, more rational decisions with my life.

Conclusion

In the 1988 film They Live, a homeless John Nada picks some sunglasses out of a dump in Los Angeles. As he permabulates the streets, Nada sees a billboard of a blond in a bikini, magazines outside a pharmacy cajoling him to consume, a handsome man exiting the store in a business suit and tie. When Nada haphazardly dons the sunglasses, the billboard flashes “Reproduce”, the magazines wink “Consume”, the dollar bills in the man’s hand flash “This is your god”, while the handsome bystander transmutes into a “fuckin’ ugly,” skeleton-faced alien.

Instead of perceptions flowing into the brain from the outside world, what we see actually depends on perception flowing out of the brain in the opposite direction. If our brain’s fed wrong things, we may see wrong things, do wrong things, be wrong things, live wrong life…

Nada’s truth-revealing glasses helped him see things as they really are. They helped him remove ideology from his perspective. For me, those truth-revealing glasses would be this As-Is way.

As I concentrate on seeing things as they ARE, new more accurate pathways build in my brain that gradually replace the skewed culturally-embrained ones. In contrast to the past, where I was programmed, I can now reach into my brain and steer its ¨internal GPS¨ to my own ends.

Case Studies of As-Is in Practice

1. The Dutch Jew’s friend

On Reddit, a Dutch Jew asked for advice on how to respond to her closest friend, the leader of the local Pro-Palestinian party, who had posted about her alliance with the terrorists. Now Redittor wonders what she could do to salvage her friendship: “She really meant a lot to me for a long time and I do still love her in a way.”

I used As-Is to suggest:

Think of it this way: She used to be your friend. Right now, she isn’t your friend in the literal sense of the word. That may/ not change in the future.

That’s the As-Is way of seeing the friendship. Looking at her actions as they are. Her brain, shaped by childhood experiences, automatically sees the person as a friend. Maybe that was the case yesterday, but if the Dutch person sees things as they are at the moment, her As-Is view will tell her to update her impressions.

2. The Ex-Muslim’s prejudice

An ex-Muslim on Reddit asked me:

How do I stop myself automatically looking down on other women who dress more revealing and who date before marriage?

Answer: It takes time. The only reason you do so is because your brain has been programmed by your experience and environment. Just like an AI, your brain has been trained over and over again to associate certain behaviors with certain images. (e.g. women who show their breasts are bad).

I told her I had the same problem and found, if I saw these people as they really are, I’d be able to see them more rationally and get past my reality-distorting impressions.

In your case, she may be a woman who happens to have blond hair, t-shirt, high-heeled shoes, sunglasses. Look at each of these. Break this person down to her discrete elements… Brain research showed me that if I break the emotional trigger into its factual elements, I can better self-regulate, think clearly, rise above my conditioning and deal with people and situations more rationally.

Questions

1. Hey, how about those deeply ingrained “deep culture” ideas, like hell? It’s something I can’t observe ‘As-Is’ in reality. So how do I know I will/not go to hell because I flipped light switch?

From my field research, I’ve learned that people who trace their beliefs back to their primary religious text (e.g. a reliable version of the Bible) and to reliable histories of their ideological movements often gain a clearer understanding of reality. But what if the core text is violent, self-destructive, or promotes hate? As part of human growth, aren’t we meant to evolve and reach our full potential? So, I ask myself: Does this belief help me grow?

TLDR: I track abstract ideas, like the concept of hell, to their original source. For example, is hell mentioned in the Torah, or is it a societal construct? Then I ask: Does this belief help me or the world grow?

It always comes back to seeing things as they are!

2. How is As-Is different from the way neuroplasticity advises we replace bad habits with new ones?

As-Is differs from traditional neuroplasticity approaches by focusing on seeing things exactly as they are in the present moment, without judgment or preconceived notions. Traditional neuroplasticity often emphasizes replacing bad habits with new ones through repetition and practice. As-Is, on the other hand, isn’t just about forming new habits but about consciously perceiving reality in its truest form, which naturally leads to the formation of new, accurate neural pathways. This method doesn’t just replace old habits but also helps us accurately choose which old habits to replace with new ones.

3. “I get the impression you say As-Is replaces therapy. I don’t think so!¨

Correct. If you’re really hurting and in a difficult situation, the right therapist can do wonders. I see As-Is as a complementary approach rather than an alternative.

4. “You can’t say As-Is is tested or evidence-based. You’ve never published any peer-reviewed articles on your idea.¨

That’s true. At the same time, I’ve made a point of using only books and journal articles that have been published in the most credible highly reviewed academic sources. When relevant, I used the most recent up-to-date findings. I also discussed my assumptions of these findings with experts in the field. There’s a direct and logical connection between the sources and my idea, which seems to support my approach.

5. “Our senses distort how we see things. You say ‘see As-Is’ — but how do you know you’re SEEING the right thing?”

“How do you know you have a hand?” I asked this intelligent person.

“I see it.” She answered.

That’s foundationalism. Useless to dabble in hypotheticals. We look at things in their essence, precisely as we see them.

6. Is it possible to be completely objective? Won’t I sometimes feel some level of bias — and isn’t that important, say, for my protection?

Wonderful question! I practiced that on the bus. Sitting across from me was someone who looked like he’d detonate me, if he could. He was dozing, so I took the opportunity to “deconstruct” his features. But the bias remained. What I realized from that situation is that my automatic response (System 1) was to fear and avoid him. Maybe I was wrong? Maybe I was right? By focusing on seeing him As-Is, I shifted from System 1 to System 2 — a more conscious, deliberate process involving prefrontal cortex reasoning.

Now, I can compare my snap reaction to reality and question the validity of that bias. The goal is to uncover unconscious cultural and societal impulses and test them against reality. Maybe the bias is unavoidable — I might feel it even when seeing things As-Is. And maybe this instinctive judgment serves a purpose, like protecting me. The key is to be aware of the conditioning and then check if there’s a good reason for feeling that way.

Core Sources

On how brain is conditioned

Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. (Bruce E. Wexler, 2008; MIT Press)

On how brain is embrained by culture

Kitayama, S., & Park, J. (2010). Cultural neuroscience of the self: Understanding the social grounding of the brain. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 5(2–3), 111–129.

Kitayama, Shinobu and Uskul, Ayse K. (2011) Culture, Mind, and the Brain:
Current Evidence and Future Directions. Annual Review of Psychology,
62 (1). pp. 419–449. ISSN 0066–4308

Park, D. C., & Huang, C. M. (2010). Culture wires the brain: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(4), 391–400.

On how brain is physically effected by trauma

Researchers reveal how trauma changes the brain (University of Rochester Medical Center)

On how brain is physically effected by indoctrination

Zmigrod L. A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2022 Jul;17(4):1072–1092.

Zmigrod L. A neurocognitive model of ideological thinking, Politics and the Life Sciences, 2021 40(2):1–1540

On how brain processes information

Neural Pathways: How Your Mind Stores the Info and Thoughts that Affect Your Behaviour

The Brain with David Eagleman (PBS)

On how brain thinks/ reasons/ processes information

Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2010). Mental models and human reasoning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(43), 18243–18250.On how brain self-regulates

Simpson, J. R., Öngür, D., Akbudak, E., Conturo, T. E., Ollinger, J. M., Snyder, A. Z., … & Raichle, M. E. (2000). The emotional modulation of cognitive processing: an fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(Supplement 2), 157–170.

Drevets, W. C., & Raichle, M. E. (1998). Suppression of regional cerebral blood during emotional versus higher cognitive implications for interactions between emotion and cognition. Cognition & Emotion, 12(3), 353–385.

Popular books on how to liberate ourselves from our conditioning

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book), D.M. Ruiz, 1997

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (B. Wiest, 2020)

Why therapy can be useful but fails to liberate us from deep conditioning

Wang, Y. X., & Yin, B. (2023). A new understanding of the cognitive reappraisal technique: an extension based on the schema theory. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 17, 1174585.

Yager, J., Kay, J., & Kelsay, K. (2021). Clinicians’ cognitive and affective biases and the practice of psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 74(3), 119–126.

On why it´s impossible to escape our conditioning

Conditioning. J.D. Krishnamurti

(Everything by Krishnamurti on the topic).

Kitayama, S., & Salvador, C. E. (2017). Culture embrained: Going beyond the nature-nurture dichotomy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 841–854.

General Semantics

Korzybski, A. (1958). Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. Institute of GS.

Introduction to Alfred Korzybski´s General Semantics

Semiotics

Sebeok, T. A. (2001). Signs: An introduction to semiotics. University of Toronto Press.

On neuroplasticity and perception

The Plasticity of Perception: How Our Minds Adapt and Evolve

On how brain neurons are created and die

Jain, C. The Laws of Neuroplasticity©.

__________________________________________________________

Bio: Self-educated, Leah Zitter holds university degrees and certifications in counseling, liberal arts, philosophy, and research science. She is a trained journalist with bylines on counterterrorism in papers that include The Iranian, Turkey´s Diplomatic Observer and Israel Times. She has 15 years of experience writing on emerging technology for clients that include Yale Law School, Google, Microsoft, and The Future Innovation Policy Institute, an Emirates-based think tank.

She can be contacted at leahzitter@yahoo.com.