This post was actually pretty enlightening. I've had the typical religious debate with a theist before, and I use to go ahead with the 'kill them with arguments' method, and I did notice that it left people more convinced of their beliefs than they were before, even if I 'won' the argument.

I first heard of cognitive priming on a TED talk where a guy from Skeptic magazine was explaining 'pseudoscience and weird beliefs'. They played a popular song backward, most of the audience couldn't hear anything that sounded like words. But when the supposed 'lyrics' of the backward song were put on the screen, everyone could clearly hear the words 'satan' and '666' and entire sentences that were supposedly there. It was easy to hear once we were 'primed' for it, even though normally no one would have heard anything but gibberish.

Im a sophomore in IB at the moment, and i've heard a lot about ToK. I'm pretty excited about it, many of the older students say it changed the way they view things, and that our school's ToK teacher is exceptional. Apparently at the beginning of the first class of the year, the first thing the student's are asked is 'how do you know 2 plus 2 equals 4?'. And in the IB MYP, not all the kids are that motivated, but they're 'filtered out' before the diploma program. I attend a IB world school here in Canada and i live in an area with relatively high immigration rates, so there's a lot of competition since immigrants (like my parents) are obsessed with education.