How to Change the Channel - to Make Thinking Feel Better is built as a working toolkit. It's a sequence of short parables paired with "consciousness games," small mental exercises meant to interrupt unhelpful thoughts as they are happening.

The parables in the book draw from an unusually wide range of sources for a self-help book: spiritual teachers, poets, therapists, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, and, by Marks's own account, a Chinese chef from Berkeley, who he credits directly in the text.

The same instinct that led Marks to teach, to write books about piano improvisation, and to invent a new form of poetry called "Colo-petry," (color poetry), shows up in How to Change the Channel. The book doesn't promise to fix your thinking. The goal is to make thinking "feel better" along the way, not by solving the mind's problems and concerns, but by altering the story when you don't like the plot. He allows his improvisational thinking and creativity to spill over into mind control, or mind self-control.

How the Parables and Games Work Together

Marks structures the book so a reader can open to any chapter under stress and have something to actually work with and think about, rather than reading information they are asked to merely understand or believe.

How to Change the Channel is the one book in Marks’s catalog that isn't fiction, isn't poetry, and isn't about music. It grew out of decades of free improvisation and his natural instincts as a teacher.

Published in 2023, the same year Marks also introduced "Colo-petry," How to Change the Channel - to Make Thinking Feel Better reflects a period when he was actively inventing new structure to his literary works.

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