Recently at one of my favorite sites, RealitySandwich.com, I came across a short but interesting article entitled, “Hallucinating In The Dark.” It stated,
“A new study, published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, reveals that participants of normal health could achieve visual hallucinations after only 15 minutes of sensory deprivation. Interestingly, nobody pressed the panic button that was available to end the experiment.”
The article doesn’t describe what type of hallucinations they are. So I will make a comment on two things:
Sensory deprivation is known for causing out-of-body-experiences (OBE) and wake-initiated lucid dreaming (WILD). If that is the case for these hallucinations then they are probably generated in the upper visual cortex regions. The optic nerve and primary cortex will only have limited activity in this process.
However, more than likely we are talking about “geometric hallucinations” which are often due to phosphene, or what I like to call “neural static.” The brain is always firing neurons regardless of the presence of stimuli or not, you can actually detect this activity in your eye if you become aware of it and hold your attention. It is always there. Check out the link for a better explanation.
The idea of using sensory deprivation techniques as a tool for exploring consciousness has fascinated me ever since I first watched Joe Rogan’s explanation of his isolation tank.
I also believe that these exact states can be achieved with meditation, deep sleep hypnosis, and any other mental skill that allows an individual to put their body to sleep while keeping their mind – or more specifically consciousness – intact. The best way to describe it is like slipping into a lucid dream, but it is less expected and it is easier to get overexcited and wake yourself up.
Émile Coué, a French psychologist and pharmacist in the late 19th century, was one of the first individuals to make use of optimistic autosuggestion as a popular form of psychotherapy and self-improvement.
His most famous method – the Coué Method – involved saying the positive affirmation, “Everyday, in every way, I am getting better and better” at the beginning and end of each day. It was meant to be repeated in a clear and focused state of mind.
Coué believed that through the use of autosuggestion and imagination an individual could motivate their self to better living habits and health. Émile Coué noticed that he could improve the effectiveness of a drug by praising its effectiveness to his patients. This discovery eventually became known as the placebo effect.
These kinds of findings turned Coué’s interests towards hypnosis and digging deeper into the nature of suggestion. Coué observed that the main obstacle to hypnosis and autosuggestion was willpower; in order for the suggestions to be most effective the individual had to reserve judgment and accept the suggestion based on an element of faith.
This could explain why hypnosis can be so hard to study reliably using the scientific method. Because each individual has their own degrees of suggestibility, and the hypnosis-patient relationship is so crucial to the effectiveness of the treatment; which makes it difficult to establish a good control group.
The power of suggestion has proven to play a huge yet perplexing and largely unexplained role in human psychology. According to a recent article by Wired Magazine, placebo drugs have been getting more effective over time. Perhaps this is due to society’s growing acceptance of pills as a convenient “cure-all” for all of our problems? On a related note, one blog by a U.K. neuroscientist even reports on placebo side effects, which could theoretically account for some of the side effects common in various medical treatments, not just psycho-pharmaceuticals.
It seems only natural that with all of this evidence on the power of suggestion that scientists should begin to seek what factors play a role in making a particular suggestion powerful. Hypnosis should not just be seen as a tool that only works on “highly suggestible” persons, but also a tool that can be learned and applied by everyone.
Coué himself claimed that he was not a healer, but one who taught others how to heal themselves. To read more about Émile Coué I highly recommend this blog entry by UK Hypnosis, which gives a very fascinating and in-depth analysis to Coué’s practices.
There is growing amounts of research being done on how hypnosis affects the brain. For example, when patients were hypnotized to experience a paralyzed limb, experimenters found that…
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“…brain areas normally associated with the intentional inhibition of movement are not active in people with hysterical paralysis nor hypnotized volunteers, suggesting that it really is the case that they cannot, rather than will not, move.”
One common use for hypnosis is pain relief and anesthesia. In April 2006, the British television channel More4 broadcasted a live hernia hypnosurgery operation.
Some individuals are more hypnotizable than others; research seems to suggest that those with a bigger anterior corpus callosum, which is a part of the brain thought to help focus attention, has show to associate with higher hypnotizability.
Neuropsychologist Peter Halligan at Cardiff University, UK, believes it may one day be possible to create “virtual patients” through hypnosis in order to help study some of the stranger neurological conditions seen in individuals. Some conditions researchers believe can be duplicated in healthy people through the power of hypnosis include:
- Hysterical blindness (the person cannot see but has no perceptible damage to their eyes or brain)
- Hysterical paralysis (an inability to move a part of the body despite having no physical injury – the same limb may move while the person is asleep)
- Prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise faces despite having good sight)
- Alien limb syndrome (the feeling that an arm or leg is acting of its own accord)
- Visual neglect (total lack of awareness of half of the visual field)
- Capgras syndrome (a delusional belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter).
NewScientist.com reports on Halligan:
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“Oakley [another researcher who works with Halligan] and Halligan are convinced their virtual patients are experiencing some of the same brain changes as people with genuine disorders. Halligan tells how they once induced a case of visual neglect in a volunteer by suggesting that the left side of his visual field would cease to exist. They then asked him to copy a picture with a dozen objects scattered on the page. Most hypnotized people given this instruction would copy only the objects on the right hand side of the page, as most people with visual neglect do. But this volunteer drew the right-hand side of every object on the page. ‘That’s not something you would intuitively expect,’ says Halligan, ‘but it is also seen in real patients.’”
I personally have been studying hypnosis and practicing it on myself for the past five years. It was one of the first things to get me interested in the mind and what influenced me to pursue a degree in psychology. If you would like to read some of my writings on hypnosis I recommend: Hypnosis: The Nature Of Suggestion and Hypnosis Explained (Debunking The Myths). These articles mention some of the science on hypnosis but mostly focus on a pragmatic analysis.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of trance refers to one’s depth of awareness. There are two main components to our awareness: the form, which is dependent on which objects are being attended to by the observer, and the intensity, which is dependent on one’s degree of concentration on the attended objects. Working together, these two mental faculties create our overall scope of awareness – our shining spotlight at any given moment into experience and reality .
The form of our awareness can be contracted inwards and expanded outwards. It can move within the three-dimensional space of our external world – both outside and inside our physical body – and it can also be directed to the internal space in our minds.
The intensity of our awareness can either become stronger or weaker. This has different implications depending on what sensory modality is being attended to. For example, a visual object that is strongly attended to will seem more bright and crisp to the observer. Meanwhile, a well-attended auditory object may become more loud or rich in timbre.
Our trance state is dependent on what is being attended to and to what degree one is concentrated on that physical or mental object. In other words, every mental state can be seen as its own distinct kind of trance. It would be hard to define what an “altered state of awareness” is when our own everyday awareness is so flexible and prone to change. One moment we are attending to a small pain in our toe, the next moment we are shedding our awareness into the vastness of the night sky. Any attention that is held on an object can be described as a light trance, but there are also everyday, natural occurrences of deeper trance states.
When we typically think of these deeper trance states we are reminded of the techniques of meditation, prayer, hypnosis and other disciplined practices of mind that increase one’s ability to hold attention and fall into deeper states of awareness. But these states are naturally occurring in the mind under certain conditions. One example is when we are absorbed in a really great and enjoyable movie. We are so strongly attended to the events in the movie that time just flies by. The distortion of time perception is one good indicator of deep trance. One can become similarly absorbed in an excellent book, piece of music, and other forms of art and entertainment.
In this way, it is reasonable to assume that most human beings have had varying experiences with trance – so what is the need to explore these states further? Well, a better way to phrase the question is: what is so important about having good attention skills? I think then the answers become much more evident. Attention is one of the most crucial mental faculties when it comes to learning, problem solving, creativity, and building on new skills and behaviors. A mind that is well trained in attention, and specifically the kind of attention that elicits deep trance, is a mind that is better at discernment, understanding, and generating rational solutions. Some studies even suggest that meditation can help treat children born with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Either way, the benefits of practicing voluntary attention, and subsequently deep states of trance, one can begin to cultivate positive effects on almost all areas of personal development.
TECHNIQUES AND TIPS FOR DEEP TRANCE
How can one develop deeper states of awareness and concentration?
As it has already been mentioned, trance typically refers to a deep sense of awareness and long held voluntary attention, like that of being absorbed in a good movie. These states of absorption can be produced on any object.
Most beginners of meditation start by attending to the breath. The breath is a great object of meditation because it is always present and it is usually neutral in its feeling (neither pleasurable nor painful). Because of this, the breath is a great place to start focusing one’s awareness and becoming more familiar with the faculties of our attention.
One drawback to the breath is that it is often not as thrilling as a good movie, so how do we hold our attention on it without letting the mind drift off? Here are a few short tips and techniques that can be applied to practically any object of meditation:
1. Become fascinated by the object.
The more interested we become in the sensations of this object, the more likely we are to hold our attention. The more we hold our attention, the more we begin to notice about this object – the more distinctions we can make about it – and the deeper in trance we will go. It can sometimes be tough to cultivate curiosity towards seemingly mundane objects, like the breath, but rest assured that the more curious we become the more we begin to discover. Eventually, our fascination will become justified by our own experiences of trance. Consequently, this can become a self-perpetuating process once you get your foot in the door of discovery.
2. Be mindful of the relation between subject/object
As you focus your attention on the object, be particularly mindful on how the object affects you (What thoughts arise? What emotions arise? What memories arise?). Also, be mindful of how you effect the object. For instance, how do your perceptions change the object of meditation: from what it is to the qualities you project onto it. Don’t be alarmed if you begin to sense an interdependence between the subject and object. Focus in on that sensation, let yourself experience it.
FINAL WORDS
Sometimes a subject can fall into trance without directing the mind to such a state, this is typically what happens when we fall in and out of trance throughout the day (see: highway hypnosis for another popular example). But if one wants to dive deeper into trance then they must become aware of the mental faculties that create trance. These are attention acuity (or concentration, previously mentioned as the “intensity” of trance) and directed awareness (mentioned as the “form” of trance, also known as, the object(s) which are being attended to).
No amount of words or reading is going to make you better at achieving deep trance states. Like any skill, you need to dedicate the time to practice. Meditation is, in my opinion, the best way to begin cultivating these states of awareness and direct attention. Spend time on the cushion, observe the breath, become interested in the breath, be mindful of the breath, and see where you can go from there. So many things can arise within a meditative session, that it is difficult to educate someone on all the possible occurrences. Therefore, the best advice one can give is to just sit and then work and learn from there. This isn’t to diminish the value of reading materials – this article is hardly enough to cover everything you’re going to need or want to know – but I hope it gives you a good enough sense on a starting point for this journey in personal development.
Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments section and I will be sure to answer all of them.
FURTHER READING,
I recommend the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Ven. Henepola Gunaratana’s book “Mindfulness In Plain English.” (click for full read), and the late 19th century psychologist William James’ chapter on “Attention”.
Hypnosis is a set of effective communication techniques for shaping one’s beliefs, attitudes, thought-patterns, and behaviors. Often these communication techniques take advantage of direct or indirect suggestions, of which a participant may accept or deny, depending on their own free will or “condition of suggestibility.”
Hypnosis shouldn’t be associated with a particular state of consciousness or awareness. Different uses of hypnosis may call upon different mental states. A patient in hypnotherapy may be put in a deep sleep or trance state in order for the therapist to have better communicative-access to a patient’s subconscious mind; but a stage hypnotist allows his or her participants to keep their awareness focused outwards within one’s environment. Some hypnosis plays upon the imaginative and generative faculties of the mind, while other hypnosis utilizes the exploratory and perceptive faculties of the mind. So, there is no one mental “state” that hypnosis can be really associated to – this is why I keep its definition strictly in the realm of communication.
A hypnotist is essentially no different than a good communicator. A hypnotist must have a good sense of flexibility in his or her vocabulary, tone of voice, and body language in order to be the best communicator he or she can be. In other words, a suggestion that works on one individual does not necessarily work on another individual. This is due to the inherit subjective nature of language, meaning, and communication. There are some hypnosis techniques that are specifically designed to elicit this subjective information from the patient, and using this information a hypnotist can gain a better strategy on how to effectively communicate to that individual. Elicitation strategies are not always used by hypnotists, but they are especially common for hypnotherapists – those who are trying to reshape a participant’s underlying beliefs, attitudes, and thought patterns regarding a situation.
Stage hypnotists don’t need to do these elicitation strategies since many participants are volunteers and thus already have a high suggestibility or willingness to “play along” with the hypnotist. Another thing that plays a strong role in suggestibility during hypnosis shows is the social role of the hypnotist: he is the star and leader of the show, he has a certain aura of command within the room. Thus, it is easy to find obedient participants. And of course – these participants almost always have a fun time participating and using their imagination during hypnotist shows, so the entertainment aspect of hypnosis itself is always an enticing suggestion.
How do suggestions work?
Suggestions can work in the same multitude of ways in which we can learn. This can be through story-telling, analogies, asking questions, giving commands, providing information, evoking the imagination, encouraging contemplation, or a person’s body mannerisms and body posture – all of these are different mediums in which a suggestion can take place.
A third party does not even need to be present in order for a suggestion to be suggested. Instead, an individual may even suggest something to their own self and then try to convince this self that this suggestion is the right thing to do. This interaction is typically the conscious self speaking with the unconscious self. The unconscious self is best communicated to when it is brought into consciousness – this is why it is typically called “subconscious” (which is just a useful term for: mental activity than can be brought into conscious awareness. This is mental activity that is often ignored by the conscious mind, despite the role it plays in our thoughts and behaviors). Another way to describe it is our “conditioned self.” It is responsible for those actions we do that we continue doing, without question, because they have become second-nature.
Some hypnotists believe that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. In other words, the “suggestion” always originates in the mind of the individual in which it is being suggested, and then from there the individual either accepts or declines the suggestion.
The environment plays an important role in suggestibility as well. If a hypnotist tells you over a YouTube video to quack like a chicken it may not be as effective then if you were in front of a live audience who are all waiting for you to respond as a chicken. In reality, this is little more than social pressure and conformity, but it is all suggestion when it comes to the world of hypnosis. A good hypnotist must therefore keep a strong mind on the environment, and the varying ways this can affect a particular person’s response to a suggestion.
What effects the degree of suggestibility?
- A. The individuals preconditioned “map of the world.” In other words, his or her preconceived concepts, language tendencies, thought-patterns, attitudes, and behavioral tendencies to a given subject or situation.
B. The environment in which the suggestion is being given (You wouldn’t take a puff of a blunt right in front of grandma, but you might do it in the presence of a bunch of your friends).
C. The delivery of the suggestion: using effective verbal and reasoning skills, appropriate vocal tone, and congruent body language.
How can a hypnotist get better at giving suggestions and being an effective hypnotist?
- A. Be a good listener. Pay attention to others’ word patterns and language tendencies.
B. Pay attention to universals behind the meaning of body language and posture.
C. Read up on psychology, how the mind learns and creates associations, and how the mind and its environment interact.
D. Keep practicing and gaining new experience. Experiment with different delivery styles and develop your own kind of niche for communicating effectively with others.