Memory Suggestions
There are several memory systems at work in the human mind: working, declarative, and non-declarative.
Working memory is used for making decisions in the moment: it is the sketchpad of the brain. Working memory encompasses language processing, visual processing, and an episodic buffer that acts as a bridge between working memory and long-term memory.
Declarative memory is explicit memory, including episodic and semantic memory. This is what we think of as memory. It is prone to amnesia, and undergoes consolidation and reconsolidation periodically. Roughly speaking, declarative memories are stories. The way these stories are told and the details of these stories change as we tell them and reexamine them.
Non-declarative memory is implicit long term memory. It includes skills, habits (including habits of thought), and may not involve conscious recall. Non-declarative memory involve automaticity and typically does not involve amnesia; once you learn a skill, that skill is retained even if you have not practiced it for years.
However, habits can change or even suffer extinction, so change is possible even in non-declarative memory systems. You can, in fact, unlearn how to ride a bike.
Each of these systems is open to suggestion. Suggestions fall into four categories:
-
Amnesia: blocked recall of memory.
-
Hypernesia: enhanced recall of memory.
-
False Memory: creation of memory that never happened.
-
Alteration: manipulation of an existing memory, i.e. confidence or emotional impact.
Memory depends on attention, and losing attention can cause us to completely lose track of events. It is also very easy to misremember or even confabulate memories completely. Imagination and past experiences paper over the gaps in memory and cause us to recall events differently or place events in a different order.
Suggestions can also involve modification of memory, an enhanced recall of an existing memory, or even the creation or confabulation of false memory. These suggestions can also apply to any of the different types of memory, which can lead to some interesting suggestions. You can give someone recognition amnesia, where they may know who you are but not recognize your face or voice. You can give someone episodic amnesia but leave their procedural memory intact, so that they are surprised by the fact that they immediately know how to play piano or ride a bike. You can also apply memory suggestions to hypnosis, i.e. you can give people false memories of successfully following a suggestion during hypnosis, or have them recognize a new suggestion as a familiar one.
Beginner Suggestions
There are some classic hypnotic suggestions that work with memory.
-
Episodic Amnesia: Have your partner forget being given a suggestion, or forget being hypnotized altogether.
-
Semantic Amnesia: Tell your partner to forget a number between 1 and 10. Have them count on their fingers.
-
Recognition Amnesia: Have your partner forget their name or your name.
-
Semantic Alteration: Have them remember their name as something else, and then show them their original name.
Amnesia
Amnesia is common and normal in every day life. Amnesia is especially common when crossing event boundaries, e.g. walking through a doorway causes amnesia. Generally speaking, anything involving closure of some sort involves amnesia, a "moving on" from the previous activity. This can be symbolic, such as placing photos of an ex in a box, or can involve physically moving to a different location. This is a common reason why people forget where they put their keys when they come home.
Boundaries make a good construct for suggesting amnesia. You can provide suggestions that explicitly reference event boundaries:
-
Imagine putting the memory into a room or container that creates a boundary, such as a vault or storage box.
-
Imagine putting a physical boundary of time or distance from the memory.
-
Remind and link amnesia to other common amnesia habits they have.
One common tactic is to have your partner explicitly remember that they are forgetting the event, and then forget remembering that.
Remember to forget, and forget to remember.
Hypnosis is itself an event boundary, and can produce post hypnotic amnesia, which many people compare it to forgetting dreams after waking. There’s the moment where you remember pieces — and as soon your attention moves to something else, it’s gone. (This can be extended for fun activities like moving people to Morocco while hypnotized.) Conversely, many people believe that they remember everything in hypnosis, and only become aware of their amnesia when shown video evidence of them doing things they don’t remember. This can be useful to show people that they can experience hypnotic amnesia, because they have already experienced it.
You can also reinforce the event boundary by suggesting an activity or shifting focus to prevent recall.
-
Ask a question or suggest an activity immediately on waking from trance.
-
Start an activity, bring them into trance and give them a suggestion with amnesia, then continue the activity where you left off.
-
Suggest a particular thought, song, or mantra that plays in their head that replaces the memory.
Once you have amnesia, you can build on that. Lex Lucas suggests the following:
Delayed Reaction: You do something whilst they’re blank / oblivious / under. Any time you say "Replay" once they’re back to normal they get to finally feel it.
Reset: Any time you say "Reset" their memories reset till an earlier point in the conversation. When you say "Realise" they get to realise how many times they’ve repeated that moment.
When you start working with declarative memory, start with working memory amnesia first to get them warmed up. In addition, declarative memory amnesia can be disconcerting for some people and requires more trust. Make sure to add safeties that limit the duration of the suggestion.
When amnesia is suggested on declarative memory, there can be a conscious awareness of the suggestion. For people who forget their name, they may be aware that they could remember their name, but they are choosing to not access it.
Mr Prism defines strategies in four categories from least to most effective:
-
Memory dissembly: the memory exists, but is not being accessed.
-
Memory confusion: other processes (misdirection, obfuscation, pattern repetition) interfere before the memory can be accessed.
-
Memory blocking: the memory is simply gone.
-
Memory failure: the memory was never encoded and cannot be retrieved.
Memory failure is unlikely, but it is possible for people to fall asleep during induction and wake up with no memory of suggestions — they never forgot the suggestions because they weren’t awake to remember them.
You can suggest generalized amnesia of all amnesia suggestions, and layer multiple kinds of amnesia suggestions to produce confusion and blocking. When you’re done with the suggestion, tie the recall to a finger snap or handshake so that they have the awareness come back to them in an instant.
Amnesia can be used to keep your partner unprepared, so they can’t resist a trigger. You can set up an amnesia trap to repeatedly condition and trigger someone.
I don’t know if that’s the term anyone else uses for this particular trope, but it’s when a character is unaware that they’re participating in a scenario that they’ve actually encountered before, perhaps even on multiple occasions. The hypnotist knows, of course; they planted post-hypnotic suggestions not just to forget, but to return for programming at a predetermined time without any idea that they’re responding to programming.
But it’s more than that–the key part of what makes an amnesia trap sexy for me is the specific idea that the hypnotist (and it obviously doesn’t have to be hypnosis, any form of brainwashing will do) is doing this as a means of reducing subconscious resistance to their commands. Each time the victim goes through the scenario, their conscious mind believes it to be the first time, but their subconscious mind knows that they’ve already tried and failed to resist, and that they’re responding to the hypnotist’s commands. Each repetition of the scenario reinforces the commands that have been implanted during the first encounter with the hypnotist, strengthens the part of the subconscious that wants to obey, and weakens the will to resist. The victim believes that they are a normal, strong-willed individual encountering an unusual situation for the first time, and they’re confused by their inability to resist the hypnotist’s power. Without the ability to remember that they’re fighting deeply ingrained programming, they attribute their lack of resistance to weakness of will, which makes them easier to brainwash. A story that uses this trope almost functions as its own sequel, because every time through the loop is perceived as the first for the subject.
Amnesia can also be used to insert intrusive thoughts and predispose your partner to your beliefs, for nefarious NSFW purposes.
Amnesia for non-declarative memory is a bit more tricky. One way to handle it is to bring your partner to a time before they learned the skill. For example, you can ask your partner if they remember what it was like to not know how to touch type, and bring them back to that time. Then you can wake them up, and explain that when you click your fingers, you’re going to magically give them this ability.
For a more in-depth treatment of amnesia, I recommend Hypnotic Amnesia, a book of sessions involving different amnesia techniques. The kindle version does not come with a worksheet, but you can download it here. Ella Enchanting also has some fun ideas, as does this podcast.
Hypernesia
Hypernesia is useful when it comes to remembering events that have just happened.
This Mythbusters episode shows memory recall of events taking place that day.
Scroll to around 13:44 for the memory recall segment.
So, it is possible to remember where you put your keys in the morning using hypnosis.
Hypernesia can also be used to enhance semantic memory, e.g. memorizing 40 digits for pi using a memory palace as a guided visualization technique. There’s also various ways to enhance memory.
However, there is a problem with hypernesia. It’s incredibly easy to alter or add false memory by accident. Be very careful not to add details or lead questions when they are describing the scene, because it can alter the way they can experience the memory.
False Memory
Hypnotized people are suggestible, and suggestible people are vulnerable to false memory where confabulated memories are invented and remembered as actual events. Hypnosis is possibly the worst idea you can have when it comes to recovering autobiographical memory, resulting in satanic panics, alien abductions, and past lives.
Adding false memory to working memory is possible. It could theoretically be used to prime for hallucination suggestions and demonstrate that they can "see" things that weren’t there.
False memory cannot be applied to non-declarative memory to acquire new skills, although it may be a useful visualization exercise for conditioning, and potentially could be used as a kind of mental rehearsal.
Additionally, false memory does have a couple of unusual problems.
The first is that false memory not always reversable. Attempts to remove a false memory can result in a memory that is not believed, but do not remove the memory itself.
The second problem is that adding a false memory can have unanticipated consequences. In Subject doesn’t want me to remove suggestion given in practice session:
As I shared on here recently, I wanted to try something that might meet some more conscious resistance than more recreational stuff, but keeping the suggestions harmless and safe at the time. The idea, which I shared on here a few days back, was to have her switch from wearing her watch on her left wrist, which she has done for as long as I have known her, to her right wrist.
So I did this at the weekend. She consented to being hypnotized, but had no idea what the suggestions would be. All simply asked her to remove her jewellery (rings, bracelet and watch) before we started, which she did. I then proceeded, and gave her a series of suggestions about wearing her watch on her right wrist, and forgetting that she had ever worn it on her left, e.g.:
You wear, and have always worn your watch on your right wrist
You can’t remember ever having worn your watch on your left wrist
Every time you want to know the time, you look to your watch on your right wrist
I then brought her back out of trance, and said we were done and she could put her jewellery back on now. Everything went back where it always did, except her watch, which she indeed did place straight onto her right wrist.
I wanted to see whether there would be any longevity to this, so I let it go overnight. The next morning, once again, the watch goes onto her right wrist.
Then, earlier today, I simply said to her “what if I told you to put your watch on your left wrist”. She said, quite abruptly, that she wouldn’t do it. It would feel odd, she said, as she’s never done that.
I then pointed out to her the suggestions that I had given her, and she didn’t believe me. She said she had no memory of me giving her those suggestions, and that though in the end she realised what I was saying was true, it “felt” as though it wasn’t for her.
When I offered to put things right again, she plain refused. She says everything felt normal to her, while the alternative I was offering would feel strange and uncomfortable (even though, in effect, that’s what she had always done).
So, I’m concerned that I’ve inadvertently broken the trust that we had over this. She says that she’s quite happy as she is, but that’s entirely the result of the suggestions that I gave her.
Ethically speaking, what is the right thing to do at this point? Should I respect her will as it is right now, or should I encourage her to let me put everything back how it was?
What are the chances the suggestions will lose effect in time of my own accord?
I realise I may have made some rookie mistakes here (which is why I always try to pick harmless ideas), but this has got me quite stressed right now. My wife seems fine in herself, and isn’t angry with me as far as I can tell, but I feel like I’ve let her down.
DeeperForMe suggests mitigating the risk:
I have played around with false memories with more than one partner, and I actually agree that they are easy to make and hard to get rid of. But that doesn’t mean they’re inherently extreme edgeplay: besides doing detailed negotiations beforehand, I’ve experimented with it in ways that I think greatly reduce the risk:
No amnesia for the negotiation and delivery of the false memory suggestion
"Tagging" the memory as one that will feel vivid, but artificial
About something fairly small and trivial (in one case, a memory of them sticking their finger in some ice cream we were eating earlier)
It works great, and can be fun. I would also support people doing darker/edgier things with false memories, using all the principles of good CNC discussion, keeping in mind that you could always end up with a little chunk of your memory that "belongs" to a pasrticular person, with all the commitment that entails.
Alteration
Changing the confidence or vividness of memories, or changing the frequency of a memory is straightforward. Alteration is typically done with declarative memory or working memory, and I’m not aware of any successful alteration of non-declarative memory through hypnosis.
Memory can be altered fairly easy even by accident, as has been shown by the fallability of eyewitness memory. This is a key component of gaslighting; like other perceptions, uncertain and ambiguous memories are discounted against other firmer memories, and it’s possible to manipulate people by casting memory into doubt.
For example, you can give your partner a button that makes noise when pressed. Then you can give them the suggestion that when you say a given word, they will eventually push the button no matter how hard they try to not push it. You have secretly hooked up the button so it can be triggered remotely, and when you use the trigger, the sound plays whether or not they press the button. Then you congratulate them on pushing the button, and ask how it felt when they pushed it.