Mental Suggestions

Schemas are also how the brain keeps track of itself. The body schema is the internal model of the body, including the position of its limbs. The mind uses the senses to keep track of limbs, but can also be fooled with the rubber hand illusion, even to the point of body transfer and out of body experiences.

Similar to the body schema, the attention schema keeps track of where the brain’s attention is going, providing the perception of awareness. The attention schema provides the brain with top down control to redirect attention and also allows the brain to understand the attention and awareness of others.

The paper goes into the implications — I’m not sure I buy that awareness fully encompasses consciousness, but the capability of awareness is certainly an important component.

Awareness maps very closely to attention, but is not the same thing. Awareness is also not a full and complete picture of all the activity in the mind. Our awareness of our own mental state is a simplified and heavily sampled model, similar to how an emoji represents a human face.

Multiple experiments have shown it is possible to have attention without awareness, and even behavior without awareness, and the addition of an attention schema to AI models shows notable improvements.

Attention schema theory also has implications for sense of agency, dissociation, ADHD, and autism — I’m still looking for papers, but the concept of awareness as "perception of attention" is a compelling argument.

Finally, schema can relate to the emotional perception of self, as in the emotional schema model. This is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and schema therapy.

You should not touch emotional schema, but there’s a wealth of knowledge and expertise built around CBT as it is a very popular technique. Talk to a certified professional if you need assistance.

Ideomotor ("unconscious movement") suggestions involve movement of the body or inability (aka catalepsy) to move the body. These are suggestions to make the arm stiff, feel an arm get lighter and lift by itself, or have feet stick in place. Hypnotic suggestions affect perception, so technically suggestions can’t directly involve motor control: they are typically a combination of agency suggestions and belief suggestions.

If you tell someone that their arm is as hard as an iron bar and can’t bend, their belief is what stops their arm bending. You’ve told them to actively believe that their arm can’t bend. They may know that they can physically bend their arm, but they can’t bend their arm and maintain that belief.

Other common beginner ideomotor suggestions are to freeze, flop, or engage in repetitive activities such as clapping or windmilling the hands.

Marnathas has a useful tip to get started on ideomotor suggestions: when starting with a suggestion, begin with a single piece and then add to it. For example, you might start by freezing someone in place. After you’ve established a freeze suggestion, you can combine it with other suggestions to create puppets, jedi mind tricks, or freeze buttons. There can be various ways of building up complex suggestions and building versatility into simple suggestions.

Suggestions involving mental perceptions often involve playing a role. The best way to approach this is as a game with an open-ended premise that lets your partner involve their creative side. Similar to improv, these kinds of suggestions serve as a platform that enable new behavior.

For example, suggesting to your partner that they are a cat that can talk enables more behavior than suggesting that they cluck like a chicken, because there is more opportunity to express themselves. You can involve a laser pointer and have them chase it, and they can tell you exactly what they’re going to sit on and demand scritches.

Activity suggestions will add or change the relationship of objects to the hypnotee, such as suggesting that an onion is an apple, or the aforementioned hands are feet suggestion.

Activity perceptions are often easier than sensory perceptions. Your partner may not be able to see a dinosaur in the room, but may be able to believe that there’s a dinosaur in the room if they are hiding from it. Likewise, convincing people that a shoe is a phone is a common trope in stage hypnosis, because the purpose of a phone isn’t what it looks like.

Suggestions in altering thought patterns are as old as hypnosis itself. The classic is to tell your partner that they have no thoughts, but you can also add thoughts, redirect common thoughts, and have your partner do various mental exercises to train thoughts. Although you shouldn’t use CBT as therapy, there are a bunch of useful techniques in CBT that can be leveraged, such as this fish tank exercise.

Depending on how evil you feel like being, you can also use mental traps, such as earworms, mantras, ruminations, koans, and inflicting memes.