Suggestions

Before anything else, hypnosis and hypnotism is a social context formed by a contract, a combination of meditation and Simon Says. The willingness to follow hypnotic suggestion is called "compliance" by many stage and street hypnotists, and imagination or "readiness to respond" by experimental hypnotists.

The easiest way to demonstrate how hypnotic compliance works is to play a game I call Compliance. The goal here is to shape your partner’s behavior so that your partner is willing, eager, and primed to follow your suggestions.

Sit down with your partner, and explain the rules:

This is a fun exercise to do because your partner doesn’t have to ask whether or not they are hypnotized or in a trance. Compliance gives them a way to warm up and stretch their improvisational muscles and approach hypnosis from the right angle. Despite looking similar to pet training, this is far more flexible as you can use your words and set up long term rewards for following suggestions.

Compliance is a great way to experiment with persuasive patterns and training techniques. Here are a few ideas:

You can use this game in many unrecreational situations (dishes, laundry, exercise), but be careful not to overdo it (you don’t want to create a dependency or motivational crowding), and you should phase out rewards if this is a regular game you play.

Compliance by itself is interesting, but it doesn’t explain the truly strange aspects of hypnosis, such as changing memory, producing feelings of warmth or cold so realistic that people get goosebumps, or inducing hallucinations. For that, we have to talk about perception.

Under the direction of the hypnotist, the hypnotee is able to alter their perceptions and their experience of reality. The ability to alter perception is an ability that most people never exercise and may not even realize exists, so it’s only in the context of hypnosis that people experience this.

The ability to alter perception is called phenomenological control. If we want to know how hypnotic suggestions work, we have to understand perception.

When we think of perception, we most commonly think of sensory perception. Sensory perception is the brain’s best-fitting model for the information entering the senses. Everything we see, hear, and feel is a controlled hallucination. The brain has no ability to interact directly with the senses, only with the processed data that it receives.

Your most direct experience with altering perception is with ambiguous optical illusions. When you see the Rubin vase, you can see either a vase or two people looking at each other, but not both. (Some people also have the experience of seeing three dimensional images from stereograms, which has never worked for me.) You can choose which perception to have, but the perception enters your conscious awareness fully formed. By definition, perception is outside of consciousness, because conscious thought works with perception as its starting point.

Sensory perception is the most immediate form of perception, but there are many different kinds of perceptions that layer on top of sensory, all of them existing in the background without conscious awareness of the work that they are doing. Our experience and our ability to make decisions in a complex world depend on these higher level perceptions.

For example, we have word recognition perception layered on top of visual perception and speech perception layered on top of auditory perception. When people read, we don’t put conscious effort into understanding the words, as they enter consciousness already processed. When people speak, our perception of language does the work of putting together sounds into words automatically.

Importantly, perception involves prediction, and applies to our interpretation of the future and what actions are good and bad, like driving a car in downtown traffic, or playing a game of chess. Driving a car involves prediction and awareness of the behavior of the cars around us, positions that may open up, and what moves are safe or unsafe to make, and while the decisions are made consciously, the perception is not. Likewise, chess grandmasters do not consciously analyze all possible moves on a board; they use perception to see winning moves and can remember valid chess positions more accurately.

This brings up an important point: a skill is considered mastered when it’s mostly unconscious. The four stages of competence starts with unconscious incompetence, moves through often laborious and tedious conscious incompetence, becomes understood through conscious competence, and eventually become fluid and fluent as unconscious competence.

Perceptions, habits, intuition, and muscle memory are all examples of competence through unconscious thought and unconscious action. Our ideal working state is one of flow where we can fully exercise both unconscious perception and unconscious action in unison. For as much as we like to tout about consciousness and free will, living a fully conscious day would be awful.^[1]

More practically, consciousness is an executive management layer over unconscious processes. Conscious thought begins after unconscious perception has brought a situation to the point of executive decision making, or when we need to disregard an instinct. We do have a conscious ability to override and work against our perceptions and habits, but it can be difficult to disregard perception, especially when we don’t have an understanding of how those perceptions could be inaccurate.

The next question is, where is the line between conscious interpretation and unconscious perception? Well, it’s a line drawn by the mind itself. Our sense of consciousness is itself a perception of our underlying unconscious processes, the "perception of what passes in a man’s own mind," according to John Locke.

Although there are theories, exactly how hypnotic suggestions work is still unknown. My conception is that hypnotic suggestion moves up the line of consciousness, so that what may be a conscious decision out of hypnosis is perceived as unconscious in hypnosis.^[2]

For example, a suggestion to lift the hand outside of hypnosis may result a conscious decision to lift the hand.

But in a hypnotic suggestion to experience the hand "lifting by itself" — the decision is unconscious.

The conscious mind may be perfectly aware that the line has shifted and their perception is altered, but that does not change their experience of perception itself. It is, for all intents and purposes, their new reality.

This section will walk you through the guidelines and parameters of suggestion, and walk you through some common suggestions.