Post No.: 0925
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Suggestion is simply a priming effect. It’s when someone causes you to see, hear or feel something by merely bringing it to your mind. The question, “Do you feel something on your scalp?” will cause you to think about your scalp. You might even suddenly report that something is tickling your noggin!
Any suggestion, prime or anchor will tend to evoke selectively compatible evidence, information and associations with that suggestion, thus reinforcing that suggestion. Our ‘system one’ understands sentences by first trying to make them true and – unless immediately rejected as a lie – the selective activation of compatible thoughts, memories and associative coherence as system one does its best to construct a world in which the suggestion is true, produces a series of systematic errors that can make one gullible and prone to believe too strongly in whatever one has been suggested to believe.
Unless immediately rejected, a message or story will be constructed based on ‘what you see is all there is’ (WYSIATI) and will have the same effect on this associative system regardless of its reliability. So when we read a story about a murder, its effect on our associative memory is much the same as if it were a news report or a synopsis of a film. Whether the story evoked by the suggestion is true or believable or not matters little, if at all, to our system one.
But if a suggestion is questioned by our ‘system two’, it won’t fool us. Thus if a manager accuses a footballer from the opposition team of constantly diving then that might prime referees to look out for their simulations – but if they realise that this statement was a ploy to try to influence them then it won’t work and may even have a reverse effect because referees don’t want to be seen as being suggestible.
In principle, brainwashing and external mind control are possible. They’re not against the laws of physics. Altering thoughts, feelings, memories, knowledge and skills is after all essentially about reconfiguring physical neurons and neuronal connections in a physical matter brain. Well we’re all actually being influenced – brainwashed could be another word – by our external environment (and in this environment includes other people) all of the time, and we have been ever since birth i.e. long before one had the legal autonomy of an adult. And who people are, what they know and what they believe in as an adult is a neuro-developmental path-dependent function of their past; starting right from when they were conceived. We are a product of our genes and our past experiences.
To attempt to directly and in real-time control someone’s mind like a slave, we could for instance apply electrodes, magnetic fields and/or drugs that affect their brain. But this produces crude, limited and generally chaotic results. We can currently at best only scramble or disrupt certain mental functions via these methods rather than build or activate some function that’s not already there or develop a skill in a person they didn’t already possess, at least directly i.e. we can turn someone into a fuzzy zombie far more easily than into a maths whiz. Drugs don’t always work precisely hence why they typically come with dozens of potential side-effects. Like crudely applying electrical currents and magnets across a computer’s hardware, we may find it easy to chaotically scramble things, break something and erase data, but find it hard to write coherent and useful code or data in this way. Disrupting an existing function sometimes is the aim though, like with electroconvulsive therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation for those with refractory major depressive disorder.
Read about the illegal MKUltra mind control and chemical interrogation research program conducted by the CIA, which employed methods like electroshocks, psychoactive drugs and torture. It was regarded as an overall failure if the aim was to create compliant mind-controlled agents.
Is the comparison also like trying to reprogram a computer via machine code versus a high-level code or language? Anyway, we hardly yet understand the brain to be able to manipulate people’s thoughts, memories and behaviours in a highly specific and precise manner via reconfiguring individual neurons and neuronal connections. It’ll probably require manipulating the wider central and peripheral nervous system too.
Subliminal messages only produce very short-term effects at best. Torture or coercion can in effect manipulate people, although in the sense of breaking people down rather than truly turning them into willing puppets.
Mind control is natural in nature however. Take the toxoplasma gondii parasite in cats, which then spread toxoplasmosis onto other animals, including rats and humans, which then (disputably) controls its victims by making them more impulsive. (I don’t have parasites, and I would never want to do such a thing anyway – meow O:3.) Well there are certainly many parasites that override the minds of their victims in wild nature, especially in the insect world, like the ophiocordyceps unilateralis or ‘zombie-ant fungus’!
Future technologies, like some kind of sophisticated implant, may make dystopian ideas of mind-controlling other humans like literal puppets or slaves a reality. Yet we must not forget hypnotism, which works on some people. As well as good old-fashioned persuasion and suggestion – we could incentivise behaviour change, use nudges, or just politely ask someone to do something for us!
The best way to constructively manipulate a mind with long-term results remains via effort and time – via repeated teaching and culture. Like mentioned earlier – our environment is constantly influencing us. Whether people get constantly fed truths or lies, fair perspectives or propaganda, is another matter though!
Words, visuals, scents, tastes, touch, temperature and other forms of communication are ways to tap into people’s brains indirectly via their sensory organs. It’s the classic way of tapping into and influencing people’s minds.
What’s morally or legally fair game then if anything and everything that causes brain cells to fire, including hearing a voice or seeing a picture, or reading these very words, is essentially influencing and reshaping your mind? Different selected words and metaphors can persuade us differently too. Priming someone with fear can improve persuasion. Anything that anyone does changes the world in some way because energy is only transferred or transformed rather than created or destroyed, and moving anything with a mass and/or velocity is moving energy.
This means literally everything that’s said and heard by anyone changes the world in some way. By you reading these very words, I’ve changed you by giving you a new memory – a memory that might consciously or unconsciously affect your future views and actions? Every memory is a physical structure in the brain after all, thus if you’ll remember any of these ideas in this post, it will have essentially physically reshaped and manipulated your brain, and these words may come to (unconsciously) influence your future decisions.
But don’t worry about this – worry about all those commercial adverts you’re exposed to every day and everywhere. They’re constantly shaping your desires and they want your money!
Hypnosis employs suggestion to induce compliance. The core elements of hypnosis are apparently in the pacing (feeding back the subject’s factual experience to them), leading (progressively leading the subject onto the new desired behaviour) and presupposition (instilling the instruction we’d like the subject to pick up on by ‘presupposing’ it to be the case).
So connect the desired action to things that the subject is already doing e.g. say, “As you are sitting here, in this room, as your eyes are closed, as I speak and as you listen to me, with each breath you take, each word will take you deeper, and the more you don’t feel like slumping, the more your body will slump.”
‘As you x, so you y’. Whereby x is something that is known to be true, like how the subject is seated, what the subject is looking at or is known to be clearly experiencing inside their head i.e. the pure feedback of facts. And the desired behaviour y is connected with it as if the two are implied to be somehow interdependent with each other.
Sometimes you can sneak in a little y as if an x e.g. say, “…allowing my words to relax you.” Use anything, including background noise or other unintentional happenings, to pace and lead e.g., “…the sound of those sirens helping you to drift away.”
It’s about gathering a momentum of acceptances, which is like regular persuasion techniques – turning an undesired opinion on its head not by dismissal but through acceptance of the initial opinion then shifting it towards the desired opinion as if it grew out of it, and therefore as if the subject came up with the idea her/himself.
Presuppositions are essentially leading questions and statements e.g., “You’ve been good today so you can decide whether to go to bed at 8:00pm or 8:30pm” or asking, “How fast did you think the white car was travelling when it struck the bus?” when the car wasn’t white or, “…as you are trying to unstick your arm” which implies a failure of the subject to ‘unstick’ their arm and that it’s actually ‘stuck’. Slogans like ‘do you remember how good they taste?’ presupposes that you’ve tried the product before and that it was good!
“As you’re sitting there, I want you to notice that your body is getting heavier” presupposes that the subject’s body is indeed getting heavier. This example combines pacing, leading and presupposition – that the body is getting heavier as the subject concentrates on ‘noticing’ it.
The environmental conditions must be conducive to assist suggestion. It’s harder to hypnotise someone to relax in an extremely loud environment for instance. The tone of voice should be gentle, relaxed, confident and in control – as if you’ve done this thing a hundred times. Find phrases that flow mellifluously off the tongue like, “Enhance the trance” and provide texture and a sense of dreaminess to the experience. Repeat yourself occasionally and fully relax so that the subject relaxes with you.
Appeal to all their senses by painting mental pictures, evoking sounds, smells, tastes and other sensations you’d like them to experience. Make the scene ultra-vivid and multi-sensory to make it seem potent and real. Be careful not to contradict yourself, and do allow the subject to fill in gaps as they wish. Don’t be too specific unless you need to clarify that you want them to put a certain feature into their mental picture as it may not exist in the subject’s own mental picture until you mention it. Use metaphors like, “Imagine you’re on top of a staircase and each step down will relax you more and take you deeper to sleep.” Then count them down these steps one by one.
Utilise the subject’s own expectations and beliefs – they must be convinced that they’re indeed going to do whatever you want them to do and that they can do it. And everything must sound like it’s going to plan, so turn everything into a positive. Continue to pace with what’s actually happening and continually encourage. Pick up each and every movement that happens and build on it positively. Reinforce everything towards what you want the outcome to be. Let the subject feel that it’s working, and it will.
Meow. …What’s actually been happening as you’ve been staring at the screen and reading this post is that I’ve put you under some kind of Witcher Axii spell. Now before you get de-hypnotised – please donate to a fluffy animal charity! (Teehee)
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
