I’m the person JenniferRM mentioned. I’m also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from “hypnosis” and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.
Anyway, here are my thoughts.
Suppose I really want her to be spinning clockwise in my mind. What might I do?
What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a “clean slate” without “confirmatory experience” blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at the foot alone I experience it as oscillating rather than rotating (which I guess it technically is), and from there I can “release” it into whichever spin I intend by just kinda imagining that this is what’s going on.
On the one hand, shifting intuitive models is surprisingly hard! You can’t necessarily just want to have a particular intuitive model, and voluntarily make that happen.
I actually disagree with this. It certainly seems hard, but the difficulty is largely illusory and pretty much disappears once you stop trying to walk through the wall and notice the front door.
The problem is that “wanting to have a particular model” isn’t the thing that matters. You can want to have a particular model all you want, and you can even think the model is true all you want, but you’re still talking about the statement itself not about the reality to which the statement refers. Even if you convince someone that their fear is irrational and they’d be better off not being scared, you’ve still only convinced them that their fear is irrational and they’d be better off not being scared. If you want to convince them that they are safe—and therefore change their fear response itself—then you need to convince them that they’re safe. It’s the difference between looking at yourself from the third person and judging whether your beliefs are correct or not, vs looking at the world from the first person and seeing what is there. If you want to change the third person perspective, then you can look at which models are desirable and why. If you want to change the first person models themselves, you have to look to the world and see what’s there.
This doesn’t really work with the spinning dancer because “Which way is the dancer spinning?” doesn’t have an answer, but this is an artificial issue which doesn’t exist in the real world. You still have to figure out “Is this safe enough to be worth doing?” and that’s not always trivial, but the problem of “How do I change this irrational fear?” (for example) is. The answer is “By attending to the question of whether it is actually safe”.
I don’t deny that there’s “skill” to it, but most of the skill IME is a meta skill of knowing what to even aim for rather than aiming well. Once you start attending to “Is it safe enough?”, then when the answer is actually obvious the intuitive models just change. I can give a whole bunch of examples of this if you want, where people were stuck unable to change their responses and the problem just melts away with this redirection. Even stuff that you’d think would be resistant to change like physical pain can change essentially instantly. I’ve had it take as little as a single word.
Again we see that the subject is made to feel that his body is out of control, and becomes subject to a high-status person. Some hypnotists sit you down, ask you to stare upwards into their eyes and suggest that your eyelids are wanting to close—which works because looking upwards is tiring, and because staring up into a high-status person’s eyes makes you feel inferior.
This isn’t exactly wrong, but I want to push back on the implication that this is the central or most important thing here.
The central thing, IMO, is a willingness to try on another person’s worldview even though it clashes with your own. It doesn’t require “inferiority”/”high status”/”control” except in the extremely minimal sense that they might know something important that you don’t, and that seeing it for yourself might change your behavior. That alone will get you inhibition of all the normal stuff and an automatic (albeit tentative) acceptance of worldview-dissonant perspectives (e.g. name amnesia). It helps if the person has reason to respect and trust you which is kinda like “high status”, but not really because it can just as easily happen with people on equal social standing in neutral contexts.
Similarly, hypnosis has very little to do with sleep and eye fatigue/closure is not the important part of eye contact. The important part of eye contact is that it’s incredibly communicative. You can convey with eye contact things which you can’t convey with words. “I see you”. “Seeing you doesn’t cause conflict in me”. “I see you seeing me see you” and so on, to name a few. All the things you need to communicate to show someone that your perspective is safe and worthy of experiencing are best communicated with the eyes. And perhaps equally important it is a bid for attention, by holding your own.
So far, this isn’t a trance; I’m just describing a common social dynamic. Specifically, if I’m not in a hypnotic trance, the sequence of thoughts in the above might look like a three-step process:
[...] i.e., in my intuitive model, first, the hypnotist exercises his free will with the intention of me standing; second, I (my homunculus) exercise my own free will with the intention of standing; and third, I actually stand. In this conceptualization, it’s my own free will / vitalistic force / wanting (§3.3.4) that causes me to stand. So this is not a trance.
It’s important to note that while this self reflective narrative is indeed different in the way you describe, the underlying truth often is not. In the hypnosis literature this is known as “cold control theory”, because it’s the same control without the usual Higher Order Thoughts (HOT).
In “common social dynamics” we explain it as “I chose to”, but what is actually happening a lot of the time is the speaker is exercising their free will through your body, and you’re not objecting because it matches your narrative. The steps aren’t actually in series, and you didn’t choose to do it so much as you chose to not decline to do it.
These “higher order thoughts” do change some things, but turn out to be relatively unimportant and the better hypnotists usually don’t bother too much with them and instead just address the object level. This is also why you get hypnotists writing books subtitled “there’s no such thing as hypnosis” and stuff like that.
The short version is: If I have a tune in my head, then I’m very unlikely to simultaneously recall a memory of a different tune. Likewise, if I’m angry right now, then I’m less likely to recall past memories where I felt happy and forgiving, and vice-versa.
As far as I can tell, there are several different things going on with amnesia. I agree that this is one of them, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen anyone else notice this, so it’s cool to see someone point it out.
The “null hypothesis”, though, any time it comes to hypnosis is that it’s all just response to suggestion. You “know” that being hypnotized involves amnesia, and you believe you’re hypnotized, so you experience what you expect. There’s an academic hypnosis researcher I talk to sometimes who doesn’t even believe “hypnotic trance” is real in any fundamental sense and thinks that all the signs of trance are the result of suggestion.
I don’t believe suggestion is all that’s going on, but it really is sufficient for amnesia. The answer to Yudkowsky’s old question of “Do we believe everything we’re told?” is indeed “Yes”—if we don’t preemptively push it away or actively remember to unbelieve later. Back when I was working this stuff out I did a fun experiment where I’d come up with an excuse to get people to not pre-emptively reject what I was about to say, then I’d suggest amnesia for this conversation and that they’d laugh when I scratch my nose, and then I’d distract them so that the suggestion could take effect before they had a chance to unbelieve it. The excuse was something like “I know this is ridiculous so I don’t expect you to believe it, but hear me out and let me know if you understand”—which is tricky because they think the fact that we “agreed” that they won’t believe it means they actually aren’t believing it when they say “I understand”, even though the full statement is “I understand [that I will laugh when you scratch your nose and have no idea why”]. They still had awareness that this belief is wrong and would therefore act to stop themselves from acting on it, which is why the unexpected distraction was necessary in order to get their mind off of it long enough for it to work.
I’m the person JenniferRM mentioned. I’m also a physics guy, and got into studying/practicing hypnosis in ~2010/2011. I kinda moved on from “hypnosis” and drifted up the abstraction ladder, but still working on similar things and working on tying them together.
Anyway, here are my thoughts.
What worked for me is to focus on the foot alone and ignore the broader context so that I had a “clean slate” without “confirmatory experience” blocking my desired conclusion. When looking at the foot alone I experience it as oscillating rather than rotating (which I guess it technically is), and from there I can “release” it into whichever spin I intend by just kinda imagining that this is what’s going on.
I actually disagree with this. It certainly seems hard, but the difficulty is largely illusory and pretty much disappears once you stop trying to walk through the wall and notice the front door.
The problem is that “wanting to have a particular model” isn’t the thing that matters. You can want to have a particular model all you want, and you can even think the model is true all you want, but you’re still talking about the statement itself not about the reality to which the statement refers. Even if you convince someone that their fear is irrational and they’d be better off not being scared, you’ve still only convinced them that their fear is irrational and they’d be better off not being scared. If you want to convince them that they are safe—and therefore change their fear response itself—then you need to convince them that they’re safe. It’s the difference between looking at yourself from the third person and judging whether your beliefs are correct or not, vs looking at the world from the first person and seeing what is there. If you want to change the third person perspective, then you can look at which models are desirable and why. If you want to change the first person models themselves, you have to look to the world and see what’s there.
This doesn’t really work with the spinning dancer because “Which way is the dancer spinning?” doesn’t have an answer, but this is an artificial issue which doesn’t exist in the real world. You still have to figure out “Is this safe enough to be worth doing?” and that’s not always trivial, but the problem of “How do I change this irrational fear?” (for example) is. The answer is “By attending to the question of whether it is actually safe”.
I don’t deny that there’s “skill” to it, but most of the skill IME is a meta skill of knowing what to even aim for rather than aiming well. Once you start attending to “Is it safe enough?”, then when the answer is actually obvious the intuitive models just change. I can give a whole bunch of examples of this if you want, where people were stuck unable to change their responses and the problem just melts away with this redirection. Even stuff that you’d think would be resistant to change like physical pain can change essentially instantly. I’ve had it take as little as a single word.
This isn’t exactly wrong, but I want to push back on the implication that this is the central or most important thing here.
The central thing, IMO, is a willingness to try on another person’s worldview even though it clashes with your own. It doesn’t require “inferiority”/”high status”/”control” except in the extremely minimal sense that they might know something important that you don’t, and that seeing it for yourself might change your behavior. That alone will get you inhibition of all the normal stuff and an automatic (albeit tentative) acceptance of worldview-dissonant perspectives (e.g. name amnesia). It helps if the person has reason to respect and trust you which is kinda like “high status”, but not really because it can just as easily happen with people on equal social standing in neutral contexts.
Similarly, hypnosis has very little to do with sleep and eye fatigue/closure is not the important part of eye contact. The important part of eye contact is that it’s incredibly communicative. You can convey with eye contact things which you can’t convey with words. “I see you”. “Seeing you doesn’t cause conflict in me”. “I see you seeing me see you” and so on, to name a few. All the things you need to communicate to show someone that your perspective is safe and worthy of experiencing are best communicated with the eyes. And perhaps equally important it is a bid for attention, by holding your own.
It’s important to note that while this self reflective narrative is indeed different in the way you describe, the underlying truth often is not. In the hypnosis literature this is known as “cold control theory”, because it’s the same control without the usual Higher Order Thoughts (HOT).
In “common social dynamics” we explain it as “I chose to”, but what is actually happening a lot of the time is the speaker is exercising their free will through your body, and you’re not objecting because it matches your narrative. The steps aren’t actually in series, and you didn’t choose to do it so much as you chose to not decline to do it.
These “higher order thoughts” do change some things, but turn out to be relatively unimportant and the better hypnotists usually don’t bother too much with them and instead just address the object level. This is also why you get hypnotists writing books subtitled “there’s no such thing as hypnosis” and stuff like that.
As far as I can tell, there are several different things going on with amnesia. I agree that this is one of them, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen anyone else notice this, so it’s cool to see someone point it out.
The “null hypothesis”, though, any time it comes to hypnosis is that it’s all just response to suggestion. You “know” that being hypnotized involves amnesia, and you believe you’re hypnotized, so you experience what you expect. There’s an academic hypnosis researcher I talk to sometimes who doesn’t even believe “hypnotic trance” is real in any fundamental sense and thinks that all the signs of trance are the result of suggestion.
I don’t believe suggestion is all that’s going on, but it really is sufficient for amnesia. The answer to Yudkowsky’s old question of “Do we believe everything we’re told?” is indeed “Yes”—if we don’t preemptively push it away or actively remember to unbelieve later. Back when I was working this stuff out I did a fun experiment where I’d come up with an excuse to get people to not pre-emptively reject what I was about to say, then I’d suggest amnesia for this conversation and that they’d laugh when I scratch my nose, and then I’d distract them so that the suggestion could take effect before they had a chance to unbelieve it. The excuse was something like “I know this is ridiculous so I don’t expect you to believe it, but hear me out and let me know if you understand”—which is tricky because they think the fact that we “agreed” that they won’t believe it means they actually aren’t believing it when they say “I understand”, even though the full statement is “I understand [that I will laugh when you scratch your nose and have no idea why”]. They still had awareness that this belief is wrong and would therefore act to stop themselves from acting on it, which is why the unexpected distraction was necessary in order to get their mind off of it long enough for it to work.