Street Hypnosis And Amygdala Function

Recently someone who was fairly aggressively involved in national-level conservative politics emailed me with an encounter they had on the street. In thinking about it, it seemed the encounter involved a stab at street hypnosis, so I wanted to take a look at it, and use it to examine hypnosis and the amygdala’s processing of incoming stimuli.

The most common example of hypnosis they use is the driving example. You get in the car, begin driving to work, think about something, some problem you have, and before you know it you are at your job, with no memory of driving there. While you are focused on your problem, your brain handles the driving without thought, without doubt, without weighing different options, and without questions or memories. It just does what it is directed to by the environment, without any resistance. When the need to change lanes arises, you do it. When the car ahead of you stops and the environment says “Stop” your brain does it. When the need to turn right arises, you do it, and often you do not remember doing any of it.

That is a trance-like state. Your brain simply acts, without question or concern, in response to primitive directions it sees. You enter it because your amygdala is focused on something else, so it cannot focus on driving. In short, without your amygdala to focus you, perform relevance weighing, question options, and decide on an act, you enter a robot-like state. Your brain becomes prone to take info and do what it indicates immediately, without question. Start, stop, left, right, accelerate, decelerate, it all just happens when the brain sees indicators to do it. It may be some sort of evolved mechanism, perhaps designed to allow us to do a repetitive act that doesn’t require questioning, while being productive in the mental realm on another level – a sort of natural multitasking.

Hypnosis is like that. Focus on your breathing. Imagine a grassy field. See the grass, feel how soft it is under your feet, smell it, watch it as a breeze blows over it. Think about this, focus your amygdala on it entirely, and it is as if you just “Feeeeel Caaaaallmmmmm” Your brain focuses on “X,” and the “Feeel Caaalm” slips in like a car stopping in front of you as you drive. Your brain is being told, feel calm, and your amygdala is occupied elsewhere. It happens, and afterward you may not remember why. Suddenly cigarettes disgust you, and you feel you lungs drying out just looking at them.

So the street hypnosis. The reporter had been off the grid for a while, and away from his normal haunts. A stranger approached out of the blue, and said something strangely specific to the individual, and indicative of knowing something unusual which he couldn’t possibly have known. The reporter reported feeling both extraordinarily confused and shocked. As he stammered a response, the approacher said more things, and the reporter said he couldn’t remember exactly what was said because he was so confused and shocked at the initial statement as he tried to figure out what was happening and how it could be happening. The middle of the encounter was a black hole in his mind.

His amygdala was focused on the problem, and the driving his brain was doing was on autopilot. In Eriksonian hypnosis they call it a confusion induction. You say things which the mind detects are not quite right, and all that is left is to think about what was wrong, and why what was right wasn’t left. While the consciousness (the amygdala) is focused on the error or confusion, the hypnotizer is slipping in quiet braking signs and calls to accelerate and turn, taking your brain where he wants it. The mind is seeing it all as if it were driving, and it is responding to those signs by doing what is demanded, while you amygdala handles the task at hand.

Unfortunately, what was said in that time was lost to the induction, but the meeting ended with an apology, and a statement by the approacher that that he hoped the reporter would not “get angry, and get upset.” Those are how you would present suggestions to get angry or get upset. The amygdala is thinking about the problem, and the brain is supposed to hear “Get Angry And Get Upset” and respond by getting angry and getting upset.

That would probably not work well, since anger and upset are amygdala. So you are trying to bypass the amygdala and coax it into sleep and distraction to access the autopilot function, but you are also issuing suggestion commands to the brain that will bring the amygdala back online, and shut off the autopilot. Interesting was that, that specific part of the conversation is the part which the individual could recall verbatim, after losing the middle part of the encounter. Their amygdala jumped back online, took control of the interaction, initiated thought about it, and began recording.

I thought it made for an interesting look at how the brain is processing data, and how it can be manipulated.

Now, if you will excuse me, I just saw the Queen of Hearts, and need to go kill some giraffes at the zoo with my Barrett 82A1.

The End. (or The Beginning?)

Tell others about r/k Theory, because when all that is left is wrong, all that is Spread right is all that is left, unlike if all that is right is wrong and all that is left is right…