We’ve looked at the automaticy of the subconscious mind – how we can feel things, respond, imagine things, and even think automatically.
Also how the brain automatically rationalises things – conjuring stories, beliefs and narratives to make things seem less automatic than they really are. More conscious.
Making happenings feel like doings.
Before we get to understanding how hypnosis works, there’s another important part of the puzzle to truly understand how this all fits together.
But you might not like it.
It’s one of the biggest psychological illusions of them all – the idea of conscious will. Or free will – the idea that we’re truly free to think, feel, and behave as we want.
Sidestepping the Freewill vs Determinism Debate
Fortunately, we don’t have to get into that massive philosophical debate that has raged on for as long as mankind – but there are clear implications to wrestle with depending on how far you want to take it.
Let’s keep things simple and start with the basics.
Freewill and determinism aren’t really opposites – we don’t have to choose one or the other. The opposite of determinism is randomness, and the opposite of freewill is compulsion, or automaticity.
Let’s think about this.
If you truly had pure freedom of thought, feeling, and response – you would never have a psychological barrier. You could choose your way out of everything. The idea of that is completely abstract though, because there are always precursors to every single thing you do, think or feel – reasons, causalities, neurochemical transmitters, neural electrical activity, experiences, values, attitudes, associations, automatic imaginings.
So why do some of them feel conscious? Because exactly that – they feel conscious.
The more important outputs of your mental existance have evolved to trigger a sensation of conscious will. The ‘qualia’ or raw feeling of conscious experience that accompanies a minority of responses.
Basically, those feelings of doings are really happenings that just feel like doings.
Acknowledging that doesn’t change anything – it doesn’t mean your sensation of conscious will isn’t important (of course it is), and it doesn’t change anything about the experience of being a conscious person who feels like they’re doing things.
But it can massively open your awareness to appreciating more about the true extent of automaticity, and how things happen the way they do.
First, I’ll just unravel the idea of conscious will as anything more than a sensation a little bit more.
Conscious Will as a Sensation
Here are some compelling examples to help with this way of seeing things.
Predetermined responses can be felt as conscious decisions
There are countless studies where the brain has been stimulated in various areas – triggering automatic responses. What can frequently happen is that the person then rationalises their response as a conscious choice. For example, in part of Michael Gazzaniga’s classic research on split-brains, the word ‘walk’ was flashed in front of a patient’s left hemisphere, triggering him to get up and start walking. He had no consicous awareness of seeing the word. When asked why he was walking, he explained “I wanted to get a coke”.
This is exactly the same as the same phenomena of confabulation seen with hypnosis – a subconscious compulsion to respond, followed by a conscious ‘story’ as to why. The person isn’t making it up like a ‘lie’, they truly believe the false motive.
Decisions revealed before conscious awareness
In Benjamin Libet’s classic study, participants were asked to choose between left and right, while an electrode measured electrical activity in specific motor areas of the brain. Eventually, via the electrical activity, the researchers were able to predict the decisions before the person was consciously aware of it themselves.
When the mechanism of conscious choice breaks down, things are felt as automatic
This is a huge, complex area that I can’t really do justice to. But there are explanatory models of how this accompanying conscious sensation works (e.g. Frith, and Corollary Discharge – where an automatic intention triggers both the motor cortex, and simultaneous conscious awareness. If a disconnect occurs, the response is felt as ‘alien’ and automatic). It’s thought for example that schizophrenia could be a break down in this system – experiencing thoughts (previously doings) are hallucinated voices (now happenings), movements as alien limbs or pushed by ghosts, instrusive ideas as paranoia or being beamed in from outside sources.
Our beliefs about conscious ‘doings’ are dependent on context and outcomes
Your own experience will be packed with examples of how variable the doing/happening dynamic is. A drunken night out is looked back on as more of a happening, like you were on auto-pilot. An anxious confrontation that worked out well is felt like a doing, a bad outcome more like “I don’t know what came over me”. We tend to take full conscious credit for our successes, but failures are often explained with things like “this happened, that was happening, I was tired, I couldn’t have done differently”.
Other times, we want our conscious will to be reduced, to surrender completely to the feeling of pure automatic response. If you’ve ever played any fast-coordinated sport (e.g. table tennis), you’ll have experience this feeling where it feels like your body is working entirely on its own, before your conscious awareness is able to catch up. Most athletes seek to be in this zone, for performance to be unhindered by their conscious awareness.
So start to think about the experience of conscious will as a sensation, which all experiences are, and mediated by the brain automatically as all sensations are.
It makes far more sense to look at it that way, than to look at conscious will as some kind of magical force, working outside of the brain, able to choose whatever it wants whenever it wants. It just doesn’t integrate with reality in any way at all.
Mediating Sensations With Imagination
If you imagine that your skin is warm, really imagine it with visuals as if feeling it for real, you can experience the sensation of warmth on your skin (which is real, because skin temperature can increase by 2 degrees just by thinking about it courtesy of the brain-body link).
Close your eyes and imagine a colour, and you can ‘see’ it.
Put your hand on a table and imagine it going numb, you should be able to feel numbness.
You can also imagine actions as happening by themselves – reducing your sensation of conscious will.
If any of that makes sense, then you’re already on your way to understanding human behaviour and hypnosis far more than most hypnotherapists!
But why do so many happenings feel like doings?
Aside from providing the sensation of conscious will, the brain has evolved a wonderful mechanism to hide its rampant automaticity from our thoughts and intuitions.
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