The Brain’s Beautiful Story-telling Machine
This isn’t just a fascinating aspect about how hypnosis and the unconscious mind works – it has huge important implications for our conscious experience and is crucial to understanding how all these pieces fit together.
I first read about the phenomenon of hypnotic confabulation in hypnosis books as a teen, where there would usually be just a paragraph about it – enough to fascinate me but nowhere near enough to really understand it.
It describes how a person, going about business as usual, can act out a post-hypnotic command (i.e. a hypnotically suggested compulsion to occur at a later time, typically following a cue of some kind). Bizarrely, they will often try to consciously explain why they’re doing what they’re doing, regardless of how absurd the moment is.
A typical example is that someone is suggested to respond to a keyword by laughing hysterically. The word is later dropped into conversation by the hypnotist, and the person laughs hysterically. “What’s so funny?” they’re asked.
You might expect them to answer “I have no idea, I just started laughing uncontrollably”.
But this rarely happens.
What happens instead, is that the person will have an immediate ‘story’ to explain their actions – something like “oh I just thought of (funny incident) and it made me laugh” or “the way you’re standing just looks so funny to me”.
Another example – someone is suggested to take their shoes off in ten minutes time. Later, they take their shoes off. They’re asked “why”.
You might hear an answer along the lines of “oh it just seems a bit disrespectful to wear shoes indoors / I thought I’d relieve my feet a bit / the floor was becoming hot” (you get the idea).
I was always curious about this phenomena – people can be so wild with their creativity, it’s amazing how quickly the brain does it. The people absolutely believe what they’re saying, and have no idea about the true unconscious cause.
So when I first started experimenting with hypnosis, I explored this myself.
I suggested that the person would find me painful to touch. Later, I went to shake hands and on contact they suddenly flinched back. “What’s up?” I asked.
“Your skin’s really spiny, like it’s covered in tiny spikes”.
They absolutely believed this – despite how irrational it sounded.
I also made a post-hypnotic suggestion, that if they heard the word “sunny”, they would feel compelled to offer me a biscuit.
Around half an hour later, I said “looks bright and sunny outside”.
They replied “Yeah. Would you like some biscuits?” I said “No thanks, I already said I didn’t want one. Why are you asking again?”
The reply – “I just thought you might have changed your mind”. A few minutes later the same offer was made when I said I hoped it would be sunny tomorrow.
I again asked “why offer me a biscuit?”
The reply: “I just don’t want you to go hungry”.
The wording of suggestions is always important – because everything offers a suggestion. If I suggest to someone that they can’t get out of their chair, as if stuck to it, and they’ll find it surprising and strange then the response will be that they do find it surprising and strange – there is no need for unconscious confabulation to kick in.
But if I just suggested “You will feel stuck to your chair” then I’d typically hear “I just find it really comfortable, and don’t want to leave yet”. I realise this all sounds highly manipulative, and it’s not the sort of thing I would do now – but it made for a fascinating learning experience.
Unconscious Compulsion in the Lab
There are plenty of examples of the confabulation phenomena elsewhere. In Michael Gazzaniga’s classic split-brain research, patients were exposed to a message asking them to get a Coke. This was delivered to one eye – leading to the opposite side of the brain from where speaking is located (due to having a split brain, the patient’s right brain wasn’t privy to motives in the left).
When asked why they had gone to a vending machine for a Coke, they replied “I just suddenly felt really thirsty”.
In other research, the motor cortex was stimulated (with strong magnets) to trigger a patient to walk – an automatic compulsion. Even in this situation, you might expect them to explain their actions with “I have no idea, it just started happening”, but again they explained it with “I’ve been sat a while, I just wanted to walk about a bit”.
There are so many examples like this.
I’ve heard researchers (I can’t remember which – but I’ll revise this page later) be so overwhelmed by the commonality of confabulation that they describe the brain as a “story-telling machine”. I would be inclined to agree.
The complexity, creativity, spontaneity of confabulation can be absolutely amazing.
Far beyond what a person would typically, consciously be capable of.
Far beyond conscious ‘lying’ or story-telling.
This is why it can be so hidden and mysterious – and one of the reasons the person is completely oblivious to the falsity of what they’re saying.
Everyday Unconscious Story-Telling
The confabulation phenomena isn’t limited to just hypnosis, and yet so many textbooks describe it purely contextually as ‘hypnotic confabulation’, with one small paragraph.
Unless you get into the deep work of the researchers mentioned, you’ll likely never hear of it at all.
Yet, it’s implications are so huge, when considering how consciousness and automaticity interweave.
Let me explain.
When someone has an anxiety-provoking experience, or something traumatic, they can easily associate imagined pain to things linked to the experience, regardless of how irrational or non-causal they were (something I call ‘flash-binding’).
This is how phobias can form.
The person will then seek to automatically avoid those associated ‘things’ wherever possible, to minimise threat and anxiety.
Typically, this happens on an unconsicous level.
So imagine someone with an unconscious aversion to being in a car with strangers, because of a negative prior experience. New to a job, they’re asked to carpool in a company car to a training event, but they of course choose to make their own way.
When asked why, they of course might be self-aware enough to know they get anxious in cars with strangers, and admit this or consciously make something up to not appear fussy.
But if there’s unconscious avoidance involved, there’s every chance they’ll reason “oh, I need to do some things afterwards so it just makes sense to go alone”.
In this scenario, they’ll absolutely believe their story, because they aren’t aware of the aversion.
Someone is averse to the trapped environment of elevators, and explains using the stairs as “a way to get some exercise in”.
Someone unconsciously expects failure, or is anxious that success will threaten disapproval from someone close to them, so sabotages their endeavours at the last moment. There will likely be a conscious rationale for why they suddenly changed their mind, or made an irrational-seeming ‘mistake’ to jeapardise it.
How It All Ties Together
What is happening here?
Why has the brain evolved to be such a creative, compelling, automatic and rapid story-teller to its own sense of conscousness?
It makes perfect sense.
Once upon a time, the neocortex of the brain wasn’t as well developed, language didn’t exist, the architecture of consciousness was limited and the brain was purely primitive and instinctive.
Everything was fully automatic.
Genes were more successful when working as groups and so civilisations begin to emerge, the selected advantaged of language evolves, and with it the neocortex and consciousness.
The social brain evolves the capacity for accountability – to be able to say “I did this” or “I did that”.
But remember the order of development – the overwhelmingly automatic brain is now being represented – spoken for – by this ‘new’ aspect of conscious experience.
What’s going to be the true ‘doer’ here?
The unconscious mind of course – it’s evolved for far longer to learn from experience, be protective, spontaneously responsive, controlling all the autonomic functions and compulsively guiding the body (and ultimately DNA) towards its goals.
Of course it’s going to pave over the cracks of conscious awareness with more creative intelligence. The sensation of conscious will can remain just that.
A conscious sensation, guiding the person to feelings of doing instead of happening.
Implications for Counselling and Talking Therapies
One of the main things we’ve learned here is that a person really can’t be trusted with their explanations for things.
Not because they’re lying, although they often will of course (which is easier to deal with – an accompanying sense of guilt, shame or non-verbal or narrative incongruence can be more easily spotted).
But because they will frequently explain things that aren’t really true while fully believing what they’re saying.
The effect of unconscious confabulation can run rings around a counseller, creating walls and walls of aversion from the truth while all manner of creative, distractive red-herrings are thrown out instead.
This is why it’s so important to watch for non-verbal communication in the peripheral vision, which often tells a different ‘story’ from the one being spoken – on a more emotional, raw level behind the wordy narrative.
Imagine how much more effective policing and investigative work would be, if they were trained to truly understand and work with unconscious dynamics? Especially where possible victims might appear uncooperative but are really avoiding a greater imagined pain (like reliving the event).
Sometimes it can be more effective to ignore the conscious mind entirely, and work purely on a unconscious level – which is where hypnosis and unconscious therapeutics (like EMDR) are so much more efficient and effective.
I’ve had many cases where the client’s own motive for therapy was itself a confabulation. They consciously want to quit smoking or lose weight for example, but quickly it transpires that they really want to work on altogether more complex situations.
Never underestimate the creative resources of a person’s unconscious mind.
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