Many people who would benefit from hypnotherapy say they avoid it because they do not wish to have their mind ʹmessed withʹ. Yet, if by ʹmind messingʹ we mean surreptitious influences on our thoughts, then in fact anyone who lives in a city or is exposed to modern media such as television and newspapers is already being subjected to subliminal mind messing on a daily basis. The constant battery of commercial advertising and the ideological biases of news media, are constantly trickling in through the gaps in our attention.
The human mind is remarkably susceptible to subtle suggestions all the time and you do not need hypnosis to be influenced by them. This notion that your beliefs and thoughts may be influenced by suggestions that you were not even aware of may take some getting used to though. Surprise about this may lead people to doubt that it even takes place. This was revealed in the early days of research, in the seventies. John Lilly in his book The Center of the Cyclone (1972) describes an experiment where volunteers were influenced by words that were shown to them at the very edge of their peripheral vision where they could not consciously read them:
“We noticed that some subjects were quite upset with these effects, which were beyond their immediate conscious control. They would not accept the fact that their brain was reading a word and registering the meaning of that word below their levels of awareness. No matter how hard they tried they could not read the word …”
Needless to say, such research results come as no surprise to advertisers!
Science Correspondent Nick Collins tells us that people are still being surprised by it, forty years on. In the Telegraph last Saturday (9th June), he reported “In the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science
researchers from Victoria University, New Zealand, said: ‘The effects of suggestion are wider and often more surprising than many people might otherwise think.’” Nick wrote, “Various studies have shown that the power of suggestion can help people perform better in tests and influence how well they respond to drug treatments. Experiments are now showing that this extends to behaviour. In one study cited by the authors, people who took a dummy drug which was supposed to make them feel more alert began to pay closer attention in a monitoring test because they expected the drug would help them to focus. The researchers wrote: ‘When we expect a particular outcome, we automatically set in motion a chain of cognitions and behaviours to produce that outcome – and misattribute its cause.’”
People who are good at selling are sometimes described as having ʹthe gift of the gabʹ ― the gift of words to sell. Product demonstrators so skilled and effective at their craft and their spiel can quite dazzle the gathered audience into buying something that, on arriving home, they know theyʹll never use or could well have done without.
People who take to the floor to speak to groups often adopt certain tones and modulations of the voice that appeal irresistibly to our hearing. This is the art of rhetoric, an art that has been taught to orators from Socratesʹ time onwards. And, as Socrates protested, the use of the skill of leading people to believe things was often at variance with revealing the truth. So we may fear that the current-day rhetorician holds a comparable enthusiasm for persuading their audiences by any means possible. Lawyers and barristers summing up in court adopt an elegant eloquence and a distinct way with words ― sometimes seeming to argue rationally for the most irrational judgement on a case. Successful, street-wise politicians adroitly mould and manipulate the beliefs and opinions of their crowd. And, most pervasively of all, the faceless masters of televisual advertising subtly shepherd consumers towards the checkout till.
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