These are my thought about the subject:
For example when we are walking on a crowded street, we hear and see
far too many details of information and we cannot keep consciously
track of all of them. We only end up paying attention to only a few
details that attracted our attention. If we try to remember the details
of the past minute's events, we are usually good remembering them. The
more time ellapses, the less details we can dig out of our
subconsciously recorded memories of details we saw, heard, felt or
thought of recently.
The more we recall a detail from our short term memory, the stronger we
blueprint it into our long term memory. We can only pay attention to
one thing consciously at a time, be it a sensory input or our thoughts,
so most details will end up being forgotten quickly.
Subconscious memories of these unimportant details fade away because
the neurons that were allocated to them fade away in their activity.
Active neurons keeping track of the last minute or so inputs help us
keep in touch with the reality. The one or so minute span is where all
the processing of all short term memory must occur.
Usually we have many thoughts and/or sensory input information in the
short term memory. All the neurons storing these recent memories keep
on sparking signals about themselves saying: "Please process me, give
me attention".
As long as there are enough inputs about the outside world and our
current thoughts in the short term memory, we will know where we are
that given moment are and what and we are doing, we are said to be
consciouss, or in other words in touch with the reality.
Now imagine what would happen if we fill up this short term memory with
a completely monotonic information, such as the sound of a ticking
clock, while managing to suppress our attention from any thought or
sensory inputs.
After the active memory is filled up with such monotonic data,
consciousness, or staying touch with relaity would be lost. The only
sensation that one would observe in that state is all neurons in the
active short term memory firing to the attention: 'Tick tack, tick
tack...' coming from hundred directions at the same time.
An indian out of body meditation technique focuses the attention to on
an 'unstruck bell' sound that never ends. After a given time, the short
term memories will be constantly activated and while the conscious
attention continues making that sound in mind, the short term memory
will begin to project the same sound back from hundred directions, and
the result in that hypnotic state will begin to appear sounding
resonating as music. This resonation is often reported as beautiful
music.
Epileptic symptoms are similar to this overload process. A classic case
is where a given memory sparks an image into the imagination. That
imagination sparks the memory again. That memory again sparks the image
again and so on, and the short term memory is quickly filled with the
same information over and over again. The same images coming from
hundred directions in the mind quickly become distorted by the same
image projected from all directions, and a typical sensation appears
like taking a journey through a tunnel of light.
The above described unstruck bell indian meditation technique is
basically a form of practicing self-induced epilepsy in the form of
sound. The people practicing the technique have to carry the unstruck
bell sound throughout the day so with each subsequent meditation will
be easier to achieve as the sound is fed constantly to the brain. (I am
quite amazed that the process is not a healthy one, not to mention
intellectually de-evolving.)
After disconnecting from reality but staying away by keeping a focus,
lucid dreams jump in and take over the epileptic symptoms.
These were self inducing techniques to meditation while hypnotizing is
a conducted one.
The idea in hypnosis is to keep the subject's consciousness focused to
only one sensory input to the conductor's voice. When all the other
sensory inputs are shut down, the subject's sense of reality naturally
lost. The idea is to clean the subject's short term memory from
information related to the real world and his knowledge of the real
world is gone.
In that state, hearing any words will spark the subject's mind to
construct the visual scene associated to those words. The same way we
find ourselves in scenes that appear very real during our dreams.
For example when we hear the word apple, an image of an apple pops into
our mind. When we are awake, we can imagine visualizing the apple
easily, but our sense of reality is not lost when we imagine an apple.
Our eyes keep on disturbing the imagined images so they don't appear
too real. However in a hypnotised state where no disturbances are
present, the apple would appear clear and very real. Words can guide
and translate to scenes and images in this fashion. The same way words
in an adventure book translate to scenes in our imagination when we are
reading them, but in this case the consciousness is quite fooled to
interpret the illusion as reality of these guided lucid dreams.
That is how I see the process of hypnosis.
George Bajszar
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