In the last post, I talked about how hypnotists like to equivocate between expectation and intent in order to get people to believe what they want them to do and do what they want them to believe [sic].
There is a third framing that hypnotists also use at times, which is "imagination". You don't have to expect that your eyes will be too heavy to open, or intend them to be. You can just imagine that they will be, and so long as you stay in that imagination, that is enough.
The most simple version of this, which you're probably familiar with, is the phenomenon where if you imagine biting into a sour lemon your mouth will begin to water. Or perhaps more frequently, you might imagine other things and experience other physiological phenomena associated with that imagined experience. Either way the point is clear, our brains and bodies begin to respond to imagined experiences almost as if they're real. "Imagination", at it's core, is simulated experience. It's trying ideas on for size, figuring out what that would be like, how we would feel, how we would respond -- and then hopefully inhibiting those behaviors eventually when we believe the situation we're simulating to not be "real".
If I ask you to "imagine biting into a lemon", you have one experience. If I ask you what it feels like to bite into a lemon -- assuming you don't lazily give me a cached answer of "sour" -- you simulate that experience and report on your experience. If I tell you that I'm going to give you a lemon to bite into, and you think "I love lemons! I'm gonna bite into a lemon!" and start thinking about what you're going to do (What you "expect" to do? What you "intend" to do? Kinda starting to feel the same, huh?) then it's the same thing again. Still the experience of biting into a lemon (while not actually biting into a lemon), mouth watering, just with a different framing of "imagining" vs "figuring out what it would be like" vs "thinking about what is going to happen". Same object level mental representation, different meta level tags.
These "meta level tags", for lack of a better term, do matter. It's what keeps us grounded. It keeps our mouth watering only a little, keeps us from being too mad at our spouses for what they did in our bad dreams, etc. But they matter only to the extent that it drags attention away from the object level thing. We're not perfect, and so sometimes people do get mad at people for what they do in dreams. And our mouths water a bit, and all that. And hypnotists can abuse this arbitrarily far.[1]
On the object level, we're either attending to an object level experience of reality, or we're not. Unless we know we're "just imagining", or unless we're not actually experiencing it, we don't know the experience isn't real (another one of those stupid tautological statements). If we're aiming our attention at "I will hit this target", then when the sights drift right, we shift our aim to the left -- because otherwise we'd quickly stop expecting to hit the target. If we're aiming to keep the room at 70F, then when it starts to feel like 69F, this new data is uncomfortable until it starts feeling like 70F. And again, we either act to alleviate this discomfort or otherwise it gets difficult to hold onto the expectation of 70F. The way it feels to set your "setpoint" -- or "expectations" or "intentions", if you want to think of it that way -- is by aiming our attention of the experience of that thing being true. This makes any deviations become salient, feel "not right", and motivates the response to correct them.
If we want to hit the target, we aim to experience the sights lining up and staying lined up through a smooth trigger pull and follow through.
If we want to grow up to be a doctor or lawyer and our report card comes back with bad grades, it conflicts with the fantasy we've been living in, and feels like "This can't be!".
What if we divorced this attention from any framing? Forget "intend", "expect", "imagine". What if we just look at a thing?
I tried an interesting experiment on this years ago, when I was trying to sort out exactly what it takes for a "hypnotic suggestion" to take. The hypothesis I was testing is that all it takes is to just put attention on an idea, and not take it off. So how can we do that, at its simplest and most detached from justifying contexts like "I wanted to do that"/"That's just what was gonna happen"/"I was hypnotized to"/etc?
I had an idea.
What if I just told people a thing -- for example, "when I scratch my nose, you will find it to be the funniest thing in the world" -- and then made up a weird excuse to get their attention off the fact that I just put their attention on something stupid? Maybe I could leverage "hypnotic amnesia" to do this? After all, if this hypothesis is right... I should be able to achieve that too, just by saying it and getting awareness off it.
So now the suggestion stack is "when I scratch my nose, you will find it to be the funniest thing in the world, and you will find it even funnier, because you will have no idea why you're laughing because you won't remember any of this the moment I snap my fingers".
Okay, so how do we get their attention off that, for long enough for the suggestion to take? How about just distracting them? Well, that's a start, but they're likely to preemptively keep their attention from focusing on that to the exclusion of "this isn't real".
So what I did is give them a reason to not think it was necessary to.
"I'm going to say something really absurd and not even true so I don't expect you to believe me, just hear me out and tell me if you understand -- okay? Okay. In a moment, when I scratch my nose, you will find it to be the funniest thing in the world, and you will find it even funnier, because you will have no idea why you're laughing because you won't remember any of this the moment I snap my fingers. Of course this isn't actually going to happen and I'm just saying dumb things, but you do understand, don't you. That's right, and <snap> now what were you saying earlier -- you remember what we talked about when you first got here, with the whatever and such?"
Pulling off the distraction wasn't exactly trivial, but when it worked... it worked. I'd scratch my nose, they'd laugh -- not like it's the funniest thing in the world, giving another hint about what it takes to enact "hypnotic suggestions" -- but they did laugh, and they did not know why they were laughing until reminded.[2]
Was it their "expectation" that they'd have amnesia? Or "intention"? Not really, in that there was nothing deliberate about it, and no evidence that it would be true or meta-beliefs in support. There was no bus, no tiger, they were just running. They weren't even "imagining" it, really, just holding that idea in mind, for a moment -- they thought. We really do believe everything we're told, unless we actively move to disbelieve.
When you're doing your best to hold the temperature at 75.00F, notice what you have to look at. If you are to do a maximally good job at regulating the temperature, you have to be looking at that thermometer read out, or else you won't notice when reality shifts away from your intention. You have to be focused, so that irrelevant nonsense doesn't distract you from noticing the instant the temperature drifts to 74.99F. You are constantly expecting to see 75.00F in the proximate future, and acting so as to maintain this expectation. This is where your attention lies, and is the experience to which errors are measured.
At least to me, this is the most confusing part of the sequence. Because it sure seems like "But can't you just attend to things as they are without also trying to change them???". Like, can't you just watch the thermometer readout intently because you want to know the temperature, without also trying to control the temperature? Of course.
I'm not generally a fan of the meditator "Focus on your breath" thing, but it does make a perfect example here because it is experienced meditators can observe their breath without controlling, and at the same time it isn't exactly trivial.
When we ask questions like "What will our breath do?" (or "Will my attempt to not swell 'work'?", or "Will my science experiment find a correlation?"), in order to answer them on purpose we have to intend to resolve our uncertainty. And so what happens, naturally, is that we do things that minimize this uncertainty. We come up with potential answers, like "This is what my breath will do", or "It probably won't work, expecting that would make me crazy", or "I think I'll find a correlation, that's why I'm testing it" -- and by shifting our attention to this expectation, we inadvertently set our intention. The intention of resolving uncertainty flows downhill both to "finding solutions that work" and to making solutions work.
So how do you "Just observe" your breath, or "Watch the thermometer readout, without trying to control it"?
By practicing the skill of holding expectations lightly. If your attention sticks on "It will say 75.00F", and it drifts down to 74.98, 74.95, this builds tension, and this tension motivates actions to resolve it. If you have motive to hold that expectation, you may flinch and say "NO! It WILL be 75F!" and do whatever you can to make reality not be what it is.
If you don't have such motivation, then you can shift. "Okay, it's down to 74.98F. It'll probably continue down to 74.95F soon enough". This is easy enough when you don't have anything invested in the outcome[3], but when you have reason to prefer one outcome to another and it's not in your best interest to hamfistedly try to control it, it can take some skill to allow your attention to track the data freely even as it provides that "information that we care about". The difficulty of observing one's own breathing without altering it shows how even subtle desires below the level of conscious endorsement can derail things pretty quickly, and often requires skillful direction of meta attention in order to keep our attention moving without friction or undue influence.
So yes, paying attention without controlling is possible -- if you are free of any motivation whatsoever to change the outcome or to even know the outcome. Often, this requires you to be attentive to any tension between your direction of attention and the data, and actively redirect your attention to maintain this lack of tension.
In other words, when you are expecting the thermometer readout to display 75.00F, that inherently functions as your brain's setpoint as the experience to create. In order to "just observe" you have to adjust your aim before you ever miss your target, generally by maintaining an awareness of the degree of error of your object level expectations, and aiming to drive this to zero. Sometimes this comes naturally, other times it very much does not.
Knowing this alone won't get you very far. There's a reason the "pure attention" example is a toy example and not something that was useful and truth tracking in a real situation. I had to pull some trickery to get that nose scratching experiment to work, and my attempts to distract didn't always work. People don't like reality violating their expectations and intentions, so they choose their attention... well, not sufficiently carefully all the time, but there's usually some amount of thought that goes into it -- whether because they're intent on bringing about certain experiences or else preparing for them. That's why you so you generally can't just say "Think positively!" and expect that to work.[4]
But at the end of the day, attention is the final gear that drives intentional change, as it is the experience you attend to which serves as the setpoint of your brain[5]. Everything else is either downstream of that, or it isn't intentional.
The rest of the question, is where is the right place to direct attention, and how do we get it there?
Usually, sneaky bastards that they are, hypnotists will pull some sleight of mouth to trick people into losing track of the distinction between imagination and reality. Sometimes they're upfront about it, and just say "Imagine that you're not imagining". Other times, they'll just lead with "Imagine..." and then slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) walk towards treating it as real while you're paying too close attention to what they're saying at the moment to notice that it contradicts what they were saying a moment ago about it being just pretend -- and then abruptly reminding you that you're just imagining when they want you to remember.
This is something you could try for yourself, and might be able to pull off. I had a friend with relatively little experience playing hypnotist try it, and he got it to work on his second attempt (distraction failed on his first).
It probably does take some familiarity with the basic skills though.
And foolish enough when you do -- and also have the power to change it
I mean this in a technical/empirical sense. Try to expect it to work, and see if you can manage to be surprised when it doesn't. It's generally not easy to do.
This is in line with Karl Friston's work on the brain as a free energy minimizer.
As an exercise for the reader, what does this say about target fixation?