08/04/2022
Hypnotherapy, Hypnosis and the magic or myth of the minds!
When I first trained to be a hypnotherapist, some 22 years ago, I, like most other hypnotherapists warmly embraced the theoretical mystery of the subconscious mind, why wouldn’t I, I knew no better! However, as time progressed and I gained more experience I began to challenge such a theory. For me it all started when someone I know suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and I observed significant changes in the way this person spoke, thought and behaved, in some sense, for a month or two, they became a different person. This led me to begin a quest that has never stopped, that of discovering more about our brain. A couple of extremely important case studies piqued my interest further, the first was Phineas Gage, a railroad worker whose tamping tool ploughed right thru his skull, following an explosion, taking bits of his brain with it. Early reports said that Gage was never again Gage; he changed beyond all recognition. However, a later report says that he recovered much of his functioning and was able to take on the role of a stagecoach driver in South America. A job that required a lot of planning, organising and skilful manoeuvring over rough terrain and, no doubt, certain passenger service skills. The importance of this is that even after a massive trauma, the plasticity of the brain is immense. The second case was patient HM (Henry Molaisen). A man who suffered very significant epileptic seizures, following an accident. Surgeons removed most of his hippocampal formation, the amygdala and possibly the uncus, the brain’s memory and emotional processors. Little was known about the function of the hippocampus at that time. Consequently, Henry provided them with more information than they expected and became the most studied patient in the history of neurology. His ability to form new memories was largely nonexistent, what is termed anterograde amnesia, the inability to make new memories. His memory of the past was also affected and he had virtually no memories of the 11 years prior to his surgery.
From there my research took me in all directions relating to the various brain structures, their names and their function and what emerged from that is an understanding that the brain is very logically illogical.
So, what about the minds? Well, one illustrative theory that many hypnotherapists use, is that of an iceberg, with the tip representing our conscious mind and below that, the subconscious. The problem with that theory is that no one has yet given a truly scientific validation of how the brain is structured into what we call ‘minds.’ What is more known, however, is that if certain brain regions get damaged, the functionality and behaviour of the person, or animal, changes. Similarly, it is known that deficiencies of minerals, vitamins and/or oxygen and water deprivation, drastically alter the way the brain and, subsequently, what we term the mind’s function. So, in that context our brain creates the experience we call life and what we call the mind, is merely a method (as of yet not properly known how or why), that creates awareness in us of what we are thinking, feeling and doing. Often, therapy aims to deal with the disparity between those two experiences. For example, a smoker will say “I fancy a cigarette and will proceed to smoke one. In that moment, they truly believe that it is them, as a sovereign individual, who wants the cigarette. This is the myth because it is their brain that wants the cigarette (ni****ne mostly), they are merely the dummy who has to go to the shop to buy them, store them and feed their brain when given the signal/instructions to do so. And this same psychology is involved in nearly everything that causes us some form of desire, angst or issue.
So, when a hypnotherapist claims to tap into their client’s subconscious mind, a medley of strange thoughts begin to permeate my mind! Firstly because the greatest minds in the field of neuroscience cannot agree on what the minds are and they know an awful lot about the brain. Secondly, because the minds are a scientific theory, they are not real anatomical structures, i.e. they are constructs and damned good ones at that. In fact, it would be challenging to talk about many things relating to behaviour, thoughts, feelings and experience without reference to the concept of the mind. However, let’s be clear, that every feeling, thought and behavioural response, is a consequence of brain function, a myriad of trillions of second by second neurochemical reactions.
Contextually, therefore, the brain is primarily an algorithmic sensory processor, it functions relative to its sensory input, the integration of that information and both programmed and novel responses to that sensory information. The algorithms form the function of remembering individual and grouped previous or similar experiences and these play out in lightning-fast fashion. The only reason we can speak or write so proficiently is that the brain has stored every word, its meaning, when, where and contextually how to use them, as well as the exact muscle combinations required to annunciate or type every word we use. What we call the conscious mind, is basically our ability to be aware of what we are saying, doing or feeling, which enables us verbally and nonverbally to pose questions for the brain to answer or to learn new things. The ability to do the things we know comes about as a consequence of the activation of certain memories or networks of memories, schemas or memory traces.
So, the mystery is, if hypnotherapists, can’t actually tap into a prospectively anatomically nonexistent subconscious mind, then how do the changes we so obviously observe in a client's behaviour happen? Maybe we should start by taking a deeper look at what hypnosis is? Primarily Hypnosis is a word, the nomenclature of observable experience, a term coined by Scottish surgeon James Braid, around 1842. He believed its phenomena to be a sleep-like state (following on, in part, from the work of Franz Anton Mesmer ( mesmerism)) and as Hypnos was the Greek God of sleep, it sounded both logical and catchy. While he later recanted his understanding of the phenomena, believing it was not a sleep-like state, modern research, on both memory and sleep, pretty much confirmed he was right after all. Where it gets confusing, relative to the way hypnosis and the changes it brings about are perceived, is that we are capable of bringing about change through many different methodologies and ways. For example, psychotherapy, counselling, CBT, Gestalt, REBT, NLP etc. all bring about varying forms of change. Sometimes seemingly making a conscious decision to change (willpower) can do it too, as can prayer but this is not specifically hypnosis. Nevertheless, following on from any therapeutic session, hypnotic-like processes are at play when we sleep, for it is in sleep that memory consolidation (new memories) and reconsolidation (updating existing memories) take place. As the sleeping person goes into varying neural oscillations (brainwaves) as they go through the stages of sleep, this consolidation and reconsolidation occur naturally and progressively during nighttime sleep. Similarly, in hypnosis, the client enters a trance-like state, akin to nighttime sleep. Each person goes through these brainwave stages (see image below) during both day and night, albeit differently. At night while asleep and dreaming, our brain oscillates through these wavelike experiences and while we are asleep we are predominantly in theta brainwave states. Theta waves emanate from the hippocampus, hence the memory processing and storage begins, starting in the form of a temporary, labile state and eventually to changed state called long term memory. So the changes that occur through hypnosis work seamlessly in a similar but more directed way, than in natural sleep states. Additional layers of complexity occur by virtue of our different memory systems, e.g. explicit (declarative) and implicit (non-declarative). A separate article on memory in the making! Although simply put, explicit memory is cognitively/intellectually aligned and in the realm of consciousness and implicit is emotionally aligned to feel, fear (fight or flight) and love (wellness and inner peace). Delta brainwaves are akin to a goal-directed restorative function of sleep, where, among other things, the brain heals and restores itself and the body and when experienced in hypnosis, can create extremely intense feelings so relaxation.
So, in summary, life is an ongoing process from breath to breath, complicated by what we call thoughts. Thoughts are the consequence of an outer awareness of an inner experience stimulated by sensory perceptions and experienced as feelings that then activate various memories that elicit a motor response we call behaviour. Behaviour then stimulates physical feelings that go on to arouse more thoughts and on and on it goes. Hypnosis and therapy, combined, equal hypnotherapy have the potential to be a disrupter that breaks the cycle of sensory processing and integration leading to different outcomes. The magic is in the way hypnosis changes the expression of memory the myth is in the belief that it is the mind that changes, it is the brain that changes and as a consequence of that, an awareness of an alternative reality emerges.
