Breaking news! Reliving past traumas over and over as practised in many talk-therapies might not be such a good thing after all!
Following the latest study showing that some anti-depressant drugs are of little clinical benefit for most patients, more and more individuals are likely to seek treatment through various forms of psychotherapy, which collectively have come to be known as “the talking cure”. However, a recent article in the Psychologist journal, entitled When Therapy Causes Harm, cautions that approximately 10% of people get worse after starting therapy.
Read the rest at the Guardian: When it’s bad to talk
I always love reading crazy theories and have recently heard about something called Bicameralism. Julian Jaynes wrote about his theory in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
The basic ideas is that ancient humans to an extent functioned as ’schizophrenics’ in that they had frequent auditory hallucinations. They literally heard voices speaking to them and interpreted these as the voices of gods.
Julian uses this explain how language and consciousness developed in humans and why early humans really believed that their gods were speaking to them. It’s a fascinating theory that touches on many interests of mine, ancient history, psychology, evolution of humans.
What’s particularly interesting for readers of this site is that it might help to explain how and why hypnosis works. Maybe we were used to taking ‘commands’ from one half of our brain for many thousands of years before both hemispheres started working together.
It’s also interesting that some areas of the brain that deal with language use also help us to recognise and distinguish rhythm. If you know anything about hypnosis you’ll know that speaking in certain rhythms (and listening to repetitive rhythms) has a hypnotic effect. Tribes in Africa engage in dances to rhythmic music for hours in order to go into a trance, and in the west we even have a whole sub-genre of dance music called Trance. This is the reason why for example Richard Bandler does hypnosis work with a musical backing track.
Read more about Bicameralism at Wikipedia: Bicameralism
and
Prozac, the bestselling antidepressant taken by 40 million people worldwide, does not work and nor do similar drugs in the same class, according to a major review released today.
Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists
Yet another story about the power of the Placebo. Now I don’t mean to be negative picking up on these stories all the time. It’s just funny to me that people question that science is social construct when things like this occur all the time. Some scientists say Prozac works one way, the others say something else, and at the end of the day it’s down to what the individual believes.
Don’t get me wrong I think modern science is great. But you’d think that by now we’d realise to what extent science is a social construct, then again the concept of a scientific paradigm is still largely outside the current paradigm. Everyone uses the phrase but few know what it really means. It’s like someone acknowledging that people’s perceptions are biased because of their upbringing, beliefs, culture and mood, except thinking they themselves are exempt from those influences.
Maybe a lot of us just need a sugar-pill to make ourselves feel better, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Look at Dumbo, he had a magic feather to make himself feel better!
In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on … what? It begins with P … Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”
Read the rest here: Teaching happiness: the classes in wellbeing that are helping our children
Main stream Psychology continues to forge into bold new territories. Some people are starting to realise that it might be a good thing to focus on what we want to move towards and not just what we want to get away from.
In the second part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders, marketers explain how advertising has moved away from explaining the features of products and towards the emotional benefits that a consumer gets from buying products.
The idea is to create meaning system for consumers through which they get identity and an understanding of the world. Douglas Atkin explains how he started to research cults, fans and devotees in order to find out how people become involved in them in order to create that devotion in consumers for brands. People that love Harley Davidson, Mac’s and the Grateful Dead all have something in common that explains their rabid devotion.
Douglas breaks it down into two key points:
1. People want to belong.
2. They want to make meaning (of their lives and the world around them).
It’s easy to think of brands and advertising that try to sell you a lifestyle, a belief-system, a way of thinking about life and the world. I don’t know how you’ve experienced advertising but I’ve always found it pretty transparent. ‘Buy this and you’ll be cool, you’ll be part of the in crowd’. And to be honest I’ve always found it pretty offensive. Someone is telling me what I’ll BE when I buy their product!?
The creepiest part of this documentary is the engineering that is applied to the Song Airline brand. In stead of saying something is great, employees are encouraged to say: ‘That’s so song’. I don’t care what kind transcendent lifestyle experience it is to fly with Song, that’s all it is at the end of the day, an airline. All in all, highly pretentious. And as the presenter points out, despite millions spent on marketing and advertising you’d find it to difficult to come by evidence that shows how successful this kind of marketing is at selling particular products.
What is does succeed in doing however is creating the mindset in many people that purchasing certain things and services actually enhances you personally in some respect. Don’t buy into that.
The first part of the documentary Frontline Persuaders explains how an airline is looking to start a new branch of it’s business to compete against other low-fair airlines.
They show how they have built up a profile of their ideal customer in order to get an idea of how to best market their airline. They probably built up this profile using market research data and information about spending habits from supermarkets, shops and banks.
As one of the commentators points out, it seems that a lot of advertising is becoming more and more focused on grabbing our attention in any conceivable way just to get through the noise of all the other advertising out there. I’m sure we all remember some really interesting, shocking or funny ads, but can’t remember what they were supposed to be selling. Marketers will say that it’s more about gaining repeated exposure with consumers, but that’s something that’s hard to measure.
Contrast that kind of advertising with traditional sales letters, where you can measure the success rate of different kinds of copy and adjust it to get the best results.
PBS has a really good 90 minute documentary on their site about how advertisers, marketers, think tanks and politicians are using the latest ideas in psychology and memetics to persuade you to buy their products or vote for their political party.
I’ll write an analysis of some of the concepts and ideas presented in the documentary at some point.
I had been interested in NLP and Hypnosis for a few years when my friend Magnus invited me to go on a two day Mentalism course by Igor Ledochowski. (Mentalism is the blend of Psychology and magic that performers like Derren Brown and David Blaine practice). Although I have only a passing interest in practising magic I know that many effects make use of the way human psychology works and that’s what interested me most. So we drove down to London for the weekend to see if there was anything for us to learn.
Now Igor is amongst other things an NLP Practitioner and Hypnotherapist and it turned out that some of what he would be teaching would involve using some of the skills from these disciplines. I felt quite a lot anticipation when I sat down in the room with 40 or so other people because I had heard that Igor was good at putting people into deep trances. Well it turns out he is phenomenal at it.
He started off by telling us a story about how Milton Erickson discovered his particular method of hypnosis.. But this wasn’t an ordinary story. Because as I was sitting there, listening to the words, allowing them to run through my mind, I started to feel my arms getting heavy. This feeling started to creep around my body and I found my attention completely transfixed on Igor. I was going into trance and so where the other 39 people in the room. I couldn’t believe what was happening and fought to regain control over my body. But the only part that I could still move was my left big toe, everything else felt warm and good. Yet I couldn’t move a muscle. Out of the corner of my eyes I even saw people’s heads drop towards their chests as they nodded off, and all he was doing was telling us a story about how some other guy discovered how to put people into trance.
That was the first time I had really experienced deep trance and it was one of my first ‘Seeing the Matrix’ moments. When you have an experience like that it makes you realise the power of the mind and how little most people know about it. I wonder why hypnosis still has such a pseudo-scientific image as it’s obviously very powerful and is being used increasingly in the context of mainstream medicine for things like pain control. If I were paranoid I’d think that the powers that be don’t want us to have these kinds of skills and knowledge.
So what where the three things I learned?
1. Go into the state you want to induce in others.
People naturally follow each other into various states; energetic, relaxed etc. So if you want other people around you to start feeling relaxed and at ease you have to feel that way yourself first. Once you do that you’ll find that your voice and body language will reflect this and the people around you will start to feel the same.
2. Pace and Lead.
Hypnotism is nothing more than leading someone through different states, and in order to do that you need to first describe what the other person is experiencing in that moment. For example: ‘You are sitting, reading this sentence, saying the words in your mind’.
Then you lead them into a new thought or feeling; ‘and as you’re sitting there reading this sentence your mind might wander off and start to think about in what ways learning this skill could be useful’.
3. The hypnotic state is something you do to yourself.
This literally blew my mind, though now it seems obvious. A hypnotist isn’t sending out magical brain-waves to put other people into trance. They only help us find that state within ourselves. We are the ones that are creating the bodily sensations and thoughts. That’s why the more you trance you experience the better you get at it.
Remember those people that were nodding off during Igor’s story? Those were actually the people that have been practising hypnosis the most. They’ve built up the skill that allows them to go in to trance very quickly.
Those three points raise many interesting questions. First and foremost: Are people putting themselves in and out of trance all the time naturally? What do you guys think?
Anyway, if you want to find out more about Igor Ledochowski and how you can learn these ‘Jedi-level skills’ yourself, check out his site: Conversational Hypnosis.
For the first part of this article go to Gurus: The Good the Bad and the Ugly Part 1
The Bad and the Ugly
Now as I wrote about last time there seems to be enormous power behind committing to a goal, but don’t let it get too far. Sales tactics employed by gurus often involve implying that if you don’t sign up for their courses or buy their books then you aren’t committing to your goals and you won’t be able to reach them.
They try to put you in a bind, which isn’t really fair if you can’t afford it. I’ve had people try to encourage me to take out loans or use my credit card to sign up for courses costing thousands of pounds. Not a nice thing to do in my opinion.I wonder how many people get in to financial difficulty because they fail to think critically in a situation where their emotions have been pumped up.
To be honest, at some seminars I see people that haven’t smiled or felt good in years. When someone gives them permission to be happy they go all out. It’s fun to watch but they have to realise that the guru didn’t wave his magic wand and make them change. They did it themselves. It’s a bit of a head-trip when you find out how much we are in control of ourselves and how much control we willingly give away. For example when I first became interested in hypnosis I thought it was the hypnotist who was doing something to his client, then I realised that it’s the client that is doing all the work. I was a little bit disappointed at first, I thought hypnosis was a sham… until the full implications hit me.
Some people feel disappointed when they hear that a person they respect or look up to has done something they don’t approve of. No matter how succesfull they appear to be they are still humans. Infidelity, drug-use / abuse and bankruptcy will occur in their lives in the same proportions as the total population.
If you are disappointed it can be an indicator that you are investing too much into another person. At the end of the day you should only take on board what is useful for you and discard what is not. You are responsible for your own life as they are for theirs. Learn to separate the message from the person delivering it otherwise you’ll leave yourself open to disappointment and disillusion.
Finally be wary of any organisations that encourage cult like behaviour. This usually includes separating you from your family, not allowing any disagreement with the leaders, pressure to recruit new customers / clients, coercion into donating more and more money or your free time to their cause.