This is super-interesting!
Hypno-therapeutic interventions can be really subtle and not at all pendulum-swinging hocuspocus stuff. :)

(Please excuse my half-assed commenting, after 8 years, I'd like to be finally able to use this site, so it's a lazy attempt at karma-farming...)

What I like about this article is the scientific underpinning. Excellent post.

I learned hypnosis and NLP in the 80's and had a successful private practice in that and hands-on bodywork (Aston-Patterning), so the question as to whether it can shake off its stage magician rep is quite old and rather settled.

A couple interesting NLP points: we go in and out of various cognitive and unconscious states all day. Apparently if I ask you to remember the smell of a rose, you've gone into a pretty heavy state. And the people who relieve you of your watches and wallets without you knowing it are relying on a fascinating factoid: that we can only be aware of 4 plus or minus 3 things at once, and that's for the three main perceptors: sight, sound, and tactile feeling.

Miller's law, 7 bits of info plus or minus 2, for anyone interested. All this stuff plays into my VR interests.😁

Thanks for the cite. Miller was great.

Milton Erickson was the best health hypnotist--loads has been written about him.

Yep, I'm familiar. I've been into hypnosis and meditative type stuff since I was like 9. Now, if the world will stop being crazy so I can focus for more than 5 minutes, I'm playing around with trying to combine all that stuff with machine learning and VR. Kind of a framework for automating elicitation and virtual anchoring. I'm fascinated with the idea of trying to take the language we use to create trance and change in therapeutic methodologies and converting them into a fantastical simulation to the same ends.

Sounds intriguing. I'd love to know more.

So would I lol. Unfortunately, my life went haywire and everything got put on hold while I took care of my grandparents for their final years. This was where I was collecting a lot of info. Hopefully I'll be able to get started on it again before the end of the year. I'm currently working on building out a van so I can get back on the road and then hopefully I'll have the time and space to sit down and resurrect everything. Really it comes down to trying to figure out VR experiences that trigger specific quale and understanding that, much like storytelling, things like hypnosis are a matter of taking those qualia and presenting them in a congruent way that the previous qualia lay the groundwork for the acceptance of the next quale. The modern day equivalent for all this stuff is basically rides like at Disney; There has to be congruency to the story and the experience or the user is going to be taken completely out of the illusion/trance. Now VR is a unique technology in that it lets us create these illusions, these "rides", in a dynamic manner. Then, if you're using biometric feedback, like eye tracking and BCI tech, you can monitor for subconscious cues that tell you things like preferences or fears. And since it's a world you've created and can alter, over time, you can gradually discern what stimuli creates what subconscious behavior. This is why Facebook is spending so much money on VR, they basically do a rudimentary version of this using screen focus, NLP (natural language processing), and Reactions. So VR is the perfect upgrade for their dystopian brainwashing business model.