Max Trance - Artful Hypnotic Anchoring: 9 Steps to Guide Someones Thinking

The human brain is an incredibly complex piece of equipment. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that at the time of writing, it is the single most complex piece of hardware known to us.

Our brains are essentially vast neural networks, and as such they have the same properties that neural networks do.

To keep things easy, I will mostly refer to the mind rather than the brain. Whereas the brain is the physical hardware composed of neurons and other cells, the mind is more like the software running inside that brain.

You could say that someones mind is the end result of everything that has happened to them throughout their life.

As hypnotists, we tend to consider a mind to be composed of a conscious part and an unconscious part. In simple terms, the conscious part is everything were aware of at a point in time, and the unconscious part is everything else.

As you can imagine, the unconscious part is vastly bigger than the conscious part. This has to be true since the sum total of everything that weve experienced in our lives up until now is vastly bigger than what were experiencing at this moment in time.

So how does a mind work?

At its core, our brain can only do one thing. It can associate stuff with other stuff.

It feels like we can do logic and think and reason, and the truth is that to a large extent we can only do those things consciously.

You see, the world works in a way that we consider to be logical on the scale of humans. When our brain experiences this world, it processes those experiences, and then makes up rules to reflect this.

If we experienced life on a quantum scale, there is no doubt that our brains would consider quantum processes to be logical and would find the macroscopic world that we live in now to be bizarre.

These associations constantly going on inside our brains are the core of the process of learning itself.

Every time we experience anything in the world, our brains integrate it with everything weve experienced previously.

We tend to think of learning as a separate thing that we do in school or when were studying materials specifically designed for that purpose or even when we are learning on the job. In reality, everything we do results in learning of one form or another.

When these associations happen inside our minds, representations are formed of things out in the world. In the psychological world, these representations are known as chunks.

If youre familiar with software development, they are our brains equivalent of an object in an object oriented programming language, structured in a hierarchy which is dependent on how we see the world.

For example, I am sitting on an office chair right now. In the next room over, there are a couple of couches, which are also a form of chair. Inside my mind there is a representation of a chair which includes both of these, and also the specific representations of office chair and couch, which are distinct from each other but part of the same general group of objects known as chairs.

Every time I experience a new chair out in the world, or think about chairs, every previous representation of a chair is accessed and updated in some small way.

Now, the existence of an object out in the world does not in any way mean that its representation inside our minds has well-defined boundaries.

We can say with certainty that some things are definitely a part of the concept of a chair, and some things are not. But at the level of neural connections, our brains dont really know that. All they know is that there is some stuff next to some other stuff (either in space or in time), and so the brain associates that stuff together.