5. Hypnosis, volition, and mind control

5.3. Conscious vs. Unconscious

Is there actually an 'unconscious mind' in some sense? And if so, does itexplain certain kinds of response to hypnotic suggestion?

First, it is very likely that information is actually processed, at leastunder certain conditions, outside of conscious awareness, and that it caninfluence behavior. A modern look at this old topic can be found inKihlstrom's 1987 Science article, "The Cognitive Unconscious," 237,1445-1452. This is not to say that any particular 'subliminal learning'claims have support from this notion, only that it is possible for perceptionof a sort to occur without apparent conscious awareness.

One study demonstrating a subliminal influence on subsequent behavior wasBorgeat & Goulet, 1983, "Psychophysiological changes following auditorysubliminal suggestions for activation and deactivation," appearing inPerceptual & Motor Skills. 56(3):759-66, 1983 Jun.

This study was to measure eventual psychophysiological changes resulting fromauditory subliminal activation or deactivation suggestions. 18 subjects werealternately exposed to a control situation and to 25-dB activating anddeactivating suggestions masked by a 40-dB white noise. Physiological measures(EMG, heart rate, skin-conductance levels and responses, and skin temperature)were recorded while subjects listened passively to the suggestions, during astressing task that followed and after that task. Multivariate analysis ofvariance showed a significant effect of the activation subliminal suggestionsduring and following the stressing task. This result is discussed asindicating effects of consciously unrecognized perceptions onpsychophysiological responses.

A hypnotic subject clearly also takes an active and voluntary role in somesense as well when carrying out suggestions, as pointed out by Spanos and thesocial-psychological theorists.

Perhaps the data showing this contrast most strikingly is from the study of'hypnotic blindness.' One example is Bryant and McConkey's 1989 "HypnoticBlindness: A Behavioral and Experimental Analysis," Journal of AbnormalPsychology, 98, 71-77, and also p. 443-447, "Hypnotic Blindness,Awareness, and Attribution." Subjects given hypnotic suggestions forblindness behave in some ways as if they were truly blind, and in other, oftensubtle and unexpected ways, the information from their visual field influencestheir behavior.

It appears that some form of neurological events involving more or lessintelligent response to information can occur, in or out of hypnosis, withoutour direct awareness of them. One theory proposes that the brain has asimultaneous parallel capacity for cognitive learning and forstimulus-response learning, independently of each other and by differentneural mechanisms. This has been proposed by some as a partial explanationfor automatisms and some hypnotic responses. One version of this view may befound in the article by Mishkin, Malamut, and Bachevalier, "Memories andHabits: Two Neural Systems," in The Neurobiology of Learning andBehavior, edited by McGangh, Lynch, and Weinberger, by Guilford Press.

It is important to recognize that the detailed physiological mechanismsunderlying the processing of information in general are largely speculative,and that the gaps in our understanding of hypnotic phenomena (or 'states ofconsciousness' in general) complicate the situation. It has been contendedthat even some of the simpler forms of learning and information processingconsist of a number of different processes, each with its own specialproperties.

One important distinction is between explicit and implicit learning. Explicitlearning is what we commonly think of as doing as part of the consciousreasoning process when we try to learn something deliberately. It generallyinvolves reasoning and hypothesis testing. Implicit learning is acquiring newinformation which either cannot be verballized, or which occurs apparentlywithout conscious reasoning and hypothesis testing. Kihlstrom, oneinvestigator of hypnotic and unconscious psychological processes, has shownthat a particular variant of implicit learning, involving certain non-novelinformation (such as word pairings), can occur under medical anesthesia. Thedegree to which this can be considered a form of learning in the more generalnon-technical sense is difficult to say, and the precise neurobiologicalmechanism of anesthesia is likewise somewhat elusive. But it has also beenobserved that implicitly learned material has certain unique characteristics,as compared to explicitly learned material, such as that implicit material ismore often preserved intact in cases of amnesia.

Some examples of research into learning and perception which occurs outside ofsensory (visual) attention:

• Mandler, Nakamura & Van Zandt (1987). Nonspecific effects of exposureon stimuli that connot be recognized. J Exp Psych: Learning, Memory andCognition, 13, 646-648.
• Miller (1987). Priming is not necessary for selective-attention failures:Semantic effects of unattended, unprimed letters. Perception andPsychophysics, 41, 419-431.
• Carlson & Dulany (1985). Conscious attention and abstraction inconcept learning. J Exp Psych: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11, 45-58.

Some examples of research into multiple foci of attention:

• Cohen, Ivry & Keele (1990). Attention and structure in sequencelearning. J Exp Psych: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 17-30.
• Dienes, Broadbent, & Berry (1991). Implicit and explicit knowledgebases in artificial grammar learning. JEPLMC, 17, 875-887.
• Hayes & Broadbent (1988). Two modes of learning for interactive tasks.Cognition, 28, 249-276.

On the concept of attention in general:

• * Allport (1989) Visual Attention. In M.I.Posner (Ed.) Foundations ofCognitive Science. (pp. 631-682).
• Kahneman & Treisman (1984). Changing views of attention andautomaticity. In Parasuraman & Davies (Eds.) Varieties of Attention.
• Navon (1985). Attention division or attention sharing? In Posner and Marin(Eds) Attention and Performance XI.
• Neumann (1987). Beyond capacity: A functional view of attention. In Heuer& Sanders (Eds.) Perspectives on Perception and Action.