“I just read this great science fiction story. It’s about how machines take control of humans and turn them into zombie slaves! . . . HEY! What time is it?? My TV show is on!”

- Bill Watterson

We’ve all experienced being in trance while watching TV, movies or while at the cinema or movie theater. Since trance is a natural process, it is pretty easy to get into a trance when we concentrate on a movie or the TV screen.

• Have you ever been sucked into a movie and felt as if you were involved in it?
• Have you notices, or been told how while watching a show that you like, that your mouth was slightly open, jaw relaxed, and eyes fixated at the TV without much body movement?

If you answered yes to any of these, then you’ve experienced hypnosis in action, you were in trance.

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“The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.”

– Stanley Milgram, 1974 .

Do you think of yourself as a conformist or a non-conformist? If you are like most people, you probably believe that you are non-conformist enough to stand up to a group when you know you are right, but conformist enough to blend in with the rest of your peers.

In psychological terms, conformity refers to an individual’s tendency to follow the unspoken rules or behaviors of the social group to which he or she belongs. Researchers have long been interested in the degree to which people follow or rebel against social norms. During the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the powers of conformity in groups.

Another shocking psychological experiment conducted was the Milgram Experiment for obedience to authority. If a person in a position of authority ordered you to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person, would you follow orders? Most people would answer this question with an adamant no, but Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of obedience experiments during the 1960s that demonstrated surprising results. These experiments offer a powerful and disturbing look into the power of authority and obedience.

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“It’s really become a game of chicken, … But to mix my metaphors, the consumer has also become trained like Pavlov’s dog. He expects the pre-Christmas sales and deeper price cuts through the holidays.”

- Craig Johnson

Social Conditioning refers to the sociological phenomena characterized by a process of inherited tradition and gradual cultural transmutation passed down through previous generations. Manifestations of social conditioning are vast, but they are gererally categorized as social patterns and social structures.

In the psychological sense includes all the negative and positive emotions learned through our childhood. Emotionally all of us are so conditioned that practically we are unconscious; we simply are reactive entities. During childhood we learned when to display a particular emotion, and that is what we do until we discover that we have been conditioned to self destroyed ouselves. We react, we do not use self-awareness, which is not part of the social conditioning. Social conditioning is about not having awareness and allowing the empty feelling inside to take over. Because of the social conditioning we lack awareness, without awareness we think we are the body and mind, that is all. This is sad. Isn’t it?

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“There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there. “

- Albert Einstein

Even though hypnosis has a deep history, it still took the scientific and unscientific efforts of numerous pioneers for the subject to gain acceptance throughout western science and medicine. All around the globe, scientists and mystics tweaked the understanding and presentation of hypnosis to the public in such a way that it inevitably gained much attention and recognition. Despite many harsh critics and obstacles, the concept of hypnosis slowly began to receive the respect it so appropriately deserved.

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“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”

- Adrienne Rich

Scientists now know the power of suggestion is more influential than previously thought. In a 2002 study involving undergraduates at Midwestern and California universities, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and her team of behavioral researchers at UC Irvine got over a third of her subjects to say they shook hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, by implanting the impossible suggestion– Bugs Bunny is not a Disney character. The study demonstrates the reconstructive nature of memory, and Loftus says the results show that it’s possible to convince people that they have witnessed something that has not actually happened. Her research has been cited in the US Department of Justice’s guide to eyewitness evidence and is helping to prevent wrongful convictions due to unreliable eyewitness accounts.

These results may be surprising to some, but not Loftus, who has been researching memory for over twenty years. Although no one knows exactly how memory works, Loftus says scientists’ ideas about memory are evolving from the theory that memories are permanently and immutably stored in the brain. Now, Loftus and many of her colleagues believe that memories are constantly being updated to fit “post-event information,” such as events, details, and comments that are experienced later.

According to this theory, memories are not stored like snapshots, but are instead like sketches that are altered and added to every time they are called up. Loftus has shown subjects who are given false information about an event or scene tend to incorporate it into their memories, and “recall” the false information as a part of their original memory even two weeks later. In other experiments, subjects asked to imagine scenarios can then become convinced that the imagined scenario is a real memory. This happens, Loftus says, when people forget the source of the information.

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“Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it. “

-Stephen Vizinczey

The placebo effect is a mechanism where someone is taking a medicine that contains really nothing. They think the medicine that they are taking helps them to get rid of their ailment. The person automatically becomes better even though the medicine contained no real substance.

Many critics point out that homeopathy works because of the placebo effect. Many homeopathic medicines contain no active substance so any benefits realized with homeopathy must be due to a placebo effect. So much does the placebo effect actually help is brought into question?

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“Human intelligence may not be the best trick nature has to offer. “

-Bryant H. McGill

Our eyes see everything going on around us. The eyes then send this information to our brain which then interprets the information they are given. Sometimes the brain has to fudge a little when making these interpretations. This is especially true when our eyes see something that the brain knows cannot be true. In cases like this, the brain interprets the information the best it can and may end up feeling a little bit confused.

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“Free will is an illusion. People always choose the perceived path of greatest pleasure. “

-Scott Adams

Richard O. Brown, Staff Neuroscientist at The Exploratorium, talks about the interaction between mind and matter and visual perception. He talks about and illustrates with fascinating visuals three concepts:

1. There is nothing out there and we perceive nothing which he feels comes closest to blackness.
2. There is something out there and we can’t perceive it, which comes closest to invisibility.
3. There is nothing out there and we’re still experiencing or perceiving something.

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“Because our entire universe is made up of consciousness, we never really experience the universe directly we just experience our consciousness of the universe, our perception of it, so right, our only universe is perception. “

-Alan Moore

Acclaimed neuroscientist Christof Koch is renowned for his contributions to the quest for understanding the underlying mechanisms of consciousness. During a celebrated, sixteen-year collaboration with Francis Crick, he developed a pioneering account of the bases of visual perception, attention, and consciousness.

Join Nobel Laureate Francis Crick as he explains new ideas and experiments in the fascinating field of human consciousness.

On TEDtalks, Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

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“We see with our eyes, but we also see with our minds.”

-Oliver Sacks (Neurologist)

Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnett syndrome – when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon.

He particularly focuses on the hallucinations of Charles Bonnet syndrome where damage or decay of the retina can cause strikingly complex hallucinations of people and animals that seems to be a natural part of the visual scene. What diseases such as these are starting to reveal about the structure and amazing complexity of the brain, not least of which is the multiplicity of independent information processing centers dedicated to visual perception alone.

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