#academickink

I was reading a rather intriguing post from a fellow hypnotist about how to make a trigger stay with someone. Or, what science would call operant conditioning.

The post explained several concepts in an extremely scientific way. Graphs included. You know the kind: axes, slopes, arrows.

And some people may not be entirely used to reading things like that. If you haven’t touched a mathematical slope since high school, seeing hypnosis explained through line graphs can feel… peculiar.

Basically, the question was: how do we make a trigger effective? How do we make it persist?

I’m not talking about teaching it. That’s a different discussion.

I’m talking about how something stops feeling like a conscious action and starts feeling automatic.

And that is where behaviorism enters the picture. Most people remember Pavlov. But this leans more toward Skinner and operant conditioning.

Pure training. Almost as though we were little dogs.

So while hypnosis does not always enjoy being reduced to behaviorism, some of these ideas can still help explain certain mechanisms.

Science, even for those of us surrounded by it, is difficult to explain. To understand something, you search for constants and variables. Science tries to quantify things, even when some things are difficult to quantify, such as the soul.

In this case, the constant would be the hypnosis or the trigger. That is the thing I do not want to change.

And the variables? The things that help maintain it. The things that fluctuate. Ratio and interval.

Fixed Interval: giving reinforcement at a fixed amount of time. It does not matter how many times the behavior happened in between; the reward arrives anyway.

So the subject has their scheduled hypnosis session. No matter what happens, it occurs.

Fixed Ratio: giving reinforcement after a certain number of correct responses. We only reward the subject once they have done what we asked several times.

The problem with fixed systems is that the mind learns the pattern. And when something becomes too predictable, it loses part of its magic.

Novelty disappears. Surprise erodes. Analytical minds stop responding in quite the same way.

When the subject already knows exactly when the reinforcement is coming, part of the absorption becomes administrative. Almost bureaucratic. “Oh yes, this is the part where the reward happens.”

But real hypnosis rarely functions like a laboratory lever.

Reinforcement is not always simply a reward. Sometimes it is attention. Sometimes it is absorption. Sometimes it is connection. Sometimes it is the momentary dissolution of the critical response.

And humans are far too complex to obey graphs perfectly.

There is always the exception. The standard deviation. The unexpected emotion.

It also matters how much the subject participates in the process. A person who knows they are being conditioned begins to metacognitively observe what is happening. And that conscious observation changes the experience itself.

Still, the post contained an interesting idea:

If you want a behavior to become automatic and persistent, variable systems tend to be more effective than completely predictable ones.

Though perhaps the most common mistake is not reinforcing too much.

But rather trying to move too quickly from constant connection to intermittent reinforcement before the response truly exists.