This weeks blog is about how our mind hides stuff from us, what we pay attention to and our beliefs. It is based on a section of teaching I presented for last weeks diploma students, a conversation over coffee with the performer James Brown, the magician, hypnotist and pickpocket and his subsequent lecture on misdirection.
An Interesting Talk
I had a literally magical evening last night. In London there is an organisation called ‘Interesting Talks’ which lays on evening lectures on a range of subjects loosely oriented around personal development and therapy. Last night’s talk was on Magical Misdirection and the principles of getting away with moving, stealing or placing objects under someone’s nose without them noticing or realising.
The presenter, James Brown – also known as the Professional Opportunist, is an award winning magician, pickpocket and hypnotist. James is a friend of mine and I have worked on seminars with him teaching hypnotherapists advanced skills.
He didn’t give away any trade secrets, real magicians never reveal how a trick works – not least because most magic has a really simple basis which is frankly disappointing! If you were a professional magician would you want your audience to leave perplexed and entertained or disappointed? What he did describe was an interesting and seemingly automated ability of the brain to not pay attention.
How it works
If you were to wonder how this works you might guess that the magician misdirects your attention. The problem with this is that there will be people in the audience who also would have thought of that obvious tactic. They will be watching like a hawk for this, determined to ignore any obvious attempt at misdirection and looking for the opportunity to say something like ‘Ah, when you dropped the card I saw you put the pack in your pocket’.
The actual answer is that the magician looks for what James called ‘downbeats’ – when the audience is looking but not seeing.
What?
Deletion
Our brain is constantly receiving massive amounts of information from our sensory organs; eyes, ears, etc. To avoid overload it makes decision over what is important to us and deletes the rest.
Have you ever had one of these experiences?
- You look at your watch, someone spots this and asks you the time. You have no idea and have to look at your watch again.
- You are looking for something in your home; car keys, aspirin, Marmite. You can’t find it, indeed repeatedly say ‘I can’t find it’ in your head. You eventually exclaim this out loud and someone else in the house becomes interested, looks and points out that the object is in plain sight. Under your nose.
- You are in a coffee shop on your own, drinking and reading a newspaper or book. Over the top of your book or newspaper you notice an attractive person sitting nearby in clear view. At some point a little later you notice that they have left but you did not see them go.
The field of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) describes this as the brain’s ‘Deletion Filter’ – one part of a valuable and essential mechanism of the brain to cope with the constant stream of information we receive through our senses. The other filters allow us to generalise and distort – for speedy decision making and reactions - so a flapping object flying towards us can very quickly be classified as a bird and we almost instantly judge that no action is needed as it will avoid us. Then we notice that actually it is a duck but we have already handled the situation correctly.
Sneaky
So good magicians understand and know about this deletion effect. They know where and when you are going to be paying attention and when you are going to be looking but not noticing.
In one of the demonstrations James ‘disappeared’ a credit card. He told the owner of the credit card and the audience he was going to do this. They were all watching, hoping to see how he did it.
He played with the card moving it from hand to hand, twisting, turning it, reading the owner’s name out and making a joke about hoping that was actually his name and that he hadn’t stolen the card.
And then it was gone. ‘Did you see that go?’ he asks innocently.
This was made all the more impressive as he did all this with a broken hand. Clearly there is also a high level of skill and experience to pull off this trick, but there were 50 pairs of eyes watching him and none of us noticed the card going.
To make it easier for us, he repeated this with a smart phone, one of those big touch screen models. We watched intently. We didn’t see the phone go either.
Beliefs
This principle reminded me of some of training I did over the weekend, teaching a group of diploma students about challenging beliefs. These are beliefs that are detrimental to the client – they think they can’t do something because they are too old, too stupid, too slow, too poor, too unadventurous, the list goes on.
The problem is that many beliefs have no basis in reality but are constantly supported by the deletion principle as our brains decide for us what it thinks is important. The principle here becomes that the brain will notice things that support our beliefs and disregard or dismiss evidence that conflicts with them.
Belief Excision
As a therapist I have a number of ways of adjusting , removing and replacing beliefs with something more positive and progressive (meaning continual improvement or increasing achievement).
Step 1 - have the client notice the belief.
Step 2 - Write it down, in some way taking that belief out of it’s safe environment within the mind and exposing it for scrutiny.
Step 3 – Logically dispute the belief. Ask for evidence that supports it (‘how do you know this is true’) and point out evidence that conflicts with it.
Step 4 - Suggest a better belief, or ideally design this with the client. For example, turning ‘I’m too old’ into ‘I have a wealth of experience to support me’.
You can see that this is a process of weakening the belief, chipping away at it.
We can go on to challenge its position as a part of their identify – does this already weakened belief fit with their self-image or the new self-image we can design with them?
Finally we can ask them to consider and plan what they would do if differently if they no longer had that belief?
These last two point I usually do under hypnosis – engaging the imagination and allowing the imprint a new visualisation of their beliefs and identify and the benefits this will bring.
Finally
After the presentation, during which James had identified me as a therapist, I was approached by one of the other attendees who asked what my ideas were on removing negative beliefs. I suggested the following question – ‘If you no longer had that belief, what is the first thing you would do differently?’
This does a number of things in one simple sentence. It pre-supposes that the belief is something separate to their identity and that it can be discarded. It suggests that removing it will allow them to do things differently and hints that this will start with the ‘first thing you would do’ but there will be more changes in behaviour and therefore results.
Most importantly – to answer that question they have to ‘go inside’ and imagine not having that belief and doing something it currently prevents them from doing. That is called mental rehearsal, a topic for another day.