Attention and Intention

Attention is the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really the effort of attention; the strain in willing is the strain of keeping the attention focused.

– Rollo May

To get a child to trade something of genuine value for a trivial incentive is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in some cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to Unintentional Trance Formation as they were when they were children. Whenever they are in a high-risk state, provoking a relapse is as easy as taking candy from a baby.

The Mentality of Childhood

Children assume that their state-dependent perceptions and beliefs are accurate reflections of objective reality. They label their appraisals in ways that crystallize these experiential phenomena into “things” that have an independent reality. For example: “Mommy is bad,” carries with it the tacit premise that “she really is bad and it’s not just that I’m cranky.” The dispassionate observer understands that the child’s cranky state influences his current appraisals, and mommy won’t always seem bad. Later, when the child is in a different emotional state, his appraisal will be influenced by a different state-dependent filter. Naturally, the child is always unaware of the Soul Illusion and in each situation believes that he sees things as they really are.

When a child experiences fear—say in the doctor’s office just before the inoculation—her emotional arousal comes with the tacit premise that the fear is based on a real threat and its intensity is related to the awfulness of the situation. Some children experience such strong emotional states that they must be restrained by adults, even though they are told, “It will just sting for a moment.” Likewise, children often believe that the intensity of their desire for a certain incentive correlates with the degree of pleasure they will actually receive from it.

Many grown-ups continue to think that their perceptions, expectancies, and appraisals are undistorted reflections of a permanent objective reality [see The Soul Illusion]. An important developmental milestone is the appreciation that subjective experience—including cravings, negative thoughts, and anxious feelings—is merely a temporary, state-dependent phenomenon, which exists only in the mind of the beholder. The objective world is populated with events; it is only within your subjective reality that beliefs, emotional reactions, and the story that gives it all meaning exist. The technical term for this realization is, Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness is not available to children and animals. To over-ride the influence of cause-and-effect principles so you can exercise your will requires the ability to step out of the Experiential Processing System that reacts to the immediate demands of the local environment and and shift to the detached perspective of the operator who is sensitive to your core motivation.

Salience Versus Meaning

Salience refers to how bright or attention grabbing a stimulus is, not necessarily how meaningful it is.  The picture of one child suffering as the result of an act of war is more salient and thus more effective in provoking a state change in the audience than are statistics of thousands killed.

Your psychological state is, to a large extent, determined by the stimulus that captures your attention.  Some stimuli are so salient that they can elicit a state change without your conscious intention. 

Threatening stimuli are naturally salient.  After all, we are descended from the organisms that noticed threats; those who did not are not our ancestors.  If you observed a genuine threat, say a rattlesnake inches from your feet, you would certainly experience a trance formation.  Your psychological state would change from whatever it is now to fight-or-flight. Reading this text would no longer seem important, and rightly so because the fight-or-flight reaction would be more adaptive under such circumstances than considering abstract principles.  In this example, the snake is both salient and meaningful.

Now consider an individual with a snake phobia: The idea that there might be a snake in his back yard elicits fear in the absence of an objective threat.  In this example, the snake is salient but meaningless—that is, the thought or image of the snake is effective at capturing attention and evoking state change, but the resulting state-dependent phenomena are not well matched to the objective reality. 

When there is a mismatch between salience and meaning:

In the best of worlds, we would focus on things that are meaningful to us and not spend it on activities we consider to be a waste of time, or, worse, counter to our interests.  In the real world, stimuli that promote relapse tend to be more salient than stimuli that provoke you to act in accord with your interests and principles.

There are always competitors for your attention.  The principles of cause-and-effect seem to conspire to favor stimuli that promote relapse:

  • Relapse fantasies are hotter than imagery of successful coping:
    • The image of you relapsing is “hot” either because you get to imagine using the incentive, or you get seduced by the salient negative imagery of the shame and demoralization of the violation.  On the other hand, the image of you behaving as you intend to behave seems ordinary and not especially interesting.
  • Bias toward accepting a negative rather than a positive belief about yourself:
    • A popular misconception is that there is an authentic you and pretending to be better than you are would simply be prideful self-delusion. In fact, there is no authentic you. The one that shows up at any given time is the one that emerges from your current subjective reality. Barry performs better socially when he perceives himself as clever and attractive than when he feels socially inept and shame-worthy.  Even though the former appraisal is more accurate and helpful than the latter, Barry acts as if the more salient suggestions were valid. By so doing, Barry transforms these negative suggestions into objective reality through his state-dependent performance. 

Hypnosis and Selective Attention

Attending to salient but meaningless stimuli, such as thoughts of using the incentive or critical self-judgments for having such thoughts, elicit pathogenic trances. You do have the power to change the contents of your consciousness and the target of your attention. So rather than accepting high-risk emotional states such anger or desire, have the courage to selectively attend to efficacy-enhancing thoughts and images.

It is easy to perform well when you are cool and confident and doing something you know you are good at. The heroic challenge is to perform well during a crisis. A good part of this heroic challenge is learning how to access the state-dependent phenomena that will help you cope with an ongoing crisis.

Hypnosis and Ordinary Trances > >

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