Book Review: "The Hypnotist" by Jake Shannon

"The Hypnotist: Healer, Head-Hacker, & Headliner"

by Jake Shannon

https://www.createspace.com/3623853

Jake Shannon is a fascinating multi-talented man with a rich and partly enviable life experience. He has also lived through extraordinary pain and illness which were a big part of his initial inspiration for his deep study of hypnosis. As in the life story Dan Ariely, whose life with severe burns helped shape his fascination with psychology, Jake turned to the study of the mind for healing and pain relief. Hypnosis served Jake, as it has served many, as a way to alter the way they experience pain and discomfort.

If "hypnosis" simply referred to a straightforward technique for altering our perception, and that were the end of the story, then Jake's book would have been much more narrow in scope. The intentional structure of the human mind as we understand it pretty much ensures that any any discussion of perception also overlaps with a discussion of beliefs, behavior, communication, and social interaction. This network of concepts has far reaching implications in areas that fascinate all reflective people.

Topics as deep and diverse as the nature of "free will" and responsibility, the sources of extraordinary (and ordinary) human abilities, the role of social compliance in human life, and the malleability of perception all have some meaningful dependence on the ideas that underlie contemporary theories of hypnosis in terms of things like suggestion and expectancy. That interaction, and those dependences, are where the story gets really interesting, and Jake stands out to me in the broad way he has captured them.

Jake surveys the key concepts from a wide range of hypnosis theories, but he does not stop there. He also explores their use in daily life and their implications for social and political issues. When we extend our scientific theories to less directly empirical questions like the implications for social and political issues, of course we tend to incorporate our own distinctive leanings along the way.

Jake's distinctive leanings are strongly libertarian, and libertarian philosophy does not map neatly onto the usual political spectrum but has its own distinct principles. In his book "Justice," Michael Sandel argues that libertarian philosophy revolves crucially on the idea of self-ownership, and I think this is borne out in Jake's perspective on hypnosis. Jake is starting with the central notion that we own the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our role in it, and that we can and should take responsibility for guiding our own self-talk and for filtering the inevitable influences that impinge on it.

For Jake, the crux of hypnosis is entering into and redirecting the conversation we all have with ourselves in our own thoughts, thus shaping the inner stories we tell ourselves. This emphasis on the language aspects of hypnosis are particularly complementary with the communications theories of hypnosis, such as the ideas derived from the studies of Milton Erickson's hypnotherapeutic methods. Jake wants to tie the concept of hypnosis together with a host of other phenomena of importance to self-ownership, particularly social compliance phenomena, so the emphasis on communications and language seems to be strategic.

Hypnotic phenomena are all about changes in our perception as a result of "suggestion," and it is notoriously difficult to distinguish changes in perception from their related mutual influences on belief, behavior, attitude, and emotional associations. So Jake is working from very fertile ground in adopting the broad view of hypnosis as a class of psychological phenomena with interesting social implications. The question that arises about the role of "hypnosis" (in the broad sense Jake uses the term) in human life is whether the sorts of focused suggestions we associate with hypnotism really have a lasting and systematic effect. This is where the topic has historically gone astry in the public mind, with many people attributing much greater and more mysterious power to hypnosis than it deserves, and others attempting to debunk it out of existence as a distinctive class of phenomena of any importance.

Jake would seemingly focus on hypnotic suggestion as a situation where the someone's existing inner conversation is entered into and guided or redirected by the voice of the hypnotist. In the communications view, the explanation for what is going on in the situation (our self-talk about the situation) seems to be a driver for what will follow. We explain the situation to ourself in a particular way, and as a result we act in the situation as if that explanation were true. I think this primacy of the role of explanation in behavior in Jake's thesis is tied tightly to his committment to libertarian self-ownership. It provides a focus point where we can more clearly see how we can influence our own behavior, and how we influence each other. In psychological terms, it centers around *compliance* rather than the _experience_ we have from hypnosis.

Jake's summary illustrates this focus on compliance very clearly: "The hypnotist accesses the subject’s self-conversation through specific rhetorical techniques and subject similar-body language while leveraging the effects of expectation and authority in the subject’s mind in order to achieve compliance."

Explanation is just one albeit critical aspect of human mind, but it clearly isn't the primary driver of behavior in a wide range of situations. Jake refers to the work of John Bargh and others who have demonstrated this experimentally. Jake seems to give the non-language aspects of hypnotic phenomena a secondary role as influencers on our inner dialog. Importantly, he sees hypnosis as "leveraging the effects ..." of expectancy rather than expectancy being the central distinction of effective suggestion.

A less communications-oriented view might see the same situation as if our expectations were altered first, through various language and non-language means, and then our experience and behavior followed our expectations, followed at last by some explanation. In the expectancy view promoted by Irving Kirsch (for example), the explanation for why we responded to a suggestion is an artifact, not a driver of the behavior. We follow a suggestion, and then explain why we followed it. Experiments have sometimes deliberately imposed a conflict between an explicit suggestion and an implicit expectancy, and Kirsch interprets those as demonstrating that the expectancy (rather than the language per se) is what drives the resulting behavior. Jake sees automaticity as "the ability to do habitual tasks with little active thought." Kirsch, in his writings on automaticity, has gone much farther and described it as the default state for daily life, where active thought arises only under limited conditions. The non-communications views tend to focus more on the _experience_ of hypnosis and especially why **our experience of control** differs from situation to situation.

This is to some extent a chicken and egg problem, since we can find circumstances where behavior is more clearly driven by the (potentially) self-owned stories we tell ourselves, and also circumstances where our explanations for our own behavior are completely at odds with a more compelling cause. The stronger-self-ownership view of the mind will of course tend to emphasize the role that we play in guiding it. The stronger-automaticity view emphasizes the small, critical windows where active guidance actually takes place. These are not mutually exclusive ideas, something that I think Jake does manage to get across in his book. Again, though, there is that important difference in emphasis, and the different role of language in the human mind that this difference in emphasis represents.

It seems plausible that we can reconcile these different views by seeing the mind as having multiple different parallel systems, perhaps one speciallized for explanations, and others speciallized for motivating and guiding behavior as such. This is part of the role that Jake seems to attribute to bicameral theories of mind. As good promoters of natural science, we want to somehow try to map the features of the mind onto the brain, and bicameral theories take a big swing at that. I think the process of mapping mind onto brain is, while laudable, problematic in practice for various reasons perhaps better identified by philosophers than scientists. Also I don't personally step onto the train of thought that views the anatomical division of many of the brain's "higher" structures as also being a fundamental infrastructure of psychology, nor do I think it plays a particularly fundamental role in explanations of hypnosis, but I do think it is likely that it plays at least some secondary role. My difference with Jake here seems to be mostly one of emphasis.

I don't criticize Jake for taking on the language-focused view of hypnosis here, and I understand how compellingly it fits into the bigger picture of ownership for our own thinking and behavior. In various notable attempts to naturallize consciousness, various reflective thinkers such as Daniel C. Dennett have also described the meaning-making function of the mind largely in terms of stories we tell ourselves, and this does seem to imply a huge role for language as well.

The remaining question is the relationship between language and experience, and in the case of Jake's thesis in this book, especially the experience of *control* and its relationship to compliance. Understanding the phenomena of hypnosis (broadly defined), Jake empahsizes, can help us gain better control of our own mind, and better understand the influences that others are having. I would say that compliance and self-ownership of our mind is a larger topic than is hypnosis, but that Jake is right on target in pointing out the crucial importance of understanding how our mind is shaped and influenced, and how much we can learn about this from the phenomena of hypnosis.

I would actually go farther and say that I think the phenomena of hypnosis have potentially much more to tell us about the nature of the mind than just about the issues pertaining to compliance and influence. I wouldn't entirely define hypnosis in terms of compliance or language, I would define it more primarily in terms of expectancies, and in revisioning the workings of the mind in terms of expectancies I would expand Jake's thesis to include even broader implications of our shifting sense of control for law, medicine, philosophy, economics, and so on. Still, this is a great start and a very worthwhile research effort with both a depth and breadth of ideas you won't easily find elsewhere and which most people will find surprising, fascinating, often troubling, and most importantly, useful in understanding ourselves. I urge you to learn from Jake's experiences and reflections.

Shirky vs. Carr: Battle for the future mind

The Wall Streeet Journal online is playing off two authors of recent books with opposing premises:



Clay Shirky with his optimistic view of how the Internet is making us smarter by giving us more freedom to expand our minds, as discussed in his book, Cognitive Surplus



Nicholas Carr with his more pessimistic take on how the Internet is making us think more shallowly, from his book, The Shallows


As both a fanatical book reader and a collaboration technology specialist, I appreciate both views so this is a fascinating dialectic for me. So far I give the edge to Carr for realism and depth based on the articles, but I haven't read both books yet and of course I have my own bias as well.

Both authors share the common understanding that the way we read shapes the way we think, but they take away different lessons from that. I am reading Carr and he seems to have a good handle on the tradeoffs between the high velocity high diversity web tech reading mode and the undistracted reflective book reading mode. I haven't read Shirky, I don't know how realistic he is about the tradeoffs. His article seems a bit Panglossian.

Since I create web tech for clients for a living, I realize how powerful this technology is, but I am also often in a position to see how it affects their thinking. My biggest challenges in helping people think together using portals and knowledge management tech involve getting them to think about the content in a useful way rather than just clicking on things and making hasty choices. My objective in a good portal site is to encourage people to ask the right questions to the solve real problems faced by the team. Just putting links up on a page is helpful, but it makes a real difference to the outcome to have a structure that guides thinking.

Shirky seems to assume that greater cognitive freedom will automatically be used well because cognitive surplus will somehow make people want to be responsible for their own understanding.

Carr takes the view that media are not just neutral tools that can be used for better or worse, they actually impose a particular way of thinking and interacting upon us. So the freedom Shirky prizes has unspoken structure to it that we take for granted. I think this has a very strong basis in scientific theory as well, from a variety of fields. The symbolic mind did not arise out of nowhere as part of the modern brain macro structure. We know from modern neuroscience research that the brain is far more plastic than we previously assumed, and we know that abstract symbolic thinking involved distinct changes in the brain. It is entirely plausible that over time the nature of each type of media has shaped the brain in different ways. Every step had its tradeoffs.

Our assumption that in every age the tradeoff was always purely for the best ... that's the definition of a Panglossian view.

Maybe it's just my own bias as a book lover, but so far I think Carr has a more realistic view of the tradeoffs involved and understands better real advantages and disadvantages of the different kinds of media.

In one sense, the power of web tech is very obvious. Authors often find me talking about their books and contact me to start a dialog. That's a pleasure I rarely had when writing in a more traditional format. I am exposed to far more interesting material on the web than I could ever manage to gather up in a bookstore. But then I do have to isolate myself for a while from the distractions in order to really dig into a good book and engage the mind of its author and think deeply about their points.

Those are the tradeoffs for me, and if Carr is right, future generations won't have both options.

I'm looking forward to reviewing the Carr book when I'm done.

Update 6/5: Jonah Lehrer had this excellent NYT review of Carr which so far I largely agree with: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/books/review/Lehrer-t.html

Update 6/6: Wen Stephenson on Bostom.Com with another good review:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/06/06/the_internet_ate_my_brain/?page=full

Update 6/10: Carr's own blog "RoughType" has a list of reviews as well: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/06/reviews.php and there's a wonderful conversation between Nicholas Carr, Jonah Lehrer and others on Jonah Lehrer's blog "Frontal Cortex" at http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/06/the_shallows.php

Update 6/20: Jonah Lehrer reviews Clay Shirky:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2010/06/cognitive_surplus.php

Book Review: Minsky's "The Emotion Machine: - Doing Strong AI Right?

Early efforts to model human-like thinking with machines using rules were interesting but failed in a number of ways to capture even simple ways that humans think. Marvin Minsky, AI pioneer at MIT, insists that we understand the mistakes and can begin to appreciate how the mind actually works in functional terms from the lessons we have learned. Learninig from our past mistakes, what a novel idea.

To put this into perspective, the question of whether a machine model can adequately describe a brain has long been considered in terms of either strong AI or weak AI. Most people find weak AI plausible: computers can solve certain kinds of problems better than humans. We mostly balk at strong AI however: machines can literally think like humans and solve the same kinds of problems just as well.

In The Emotion Machine, Marvin Minsky presents a very machine-like architecture that he claims actually represents the way real minds probably work in fundamental respects. That sounds pretty much like strong AI. So a lot of people will reject the concept of this book out of hand. I think that would be a mistake. Minsky has done a very good job identifying plausible specifics of why AI programs have failed to deliver on, where they have actually managed to deliver, and speculates on how we can fill in the gaps.

No, he doesn't spend time arguing against Searle's Chinese Room or other conundrums of AI, he just presents his case and gives examples in a clear, simple, accessible way. And I am persuaded that he probably gets a lot right. Probably more than he gets wrong. And that's a lot better than a lot of critics will give him credit for because it goes against both the mainstream disdain for strong AI and the mainstream love of flashy neuroscience images.

Minsky skips right on past the issue of connectionist networks vs. semantic networks and simply posits that we had to evolve semantic representations at some point. How is left as an exercise for neuroscientists. There is a lot of "details to be filled in later" sort of thinking here, so don't look to this book as a detailed physical model of the brain. This is a high level functional model of the mind and I like it.

So I claim that this is an important book that seems to promise a 21st century reboot of scientific naturalism as our guiding philosophy for the future. Minsky takes on nothing less than an overall architectural model for the mind in natural terms. It is brilliant. Too brilliant to be appreciated in its time because Minsky makes complex ideas so accessible that the biggest challenge for this book is that people will not appreciate its power. It reads like a simple AI model of a mind, but it is much deeper than that because of the amount of deep thought that has gone into it and the consideration of the weaknesses as well as strengths of previous AI programs.

We are currently in the grip of a widespread fascination with poorly understood pop neuroscience, and most readers will be deeply disappointed that this book does not attempt to wrestle with brain science at all. I think that's a strength because it means Minsky is not falling into the weird metaphysical spins that we too often see in pop neuroscience books, especially those by non-researchers and over-enthusiastic under-trained journalists.

What Minsky is doing here is simply coming up with a logical model of what a mind has to be able to do to provide the capabilities that we observe real human minds to possess. Sounds simple, right? No, not at all. The reason Minsky has accomplished something special here is that he recognizes many of the powerful fallacies we usually fall into when we introspect about thinking and rely on traditional models. We tend to think of emotions and reasoning as separate kinds of things, and then we talk about how they are both needed and how they interact. But as Minsky points out, both neuroscience and psychology seem to provide us evidence that these are points on a continuum, not different kinds of things. Minsky takes that seriously and builds on it.

The result is something amazing that looks like a simplistic mechanical model of the mind but captures some deep insights into how minds really work.

The central implication of Minsky's model is an epistemological stance that resourcefulness in human thinking is a matter of switching between different kinds of representations, each used in a different way of thinking, each of which captures something essential about specific things in our world while neccessarily leaving out other details. A mind can't comprehend everything at once. Some decisions simply don't have an optimal answer because they look different from different angles.

The key concept underlying Minsky's model is that minds as we think of them had to start with simple rules for recognizing and responding to cues, had to be able to incorporate goals in some form in those rules as well, and then eventually had to be able to recognize kinds of problem and activate appropriate ways of thinking. It makes sense to think of this in terms of logical levels of recognizers and responders, and importantly, what Minsky calls "critics" and "selectors," where each new level provides some way to resolve conflicts that arise in the level below it.

So conflicts in our instincts can be resolved by learned rules, conflicts in learned rules can be resolved by deliberation strategies, and in turn levels with different kinds of representations of the problem and eventually the problem solver and their own ways of thinking. Once the problem solver can represent themselves and their own thinking, we have the power to shape our own thinking in meaningful ways.

I'm really not doing justice to this book in this review, because it's power is in the details of his examples and how they illustrate the architecture at work. Suffice to say that I think if you find a functional architecture of the mind of interest, I highly recommend this book. I think it gives a much more fundamental understanding of how minds most probably work than any amount of flashy recent brain scans, and certainly more than untestable holistic and quantum mechanical theories will ever tell us until we better understand the functional design. Neuroscience in the future will, I believe, be filling in the details of a framework very much like this one.

Book Review: "Out of Our Heads" by Alva Noe

Review of: "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness" by Alva Noe

Review by Todd Stark, 3/30/09

An accessible and compelling exploration of the extended mind

The mind is more than what the brain is doing. The idea isn't new, but it often gets too little respect. Perhaps because people think it implies something supernatural, or perhaps because it just seems weird, but it is a very respectable argument and in Alva Noe's hands, a powerful one.

We often take for granted in brain science that the mind is implemented by things happening inside the skull. That goes against the growing findings that perception is an active process of exploration that depends on our contact with the real world and the skills we possess for navigating its structure. This book takes on the significant challenge of bringing that difficult idea accessibly and non-technically into the popular mind and I think he does an excellent job.

Although Noe doesn't talk about it specifically, Ruth Millikan makes a good related argument that substance categories are really skills. We know substances by our skills for finding and identifying them over and over, not through their intrinsic properties. Noe approaches perception in much the same way. We know the world by interacting with it, not by (or in addition to?) simulating it with detailed models inside our head.

Noe goes a step further and points out how some concepts just don't make from a detached viewpoint, so we are often forced to destroy the phenomena of consciousness, reducing them to something else, in order to study them dispassionately. This is a tough sell, I think, to habitual materialists, but he doesn't rely too heavily on it.

The implication Noe emphasizes is that consciousness is a process involving interaction of the nervous system with the world, not (just) something that is lighting up inside our neural nets. The distinction is sometimes more subtle that Noe acknowledges. He approves of Gibson's ecological theory of perception, but doesn't address the equally important work on expectancy and hypothesis testing approaches to perception, such as Richard Gregory's ideas and the experimental work done around them.

He is probably right that much of our basic perception relies heavily on active engagement with the world, but then some of it, to me, clearly doesn't. He does a good job showing limits to the feature detection approach to vision (doesn't it beg the question to say that features are "built up" toward pictures in the brain?), but doesn't have an alternate explanation for the elaborate architecture of columns and receptor fields and their activity in dreaming and imagination that seem to support at least some version of the mental representation concept in some kinds of mental activity. It seems in places that Noe acknowledges this sort of work but considers it an impoverished-perceptual or non-perceptual kind of mental activity.

Other than the excellent writing and clear arguments, the best part of this book is the skillful use of various findings regarding phantom limbs, sensory illusions, and inattention phenomena to illustrate the empirical implications of a mind extended beyond the brain case. Even if you don't buy the full externalist argument in all its details, it's hard to read those examples and not have a little light go off in your head and think "oh, so that's what he means by the mind being outside the brain!" That's a mark of good writing.

Noe mentions but does not dwell on the role played by philosopher J Merleau-Ponty in many of these ideas, and his work is worth exploring as well. A good non-technical intro in keeping with the spirit of Noe's book is: Merleau-ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed).

This book is a good read, a relatively quick read, and very thought provoking.