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Lemon party – ideosensory phenomenon for discomfort

It’s the crumpled up paper towels that make this picture so confusing. Just what is happening here?

Imagine that you’ve got a ripe lemon in front of you on the kitchen counter. As you cut into it, you can feel how juicy and fresh it is. The aroma of the lemon is in the air, that fresh and sweet smell. You cut a wedge off of half the lemon and pick it up, getting ready to bite into the lemon. You know it’s going to have that sour bite to it that makes your whole body contract. Go ahead and take a bite now, tasting the flavor as you sink your teeth in.

When you were reading that, were you able to almost taste the lemon? Did your mouth fill with saliva as you thought about biting into it? Did you even shudder a bit as you imagined the sour flavor? That’s the lemon drill. It capitalizes on ideosensory phenomenon – that is, eliciting a sensory experience (like taste or smell). Eliciting ideosensory phenomenon is a big part of the using hypnosis for two key sensations: comfort and relaxation. Bringing forth these resources are important for anyone who wants to use hypnosis for discomfort or pain. This could include a specific event like childbirth or a general event like pain modulation (whenever it should arise). If you read through any hypnosis script, you’ll likely notice a lot of language for increasing comfort and relaxation. Another “sensation” commonly elicited is numbness or the lack of sensation (including pain). More specifically, numbness is the lack of all sensation while analgesia is the lack of just pain. So if numbness were induced in your arm, you wouldn’t feel a pinprick (pain) and you wouldn’t feel a cotton ball touching your arm. If analgesia were induced in your arm, you wouldn’t feel the pin but you would feel the cotton ball.

Using either of these seemingly opposite methods (adding comfort or removing sensation) works based off a common concept in hypnosis which is the balance between positive and negative phenomenon. A positive adds something that isn’t there, like “seeing” a ball on your desk, that isn’t actually there. A negative takes away something that really is there, like looking right at your keys but not realizing they’re in front of you. While these seem like opposites, they actually both always happen simultaneously. For a positive phenomenon, take “seeing” a ball (that isn’t really there). On the positive side, your brain manufactures the image of the ball. On the negative side, you brain must ignore the desk behind the ball that the image of the “ball” is “blocking” (even though, in reality, that is what your eyes are sensing because there really is no ball). For a negative phenomenon, take not seeing your keys even though they’re right in front of you. On the negative side, your brain is ignoring perceiving the keys even though your eyes are sensing them. On the positive side, your brain is filling in that area with the rest of the desk (which you’re not actually seeing in a physical sense because the real keys are blocking your eyes from seeing the desk behind them) so that there is no random gaps or holes in your vision when you skip over seeing the keys. Hypnosis for pain and discomfort functions similarly. You can elicit a positive (feelings of comfort and relaxation) which will both 1) add positive sensations and 2) negate negative sensations (pain, discomfort, etc.). Or you can elicit a negative phenomenon (feelings of numbness or analgesia) which will both 1) negate negative sensations and 2) fill in ‘normal’ feelings or substitute feelings (like the ‘feeling’ of numbness). Numbness does have a feeling to it, think: local anesthesia, when you arm falls asleep, or when you have an ice pack on long enough.

All of this helps explain the theory of how hypnotic ideosensory phenomenon work. Tune into next post on actually eliciting some useful ideosensory phenomenon!

The United Strengths