Richard Bandler - Trance–formations. Neuro–Linguistic Programming™ and the Structure of Hypnosis

Woman: Why will he be amnesic?

Well, because it's a single unit of behavior. What could happen inside of a handshake? If you offer these kinds of suggestions, and then complete the handshake as if nothing had happened, his consciousness will probably be simply that he met somebody.

Man: I've seen Groucho Marx on old reruns of his program, and often he did something similar. He would reach out to shake hands, and when the other person's hand came up, he'd pull his back. As soon as the other person would pull his hand back, he'd put his out again.

Woman: I would presume that people would come out of it almost instantly after you get their hands, and they would wonder what in the world was happening.

They will, if you do nothing but interrupt the handshake. That's the point of supplying verbal instructions about what you want to occur next. People can find a way out of an impossible situation, like an interrupted handshake, given enough time. I believe everybody's capable of that. I've tested that, and the length of time has ranged from about ten seconds, when the person recovers and says "That was weird," to five or ten minutes, where people have stood there until they found a way out of that impossible situation.

David: Was it important in your mind for me to not remember what happened while I was in that state?

No. It wasn't important to me.

David: Because I did remember it, but I also felt that in no way did that take away from what was happening.

Ron: Is it interruption when you expect to hear somebody and you don't, either like Milton Erickson's mumbling or when someone's voice drops and becomes inaudible?

The answer is in feedback. That would be an interruption for some people and not for others. Everybody is interrupted by a handshake interruption, but some people have a lot of ways to recover from unanticipated auditory experiences. You will discover that with people who are sophisticated auditorily, it won't have the interruptive effect. For people who are attending to you auditorily at that moment and don't have a lot of sophistication, it will.

For example, have you noticed how this TV monitor? . . ,

Now, the different times at which people laughed is a pretty good indication of how long each of you takes to recover from impossible auditory situations. That was a sentence fragment; it wasn't a sentence. So if you felt that waiting for a completion… . That is the interruption phenomenon.

Man: Is this the same pattern Milton Erickson used when he actually did shake hands with a woman, and then led her into a trance?

No. That was kinesthetic ambiguity. That's a different kind of interruption. If I reach out and I shake your hand normally, at the end of a certain period of time we're supposed to release. If I fail to release, or if, as Erickson did, I begin to release but release ambiguously, in such a way that you don't know exactly when I make the last touch, you'll be suspended without a next program. If you read Erickson's account of that, what he did was release his hand with varying touches so that the woman wasn't sure when he actually broke the contact. Thelast thing Erickson did before releasing completely was to make a slight push upward at the wrist, which got catalepsy. It's the same principle as holding up someone's arm and jiggling it until his muscles take over and hold the arm up.

Norma: What about incongruence as a pattern interruption?

That's an excellent way to do it. Funny that Norma would be the one to mention that. I know from other contacts with Norma that she has a really exquisitely refined strategy for congruency checks. That's a very important strategy for anybody who is a professional communicator to have. It does, however, leave her open to certain manipulations. If you present some material congruently and suddenly … (He continues gesturing and mouthing words, but without sound.) If you continue to present it as if nothing had happened but you simply cut out one channel, in this case auditory, she almost falls forward off the chair. The congruency check strategy she is using as she listens and watches somebody communicate demands that movement of the lips be associated with some sound so that she can make a congruency check. If there is no sound, it really interrupts her program.

If you know about the class of information we call "strategies" (See the book Neuro–Linguistic Programming Volume I) you have access to a really elegant way of doing pattern interruption. If you interrupt someone's key strategy, you get a more profound interruption. Those interruptions really hold.

Man: You could also feed people numbers that they're used to getting in certain chunks, like the social security number, in chunks they're not used to. The social security number is usually given in chunks of three, two, and four numbers.

Yes, or you can use telephone numbers. Seven eight two four … three six seven. You can tell what strategy the person uses by their response. If they use a tonal pattern for storing telephone numbers, presenting the numbers chunked differently will totally interrupt them. If they do it purely visually, typically it won't have nearly as much effect.

Pattern interruption can be used in any competitive sport. You can notice that every time you make a certain move, you get a certain response. Then you can interrupt that pattern to gain an advantage.

My wife, Judy, is really good with saber. She will set up a movement pattern and run the pattern half a dozen times to discover what regular response her opponent makes. When she knows what response she's going to get to this pattern, she figures out what response to that response will succeed in her making a hit. Or she'll begin the gesture and then interrupt it. Her opponent will have already committed himself to some response to Judy's gesture, and she can then utilize that. Boxers do this too. They set up a pattern and then interrupt it.

If you've watched Bjorn Borg play tennis, you know that he wastes no energy. He organizes his consciousness in a very narrow band. It doesn't matter whether the crowd is going crazy cheering or booing; he doesn't hear any of that. There is no difference in his response whether he misses or makes an easy shot. He simply turns around and re–anchors himself—he twirls the handle of his racket as he walks back to begin the next play. He wastes no energy at all; he's entirely concentrated on essentials. That concentration protects him from psychological maneuvers by opponents. If you can interrupt somebody else's altered state—the one that they need to perform well–then they will play poorly, and you may be able to beat them.

There are lots of applications of the principle of pattern interruption. Anything "unexpected" will get you that response. During that period when a person goes "on hold" because you have just done something wholly irrelevant or unexpected, that's the time to offer them clear suggestions about what response you want next.

You have to practice these techniques until you are personally powerful and congruent in carrying them out. You need to act in all of your behavior—verbal and nonverbal—as if this is going to happen, and it happens. As soon as you can present yourself fully congruently in making the maneuver, your job is to detect what response you get. You've got to have feedback. None of the generalizations that we offer you will always work. They always have to be adjusted to the feedback that you get.

Overload

About twenty–five years ago, George Miller summarized a huge amount of both human and animal perceptual research in his classic paper 'The Magic Number 7 ± 2." Human beings have the capacity to consciously attend to about seven "chunks" of information at one time, Beyond that number, a person becomes overloaded and starts to make mistakes. If I tell you a sequence of seven numbers, you can probably hold that in consciousness without error. If I give you a sequence of nine numbers, you will find it much more difficult to recall them correctly, and will start to make mistakes. Each number is a "chunk" of information. However, if you—or I —divide the nine digits into three groups of three, you will be able to recall the nine numbers much more easily. Now there are only three chunks of three digits each. By grouping information in larger chunks, it becomes possible to deal with more information with the same 7± 2 chunks of conscious attention. You can consciously attend to seven leaves, seven twigs, seven branches, seven trees, or seven forests. How much you can attend to depends upon the size of the chunk of information that you are dealing with.