Everyone has heard of hypnosis. Is it a fairground phenomenon or a therapeutic tool? asks the honest man who fears manipulation. However, anyone who has experienced it cannot doubt the reality, very particular, of this modified state of consciousness: closer to a dream in its sensory evidence than to a memory, and yet occurring in the waking state, under the direction of a voice, of a presence that guides the exploration of our internal world. Current research in neuroscience is beginning to discover its neural bases, and its action on the pain circuits and on mental representations is quite visible in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This very real phenomenon of psychic life, already used by the shamans, is thus finding its way, albeit with difficulty, into modern therapeutics.

What have we learned from the neuroscience research of recent years? Our brain is constantly performing numerous calculations in a distributed and parallel way. There is no rest and even sleep is an active phase of consolidation of our learning. Of this incessant activity, only a tiny part is conscious. You don’t notice the eye jerks that bring each word to the center of your retina as you read these sentences, or even the retrieval of each word and its integration into a syntactic structure that allows you to access what someone thought months ago as they wrote these lines. But suddenly you get a call and you realize that you are hungry, that it is dark, that your chair is uncomfortable. Where were all these sensations before you were called? They were already there, but you were distracted by your reading. Consciousness is only the foam of a permanent underlying activity and attention is the projector that allows us to call into this conscious space a sensation, a thought, a memory. The actors push themselves to intervene on the stage of the theater of consciousness, but they can only enter one at a time. They follow a more or less regular order, sometimes interrupted by an emergency (pain, an obsession, or simply a friend who calls out to you).

The techniques of consciousness activation (hypnosis) allow us to understand the functioning of this theatrical scene, by directing our attention to a particular flow of information, the successive entry of the actors, and also to learn to direct this flow, like the lighting technician who puts the main part in the light and leaves the side in the shade. Becoming aware of the possibility of manipulating one’s internal theater rather than suffering a bad play is a key factor in the effectiveness of these techniques.

And now let Iris’s voice guide you…