Why Mastering the Learning Trance Can Be Useful

Combine these techniques to induce a learning trance, and people will remember your message for years instead of hours or days!

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
— George Orwell

Getting someone’s attention is a key element of the communication tool kit. Additionally, to communicate you must have a listener who’s actually paying attention to what you say. That just seems like common sense, but it’s not as easy to do as we often think.

So, how do we induce a “learning trance” in people we’re trying to teach something to? Or put ourselves into a learning trance so we can remember something we’re being taught in the moment?

Most of the time, we’re pretty tuned out. We’re all busy people, and few of us have the bandwidth for political decision-making. Even when we turn on the radio or check out the local news, most of us are not paying that much attention.

There’s science behind that. It turns out that the human brain can pay attention to only about seven (plus or minus two, depending on the person) things at a time.

For example, until you finished reading this sentence, you probably didn’t notice the position your body is in right now. You probably didn’t notice every time you blinked, looking at the page, but now you are noticing. You may not have noticed whether you were hungry or not, or if your shoes are tight or loose, but now you’ve noticed.

You didn’t notice these things before because our brains can process only a few things at a time, so we automatically delete, distort, or generalize most of the information coming in to us, be it sensory or abstract data. You are noticing all these sensations now—like how hungry you are or how your shoes feel—because I’m throwing your attention around in different directions.

This is one of the most common strategies — causing people to attend to a variety of things to overwhelm consciousness — that both stage and clinical hypnotists use. And it has all sorts of applications.

What Is a Learning Trance?

Most people think that a “trance” is about being in a state where one is no longer paying attention. It seems like common sense: If somebody is so hypnotized that he can have dental work done without anesthesia, he must not be paying attention. If a hypnotist can put someone in a trance and then put her arm in ice water and the subject doesn’t even flinch, she must not be paying attention. Right?

Wrong. In fact, a trance is the result of a surplus of attention.

The key to creating a trance state is to use the fact that we human beings already have a very limited attention span. We then amp up that attention into a very narrow sensory spectrum.

If we put a lot of energy into attending to one small sensation, we will not be able to hold on to the other between three and eight possible things that were distracting us. The dentist’s patient who has been hypnotized doesn’t notice the pain from his tooth because he is too busy focusing all his attention elsewhere.

The way stage hypnotists induce a trance is by causing a person to focus just on the hypnotist’s voice (for auditory people) or on a particular point (for visual people) or on a particular sensation (for kinesthetic people).

In old movies hypnotists would ask people to stare at a watch slowly swinging back and forth on a chain, a technique developed by Scottish psychiatrist Dr. James Braid in the early 1800s to disprove Franz Anton Mesmer’s belief that trance states came from the energy of the moon being channeled through the hand of the hypnotist. Especially if the person is primarily visual in orientation, that swinging-chain technique really works.

The key to inducing a trance is to cause a person to focus, focus, focus, more and more intensely. Some people are very easily hypnotized; for others it’s more difficult. People who are most easily hypnotized are generally those who can most easily and naturally focus their attention with great intensity.

Sometimes the trance is called daydreaming, where we’re very focused on something that is happening or that we want to happen in our lives. Sometimes we go into a reading trance. That’s when you’re reading a book and you’re not noticing the clock ticking in the room or much of anything else: you’re totally wrapped up in the world of the book. Sometimes we go into a trance listening to a talk show or attending to the media or listening to a teacher; that’s a learning trance and the subject of this article.

Another trance that virtually everybody has experienced is the movie trance, where we’re so focused on the movie that it actually becomes our primary reality. To do this, movies alternate close-up and distant shots (visual submodalities), vary music and sound (auditory submodalities), and evoke increasingly more powerful feelings (called “building tension,” it actually does, physically, build tension in the body).

All effective communication requires that the recipient focus on the data contained within the communication itself. By definition, that’s a trance. In a learning trance, the person’s awareness is totally focused on the message you are communicating.

How to Induce a Learning Trance

We all hope that our communication is effective enough that our listeners and readers will be literally “entranced” by what we say. For some people that ability comes naturally. We’ve all met people who somehow seem to just know how to get others to listen attentively to them. Bill Clinton is that kind of natural communicator, and so was Ronald Reagan.

A few decades ago I was asked by Democrats in Washington State to introduce President Bill Clinton and Congressman Jim McDermott. Standing backstage with Clinton while McDermott was speaking, he began asking me about my life, my opinions, etc. It was an amazing experience: when Bill Clinton turns his full attention on you it’s as if you’re caught by the beam of a 20,000 watt spotlight. I was so mesmerized by Clinton’s attention that I almost missed my cue to go onstage and introduce him. I was literally entranced.

Most of us are not “unconsciously competent” communicators — we’re not naturally as competent as Bill Clinton, for example. We have to learn how to get people to pay attention to us. In part that means learning how to induce a learning trance.

A learning trance is a pretty light trance: people can break out of it themselves and are fairly aware of what they are doing.

An effective learning trance is a lot like a movie trance.

A good movie tells an interesting story. A few weeks ago here at Wisdom School, I talked about the value of stories in political persuasion. Stories, to be effective, must be multimodal and are full of anchors. A good story creates pictures and sounds in our minds and attaches a particular emotion to those pictures and sounds. A good movie story will use anchors to make us feel a variety of emotions.

The story creates a bridge between our feelings and the story line. That bridge functions positively to keep our feelings narrowly attuned to what is in the story; it also functions negatively by preventing our brains from wandering to some other feeling. That’s one reason why people like to go to the movies or read a good novel when they’re feeling down: they know the movie will draw their focus to a different emotion.

Second, a trance-inducing story shifts back and forth between modalities as a way to keep our attention focused on the action. Because we can pay attention to only a few things at a time, shifting modalities very quickly is hard for us to do and makes us focus very intently so we can catch what is happening. This modality shifting is even more powerful if the modalities are connected to anchors.

Third, a good story will also pay attention to rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Creating and maintaining a person’s focus requires creating all three.

Film editors use a variety of means to create these effects. They use music to create a rhythm and a tempo. They intercut, cut in on, and cut away from a scene to change the film’s tempo and pacing.

Think of any scene from a Hitchcock movie—how we first may see only an eye, or a knife, and then the window looking out across the street, and then cut back to the victim, and so forth.

That cutting is hard to follow, so we focus all our attention on it, and that intense focus puts us in the movie trance. The same is true of listening to a good storyteller or reading a good novel.

We most often find anchoring (the “scary” music is anchored to the “scary” moments, for example, or the thunderstorm begins when the drama is being amped up), modality shifting (we see a face, then the screen goes black and we hear a scream), and pacing used to create a movie trance in action movies, thrillers, and—no surprise—commercials. It’s the surest way to get and hold someone’s attention.

Modality Shifting

One way to create a learning trance is to employ a method discussed above: to shift a person from one sensory modality to another very quickly between the different sensory states: what we see, what we hear, and what we feel.

Again, it’s important to stress that one way to communicate effectively is to identify the primary mode a person uses and speak to the person in that mode.

For example, if you’re talking to someone who is highly visual, use a lot of visual metaphors and ask, “Do you see that?” For somebody who is highly auditory, use auditory metaphors: “Do you hear what I’m saying?” For someone who is very kinesthetic, use kinesthetic metaphors: “Hey, do you get that concept? Is that a solid one for you?”

Using someone’s primary modality is a good way to initiate a conversation; but a learning trance is actually created by switching modalities in a serial fashion. Doing so focuses people’s attention and puts them into a kind of heightened trance state.  

An important element to creating a learning trance is pacing. Politicians understand the power of creating a trance to ensure that their listeners get their ideas. Politicians pause a lot. They pause for applause. But they also build in dramatic silences at times when they don’t expect applause. That’s a component of pacing, and it’s of critical importance in creating a learning trance.

Pacing works because it is a technique to focus attention. If you flip people’s attention on and off, on and off, on and off, they must concentrate to attend. That kind of concentration can induce a learning trance. When politicians pause often, it’s to get their audience’s attention by causing you to attend, and then not attend, and then attend, and then not attend.

Building a Learning Trance

Putting a person or an audience into a learning trance involves just a few simple steps: Tell a story to capture their attention. Build into the story visual and auditory metaphors and elements, each designed to evoke emotional responses. Embed into the most emotional parts of the stories the information you want remembered. And pace the story so that listeners and viewers move to your beat, not their own.

Combine these techniques to induce a learning trance, and people will remember your message for years instead of hours or days!