# The Spectrum of Attention: From Empathy to Hypnosis 

Whenever there's a ["disagreement](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JpY7uztEdTF7HSDrT/beneath-psychology-introduction-part-2-the-solution-and-what)" \-\- again, including everything from the obvious "Who should we vote for?" to the physiological "Should we swell this sprained ankle?" to the 'unnegotiable' "Should you love me?" -- there's a question over which side deserves attention, and to what degree. Part of this is "Who should be talking, and who should be listening?", but this is making a binary out of a deep and rich spectrum.

The thing that makes hypnosis so bizarre and seemingly powerful is it's ability to *keep* attention, in the face of ordinarily compelling objections. I'll give you an example.

Right now, you're reading what I've written. You've tentatively agreed to follow my direction of attention, for now. The moment I say something *wrong* \-\- or at least, something that *you think* is wrong, using your worldview to guide you, I lose that. If I tell you that when I say the name of a color, you will no longer be able to remember your name, you don't say "Wow... that's amazing, I wasn't expecting to be unable to remember my name!". You say "No" -- or maybe "We'll see about that", with an expectation of experiencing something else. Rather than following my lead, and attending to the possible world I describe, you reject my bid for attention and attend to a possible world that is mutually exclusive with the picture I'm painting. Which you should, because that'd be a dumb thing to say.

When "in hypnosis" though, people don't. Setting aside the "why?" for a moment, people who are hypnotized attend to the predictions given by the hypnotist. If the hypnotist predicts that when he says the name of a color you will be unable to remember your name, that is what you attend to, and that is what you expect, so that is what you experience -- because that is the experience you create. When you follow along despite being told strange and counter-worldview things, and decline to point your attention in an objecting direction, you experience strange and counter-worldview things.

Richard Feynman's experience with hypnosis demonstrates this well. Curious what the experience of being hypnotized was like, Feynman followed along:

> He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said, "You can't open your eyes."    
> I said to myself, "I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes." It was an interesting situation: You're only slightly fogged out, and although you've lost a little bit, you're pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of course, you're not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can't do it.  
> 
> He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.  
> 
> When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis, instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.  
> 
> All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on, and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided, "Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat."  
> 
> When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the hall.  

  
This all seems like poor design from a blind idiot god again. Why design a mind so as to be so susceptible to nonsense?

Because that's how you get susceptible to learning that what you *think* is nonsense, isn't.

Here's the rest of Feynman's experience with hypnosis:

> I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While I was hypnotized she said, "I’m going to light a match, blow it out, and immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain."  
> 
> I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were closed through out all of this, but I was thinking, "That’s easy. She lit one match, but touched a different match to my hand. There’s nothin’ to that; it’s a fake!"  
> 
> When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.  

  
On the one hand, "You can't remember your name!" is stupid, and false. "You will walk the long way around" wasn't in line with what Feynman *wanted* to be true, and it didn't have to be.

On the other hand, "You don't have to have the normal unpleasant experience of pain. You can simply be comfortable, if you want" is *true*. And important. And not something he was primed to notice without hypnosis.

The idea that you can simply *not be bothered* when a match is put out on your skin is *unthinkable* a lot of the time, despite being totally and completely true -- and if you can't think it, you can't act on it even when it would make sense to do so. Getting people to point their attention in that direction takes a more compelling bid for attention than people are used to making.

  
In Terminator 2, they depict the terminator as [not responding to a cigar burning his chest](https://youtu.be/24hNr-VFzKY?&t=50) as a way to demonstrate his inhuman nature. The difference here isn't that the terminator isn't capable of sensing damage. The difference is that the damage isn't particularly interesting to him, and does not control his attention so he's free to focus on other things. The actual sensations a human would feel in this situation is a barely scaled up version of what Feynman went through no problem, and this reaction is readily achievable if that's what makes sense to do. The big difference is that not being a terminator, if you were to try such a bold move in a biker bar, the rest of the scene might unfold differently *and you know that*. If you were to ever consider something so foolish, the rest of your brain would be screaming at you, and it'd be hard to ignore because the warning is clearly legit.[^t6hps1f7mv]

But if the damage has already happened, and you're not in a biker bar being threatened? When my thirteen year old cousin picked up that hot fire poker, that burn was worse than the terminator's. And yet, as soon as he thought about what the problem was, he wasn't any more bothered than the terminator. So maybe it's not our designer being less than intelligent, but us being less than intelligent. 

This raises the question:

In what contexts *does* it make sense to attend to the things we might ordinarily reject out of hand?

Feynman gives a good hint:  

> I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes.

It makes sense to focus on the seemingly absurd when the potential to learn things that are true and useful outweighs the costs of considering (and risking acting on) things that seem to be false.

There are multiple factors that can drive the decision here.

*   Is it likely going somewhere interesting?
*   Is it easy to throw up objections without interfering with the process of communication?
*   Is your objection actually important to address right now or not?
*   Am I at risk of harming myself by acting on false beliefs if I don't object?

And perhaps most importantly,

*   Are you likely to be *wrong* about what you're objecting to?

  
Feynman's answers were "It would be interesting", "Objections would disrupt the process", "Postponing objections was fine", "Any false beliefs would be temporary and the harm acceptable", and "Maybe! It's almost a weird philosophical question I guess." So he let his attention follow the hypnotists bids and achieved the results he expected, to his surprise, as he thought might happen.[^k8tabk2jriq]

With the swelling injury thing, my friend's answers were "I might learn something surprising", "Sure, but what can I say that he hasn't thought of", "Just try it first", "Worst case nothing happens", and "*Yes*, it's likely that my skepticism turns out to be wrong". So she had her skepticism, and didn't let it get in her way of listening and finding out.[^muexgo4ids]

All of these questions are important, and there is much to say here. For example, there is value of listening to ideas *as ideas* rather than "as reality" so that they can be safely quarantined and allow you to consider more ideas for potential truth. Feynman's willingness to experience "being wrong" allowed him to test more ideas and find out first hand when some of them weren't. There is also great value in knowing what it takes for a fair test, and when its important to hold off on stress testing until the full arc has been completed, so that you don't find that the ideas can't support their weight in your perspective when it's just that your perspective is missing a few critical pieces.

For sake of brevity though, I'm going to focus on the last one. Maybe we're wrong.

Us atheists have a terrible tendency to equate "faith" with "believing things that there is no evidence for", which is understandable, but ultimately an error into arrogance. The value in faith is that it allows you to believe *true* things, which there *is* evidence for, but which you cannot yet comprehend for yourself. "God works in mysterious ways" isn't just a cope, it's also a necessary fact about any wisdom generating process operating on a level above yours; for if its ways weren't mysterious, you'd be on that level too.

Consider children, for example. When children are young enough, they lack the ability to comprehend the danger of playing in the street, and simply explaining "you could get hit by a car" does not convey the needed understanding to make the relevant decisions wisely. The first time I tried explaining the danger to my daughter, she excitedly told me "And then we'd put a bandaid on the booboo!" -- she just had no experience with injury so bad that it justifies this degree of fear and respect. While helping her build her own understanding of things is an important long term goal, I can only do that if she's alive to build understandings. The more time sensitive thing is that she understands that streets *are* dangerous, not *why* they are dangerous.

The proper response, when in the position of a child, isn't "I can't see any reason to believe playing in the street could be *that* bad, and if we were to get a booboo we'd just put a bandaid on it". It's mama and dada seem *very serious* about this, I don't fully understand why, and despite the fact that I don't know *why* I do know *that* it is very important to not play in the street".

The proper response from the position of the adult isn't "Yes, you're totally capable of making the right decisions here, so long as you understand these object level facts". It's "I know that it might not fully make sense yet, and still, it is important that you stay out of the street".

Facilitating good navigation here necessarily requires that the child take the "god like" parents' view *on earned faith*, so that the child can believe in mysterious[-to-them](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/2-place-and-1-place-words) truths and use them to avoid tripping over things they don't see. The same processes which, when used inappropriately, leads to "Controlled to walk the long way by a \[playfully\] tyrannical hypnotist" and "Accepting false beliefs without evidence because someone speaking on behalf of a non-existent entity told them to", when used appropriately are just following a greater wisdom than one's own, when there's plenty of evidence to support this action.

My own father was very effective at this when I was still young enough to lack the proper perspective. The man let us play with firecrackers, when hysterical parents would freak out over the "danger" of maybe getting a blood blister if you're some combination of dumb and unlucky. To the extent I may have been blind, I had plenty of evidence that it was worth taking his perspective here on faith; if there wasn't reason to believe cars posed a very serious danger, he wouldn't be acting like they do. As a result, I listened, and behaved in accordance with his perspective that I couldn't yet fully support on my own.[^0pbvlld09z7] While the full extent of this might not make sense until the "security" section, another word for this "looking to understand others' perspectives as true" is "empathy" -- it's taking on another's experience as one's own. I was noticing "This seems really important to him", and feeling the importance of that bit of his experience.

This dynamic of trusting and following guidance beyond our current understanding often comes up in hypnotism, where people will ask hypnotists "Do you hypnotize your kids?" -- or even "Do you hypnotize your wife?". Answers vary from "Oh no, I would never" to "Of course ;)", but the best one is that it's a [confused question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions), and that what my dad did with me *is* hypnosis in the most meaningful sense. I'll explain by answering "Do you hypnotize your wife?" with an example.

One morning my wife woke me up asking for help in a concerned tone, with a stream of blood pouring out of her hand. She had dropped a glass and cut one of the larger veins in the webbing between her thumb and forefinger. I bunched up some paper towel and put pressure on the cut, raising her hand to decrease the pressure. And then, since we were stuck waiting for the bleeding to stop anyway, decided to try something I didn't expect to work.

I had heard of hypnotists stopping bleeding through vasoconstriction, so I thought about what it would be like to experience that working, and started explaining what I wanted her to do.

> You know that feeling you get when it's cold out and your brain shuts down circulation to your hand to preserve warmth, and your hand just gets *cold* and *numb?* You know that feeling, yeah? You know what this feels like? Good. Bring that feeling back. Go there *now.*

From the outside, as was my position when instructing her, it probably feels like this shouldn't work. The ~~magic happens~~ mundaneness becomes apparent when you step down from the meta level intuiting whether this "would work", and intuit *what would happen*, directly, at the object level.

You do know that feeling you get when it's cold out and your brain shuts down circulation to your hand to preserve warmth, right? Like, you've had experience being out in the cold, and know that this is a real thing, with a sense of what this experience is like? And that it results in your hands being both *cold* and a degree of *numb?*

Does it make sense that when "thinking about what that's like", you begin to revisit that experience? Much like if you're asked what it would be like if your phone were to ring and it were to be an unexpected call from your crush, you could actually feel which emotions would come up in that situation, because you're simulating that situation and feeling them now? And that the limit of how fully you experience these emotions is likely to be your motivation to feel and get your hopes up for something that isn't even real and contextually important? And that if you *were* to see it as contextually important to commit to -- for example, if you have a real world date coming up, and the anticipated scenario *will actually happen*, you tend to feel that anticipatory excitement/anxiety/etc almost as if you were there, and not just in a "Yeah, I guess I can kinda tell that I'm going to be excited" sort of way?

Does it make sense that when you revisit an experience, your body responds in kind, much like it does when you revisit the experience of biting into a lemon, and when you get the very real butterflies in your stomach anticipating the date that doesn't start for another thirty minutes?

When you're asked to revisit the experience where your hand gets *cold* and *numb*, because it's cold out and your brain is shutting down blood flow to that area, does it make sense that you could revisit that experience, somewhat, when you have sufficient motivation, and that blood pouring out of your hand might be a little motivating? Does it make sense that in doing so, your brain might start doing the same things, leading to some amount of the same physiological responses?

We held pressure on the cut for a minute, maybe two tops, and when we pulled back the paper towel, the wound was dry. Not only had it stopped bleeding, there was no blood visible -- like when you cut into a chicken breast from the store. Not solidified into a big clot, just not there. I was shocked, and had never seen anything like it.[^zjncr9at5z] 

When the doctor was stitching her hand back together, he noticed how cold her hand was and expressed his concern that she had circulation issues that needed to be addressed. I told him to feel her other hand, which was fully warm, and explained that I suggested she constrict her blood vessels to stop the bleeding. He went back to stitching without comment.

In one sense, that's a clear "Yes, I hypnotize my wife sometimes". Because I achieved a "hypnotic phenomenon", the pattern of pacing and emphasis is something I picked up doing hypnosis, and no hypnotist worth their salt thinks that formal "inductions" are needed. In a more important sense, literally all that happened is that I explained to her what to do, and given the circumstance and our history she was inclined to listen and intend to do what I instructed.[^p1rhe0joaw] It may be an unusual target suggestion, and I may have learned to extend into the "hypnotic" side of the attention spectrum from practicing more formal "hypnosis", but the fundamental dynamics at play are the exact same as when my dad explained not to play in the street. So called "hypnotists" do have their conspicuous grab bag of "tricks and techniques", but the thing that matters -- the thing that determines whether their suggestions take or not -- is whether they succeed in directing attention towards the desired suggestion. This is what hypnosis *is*, in the most fundamental sense -- a willingness to put aside the normal "But that won't work!"/"But I can't do that", [shut up, and intend to do the ~~impossible~~](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible) merely worldview incompatible. It is focused attention on one idea to the exclusion of others, no more, no less. Even James Braid, who popularized the term "hypnosis" which has stuck to this day, recognized not long later that "monoideism" is a much more fitting label.

Whether we respond to an idea -- for example "don't play in the street", or "constrict your blood vessels", or anything else -- is a matter of whether we allow it to hold our attention or whether we dismiss it and look elsewhere. So the question is of what is worth attending to.

The more we know what is *true*, and important to see, the more we are called to look at what is true, point at what we are seeing, and expect others to accept our invitation to look with us -- even if it might seem "crazy".

The more we need guidance, and have available someone who can see the things we cannot, the more we are called to *listen*, and follow the gaze of those who see more -- even if we're not yet sure how to make sense of it.

In my physics program, things worked quite wonderfully, and the back and forth flowed fluidly. Most of the teaching was done by the professors, but occasionally the prof would say or write things which didn't quite make sense. In those cases, in the service of broader learning, the students would then speak, and point to what seems to be an error. Locally, the students were calling for the prof to look with them, and the prof would accept this guidance -- most of the time resulting in learning of their own error and acknowledging it, but sometimes learning where the student needed something explained, and explaining the missing piece so that the class could understand his lesson.

Sometimes though, the possibility of coming up with seemingly good objections is known, and not indicative of a problem in what's being taught. In those cases "Hear me out. I know this isn't going to make sense at first, and I promise it will all come together in the end" can be a lot more appropriate -- and lead to experiences like Feynman's where he's willing to hear things like "The earth is a giant spherical rock" without "Um ackshually"ing that the earth isn't quite spherical or just rock, and following along until he learns something true and so surprising that he had no way of fitting it into his existing conceptual framework.

This is the spectrum we have to play on. Sometimes, in the moment and near future, its important to stfu and listen because any objections we could come up with would be irrelevant or mistaken, and experience truth straight from the source. Sometimes we need to be vigilant to a degree, and point out when we have objections we *do* expect to be worth addressing -- and find out. Sometimes we're on more even ground and attention flows from one thing to another being directed more or less equally from both sides. And sometimes we're on the other half of the spectrum, having things to point to and convey, with various levels of sensitivity to objection being appropriate.

The challenge isn't in "How do we get people's attention so that they do what \[we think\] is right" but in "To what degree do we even think we even know what is right here?". In order to learn physics, a student must evaluate when it is worth voicing that something doesn't make sense -- and to teach the teacher must evaluate whether it's worth addressing the confusion on the spot, or whether to trust it will resolve as they get further into the lecture. In order to help my wife constrict her blood vessels, I had to evaluate whether it was worth instructing her to do a thing she might not be able to do -- and she had to evaluate whether it was worth pointing out that this is kinda a ridiculous ask. We constantly -- on a moment by moment basis -- face these questions: to what degree does it make sense for them to look where I'm pointing, and to what degree does it make sense for me to look where they're pointing?

In full blown hypnosis, I can say "You will not remember your name" and it just doesn't matter whether that's absurd or not because they are putting their attention where I specify without doubt or hesitation. Everything I say becomes their reality -- as hypnotists like to say in ["the super suggestion"](https://howtodoinductions.com/2021/02/01/the-super-suggestion/). This is rarely appropriate, but approaching this can have its place -- especially for a moment at a time.

In what might be called a "lighter trance", the "hypnotee" -- or "student", or "learner" to be most general -- will go along with most things, but object when things get too far from fitting with their conception of the world. The sensitivity to objection has been turned up from epsilon to something finite.

As we continue to crank this knob, the "student" becomes the "teacher", and the teacher begins to attend to the student to increasing exclusion of what he was going to teach, until we're on the other side of the spectrum and the hypnotic attention flows in the other direction.  
 

[^t6hps1f7mv]: As an aside, this scene makes a good example of quickly escalating from attention to respect to security, and then achieving agreement on the fact that they were going to give him their clothes.Terminator asks for clothes, holds his attention there bidding strongly. He is immediately laughed at, showing that his bids are rejected due to insufficient respect, and the biker counterbids that terminator attend to the cigar burn on his chest. Because the burn isn't threatening to him, his attention isn't pulled away from his initial focus, surprising the biker -- giving him new information and causing him to learn something. The bikers are then pushed into insecurity and fight back out of fear (they're afraid of losing what they'd lose to give this guy respect, e.g. clothes/etc). Then they decide that giving him respect is actually the safer thing, so they give him the respect and therefore the clothes. 

[^k8tabk2jriq]: This is not a contradiction. He expected to walk the long way around, so he did. He didn't expect that this expectation would be fulfilled, so he was surprised when it was. He expected that some of his (meta) expectations would be falsified, and just as he thought, they were. The objects of each expectation are on different meta levels. 

[^muexgo4ids]: I should explicitly say that I do not predict that you will be able to pull it off if you "try" to not swell your injuries. Maybe you would, maybe not. Like the flinch example starts to show, it can be non-obvious what one is actually trying to do sometimes. I was able to tell her other true things about what she could do that she didn't realize that she could do, and have her predictably fail to try and fail to notice that she wasn't trying -- even after getting this one right 

[^0pbvlld09z7]: It's worth noting that this often doesn't feel like "I don't get this at all, but okay". It felt like "Okay, makes sense" because the reasoning he gave did make sense -- as teacher's passwords and other insufficient understandings often do.But would I have recognized and appreciated the gravity of the situation on my own? The idea that a thing "makes sense" usually functions more as a justification for keeping an embodied belief than it does to create the belief. The latter comes straight from the direct suggestion to stay out of the street. We try on the conclusion first, and then use reasoning to decide whether to reject it or justify it. 

[^zjncr9at5z]: Except, I guess, when I'd cut into chicken breast from the store. 

[^p1rhe0joaw]: This pattern of "Hey, look what falls out of this framework naturally!" will turn up again and again. In cases where you know the right answers, and they're counterintuitive, and the normal objections don't matter because what's important is making space to see the world differently, then you get focused attention. When you navigate this way, and end up in these situations, you can be mid conversation and notice "Wow, the person I'm talking to is hypnotized" -- and then recognize why it makes sense in context.