Conditioning Hypnosis has also been defined as a form of conditioning. A person learns, through direct experience or the media, how to behave hypnotized. Once having allowed himself to relax, the client is thereafter conditioned to repeat the experience of relaxing upon hearing the trigger-word. Yet another definition of hypnosis, one that has wide support among researchers, is that hypnosis is a form of dissociation. Meaning, that in some as yet unexplained way, the mental functioning of a person is compartmentalized and one part can be isolated from the others.
Dissociation is an everyday conscious experience which begins in childhood.
When a person is engaged in conversation with someone else he is also talking with himself and thinking ahead to his next comments. Children blithely slip in and out of fantasy lives, temporarily adopting make-believe roles which they discard at will. This capacity to fantasize can be retained through practice and makes the dissociation characteristic of hypnosis less surprising. Altered state, relaxation, heightened suggestibility, role-playing, conditioning or dissociation, whatever hypnosis is, it enables a person to experience thoughts and images as though they were real. What is relaxed is first, the body and second, the conscious part of the mind or one's critical thinking.