Posthypnotic Suggestions

Posthypnotic suggestions are a large part of what people regard as typical of hypnosis. We start by comparing it with the common phenomenon of social compliance: the fact that people quite normally will do what another asks them to do. A description of a subject (Nobel Prizewinner Richard Feynman) is used to illustrate what it feels like to carry out a post hypnotic suggestion. Both phenomena are based on establishing a causal connection between two subsystems of the brain.
Some exercises are suggested for you to find out how easy it is under ordinary conditions to establish such a causal connection between two subsystems of the brain, so that you can (as in the previous chapter) later compare the ease of doing the same after a preliminary induction.
In fact the usual word to describe the creation of a causal link between two systems is learning! And you are asked to consider the conditions under which learning is most likely to happen well. I suggest that a focussed attention is generally best.
However this matter is complicated by the fact that the brain consists of very many subsystems and we may consider each to be capable of independent attention, or arousal. To explore this exercises are given aiming at maintaining the attention of just one subsystem (in this case that connected to fingers) while conscious attention subsides.