When Teaching Hypnosis Classes Check Your Students Intent

In the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers, using the MRI, found that when a person watches someone else perform a task with the intention of later replicating the observed performance, motor areas of the brain are activated in a fashion similar to that with accompanies actual movement.

Teaching a physical skill often usually involves someone demonstrating the action and its components after which the learner then tries to reproduce what he or she has observed.

In this experiment, 19 college-aged, healthy adults watched a series of digital videos of another person who was putting together or disassembling objects using toy parts. In one condition, participants simply watched the activity; in another, they observed clips with the intention to be able to reproduce the actions in the correct sequential order minutes later.

Despite lying completely still during these tasks, observing with the intention to learn actions and subsequently reproduce them engages areas of the brain known to contribute to motor learning thorough actual physical practice. It is of particular attention that the amount of activity occurring in the intraparietal sulcus (the part when watching to learn accurately) predicts how well these actions are reproduced minutes later.

The researchers concluded that it appears to be vital that the intention of the observer is important rather than simply the visual stimulus that is being viewed. Therefore, if the student has the goal to be able to do what you are seeing, then it appears that activity through your motor system is up-regulated substantially.

So, perhaps when teaching our hypnosis classes we should emphasize to our students to have the intention while they watch a "demo" to learn all they can so they can duplicate the process.