CHAPTER 8
MASTERING THE LEARNING TRANCE

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. To communicate you must have a listener. That just seems like common sense, but it’s not as easy to do as we often think.

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 have 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 am throwing your attention around in different directions.

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 three or 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.

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 chapter.

The 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.

Most of us are not unconsciously competent communicators. 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. In chapter 2 I talked about the value of stories in political persuasion. Stories are 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 bored—they know the movie will draw their focus to a different emotion.

Second, a good 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 the right tempo. A good story will use rhythm, tempo, and pacing to draw the attention back into the story.

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

We already discussed anchoring at length in chapter 5. The second way to create a learning trance is to shift a person from one sensory modality to another very quickly. In part II we went over the different sensory states: what we see, what we hear, and what we feel.

I stressed at the beginning of this book 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.

One of the strongest ads from the 2004 campaign, “Yakuza,” was put together by the Bush team; you can find it at http://pcl.stanford.edu/campaigns/campaign2004/archive.html, a Web site created by some folks at Stanford University to analyze all the media ads from past political campaigns.

The ad shifts modalities from sentence to sentence, frame to frame. It starts with a book cover—a visual image—that’s accompanied by a question mark, which asks you to listen to the narrator, moving us from visual to auditory. Announcer: “John Kerry says he’s ‘author of a strategy to win the War on Terror.’” The next image is very visual, a page from a Japanese comic book, forcing us to focus on visual input and all but ignore the narrator. Announcer: “…against the Japanese yakuza.”

Then we go to an image of John Kerry against a black background with a blurry photo of a terrorist in the background covered by a question mark again, which is now becoming a kind of trigger for a return to the auditory. Announcer: “…never mentions al-Qaeda. Says nothing about Osama Bin Laden. Calls Yasser Arafat a ‘statesman.’” The ad continues like that, pushing us back and forth between auditory and visual.

As these images fly by, the announcer turns to purely visual words:“The New Republic says Kerry’s plan ‘misses the mark.’ And Kerry’s focus? Global crime, not terrorism”

Auditory, visual, auditory, visual. The effect is to anchor a sense of confusion. That’s how they end the ad, suggesting that Kerry is just as confused as we are: Announcer: “How can John Kerry win a war if he doesn’t know the enemy?”

Notice that these last words also take advantage of the unconscious mind’s inability to process the negative and the fact that the word “know,” in a purely auditory setting, sounds like “no” That last sentence can be very difficult to understand if it goes by quickly because of what to our brain can sound like a double negative—“doesn’t know”—and that will leave people with an even simpler conclusion: “Kerry is the enemy in this war.”

This ad put viewers into a learning trance through mixing visual and auditory stimuli. What viewers learned from the ad was that John Kerry was as mixed up as viewers felt after watching the ad. It echoed that campaign’s description of John Kerry as a “flip-flopper” and helped enhance the myth Republicans promoted to the media that there was no need to look into widespread election fraud in Ohio because Kerry had lost by being out-campaigned. (This was something the Bush campaign had planned as early as 2002, by the way, as that was when the now-defunct www.democratflipflop.com Web site was registered to the Republican National Committee.)

PACING

The third 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 maintain their attention. 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.

Here’s another ad, “World View,” created by the Bush team for the 2004 campaign, which does a very effective job of using pacing to tell its story.¹ This ad begins with an image of a blue TV screen with words on it that are impossible to read because they go by so quickly. The ad then cuts to an image of John Kerry sitting in front of a bank of nine TV sets, all with blue screens. The ad continues to intercut between a single screen and the image of Kerry in front of lots of screens. Each time the ad zooms in on a single screen, it’s got a message on it that the conservatives really wanted people to see, and the narrator speaks the words at about the same pace that we read them.

Each small message suggests that Kerry is confused about the nature of the terrorist threat.

The constant intercutting between big and small holds our attention. The narrator pauses each time the small screen comes on, then matches his voice to our reading speed. At the same time, the background music is at an even slower rhythm so that a difference in tempo is set up between the very quiet but insistent music and the narrator’s voice. The two come together only when the image intercuts—every time a new picture flashes on-screen, there is a louder sound in the music.

With both images, large and small, featuring blue TVs, there is not much to distract us from focusing on the back-and-forth. The “big picture” is “John Kerry.” He’s the only element it’s easy to focus on. The small picture is “what Kerry said.” And the words the writers pull out are ones designed to summon the conservatives’ worldview, a view that the world is a dangerous and fearsome place. The blue is laying down an anchor—blue, the color of the Democratic Party—associated with the negative emotions evoked by the ad.

The focus on the screens, the intercutting, and the music—the pacing—all prepare us for the difference between what the Republicans are portraying as Kerry’s “worldview” and their own. The tagline:“How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?”

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, thus amplifying the learning trance.