Glossary
Ideomotor effect
Listen instead of reading · 35 minDirty Mind: Dirty Talk Hypnosis – Find Your Own WordsNo script, no borrowed lines: a trance that lets your own words out – in a lower, slower voice. Also known as: ideomotor movementChevreul pendulumCarpenter effect
In short
The ideomotor effect means: when you vividly imagine a movement, your body makes it in a small way – without it feeling intentional. That is why a pendulum seems to swing on its own.
What does it mean for you?
You have surely experienced it: you think of a touch, and your skin reacts before anything has happened. Your body listens to your imagination. The warmth experiment on the home page makes exactly that noticeable.
What research says
The idea goes back to William Carpenter in the 19th century; the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul had earlier studied the swinging pendulum and concluded that his own unnoticed movements caused it.
Try it: hold a small weight on a thread between finger and thumb, elbow resting on a table. Keep your hand still and only imagine the weight swinging left and right. Most people see it start to move. Then imagine it circling.
The same mechanism explains dowsing rods and Ouija boards. In hypnosis research, ideomotor tasks are among the easiest suggestions – most people pass them.
Related topics
- How hypnotizable are you? How researchers measure it How hypnotizability is measured with the Harvard and Stanford scales, what low, medium and high scores mean, and why it matters for every hypnosis study.
- Mindful touch: Sensate Focus and mindfulness What Sensate Focus by Masters and Johnson is, why mindfulness helps during sex and what that has to do with an erotic trance – in plain words.
Trances
Studies on this page
Glossary
- Suggestion A suggestion is a sentence that invites you to experience something as if it were happening on its own – for example "your arm is getting lighter" – rather than doing it on purpose.
- Response expectancy Response expectancy means: if you firmly expect something to happen on its own – calm, a light arm – that very expectation can help bring it about.
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