Glossary
Suggestion
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: hypnotic suggestion
In short
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.
What does it mean for you?
A sentence like "feel the warmth spreading" can actually create warmth. Words act on the body – when flirting just as in trance. In a Sexnosis trance, sentences invite you to feel something. Whether and how far you go along with it is up to you.
What research says
The key word is by itself. A command ("lift your arm") asks for a voluntary action. A suggestion describes the action as happening without effort, and responsive people often report that it really felt involuntary.
Researchers sort suggestions roughly into motor (arm heaviness, hand levitation), challenge (you cannot bend your arm) and cognitive-perceptual (hallucinations, amnesia, not seeing a word). Cognitive suggestions are the hardest; only highly hypnotizable people pass most of 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.
- Why desire begins in the mind – and often gets stuck there Why desire often does not arrive spontaneously but responds – and why worrying about performance holds it back. What studies show, in plain words.
- Sexual fantasies: how common and normal are they? How common sexual fantasies are, what they are about and what they say about you – and what they do not. What research shows, in plain words.
Trances
Studies on this page
- Theory · 1985 Response expectancy as a determinant of experience and behavior Kirsch, I. (1985). Response expectancy as a determinant of experience and behavior. American Psychologist, 40(11), 1189–1202.
- Review · 2017 Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness Terhune, D. B., Cleeremans, A., Raz, A., & Lynn, S. J. (2017). Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 81, 59–74.
Glossary
- Hypnosis Hypnosis is a state in which you turn your attention fully inward and engage with your imagination – so much that it feels real, like an arm growing heavy.
- Posthypnotic suggestion A post-hypnotic suggestion is a sentence from hypnosis that is meant to keep working afterwards – triggered by a small cue, such as a word or a gesture.
- Ideomotor effect 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.
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