I am 13 years old. 6 months ago I became interested in Korean culture. It all started very innocently: I was watching Korean TV series. Every day a new series and so on every day. And it got to the point where I started staying up at night to watch more and more. My health has deteriorated, and I can hardly remember my lessons.
Then the Internet was turned off for 2 months and I slowly forgot about all this. Of course, it happened that I looked up some information about all this on the phone, but it was completely different from what I experienced later. And so they turned on the Internet for us and I tried not to watch TV shows or any information. However, I came across a very popular K-pop group and that's when the madness really began. At first, I just listened to music and it was just good for me to hear and look at these guys. But then I began to feel that I depended on them. I liked one guy from this group and I liked his character, that is, I understood that this was just the image that the agency created for him, but I could not refuse to look at his photographs and videos with him. And it stuck in my soul that he was very important to me. dear person. But at the same time, I knew that I didn’t know him and he was just a guy who didn’t even know about my existence. Every day I looked for more and more information about him. And something started happening to me, I don’t know how to explain it: I began to hate this person, this happens when you love and hate at the same time. I thought more and more about this man, looked and was touched by his eyes, face, lips. Lately I note that my nerves are failing me more and more often. One day during class, the teacher yelled at one of my classmates and I started to panic: I felt like I was scared of something that wasn’t there, fear was eating me up from the inside and I couldn’t even eat. But then I somehow calmed down, but still the anxiety remained. In the evenings, I turn on the music of their band and quietly torture myself, thinking about this guy. Sometimes a mania of persecution begins, often just panic - fear of something. And then you want to throw yourself off the roof, just so as not to think about this group and that guy. Even just thinking about him makes me hate both him and myself. It’s like drugs that you want to quit, but you can’t give up: you want to listen to their songs, watch them for hours. I try, but I can’t forget all this myself. Sometimes I think I wish I had amnesia - memory loss, so that I could forget about it and never know that all this exists. I think it's fan love, probably, and maybe I'm just escaping reality by watching Korean TV series and groups whose image was created to make money from people like me. I don’t know what to do: how to forget all this and how to start life from scratch - without them....
Psychologist's answer:
Hello, Alina!
Let's look at your question from both sides. When I was your age, we were fans of Shatunov, their concerts were held with a soundtrack, no one especially danced, but we listened and roared. Were fans. And now it’s funny to remember, but this is youth and everyone goes through it.
What a smart girl you are, you guessed that you were “hooked” on music. Unfortunately, not all music can be listened to on the Internet. The thing is that dishonest people began to upload music with the so-called “25 frame effect”, i.e. There are noises in music that we cannot hear and, alas, we do not know what is recorded along with these noises. I am sure that you have well-developed intuition and willpower. You yourself tried to refuse information (TV series, music). Your inner voice itself told you what you need to do: stop watching, listen. You are absolutely right - you liked the image of MCH, then your imagination completed the picture. Let's bring the guy's image down to earth. His managers know exactly what image girls like: the shape of lips, eyes, etc. plus photoshop - and here it is your ideal.... In our time is running strong imposition of Asian culture. Do you know that rolls and sushi were forced on us, but we liked them and began to devour them. Yes, Korean culture is interesting, everything is different there. Do you know that you can leave your bag on the street and it will remain there.
Hobbies are good, but without fanaticism and in moderation.
Let's do this, turn on your willpower and until July 1, there will be no Korean culture. Can you?
Today we will have a very interesting practical lesson.
I will teach you how to cause short term memory loss in people. You can use this phenomenon to distract your interlocutors from unwanted topics in conversation and unnecessary thoughts. And if you want, you can just have fun by confusing your opponents’ prepared script for communicating with you.
First, a few words about how our memory works.
Memory is related to state
Memories of events are closely related to corresponding states and experiences. For example, things that are unpleasant to us are often repressed from memory. On the other hand, there is the effect of spontaneous amnesia, when people find it difficult to remember what happened to them at the moment of an altered state of consciousness. Be it a hypnotic trance, a dream, an extreme situation or just a drunken party.
A person remembers by association
As a rule, each of our memories entails other, related memories. With enough practice, you can even remember your entire day, sequentially pulling from your memory one picture after another.
And in this lies both our strength and our weakness. Because if there is no connection between events, then the tape of associations can easily break. Remember how unexpected phone call incapacitating you, forcing you to remember where you were going to go and what you wanted to do.
Another weakness of associations is that if two approximately identical events happened during the day (or you just spent the whole day in one room at your desk), then your associations will simply have nothing to cling to. Everything is the same.
There are even special memory tests. A person is asked to remember and reproduce a chain of words. Usually this does not cause any particular difficulties. But if the words in it are repeated... If entire chains of words are repeated... Then it becomes very easy to make a mistake. For each repeating chain, the brain will remember several options for continuation, which will confuse it.
A completed action is forgotten more often than an unfinished one.
According to legend, this effect was first noticed in a restaurant where there was a waiter who remembered all his orders without writing them down. Until they were paid for...
The beginning and end of a message are remembered better than the middle
Why is unknown. This is just how human memory works.
What attracts attention is remembered
And vice versa. If a person is distracted from some object, he will quickly forget it.
This is best seen in contrast. For example, if you, unlike your friend, are well versed in cars, then you probably better remember the brands of cars that you meet on the road.
On the other hand, if you have been to a certain place many times and everything there is familiar and ordinary to you, then you will remember much fewer details than someone who gets there for the first time and looks at everything with curiosity.
Knowing these features of memory, we can consciously provoke forgetting in people using special techniques. There are two groups of such techniques: structuring amnesia and inducing amnesia.
Structuring amnesia
IN in this case you structure your speech in such a way that the peculiarities of the interlocutor’s memory begin to work for you.
People tend to remember the beginning and the end, so information in the middle of a conversation can easily get lost. Memory works by association, so it is difficult to remember words that are in no way related to the main topic of the conversation. People avoid unnecessary stress and therefore strive to remember only the essence of the information received. Everything else is swept aside.
Based on these premises, the following methods of structuring amnesia can be distinguished: ritual, looping, breaks and jumps, stem line.
1. Ritual
We perform the same actions at the beginning and at the end of a conversation. For example, we look into your eyes and say that today is a wonderful day. Or pour water into a glass and drink. Or we take off the watch and put it on the table. Or we say: “We are glad to cooperate with you.” Or... Absolutely the same. Gesture within gesture. Tone on tone. With the same facial expression. In the same position. Both at the beginning and at the end. What's in between is easily forgotten.
You can repeat this ritual not only at the beginning and end of a conversation, but also several times in the middle. What will happen? The chain of associations of the interlocutor will begin to work against him. It will be difficult for him to reproduce what followed. Remembering your actions, a person's memory will slip him different variants continuation. As a result, everything in his head will become confused and mixed up, which is what you need.
2. Loop
As in the previous method, we hide our suggestions (which we need to help the person forget) in the middle of the story, and we design the edges of the story in a special way.
Here are some examples.
We took off our jacket, talked, and put on our jacket.
They started telling a story - got distracted - reported information “by the way” - finished telling the story.
They opened the folder - took out the documents - talked - put the documents away - closed the folder.
To understand the integrity of the process, the subconscious of the target will need to throw out the intermediate conversation from consciousness. Again, we are not talking about the fact that our interlocutor will definitely forget it. We are just making it as difficult as possible for a person to reconstruct the chain of events.
3. Tears and jumps
A sharp change in the topic of conversation, distractions “by the way”, unexpected questions, as well as built-in confusion techniques break the chain of associations, and even with a strong desire, it will be difficult for a person to recall everything in memory.
Remember how professional negotiators like to ask completely abstract questions (perhaps even of a personal nature) or make off-topic quibbles in order to make you forget about the line of argument prepared in advance.
Listen to good storytellers. An ordinary story by a master of the conversational genre contains up to a dozen intricately intertwined stories. And although it is incredibly interesting to listen to all this, it is very difficult to remember, and even more so, to reproduce such a story.
By the way, there is one more – quite powerful – method of provoking amnesia. It is based on the idea of lever-induced trance induction. You start a story, but, noticing that your interlocutor is distracted for a second, you remove a small fragment from your story and continue it from another point. With an ordinary facial expression. As if nothing had happened. As a result, the “as if amnesia” you created will provoke the appearance of real amnesia.
4. Stem line
We highlight the main storyline in the conversation and clearly indicate it. For example, we are discussing general plans. Or we talk about clothing styles. At the same time, from time to time we are distracted by “minor” topics, but invariably return to the main line. And if after some time your interlocutor is asked what you talked to him about, the answer will be simple and clear: he will remember the main plot.
Amnesia induction techniques
Suggestion of amnesia is carried out similarly to any other suggestions. In other words, along with strategic suggestions (for new beliefs, thoughts, desires...), you also give the person service suggestions: to deepen the trance, to trust us, to fix the person’s attention on your words, and, of course, to forget. This is implemented using the following techniques:
1. Direct suggestion
The word “Forget!” One time. Fluently. Without giving any importance. On to the next topic. It is very important. Otherwise, a person will involuntarily ask the question: “Why does he need me to forget this?!” And he will remember. But I need to forget.
In fact, direct suggestion for amnesia is quite common. So you blurted out something without thinking. Interlocutor: “What?” You: “Nothing, forget it!” And if you throw it out with due carelessness, the person actually forgets your words.
2. Mention
This is one of Milton Erickson's funny creations. If he wanted to provoke amnesia in his patients, then immediately before putting them into a hypnotic trance, he mentioned forgetting several times under various pretexts. And he forgot something there. And his relatives forgot about him. And the clients forgot. And now, even if during the process of inducing the trance you forget to instill amnesia, it will still happen.
Don't be afraid that people will forget to do what you told them to do. They will definitely do it. And involuntarily. Especially if they forget that it was your suggestion.
As an excellent example of this technique, we can cite a video with the participation of Deren Brown, when he, accompanied by a television camera, approached a passenger in the subway and said something like the following: "Hello. We are making a film about the subway. The film tells how suddenly a person can suddenly forget the station at which he needs to get off... Once - and he forgot! For example, what station do you get off at?”.
More examples:
- I almost forgot, tell me...
– People tend to forget.
- Vasya forgot to tell you that...
And one more example:
“You know, something very happened to me recently interesting story. I was on one business reception and talked with Pyotr Petrovich and his friends about the features of fur production. When I turned around, I saw a pretty girl. She stood near the window with a glass of martini in her hands. I was quite engrossed in the conversation, but when I saw her, I realized that I had met her before. The conversation continued, we talked about various topics, but all I could think about in my head was “Where did I see her?” When I turned around five minutes later to where she was standing, she was no longer there. I began to answer the questions of my interlocutors at random, because I was painfully trying to remember her name. Nothing worked for me. I even began to worry about my memory. I realized that I had completely forgotten this girl’s name and where we met. I decided to relax and said to myself: “Yes, I don’t remember her name or where we met. But that doesn't matter. Everything that is important, I remember, and everything that is not important, I can forget. My head is not a computer." After that I felt better, and I was happy to join the conversation again. Well, you understand that sometimes you can write something on a piece of paper, and then tear this piece of paper out of the notebook and completely forget what was written there. A few days later, while sitting at work and looking through the profiles of candidates for one of the vacancies in our department, I came across her photo. And once again I said to myself: “It’s good that we don’t have to remember all the little things and details of what happens to us...”.
3. Metaphors of forgetting
We describe images that metaphorically prime the interlocutor's subconscious to forget. These are images of erasure, disappearance, leaving...
Examples:
– the river carries away everything that falls into it;
– deleting files on the computer;
– erasing from the board, etc.
Metaphors have an interesting property. Even if a person is “in the know” and is perfectly aware that you are telling him a metaphor to forget, he will most likely remember the metaphor itself, but not the content of the conversation. Unless, of course, he is too experienced...
4. Unimportance
We label the target suggestion as unimportant. This is best done through the absence of at least some non-verbal selection of basic information from the background flow. You can also give key information (without indicating its significance) in informal times. During a smoke break. Or over tea. Or during a conversation about nothing. In other words, we allow our suggestions to get lost in the information noise. They only benefit from this. I think it’s clear how it works. This is one of the laws of memory: consciousness does not like to remember unimportant things, it prefers to deal only with important things. That's good.
5. Implied Opposite
We take a distracting subject (or topic of conversation) and make sure that the person remembers it. As a result, he will forget everything else.
Imagine that you were asked to carefully monitor how many words starting with the letter “k” appear in a speaker’s speech. How much will you remember from the content of this speech?
Another example: the better the breasts are visible, the worse the face is remembered.
When you come to negotiations, your opponent's attention will be focused on all passages related to the immediate topic of negotiations. This is why you have a good chance to forward suggestions on other topics. Which your opponent will most likely miss, forget, and implement.
We also remember that what is perceived (and remembered) as important is something that is associated with strong emotions. Therefore, we actively provoke emotions in relation to the distracting subject. Something that the interlocutor must remember. Instead of what we suggest to him. Sometimes there can be a scandal in right place arrange. Or even distract someone from something with sex.
To summarize what has been said, we can conclude that provoking amnesia is a matter of technology. And the fact that all these techniques are quite commonplace only speaks of their effectiveness.
At the end of the lesson, I suggest you watch short video, and try to determine what technique of provoking amnesia was used main character. Write your answer in the comments to the lesson.
P.S. I hope you have noticed that the above techniques can be used very effectively to make a person forget the suggestion you have placed in him. Therefore, this information will be especially valuable for owners of the “Practice of Covert Hypnosis” course. If the target does not remember your suggestions, he will not be able to consciously resist them.
Here, by the way, it is important for a person to play along at the right moment. When he comes to you to tell you about his new great idea, don't remind him that you were the one who gave it to him. This is unnecessary.
Memory is one of the most important, influencing his entire life. And many people take the problem of developing their memory skills very seriously. Fortunately, there are a huge number of opportunities today: various trainings, courses, seminars and other training programs. If a person has a need to improve his memory, he can easily find suitable materials. However, much less attention is paid to the problem of forgetting, although its importance is no less. After all, many of us often have a desire to get rid of some memories, feelings from the past, and simply free our memory from unnecessary information. This is exactly what we decided to talk about.
Among the many methods designed to improve memory, there are special methods designed for intentional forgetting. Their totality is called flying technology. The term itself has its roots in greek mythology, in which the well-known Lethe River was often mentioned (remember the common expression “sink into oblivion”). Lethe is the river of oblivion, which was located in the underground domain of Hades. Dead souls who entered his kingdom, having drunk water from Lethe, forever forgot that they had ever lived.
So what are the benefits of flying technology and what exactly is it used for? To begin with, it is worth saying that the property of human memory to forget is its integral component, because thanks to it, mnemonic processes are complete. And many Russian and foreign psychologists have talked and are talking about this. It is the ability to forget that helps a person erase from memory something that happened in the past, but has an impact on destructive influence on the psyche and personality in the present, as well as any currently irrelevant information. These are the two main reasons why it is recommended to master forgetting techniques.
There are two main flight techniques: suppression and removal. Let's consider each of them separately.
Suppression
This method is considered specifically as a psychotherapeutic one, i.e. thanks to him, it becomes possible to forget what has a traumatic effect on the psyche. Often some memories of negative events bother people and come to mind more and more often because of their vivid emotional coloring. A person begins to react sharply to this, to be afraid of these memories, and they become stronger. To eliminate these and other various obsessive thoughts, two exercises are usually used.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on a piece of paper all the memories that make you feel negative emotions. Describe them in full detail. Then take this sheet, crumple it and place it in a pre-prepared fireproof container. Set fire to the crumpled sheet. Watch the flame. And while the leaf burns, imagine how all the memories that bother you burn with it, and then turn into ashes. As soon as the paper completely burns out, scatter the ashes to the wind, throwing them, for example, out the window.
The essence of this exercise is that it not only helps you get rid of unnecessary memories, but also becomes their master. It is by having the opportunity to manage his memories that a person can get rid of them. This may even be unpleasant to some extent, but the result is worth it, because a person no longer needs to defend himself from annoying thoughts or suppress them, because he can simply describe them and burn them. And fire, as we know, has always been the best psychotherapist for people: looking at it, people were cleansed of what was psychologically pressing on them, “threw a heavy burden off their shoulders.” If a person has a vivid imagination, he is able to almost literally imagine how his troubles and misfortunes burn together with the paper, freeing his memory from a heavy burden.
"TV"
Sit in comfortable armchair or on the sofa and take a comfortable body position. Try to project your negative experiences in detail onto a large television screen created in your imagination. After that, pick up the same imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Watch it as a silent movie. Then gradually make the image blurry and dull. Imagine that it becomes less and less bright and disappears completely.
The most important thing in this exercise is not to rush. There is no need to try to complete the entire exercise in a couple of minutes. On the contrary, you need the process to be as detailed as possible. For example, you can imagine how, after the picture disappears, you turn off the TV, unplug the power cord, pick up the TV, bring it to the window and throw it away.
You can also get creative with the film itself: change the plot from drama to comedy. Model the continuation of the situation in a comical version, put a funny melody or a stupid song on the image, imagine that the role is played not by you, but by one of the comedians. Become the director of your memories - this way you can manage and control them. If you don't need them, throw them out of your “video library”.
Even if “Burning Letter” and “TV” do not completely rid you of memories, you will no longer be afraid of them in any case. And if you are not afraid of them, then they will probably become indifferent to you. And what is indifferent to a person rarely disturbs his memory.
Removal
This is the second flying method. It is intended to a greater extent to remove from memory information that has lost its relevance and represents only mental and emotional garbage. Several exercises can be distinguished in the removal technique.
"Flight technical rag"
For example, your memory contains unnecessary images (words, people, pictures, data), which, although they do not have a negative effect, distract your attention and interfere with concentration, free flow of thoughts, etc. Imagine all this information figuratively reflected on a large chalk board. Then imagine taking a wet rag and erasing all those blocks of this information that you don’t need. In empty spaces, new images may form, related to the previous ones or associated with those nearby. Take the rag again and continue washing. Do this until nothing appears in the empty space. This technique is suitable if there is little information, because... you can divide the board into several sectors and clear each of them in turn.
"Images on Film"
There are cases when the amount of information is large and a simple “flying rag” may not work. Then you can transform this technique a little. Imagine that all the images being recreated are displayed on the same board, but only it is covered with an opaque film. Fill this entire film with unnecessary data, and then simply pull it off the board, immediately freeing up a large space on a new film stretched over the same board. The presented technique was used at one time by the outstanding Soviet and Russian journalist, professional mnemonist and owner of a phenomenal memory, Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky.
Recording
This is another technique that S.V. used. Shereshevsky. He said that he always found it funny that people write down everything they want to remember, because if a person writes it down, why should he remember it? He decided that if he wrote something down, then he did not need to remember it. This became one of the laws of forgetting developed by Shereshevsky, which he began to apply whenever he needed to forget something not particularly important: telephone numbers, people's names, etc. You can use this technique too. Just pay attention: than more people writes, the less he uses his memory, and the less he uses his memory, the less it is trained and the less he can remember. Therefore, the less he writes down, the more he will train his memory, and the more he will remember. And it turns out that the information being recorded is information that should not be imprinted in memory, which means it can be safely forgotten. A very good reception, although to many it seems somewhat paradoxical.
In conclusion, I would like to add that the more you practice forgetting unnecessary information, the faster you will master this skill. After some time, the need to use any techniques will disappear by itself, because... You can forget any information and erase memories only with the help of one volitional effort, by giving your brain the appropriate command.
Don't forget to leave a comment. We will also be interested to know which of the forgetting techniques discussed seems most effective to you.
Psychologists say that a person forgets 80% of what he heard in 24 hours, and 90% of the information received in two days. To forget the remaining 10%, we need only one week. It seems that the mechanism of forgetting is fine-tuned by our brain to perfection. But sometimes we still want to erase unpleasant memories from our lives!
You've probably already heard about ways to improve memory and various exercises for memorization. But when we need to not remember, but rather forget about something, other exercises will come to the rescue.
Techniques designed to forget unnecessary information are called flying technicians (from the name of the ancient Greek river of oblivion Lethe, remember the expression “sink into oblivion”). Let's look at a few exercises that will help you forget unpleasant moments:
"TV"
Sit comfortably in your favorite chair or sofa. Imagine your negative experiences shown on a big TV screen. Take an imaginary remote control and turn off the sound of your “movie”. Observe the picture, then make it fade and finally dissolve. Don’t rush to complete the exercise in a couple of minutes, imagine a lot of details.
"Burning Letter"
Write down on paper those memories or feelings that bother you unpleasantly. Then crumple this sheet and burn it in a special container. Imagine that all your negative emotions burn away along with the paper. This will help you gain control over the situation.
"Rag"
This method is suitable for forgetting not so much unpleasant as unnecessary things. Imagine these facts written on chalk school board. Take an imaginary wet washcloth in your hands and start wiping them off the board. Continue the exercise until new information no longer appears in place of the erased information and the board becomes clean.
"Recording"
Our brain considers it unnecessary to remember information that is written down and always at hand. Use this feature if you need to forget something unimportant. Write down your daily plans, make shopping lists, and write down phone numbers instead of keeping it all in your head at once.
Have a good, but selective, memory!
Life is a complex and vibrant thing, with a lot of different moments and intersections with the destinies of thousands of people. And every time certain moments sink into the soul. If it is something positive, it gives strength, but if it is bad, then, on the contrary, it takes away. Negative memories also have this property - they corrode the soul and, like a lump, accumulate grievances. And in order to simply move on, you need to learn to forget the bad, throw it away and live a new day.
spring-cleaning
Oddly enough, you need to start by cleaning the house. And then do it cleaning your head. You need to get into every cabinet and box, shake out your things and documents, and leave at home only what you really need. You should not keep gifts and things of those people with whom you have negative emotions. Throw away everything that your ex gave you, all the photos together and travel tickets. Let there be room in the house for something new.
While going through things, work through your memories, remember not only the bad, but also the good, mentally thank people for being in your life, thank things for their faithful service. And then imagine that along with your things you are taking away from your home all the negativity that has accumulated over the years. That's all: cleanliness in the house, cleanliness in the soul.
Learn to meditate
Meditation is not just a special pose and divine music, it is the ability to withdraw into yourself for a while, harmonize your thoughts and feelings. Let these be half-hour thoughts about goodness, prosperity and love. Set yourself up for the good, bright and positive.
Spend more time in nature, distracting yourself from external problems. Don't get hung up on grievances, be calm and balanced. Only unhappy and unloved people are rude and swear, so always be above it and don't pay attention to them. And if something really hurt you, then sit down, write it all on a piece of paper, express all your feelings and burn this piece of paper, imagining how the flame eats up everything bad.
Don't accept and forgive
It is true what they say is that as long as you have not accepted the negativity of other people, it does not concern you. You have the right to be happy and loved, even if everyone around you whines and complains. Everyone chooses how to live and how to feel.
If people are forcibly trying to offend you or have already offended you, then forgive them and don’t replay this situation in your head. By being able to forgive, we gain great power love and understanding, which helps to be a source of light in this world even in the darkest times.