Note 16 — INTRODUCTION TO PART II

“This experimental observation is so far to our interest that it has proved that hypnotic suggestion is by far surpassed in the duration of its effects by suggestion in the waking state, and this again by regular teaching and practice. But this is physiologically explicable: Hypnotic suggestion obtains its results solely through the intensity of the isolated stimulus and through the brain-track it leaves behind, which has an abnormally slight connexion with the whole associative mechanism of the brain. Regular instruction, on the contrary, is based on the strong associative implanting of the stimulus and the brain-track it leaves behind, with the normal activity of the brain, i.e., on the many-sidedness of the nervous connections and their reproductive effect; whilst, in the first case, the trace is more or less easily effaced, in the second the accompanying reproductive, sympathetic stimulus increases and preserves the result obtained, as well as effecting the other bodily functions dependent on it.”—The Psychic Treatment of Disease, Berthold Kern.