There are lots of applications of the principle of pattern interruption. Anything "unexpected" will get you that response. During that period when a person goes "on hold" because you have just done something wholly irrelevant or unexpected, that's the time to offer them clear suggestions about what response you want next.
You have to practice these techniques until you are personally powerful and congruent in carrying them out. You need to act in all of your behavior—verbal and nonverbal—as if this is going to happen, and it happens. As soon as you can present yourself fully congruently in making the maneuver, your job is to detect what response you get. You've got to have feedback. None of the generalizations that we offer you will always work. They always have to be adjusted to the feedback that you get.
Overload
About twenty–five years ago, George Miller summarized a huge amount of both human and animal perceptual research in his classic paper 'The Magic Number 7 ± 2." Human beings have the capacity to consciously attend to about seven "chunks" of information at one time, Beyond that number, a person becomes overloaded and starts to make mistakes. If I tell you a sequence of seven numbers, you can probably hold that in consciousness without error. If I give you a sequence of nine numbers, you will find it much more difficult to recall them correctly, and will start to make mistakes. Each number is a "chunk" of information. However, if you—or I —divide the nine digits into three groups of three, you will be able to recall the nine numbers much more easily. Now there are only three chunks of three digits each. By grouping information in larger chunks, it becomes possible to deal with more information with the same 7± 2 chunks of conscious attention. You can consciously attend to seven leaves, seven twigs, seven branches, seven trees, or seven forests. How much you can attend to depends upon the size of the chunk of information that you are dealing with.
Whatever chunk size you choose, when you are paying conscious attention to7±2 chunks of information, anything else will not be processed consciously. Anything beyond 7±2 chunks of information becomes overload and will be processed unconsciously.
An example of this happened in another workshop. I asked for someone who had a way of remembering names that worked exquisitely. A woman named Carla had one, so 1 had her come up to the front. Ann Teachworth was sitting in the audience, and I said to Carla "Do you happen to know this woman over here?" and I pointed to Ann. Carla said "No," When Carla was introduced to someone her pupils dilated and she made an internal image of the person's name on her forehead, Then every time she saw her again, her pupils would dilate slightly and she would see the name written there on her forehead. That was the way she always knew someone's name, and it worked very well. Since I know what she does, I know where in the sequence of Carla's experience she will be unable to consciously represent any additional input: when her attention is oriented inward and all of her 7± 2 chunks of attention are occupied with visualizing the person's name on her forehead.
I said to Carla "Look at the woman over there. Her name is Ann …"I paused, saw her pupils dilate, and then said "Teachworth." She heard "Ann" and visually wrote it on Ann's forehead. Then I asked her "What's that woman's name?" Her pupils dilated again and she said "Ann." I said "Do you know what her last name is?" She said "No, you didn't tell me." When your timing and your sensory experience are refined enough that you know when a person's attention is inwardly oriented and when it's not, you can introduce anything you want. When someone is oriented inward, she will respond appropriately to your suggestions because you bypass her conscious mind. There's no way for her to filter or defend against such suggestions.
At that point I said "Her name is Ann Teachworth" and Carla said "Oh! Now I remember." That was an elegant demonstration that although she didn't have it available in conscious awareness because it didn't go through her name–remembering process, it was there. She recognized Ann's last name when she heard it, so it had been processed and remembered unconsciously.
Whenever a person's conscious processing is overloaded, you can pass information directly to the unconscious, and the person will respond to that information. The easiest way to overload someone's attention is by having her pay attention to a complex internal experience.
I used an overload technique the second time I ever officially induced a trance. I'll demonstrate. Would you come up for a second, Bill, and stand here?
"OK, would you close your eyes? Now what I would like you to do is to softly, out loud, begin to count backwards from two hundred by threes. And as you do that, I'm going to put my hands on your shoulders and turn you around in circles. If at any point you discover it is more comfortable for you to simply drop into a nice deep trance, do so with the full realization that you are in good hands."
By doing this, I create an overload by occupying all of his representational systems. He's using visualization as a way of helping himself count backwards. Auditorily he's saying the numbers to himself. I disorient him kinesthetically by turning him in circles. He's now overloading himself with things to attend to, so I don't have to.
I could just as well have said "Now turn slowly in a circle." However, if I turn him with my hands on his shoulders, I get a lot of tactile feedback about when he's changing states and what kind of state he's going into. I also give him something else to attend to kinesthetically: the feeling of my hands on his shoulders.
To make sure that overload works, you make sure that all systems are engaged. If he's busy visualizing and counting off the numbers while he's being disoriented kinesthetically, I can offer suggestions which will go right past his consciousness into the unconscious. If I say something that distracts him from the task, I will immediately know it, because he's counting out loud. There's a built–in feedback mechanism in this traditional method. If he stops counting, I know he's either dropped into a deep trance, or he's shaken off the disorientation and is consciously listening to the suggestions I am attempting to pass to the unconscious. Then I'll either insist that he continue to count, or I'll notice that he is in deep trance, stop fooling around, and go to work.
This is a really traditional trance induction, by the way. I read this particular method in a book years ago, and having had no experience of it, just followed the instructions as if I knew what I was doing. It was only some years later that I figured out what the principle was, so that I could generalize from that specific method to overloading someone in a variety of ways. The way we teach in these workshops is designed to do exactly the same thing, because we arc interested in passing most of the messages to you at the unconscious level.
You can use any complicated task to occupy a person and distract his consciousness while you disorient him. Then you offer a very direct, immediate, and easy–to–follow instruction like "If at any point it is easier for you to simply drop into a deep trance, then do so and enjoy it with the full realization you are secure in your present position… ."
Here's another variation. I take Jack's hand here, and I want to overload him. So I say "All you have to do is sit here comfortably. I'm going to touch different fingers and your thumb, and I'm going to name the one I'm touching. Your job is to simply decide whether I'm doing this correctly or incorrectly."
Then I begin touching and labeling. "Forefinger, middle finger, ring finger, little finger, thumb. Middle finger, forefinger, ring finger, thumb." (He touches the little finger.)
Each time I "make a "mistake" he will do what he just did: his pupils dilated and there was a hesitation in his breathing. He had to take some time to compute. It took him longer to decide that I had made a "mistake" than it took him to decide earlier that I was correct.