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The prestidigitator stands on one side of the stage when he apparently throws the costly watch against the mirror on the other side of the stage; the audience sees his suggestive hand movement and the disappearance of the watch and sees twenty feet away the shattering of the mirror. The suggestible spectator cannot help seeing the flight of the watch across the stage.
Such experiments of the psychological laboratory can be varied a thousandfold, and it might not be unwise to introduce them into many practical fields. Everybody knows for instance how much may depend upon the suggestibility of the witness in court. The suggestible witness believes himself to have seen and heard what the lawyer suggests.
How deeply suggestible the mass of people can be is only appreciated when one sees the result of public health lectures and books. Many persons tend to develop all the symptoms they hear of, from pains and aches to mental failure. Even in the medical schools this is so, and every medical teacher is consulted each year by students who feel sure they have the diseases he has described.
It is known as the Muller-Lyer illusion. My contention is that if you said, "Both are the same size," you are potentially a good subject. You respond perfectly to previous conditioning; thus, you are responding as anticipated. If, on the other hand, you picked line AB, you are normally suggestible. If you honestly picked line CD, you are extremely cautious and respond best to "reverse psychology."
The "active" person to the psychologist is one who is very responsive to what we have called Suggestions. Suggestions may be described in most general terms as any and all the influences from outside, from the environment, both physical and personal, which get a lodgment in consciousness and lead to action. A child who is "suggestible" to a high degree shows it in what we call "motility."
To bring suggestions to greater effectiveness and to exert their influence practically upon every possible subject, we have thus not only to give suggestions or to advise autosuggestion but in both cases we have to secure, especially for the naturally less suggestible patients, a somewhat heightened suggestibility.
It has left us unduly suggestible, much open to mass movement, at the mercy of the lesser prophets and wanting in those stabilities and understandings upon which a sound culture is to be built.
The physician and the psychologist, considering the mental state with reference to its elements, will make most careful use of those accessory influences. The minister, who necessarily has his spiritual aim in mind, cannot even become aware of all the involuntary influences which reach the mind in its most suggestible state.
She herself believes that she receives the knowledge through her finger tips. In reality it is, of course, a stimulus by which she becomes more suggestible and by which accordingly her sensitiveness to the slight signs which her mother and sister give her becomes increased.
Russia is full of these madmen, who, not content with committing arson or throwing bombs at hazard into the crowd, finally mutilate themselves, like the Skopzis and other analogous sects. These perpetual rebels are generally highly suggestible beings, whose mystic mentality is obsessed by fixed ideas.
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