Phenomenological Control Across Multiple Contexts

There are stable individual differences in the ability to alter subjective experience in accordance with one’s goals: the capacity for phenomenological control. Trait differences in this ability have historically most commonly been measured by response to direct, verbal imaginative suggestion within the context of hypnosis. However, phenomenological control does not require hypnosis and does not require direct verbal imaginative suggestion (e.g., mesmerism, a historical precursor to hypnosis, involved response to implicit, non-verbal suggestion). In this talk, I will discuss the measurement of trait differences in phenomenological control and summarise some recent work investigating the hypothesis that phenomenological control underlies unusual experiences in a wide range of situations besides hypnosis. That is, in various contexts, people may draw on cues to form beliefs about experiences they could have, and then generate the required experience through phenomenological control. These include suggestive cues in psychological experiments (‘demand characteristics’), ‘viral’ internet-based cues (e.g., for ‘ASMR’ experiences of tingling on the head), anomalous experiences (e.g., of past lives).

Dr Peter Lush is a research fellow in cognitive psychology in the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. His main research interest is phenomenological control: the capacity to generate experience in accordance with one’s goals. His current work in this area is focused on investigating the use of phenomenological control in a variety of different contexts including in response to experimental demand characteristics (contextual cues which convey experimental aims to participants). In this same line of research he has previously worked on mechanisms supporting apparent experiences of involuntariness in response to imaginative suggestion in a hypnotic context and on the development of scales for measuring response to imaginative suggestion within and outside the hypnotic context.