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Hypnosis Question
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Consider a door that swings inward and has a "Pull" sign affixed.
Which would be easier for a hypnotist to achieve?
1. Having a subject read the sign as "Push" and have him struggle against the door to no avail?
2. Have the subject read the sign as "Pull" but have the meaning of the word in his mind mean "push" and have him similarly struggle to open the door?
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I think I get what you're going for.
Is it easier to process an external stimuli, reading the sign as something else, or an internal stimuli, becoming confused about the action/thought you're having?
It's subject based, which is a boring answer, so let me try and un-boring it.
These suggestions are gags, what I mean is they're stage hypnosis bits which require the subject to participate in the bit actively. You want to do the silly thing.
Further, they're just close enough that functionally they're the same suggestion because they reach the same end and require the same practical disregard of sense that the subject has.
Out of this context, the idea becomes one of how are you being incentivized to follow the suggestion, because we only accept and follow suggestions we agree with, so how is it easier to help a subject find agreement?
The external offers immediacy, usually. When you see this, you do this. That's option 1 above. It's how you act, you're prompting a different, deliberate, external action, or even an internal one. When you see any kind of balloon, you will remember this session, you see something, you do something, still the same immediacy.
The internal is an issue of thought patterns, of habituated intellectual and emotional responses. So, when you see a balloon now, you will not need to remember this session precisely, but you will feel a comfortable association with balloons and hypnosis, until balloons and hypnosis will become inseparable.
Again it's kind of a splitting hairs territory, but one is immediate and the other is prolonged, and of course with repetition of the immediate it will duplicate the same thing with the prolonged, but in a more literal way.
So we're back to the top again, are literal suggestions or figurative suggestions more effective?
And again it comes down to the subject, and down to what you're trying to accomplish.
Theoretically, going all the way back to your example, one would think along these lines that option 1 is easier to execute, but again, that's because the incentive is there for the person to take part in the silliness.
I've talked myself in circles, hope that helps.