Suggestions Blog Update

Though the mechanism of neural excitation and inhibition is as yet imperfectly known, nevertheless its observed effects are highly significant. Some of them take most striking forms, as when perspiration, appetite, or sexual desire is aroused solely by suggestion, with no adequate cause given in sensory experience; or as when activities of the intestines are inhibited merely by the recollection of a "nauseating" experience. I do not want, however, to convey the impression that excitation and inhibition, as produced by the autonomic nervous system, are unusual phenomena. Nor that their effects are confined to involuntary activities. Quite the contrary, they modify not only mechanical processes but also conscious experience. Only striking cases of excitation and inhibition attract our attention. Ordinary cases, on the other hand, occur every day, in fact every minute, yet pass unobserved, unnoticed, as a matter of course.Take, for instance, habits. Some of them, doubtless, are acquired or lost in a slow, gradual fashion. But then again we find habits formed, modified, or broken almost instantaneously. This may happen under the influence of a powerful suggestion or emotion, such as fear; or a more mechanical process may be responsible for the change. Professor Pavlov, starting with his doctrine that "extinction of conditioned reflexes is accompanied by inhibition," has actually developed a specific technique as to how to break habits. The truth is, in brief, that anything that has been learned, can also be unlearned either through the gradual process of obliviscence or through the abrupt process of inhibition. We forget either slowly or suddenly.