One can hypnotise a chicken by drawing a line in the sand. One can hypnotise a presentation audience by presenting a slide full of text. It all comes down to cognitive load. Whilst people get upset at the risks of abuse in being able to hypnotise a chicken, no one has concerns about an audience focused on a useless piece of text, paying no attention to their surroundings and losing educational opportunities.
(no chickens were harmed in this video)
Cognitive load has been discussed earlier. An overwhelming volume of processing for the chicken in doing whatever it is doing to that line leads it to be unable to take in other inputs, including risk. It simply stares at the line in the sand. In virtually every presentation workshop I run, I hypnotise an unknowing human being. During a section of speech I introduce a slide full of text but I make no reference to its content or value. As I continue speaking I become aware of an audience member at the front of the group who has become so fixated on reading the slide that they are no longer listening to me. I make the audience aware and then stop speaking. And wait. The hypnotised audience member will often take 15 to 30 seconds to become aware that I have stopped speaking. They have been overwhelmed by the cognitive load of reading and sacrificed listening.
As humans our brains have to make sense of visual inputs. It probably protects us. We are able to allow masses of data input without focus as we go about our daily lives only processing that which is essential. A simple example is you are now aware of sitting when previously this sensory input was passively accepted. Think of the silence when the refrigerator turns off or how we turn off the music when we get lost driving the car. Our cognitive abilities are limited in processing and if they are overloaded, prioritisation must occur. If we are exposed to a huge volume of complex text, we will prioritise reading over all other inputs . How to hypnotise a chicken? draw a line in the sand. How to hypnotise a human. Put up a complex slide.