Research Program / Claims / natural-hypnosis-1
Natural hypnosis is the unconscious's default to 'conscious beliefs.'
自然催眠是无意识对“有意识信念”的默认。
Concept natural hypnosis · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.
Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
First define 'default' as the ability to change automatic responses without repetition, reinforcement, or explicit implementation intentions. A pre-registered experiment with approximately 300 participants will independently manipulate explicitly communicated beliefs and actual contingency learning, including conditions where the two are consistent, conflicting, and neutral; measures include probability judgments, skin conductance, pupil dilation, and behavior, and participants' awareness of the contingency relationships will be assessed. The duration is 2 weeks, including immediate, 24-hour, and 7-day measurements; the independent predictive power of explicit beliefs versus learning history on responses will be compared.
Suggested paper title
Explicit Beliefs and Conditioned Learning as Determinants of Automatic Responses: A Preregistered Experiment
What it would overturn
If explicit beliefs continue to dominate automatic responses under conflicting conditions, this would revise the hypothesis that 'automatic responses can be maintained by learning history and are dissociable from explicitly endorsed beliefs.'
Candidate labs / funders
Devin B. Terhune，伦敦国王学院 Awareness & Modulation Lab; Anoushiravan Zahedi，催眠与认知机制研究者
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Default' may imply that explicit beliefs have priority, but the original text does not specify conflict situations, time scales, or failure conditions; until these constraints are added, it cannot be distinguished from expectancy, conditioning, or predictive processing theories.
Note
The whole table is rated according to the full claim; 'untested' indicates that no direct test was found in the present search, not that no one worldwide has studied it; similar papers do not equal confirmation of the original claim; sample sizes are planned magnitudes and require separate power analyses; paper_title values are proposed titles; literature search as of 2026-09-06, DOIs confirmed by journals, PubMed, or institutional records; no claim of completing Crossref verification for each item.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim natural-hypnosis-1, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/natural-hypnosis-1