Research Program / Claims / trance-state-11

In a trance state, the state can be verified in practice through self-suggestions such as “I cannot open my eyes” or “my arm is as stiff as a board,” after which one is indeed unable to perform the corresponding action.

在恍惚状态下，可通过自我暗示“无法睁开双眼”或“手臂僵硬如板”实际验证状态，暗示后确实无法做到。

Concept trance state · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · testable prediction · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contested · ★ 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)
  • esp-power §7
Adjudicating experiment
Supplementary Question 1: Approximately 180 participants, stratified by hypnotic susceptibility, would undergo a crossover comparison of Seth-style induction, standard hypnosis, wakeful self-suggestion, and deliberate simulation, with four visits over four weeks and a total duration of 12–18 months. Identical arm-rigidity and eye-opening challenges would be used, recording joint angles, torque, antagonist-muscle EMG, eyelid video, EEG, and prefrontal fNIRS with short-separation channels. Prefrontal hemodynamic changes and neural connectivity measures would be pre-registered, with actual exertion, eye movements, respiration, scalp blood flow, and expectancy controlled. A held-out sample would be used to test whether the induction methods can be distinguished.
Suggested paper title
Motor Suggestion Across Absorptive and Hypnotic Inductions: A Pre-registered EEG–fNIRS Study
What it would overturn
A reproducible, specific mechanism that persists after matching expectancy, exertion, and suggestion content would revise the hypothesis that identical motor suggestions primarily rely on mechanisms shared across induction methods.
Candidate labs / funders
Ursula Debarnot — Inter-University Laboratory of Human Movement Biology, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1; Juliette Gélébart — Inter-University Laboratory of Human Movement Biology, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1; Zoltan Dienes — Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex
Specificity of Seth's formulation
The motor tasks are concrete but have long been part of classical hypnosis assessment. No distinctive predictions are provided for response rates, EMG, or brain activity, and the same response to suggestion cannot be used circularly to both define and verify a trance state.
Note
There is evidence that some individuals experience motor inhibition as subjectively involuntary. However, inevitable inability in everyone, objective loss of ability, and its use as a diagnostic indicator of a specific state are not established. EEG cannot directly measure local activation, and fNIRS cannot measure the deep anterior cingulate cortex. [2026 study and author affiliations](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42158642/)
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim trance-state-11, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/trance-state-11