July 18, 2008

Psychology and you

Trance

Many of us have often felt as if we removed ourselves mentally from our day-to-day surroundings, and caught ourselves “starting off into space” or “in another world”. These are small everyday instance of entering a mild trance state. Trance includes a variety of processes, techniques, and states of mind, awareness and consciousness. Trance state may occur involuntary and without notice. The term “trance” may be associated with meditation, magic, flow and player.

There are many nature sounds, such as birds, frogs, crickets which fundamentally repeat, but which contain slight variations within each repetition. The fundamental repetition is the trance generating loop (TGL) and the variations in each repetition results in the modulation of the dissociated trance plane. It is for this reason that the sounds of nature tend to produce trance.

All forms of meditation practice involve the repetition of cognitive objects of varying degrees of complexity. The relatively simple meditation of watching the breath will induce a mediation trance. More complex forms such as are practiced by Tibetan Buddhists or Sufis may consist of combinations of meditation and hypnotic trance. Visualizations and physical movements can be combined with mantra yoga produce multiple dissociated trance planes. 

Music consists of repeating rhythms and melodies. From a trance theory point of view, music consists of multiple trances, one for each repeating rhythm or melody. Most of these musical loops repeat only a few times and there is a minimum number of repetitions needs before a dissociated trance plane will be created. Musical trance can be described as the creation of multiple trances followed by their collapse. However, another cognitive loop is precisely this repeated creation and collapsing of dissociated trance planes.

Certain types of music are more trance-inducing, generally, than others. Musical loops which are sustained, such as in shamanistic or so-called trance-drumming, have at least the critical element of high repetition. Thus, the high repetition of the musical loop is more likely to produce a single dissociated trance plane. Religious and military marching music also has a higher likelihood of inducing trance because of the high repetition of the musical loop.

Certain sports such as jogging, swimming, basketball, etc. require repetition of action and therefore a repetition of cognitive objects. These sports all create dissociated trance planes and therefore trance.