Reddit mentions of Self-Hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living (Signet)

Regarding note-taking:

I've seen studies that say the mere act of note-taking itself helps you absorb some material-- even if you never go over the notes again.

Of course, some types of material are lots more difficult than others, and so you couldn't be expected to get by simply on a single pass of note-taking, and then discarding your notes (like most engineering classes, for instance).

In many technical subjects, missing a single critical point or bit of info can throw off all the rest of a class. So it helps a lot if you can get an accurate and comprehensive record of what a teacher tells the class, and writes on a chalkboard. However, most people's note taking techniques cannot keep up with the speech and writing of many teachers, who might be lightning fast in their delivery due to having presented the same material dozens of times or more. Tape recorders often don't help either, as they still require transcription to be useful, and it can be tough to find the time to sit through the original lecture a second time to do it. And you still run into the problem of being unable to transcribe as fast as the verbal speech (and in a recording, you also lose the chalkboard visuals).

I believe the rapid note-taking technique involved dropping all or most of the vowels in words as you wrote them. The resulting abbreviations were still remarkably legible, but took much less time to write-- and so you could keep up with pretty much any lecture much better than most others.

(Please see the book for details though; after 30 years I could be forgetting something important here).

Regarding hypnosis, yes, it's good to be concerned about mucking around too much with your psyche. Lots of people do this much too cavalierly with drugs (and sometimes pay a terrible price).

On the other hand, hypnosis is also pretty safe-- much safer than lots of other things many people routinely do to themselves on a daily basis-- unless maybe you're trying very hard to make it NOT so.

I have to admit I probably went too far with hypnosis personally-- because I really liked the idea of getting some of those superhuman capabilities various folks talked about, both in fiction and non-fiction related to the topic. However, in real life, what few people do attain amazing powers through things like meditation and the like usually only do so after many years, and tons of other mental and physical disciplinary measures-- plus have an expert mentor guiding them the whole way: unlike a college student (like me) as eager to jump into something as William Hurt was in the film Altered States. Yikes! That was me; and I sort of got into some things as weird and scary as Hurt did in the film.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080360/

But I went to extremes: and KNEW I was going to extremes. There's plenty of natural safeguards against going too far with hypnosis; plus more safeguards you can add manually as you go along. In my case I eventually was trying to do my best to get around all of those. Yikes! Ha, ha.

Quite a few years later I would actually get into a similar pickle with lucid dreaming, and find myself desperate to get out of it again, too.




The main book I used to get started with self-hypnosis I found in the Whole Earth Catalog: Self Hypnotism by Leslie M. LeCron. I think the link below points to the same work:

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Hypnotism-Technique-Daily-Living-Signet/dp/0451159845



I'm gradually writing up all my personal experiences online, in a list of stories which run the gamut from straightforward autobiographical, to epic science fiction. I've presently got a chronological outline of them all here (please excuse the creative presentation format: I'm also striving to make a living with them).


As to lasting benefits from the Silva Method-- it's really hard to separate out lasting effects from any particular single thing I tried along the way: for everything tends to have some sort of effect on you, good or bad, big or small. And sometimes you can't ever realize or define such an effect except under very specific circumstances; circumstances you might well never come to meet.


I do remember the Silva book sure was good at motivating the reader to do the exercises. And the mental exercises eventually became excruciatingly difficult. Sort of like weight-lifting for the brain, maybe. But I'm not sure if it offered lasting benefits or not, to be frank. But perhaps it at least had as much effect on my brain as striving hard to understand differential equations in college did.

Maybe the real answer to your question lies somewhere in my online stories. Where you could judge such effects (if any) for yourself.