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The Romeo Error – Lyall Watson

Eugene Marais, working in the field, produced some pioneer studies in what is now well known as hypnotic hyperaesthesia.

He hypnotized a young girl and found that she was able to taste quinine in water at a dilution of one in half a million, when the best she could do under normal circumstances was a solution four times that strength. When twenty people each handled a small object and placed it in a receptacle, she was able after smelling both the object and the hands of the people, to give each object back to the person who first touched it.

Marais made a small machine that produced a sound like the hiss of a snake and found that his subject could hear it at a distance of over two hundred metres, when her normal limit was thirty. Even a baboon, normally hypersensitive to the presence of snakes, was not able to detect the hiss from more than sixty metres away.

It seems that we normally receive far more information at an unconscious level than we need or can cope with, and that this is filtered by a programme in our mental computers which is designed to respond only to a more limited range of signals.

With biofeedback techniques it is possible to train someone to become consciously aware of normally unconscious processes like small changes in blood pressure.