Skip to main content

The Natural Hypnotist


A story idea came to me while thinking about the electrical nature of the brain and brainwaves. Brain activity is, of course, electrical in part and the overall activity of the brain produces waves that can be detected through the skin by an EEG (electroencephalogram).

I wondered, “What if someone were naturally keenly sensitive to these mind patterns through the means of electrical conduction, so that if he or she were to touch someone, that would allow picking up the electrical conductivity through another person’s skin, which this person would somehow understand, in effect allowing mind reading?” But the problem with that is the EEG pattern is far to general to reflect specific thoughts. At best it could convey a mood.

However, some brainwave patterns are associated with forms of consciousness other than normal wakefulness. So then I thought, “What if someone had the ability to emit a naturally powerful (but strange) electrical generation of their own brain to override someone else’s brainwave pattern and put that other brain into whatever pattern he or she wished?”

Such a person could instantly drop another person into various stages of sleep, including dreaming (REM) sleep. People like that could also force a person’s brain into the highly suggestive state associated with hypnotism.

Imagine a story in which a villain has such a power. On contact skin to skin contact, his powerful brainwaves can force another person into another state of consciousness. He could use this in a wide variety of ways, but hypnosis would be his primary power—taking what he wanted from others by reprogramming them to do his bidding.

So then imagine the hero having a sort of brain defect that makes him or her immune to the villain’s power, but which also limits and challenges the protagonist. This could be a variety of things for the sake of a story: schizophrenia, cerebral palsy, autism, or even something more extreme, such as having had surgery to divide the hemispheres of the brain to stop severe childhood seizures or something.

Whatever the case is, the villain at some point would try to override the protagonist’s brain based on changing brainwaves through skin contact, but finds it can’t be done for this one person, who in turn realizes something very strange just happened—which the villain can’t allow anyone to know about. The protagonist now has to face the villain’s henchmen chasing after him or her, in the meantime struggling with his or her own brain deficiency, while trying to understand who the villain really is and what he is up to…

ttp

Comments

  1. UnknownNovember 18, 2014 at 9:56 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The AI "Image of the Beast"

Imagining the "Image of the Beast" from the book of Revelation is an AI is not new to me. Thinking that such an image could be an Artificial Intelligence is as least as old as the 1981 Christian apocalyptic film with that title  (which I don't consider a quality production, but it does exist). And I've also found a few Evangelical Christian sites who repeat the same idea (which I won't reference here) and even link it with the notion of technological singularity . However, I do have what may be prove to be some distinctive twists on the notion. First off, while I don't usually quote Scripture on this blog, I'm going to make an exception. Let's examine the Bible reference to "the image of the beast" itself. Revelation 13:14-16 (NKJV): "And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he is granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the...
3 comments
Read more

7 Ways to Deal with the Problem Magic Poses Christian Fantasy Writers

First off, what is the problem with magic for Christians? Or sorcery? Or witchcraft? (Are all of those things even the same?) An entire book could be written on this topic (perhaps I'll do that someday) but to keep this as brief as possible, the short reason this is a problem is the Bible has nothing good to say about the practice of magic (neither does extra-Biblical Christian tradition). No translation of Scripture will record the 12 Disciples watching Jesus walk on the water and say, "Wow, that was magical!" Nor is the mana falling from heaven in Israel's wilderness wanderings described as some kind of powerful spell that Moses used, nor even is his rod described as "magic," even though Moses had the power granted to him by God to turn it into a serpent at whatever time he chose. No, the Bible describes events like these as "miracles," or "signs," or "wonders." On the other hand, when the Bible talks about "mag...
17 comments
Read more

Story Combat Realism Part 3. How to Train a Samurai, Spartan, or Knight.

At the end of my last post of this series that deals mainly with the psychological factors of combat, I noted that Spartans, in spite of battlefield courage that implies they are natural-born warriors, were in fact the product of superior training. Note that this kind of highly-trained fighting professional is a different sort of fighter than found in warrior cultures who emphasized battlefield rage. This type of elite training was not just a characteristic of Spartans, it was also true of a number of other renowned warriors from times past, including samurais and knights. To take the last first, the conventional training of a knight began at age 7, when he became a page. Pages served knights in their company, but also learned to ride and fight with wooden swords and blunted lances. They practiced horseback fighting while riding piggy back and were continually exposed to weapons training. At age 14 a page became a squire, who now trained with both wooden and sharpened weapo...
Post a Comment
Read more