Moving on to training.
There are many nonsensical myths, urban legends and fables online about narcissists.
One of the most prominent is that the narcissists have a special gaze. If you look into their eyes, you can see that they have no soul and other such utter nonsense.
There is also shoddy pseudoscience perpetrated by alleged scholars.
Lately, the study published saying, and the study discovered, that narcissists have special eyebrows. They have very thick and special eyebrows.
Yes, I do, but many narcissists don't. Trust me, I have a database of 1,800.
So, there is this pseudoscience, it was published in an, and it won the Ig Nobel Prize. There is the Nobel Prize for good scholarship and there is the Ig Nobel Prize. The Ig Nobel Prize is a prize given to utterly inane idiotic and outlandish studies published.
So, this is one of them and it had won the Ig Nobel Prize.
Many, many of these stories about body language, about gaze, about the eyes of the narcissists, the eyebrows of the narcissists.
Even I have read analysis of the genitalia of narcissists. I'm kidding or not.
Many of these are not grounded in any research or studies. They are anecdotal and even then, the anecdotes are clearly projection. You're projecting into the narcissists, your fears, your hurt, your pain.
You want to believe that the narcissist is demonic and soulless and so on and so forth, so you do.
However, there's one myth, one ostensible myth. One urban legend, which seems to be quite true.
It is the persistent claim by victims that they had been brainwashed by narcissists, that the narcissists made them feel unreal, estranged from themselves, alienated, that they felt depersonalized and they realized that they felt that they were becoming a figment of the narcissist's mind, a real extension, that they lost voluntary control of their actions, choices and decisions.
This is a persistent claim by many victims. And I think it's a real one. I think it starts with the grooming and the love bombing.
And I think what the narcissist does, starting with his faces, he engenders a dissociative state in the target, in the would-be source of narcissistic supply or future potential intimate partner.
When the narcissist interacts with you, he causes you to dissociate. He does this using intermittent reinforcement, trauma bonding, approach avoidance.
There are many techniques, verbal abuse. The narcissist uses a multiplicity of techniques and then causes you to dissociate. It's a little like hypnosis.
Technically, I think when you are interacting with the narcissist in many cases, it would qualify as a hypnotic session. You are under hypnosis.
This is especially easy to achieve, to accomplish with borderlines and codependents. They even go into these trance-like states, codependents and borderlines, go into these hypnotic trance-like states, even in therapy, because these kind of people relegate, transfer the regulation of their emotions and their moods to their intimate partners.
The borderline tells the intimate partner, please regulate my emotions. Codependents says, my mood depends on you.
So a lot of the functions that are intrinsic and internal and healthy people are performed by the intimate partners of borderlines and codependents, so they have a lot of power. They have an inordinate amount of power over the intimate partner.
The narcissist, and of course the psychopath, they abuse this power. They leverage it to create this trance-like state of hypnosis.
The clinical way they do this, the technical way they do this, is called entraining. And I haven't seen a single video online about this. I haven't seen a single video explicating that the narcissist uses entraining to brainwash his intimate partner and to induce a trance-like hypnotic state in her, which is very long and permanent, and which causes feelings of amnesia, depersonalization and derealization, in other words, cause massive dissociation in the victim.
And to explain to you what is entraining, I'm going to quote at length from a book called The Brain's Way of Healing.
It was written by Norman Deutsch, DOI, G.
He's a medical doctor.
Listen well, and this segment, this excerpt that I'm going to read, is about music.
But in your mind, when I talk about music, replace the word music with codependent.
And you will see how this applies perfectly to the experience you have had in an intimate relationship with the narcissist.
So Deutsch writes, brain scan studies show that when the brain is stimulated by music, its neurons begin to fire imperfectly synchrony with it, entraining.
Entraining is the practice of modifying one's brainwaves to a desired frequency.
And when the brain listens to music, it entrains with the music it hears.
This happens because the brain evolved to reach out into the world and the ear works as a transducer.
Transducers transform energy from one form into another.
For instance, a loudspeaker transforms electrical energy into sound. The cochlea inside our ear transforms patterns of sound energy from the external world into patterns of electrical energy that the brain can use internally.
So the narcissist's speech, the narcissist's speech creates in you electrical waves, creates neuro-electricity and neuro-chemistry in your brain.
The narcissist reaches into your brain, in effect, with his words.
This is the power of psychotherapy.
We do the same in psychotherapy. We reach into your mind and we rearrange it. We help you to rearrange. We help you to make sense of the world.
The narcissist does the same.
And in training, when the physical brain electrical frequencies align themselves with outside sound stimuli, sound stimuli like music or like the narcissist's speech.
I continue from the book.
Even though the form of energy changes, as I just said, the information carried by the wave patterns is often preserved.
Since neurons fire in unison to music, music is a way to change the rhythms of the brain.
Again, replace the word music with the narcissist's words.
So the narcissist's words change the rhythms of your brain.
An expert, I'm continuing from the book, an expert in the neuroplasticity of sound, Dr. Nina Kraus of Northwestern University and her lab colleagues recorded the sound waves given off by a Mozart serenade. They also placed an electrical sensor on the person's scalp to record his brain's waves as he listened to Mozart.
Brain waves are the electrical waves produced by millions of neurons working together in time.
And then what they did in the laboratory, they played back the patterns of the brainwaves firing.
So the subject listened to Mozart, they recorded his brainwaves, and then they played back the brainwaves.
Amazingly, they found that the sound waves from the Mozart piece and the brainwaves that they triggered looked the same. They even found that the brainwaves in the brainstem sounded the same as the music that triggered them.
Neurons can be entrained and training. Neurons can be entrained by a variety of non-electrical stimuli, including light and sound.
These effects can be demonstrated using an EEG.
Many kinds of sensory stimulation can radically alter the frequency of brainwaves.
For example, in a hyper excitable brain, as in some cases of photosensitive epilepsy, strobe lights flashing at about 10 times a second can cause large numbers of neurons to fire synchronously.
A victim may have a seizure, lose consciousness and start writhing out of control. Music can cause seizures as well.
Entrainment is so graphic that when people are hooked up to EEGs and they are asked to listen to a waltz rhythm of 2.4 beats a second, their brainwaves' dominant frequency spikes at 2.4 beats a second precisely.
No wonder people move to the beat of a song. Much of the brain, including the motor cortex, is entrained to that beat.
But entrainment also happens between people. When musicians jam, their dominant brainwaves begin to entrain with one another.
In 2009, the psychologist Ulman Lindeberger and his colleagues hooked nine pairs of guitarists up to EEGs while they played just together. The brainwaves of each pair began to entrain together to synchronize their dominant, normal firing rates.
No doubt this is part of what musicians getting into the groove is all about.
But the study also showed that entrainment didn't occur only between musicians. Different regions of musicians' brains synchronized as well.
So individual musicians, all their brains, when they were playing music together, all their brains became one giant brain, one mega brain.
This is what happens to you with a narcissist. The narcissist entrains you. Your brain and his brain become one brain. His brain, in a way, takes over your brain, which is a great definition of a hypnotic trance.
You enter his mind and you become a captive and a hostage inside his mind via the process of entraining. Your wave frequency in your brain synchronizes with his wave frequencies as communicated via his words. Different regions of individual musicians' brains synchronize as well.
So overall, many more areas of the brain showed the dominant frequency.
Not only were the musicians playing together in an ensemble, the coordinated ensembles of the neurons within each player's brain were playing together with the ensembles of neurons in their fellow musicians' brains.
Because so many brain disorders are caused when the brain loses its rhythm and fires in an offbeat or dysrhythmic way, music therapy is especially promising for these conditions.
The rhythms of music medicine can provide a non-invasive way to get the brain back on beat.
Krauss and others have shown that these sub-cortical brain areas which were once thought to lack plasticity are, in fact, quiet neuroplastic.
Different rhythms of neuronal activity correspond to different mental states.
When a person is sleeping, for instance, the dominant rhythm, that is, the brain waves with the highest amplitude on an EEG, are those that are firing one to three brain waves per second, one to three megahertz.
When a person is awake and in a calm, focused state, the brain wave frequency is faster, about 12 to 15 hertz.
As she concentrates on a problem, the 15 to 18 hertz waves are dominant, and when she is worrying about the problem and anxious, the waves increase to 20 hertz.
Normally, our brain rhythms are set by a combination of factors, external stimulation, our level of arousal, and our conscious intentions, for example, to focus on a problem or to go to sleep.
Within the brain are multiple pacemakers that, like a conductor, generate the timing of these rhythms.
But with neuroplastic training, we can develop some control over the brain rhythms.
Neurofeedback trains a person whose brain rhythms are off-control to control them.
So it is excellent for people with attention or sleep problems or a noisy brain in general.
This is a great description of entraining, and the narcissist's verbal abuse may actually be a form of entraining, a form of brainwashing.
So I recommend that you read the book, The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity by Domen Eich, which was published in 2016, if my memory doesn't fail me.
And this is it for today. I will dedicate, as I said, future videos to some of these issues.
But in today's video, I wanted to give you the rudiments of the somatic shared fantasy and how narcissists take over your brain, in effect, how they enslave you, how they make you mindless in their presence.
This possibly is happening by inducing a dissociative hypnotic trance via the technique of entraining.