Message Overload = Trance
From the world of hypnotherapy, here is another reason to keep your designs as simple as possible. Remember a time when you were at the theater or a show and you just became absorbed into what was going on? What happened was that you went into a state of trance akin to hypnosis.
Here’s why, and how that relates to design.
A fairly famous hypnotherapist named Dr. John Kappas came up with a model of trance induction which is referred to as “message unit overloading”. Essentially, when we receive too many messages simultaneously the sympathetic nervous system becomes overstimulated and shuts down our conscious processing to prepare for the fight or flight response. We go into a trance. Trance is the mind’s escape from anxiety.
I have a couple of personal experiences with this:
Infants have almost no conscious processing - they haven’t developed critical thinking yet. When my infant daughters get overstimulated by being in a crowd, they drop off into sleep.
I have never tried hallucinogens, but one of the most mind-altering experiences I have ever had was doing a Native American Sweat lodge. Imagine sitting in a darkened covered pit with 80 or so other people crammed in tight. The only light is from the center of the lodge where stones have been heated to growing level. the air is so hot - you can barely breathe. The person in charge is dousing the stones with water - producing steam, chanting, and burning aromatic herbs. I can tell you that I was so tranced-out that I (and others I spoke to) had visions.
So what are message units? Message units are any stimulus that creates a response in the nervous system. You even have internal message units - your thoughts and feelings.
Certainly some message units have a stronger impact than others. I can imagine that if a Grizzly bear came smashing through the window of my office in Downtown Boston, I might find that overstimulating. I am so used to the feeling of the chair I am sitting on, that it makes a much smaller impact.
Think about a really bad web design from the early 90’s. Something using the blink tag, lots of animated images of dancing hamsters etc. When you see sites like this (they still exist), you probably either get a very uncomfortable feeling or you just zone them out. Zoning out is the beginning of a trance experience - but you probably won’t explore the web site any further.
Many TV commercials are designed around this phenomenon. They present a ton of stimulus, then drop in the suggestion to buy whatever they are selling.
Think about what you are designing. If you want your users’ critical factors working (you probably do), then you should reduce the message load. If you want people to go into trance, then you need to understand what to do when you get there.
