Suggestopodia

There are two basic kinds of suggestion: direct and indirect. Direct suggestions are directed to conscious processes, i.e., what one says that can and will occur in the learning experience, suggestions which can be made in printed announcements, orally by the teacher, and/or by text materials. Direct suggestion is used sparingly, for it is most vulnerable to resistance from the set-up. Indirect suggestion is largely unconsciously perceived and is much greater in scope than direct suggestion.

It is always present in any communication and involves many levels and degrees of subtlety. It speaks as the second plane of communication and considers it to encompass all those communication factors outside our conscious awareness, such as voice tone, facial expression, body posture and movement, speech tempo, rhythms, accent, etc. Other important indirect suggestive effects result from room arrangement, decor, lighting, noise level, institutional setting - for all these factors are communicative stimuli which result in terms non-specific mental reactivity. And they, like the teacher and materials can reinforce the set-up, preserve the status quo, or can serve in the desuggestive-suggestive process. In other words, everything in the communication/learning environment is a stimulus at some level, being processed at some level of mental activity.
The more we can do to orchestrate purposefully the unconscious as well as the conscious factors in this environment, the greater the chance to break through or “de-suggest” the conditioned, automatic patterns of our inner set-up and open the access to the great potential of our mental reserves.

Sources, History, Initial Results
The artful use of suggestion as a means of facilitating the learning and communication process is, of course, and has always been, a part of nearly all effective teaching and persuasive communication. Not until the past twenty years, however, has the phenomenon of suggestion begun to be methodically researched and tested as to how it can and does affect learning. In This early research, investigated individual cases of extraordinary learning capacities etc., and theorised that such capacities were learnable and teachable. He experimented with a wide range of techniques drawn from both traditional and esoteric sources, including hypnosis and yoga, and was able to accelerate the learning process quite dramatically.
A positively suggestive authority is one of the most effective means which we as teachers / doctors can use, if we use it sensitively, wisely and purposefully.
The authority we are speaking of here has nothing to do with authoritarianism, traditional “strictness” or “toughness”. The creator defines it as “the non-directive prestige which by indirect ways creates an atmosphere of confidence and intuitive desire to follow the set example”. Authority, in its positive, suggestive sense, is communicated through our “global” presence, through all our non-verbal as well as verbal signals. Students can sense when we embody the values and attitudes we “talk about”. And when there is congruency in the many levels of our communication, we become believable, compelling, worthy of respect.
Intonation is strongly connected with the rest of the suggestive elements. The intonation in music and speec In suggestopedia we do not talk about infantilization in the clinical sense of the word, nor of infantility. Infantilization in the process of education is a normal phenomenon connected with authority (prestige). Infantilization in suggestopedia must be understood roughly as memories of the pure and naive state of a child to whom someone is reading, or who is reading on his own. He is absorbing the wonderful world of the fairytales. This world brings him a vast amount of information and the child absorbs it easily and permanently.
An important moment in suggestopedia. The artistic organisation of the suggestopedic educational process creates conditions for concert pseudopassivity in the student. In this state the reserve capabilities of the personality are shown most fully. The concert pseudopassivity (concentrative psychorelaxation) overcomes the antisuggestive barriers, creating a condition of trust and infantilization in the student, who in a naturally calm state accompanied by a state of meditation without special autogenic training can absorb and work over a huge quantity of information. In this state both brain hemispheres are activated”.