Hypnosis expert finds that skills lead to mesmerising story-telling.

Daniel Herrera

In some respects, 29 year-old Daniel Herrera is the conventional Oulu expatriate. He is well-travelled. He spent two year doing an ‘Erasmus Mundo’ Masters degree, a scheme to educate non-Europeans, which involved spending six months each studying at Edinburgh University, Gerona University in Spain as well as universities in Germany and France.

Daniel pursues a very typical expatriate job as well. A computer science PhD student at Oulu University for the last two years, he is researching ‘computer vision.’

‘It’s 3D reconstruction,’ he tells me. ‘At a sporting event you have about fifty cameras all recording from different angles. The technology we’re developing would allow the TV viewer to choose which viewpoint they see things from. For example, if they think, “He’s my favourite player. I want to se more of him.”’

‘It’s still at the research stage,’ he explains. ‘It all needs processing but we know the demand is there for it already. It’ll be the next step after 3D TV.’

Daniel has presented the research at international conferences and fully admits that he is a ‘techie’ and a ‘nerd.’ But he has a very different, and far less conventional, side. Daniel is a hypnotist, a story teller and a methodical combination of the two.

‘Before I started my PhD, I got sick of the whole computer thing. I wanted to interact with people rather than computers so I trained as a stage hypnotist,’ he declares.

Reading voraciously on the topic, he became persuaded that ‘hypnosis was not a myth. How the brain perceives can so readily altered in so many ways. I just became fascinated by it. And I became really interested in how it can be used to have a good time and also for therapy.’

Daniel’s hypnosis skills are ‘self-learned’. But nevertheless, he estimates that he was successfully induced (hypnotist speak for hypnotized) about 100 people. He has conducted hypnosis events at the university and in two schools. However, he has found that hypnosis works a lot better if it is done in a person’s native language. Accordingly, he has used covert hypnosis techniques, such as the ‘silent handshake.’

Developed by famous hypnotist Milton Erikson, the induction involves shaking a person’s hand but then in some way interrupting the flow of the handshake such as by suddenly grabbing the person’s wrist or do some other unexpected thing. This creates a non-verbal trance because handshaking is such a basic behaviour that when it is interrupted, people become confused and so suggestible and susceptible to hypnosis. Daniel can be seen using this method on a YouTube video.

And it also informs his other passion, storytelling. Hypnosis simply makes people sufficiently suggestible than they can ‘experience’ the things suggested to them and, for Daniel, a good story achieves the same thing.

‘You create feelings in people with your voice,’ Daniel explains. ‘Storytelling is basically a simplified version of hypnosis. The way I structure my stories is that I think of a feeling I want to provoke and then a build my story around it.’

‘When someone tells a good story but they tell it badly then people think “Okay, that’s cool” and they move on. But if they tell it properly, then people are transported. And they just sit there, silent. I love that feeling!’ he emphasises. And he also loves inducing that feeling and having an audience hanging on his every word.

Having met another local storyteller, Irish expat Oliver Hussey, through the Irish Festival, the pair established a storytelling workshop and have been organising a series of storytelling events for children.

Christmas Storytelling for Children will take place at Oulu City Library on Saturday 17^th December between 3pm and 4pm and Daniel will be one of the storytellers. The stories will all be in English and the organizers encourage you to ‘Come along and find your own reason to get excited about Christmas.’

Who knows, if you ask nicely, maybe Daniel will shake you into a trance . . .