its a good article and answeres alot of questions. but is it possible to peek into past lives, bring back lost memory or otherwise manipulate actions and or the psychological part of your being?
what is fact, and what is fiction?
bj0rn
This is not a debate, it is a question.
Bj0rn, do us all a favor and stay in the Pit, at least until you have enough knowledge of English to grasp what the word debate means.
yes, i did ask a question. but asking generally about hypnotism wouldnt provide me with answers based on facts(historic facts perhaps). and it is debated if the effects of hypnotism are really true, or if the effects are just random bullshit spawned from the brain of the hypnotized.
perhaps i wasnt clear enough, should i have asked the question in the general questions and then gone off to the great debates with the answer to validate it?
thanks for the link singledad
The Peyote Coyote: that was a post fit for the pit…please post it there.
bj0rn - so, what is it about hypnotism that makes people belive in it?
oh yes…i almost forgot.
i expected debatable answers to my question.
bj0rn - the right answer?
OK, here’s a “debatable answer.” You cannot hypnotize someone into remembering a past life, becuase there IS no such thing as a “past life.”
No, Bj0rn, it was an observation – an accurate one at that – not a flame.
An example of a flame would be: Bjorn is a whale-murdering coprophagic putz with all the intelligence of a lump of anthracite and all the personality of a used condom. Not only was the U.S. justified in occupying your pissant country in WW2 we should have nuked it off the face of the planet before all the test ban treaties went into effect.
Understand the difference?
i do understand the differance.
first you flamed, then you used an example as a mask for a flame.
you didnt have to use a name in the example, which makes it a flame…fit for the pit you know…
bj0rn - 
Bjorn, I have the feeling that you just genuinely want to know whether it’s possible to recall “past lives” under hypnosis. I think that Single Dad and Eve answered that question, the one with a link to Cecil’s column, and the other with a direct answer–“no.”
We tend to get exasperated when people who have a question like this don’t run it through the Archives database first. After all, the whole point of the Straight Dope website IS answering questions like this.
If, however, your purpose is to actually open a debate on the subject of whether such a thing is possible, then I wish you well, babe, it’s a free country, but don’t complain if you get flamed. People tend to be doubly exasperated by other people who try to open debates on subjects that the first group of people consider to be not debatable by serious adults. This is why all the alien/conspiracy/Elvis lives! threads tend to get sent to the BBQ, PDQ.
I might also point out, that even if Eve and Single Dad and Cecil and I can’t PROVE that there is no such thing as past lives, on the other hand neither would you ever be able to prove that there IS such a thing. No person can ever produce proof of his having lived a previous life–all the “evidence” for people living previous lives is just personal testimony, very similar to a religious testimony. “I used to be Queen of the Nile” is very similar in spirit to “I saw the Light and got saved.” There’s no proof that you got saved, the same way there’s no proof that you used to be Queen of the Nile–there’s no videotape of the Holy Spirit coming down upon you or of you being rowed down the Nile in your royal barge, there are no “before and after” blood tests, there’s nobody who can describe exactly what happened to you when you got saved, not the way somebody could describe what happened to you if they saw you being mugged in the parking lot, nobody who can confirm, “Yeah, I knew her when she was Queen of the Nile and I was the King of Persia.” (Parenthetically, I notice that none of these people who do report “past lives” ever seem to get together and work in a team. They are all rugged individualists, I guess. A private fantasy.)
I sincerely hope this is making sense to you.
A couple of other minor technical points: Generally speaking, if you want to post a link to a site that you think everybody should read, it’s probably better to say something like, “Hey, everybody, lookie here!” and then just put the URL in blue. Turning an entire paragraph of the Encylopedia Britannica into a link takes up unnecessary bandwidth, plus we’ve already had requests from the moderators to watch the excerpting from copyrighted materials. The lawyers are always watching, watching…
Also, we would appreciate knowing a little bit more about where a link might take us before we click on it. Trolls and spammers have been known to post evil links that take us to nasty places. Some of these nasty places might even be able to grab onto our home e-mail addresses the moment we knock on the door, so we’d like to know ahead of time what we’re getting into. You can just put the words “–Encyclopedia Britannica” somewhere at the end (not needing to be part of the link).
Also, anytime you quote from somewhere, whether it’s a link or not, it’s not only good manners, but also required by law, to mention where you got it from.
Good hunting!
The Encyclopedia Brittanica article linked to in the OP said:
Cripes. You’d think the Encyclopedia would at least try to get their facts straight.
Franz Anton Mesmer never practiced hypnotism! One of Mesmer’s students invented hypnosis. The student guessed that Mesmer was using a form of hypnosis on his patients, but this was pure speculation on his part. I think Mesmer himself was opposed to the notion of hypnosis.
It’s too bad that hypnosis is referred to as “Mesmerism” and not “Mesmer’s Studentism”.
notthemama: thank you for that post, it was a very good one. and yes, it did make sense, in fact alot of it was something that i wanted to post but lacked the ability to do so.
about the link thing…
i dont know what compelled me to link a whole paragraph, it was a spur of the moment thing i guess. normally i think i do it correctly…
anyway, thanks.
tracer: interesting, is there a site where i could get more detailed information? (britannica was the best one i could come up with…)
bj0rn - its going in the right direction, but how do we get onboard the boat now?
Here’s what Compton’s Encyclopedia (1997) has to say:
“Mesmer, Friedrich Anton (also called Franz Anton Mesmer) (1734-1815), Austrian physician, born near Konstanz, Germany; originator of theory of animal magnetism, or mesmerism.”
and–
“When hypnosis first claimed the attention of scientists, it was called animal magnetism or mesmerism, after Franz Mesmer of Vienna. In the late 18th century, Mesmer claimed to use it to heal certain nervous ailments. He thought some sort of magnetism was transferred from him to his patients, and that it redistributed their body fluids.”
Obviously Mesmer had just better PR, and the student, being a student, had diddly.
By the way, Tracer, did you know where the Britannica gets people to write their articles? They basically ask for volunteers, which means that they get an awful lot of volunteers with axes to grind.
I don’t know if it’s in the recent editions, but I remember back in the 1960’s, when Thor Heyerdahl’s theory about ancient people crossing the oceans in papyrus boats, etc. was still a theory (the voyage of the Kon-Tiki nonwithstanding), the Britannica article dealing with the subject of whether or not ancient people could have crossed the oceans in papyrus boats was written either by Heyerdahl himself or by a fervent disciple, I’m sorry but I don’t remember which. Anyway, it was hardly unbiased.
The Encyclopedia Britannica is a private organization, out to make a profit same as anybody else, and they’re not accountable to any government agencies for the reliability of their data.
Same as the National Geographic Society–they’re just there to make a buck, they’re not the Official Last Word or anything, adequate for 7th graders writing reports, but I wouldn’t quote them on anything really important, like a bar bet.
What do you mean by:
Everyon here seems to be on the boat… except for you that is…and I believe your ship has sailed long ago…
Kindly quit trying to be whimsical and clever at the end of each post. It’s annoying as hell because it makes no sense.
QuickSilver - swearing to poke self in the eye with a sharp stick before opening another bjOrn post.
its an end statement, it doesnt have to relate to anything in the post.
bj0rn - ok, ive pushed the boat into the river…now what?
I understand that Bjorn is using a metaphor of a boat trip for this thread.
OK, Bjorn, so now we have the boat in the water. Now we have to decide if we’re going to paddle it upstream, or downstream.
If you want to paddle upstream, we will debate whether or not it is possible to recall past lives under hypnosis.
If you want to paddle downstream, we will debate whether or not the procedure known as “hypnosis” works.
It’s your boat, so it’s your call.
And by the way, Bjorn, I promise that from now on, whenever I am talking to you, I will use this – :::sarcasm enabled::: – or this :rolleyes: to indicate when the thing I just said should be taken sarcastically, OK?
Evidently you got your computer fixed…?
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Now jump in after it and see if you can catch it. Try this with cement shoes. mInute wAit one, is debatabl topic a this?
When you know that your time is close at hand
Maybe then you’ll begin to understand
Life down here is just a strange illusion
i like going downstream, and why exacly you consider past lives as “upstream” puzzles me a bit.
i am interested though in how hypnosis can manipulate your thinking process. is it possible to hypnotize through the written word?
(curing people from claustraphobia using hypnosis and stuff like that is manipulating your thinking process).
bj0rn - who did i hypnotize now?
I think I’m hypnotized by your unintelligible, incoherent ramblings.
It’s my fault really. I just HAVE to see what you’re going to say next. PLEASE MAKE IT STOP, AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH
When you know that your time is close at hand
Maybe then you’ll begin to understand
Life down here is just a strange illusion
this is your own doing, you can not blame other people for your actions.
bj0rn - there is something wrong…
I consider debating “past lives” as going upstream because I think it would be more difficult to debate, just as paddling upstream is more difficult.
To answer your question as to whether it is possible to hypnotize people through the written word, I believe the correct answer is “no”. I may, of course, be mistaken.
Go and read the Encyclopedia Britannica article that you posted in your OP and see what it says about “how hypnotism works”. I believe that an integral part of the process of hypnotism involves one-on-one contact, i.e. personal contact, between the hypnotist and the subject.
However, I welcome enlightenment on this point. If you can find something that says that people CAN be hypnotized through the written word, I would be delighted to see it.
There, now–we have a Debate. You have posed a question, I have given a response. Now it’s your turn.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen