Agreeing to hypnosis is one thing. Agreeing to malevolent post hypnotic suggestions is another. In your opinion the first agreement does not preclude the second. That situation is dangerously close to being an “against the will” one anyway. What is the big barrier to believing that conscious volition is necessary? People who are half-asleep or have taken drugs or alcohol are all probably easy hypnotic subjects with bad memories.
Sorry - I mean conscious volition may NOT be necessary
p.s. Where did you get the shades? Are Eagle Eyes doing a new rose tinted range? Say you don’t understand once more and that’s it. How can you have never heard of Skeptical Inquirer magazine or Noah Wylie and yet be computer literate? And is your user name as strange as they get? I’m beginning to think you belong to some sort of Ted Kazynski cult.
G.Nome, you’re new to the Straight Dope Message Board, so I’m going to cut you some slack.
FYI, the place for personal insults is over in the BBQ Pit. The following statements are personal insults:
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You made this hostile statement:
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And you made this hostile statement in your previous post of 4/13:
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These statements lead me to believe that you have a chip on your shoulder about something, and are looking for an argument. Here at the Straight Dope we call this “trolling”, after the fishing term meaning “riding along in a boat, hanging a baited line off the stern, hoping for a bite”.
I am not interested in providing you with an argument. I doubt whether Bjorn is, either, and I know Tracer’s too smart to rise to bait like that. The other earlier participants in this thread have long since left the room (it wasn’t you, it was Bjorn they didn’t want to talk to–sorry, Bjorn, but then you already knew that, didn’t you? 
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So.
If you’re interested in talking about hypnotism, I’m here. If that’s not what you want, then go somewhere else.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
using your example notthemama:
what is the differance between:
- the teacher saying: “all answeres to every test you will make from this book will be ‘false’”.
and; - the book the teacher is using states: “all answeres to every test you will make from this book will be ‘false’”.
??
if you read it or hear it, and you accept it as truth. how will you answer your tests?
(please do not include common sense, this is just a very crude example without common sense explanation)
please notthemama, try not to simply deny it as a possibility. and if you are going to deny hypnotism through reading, please explain in better words than; “this is not hypnotism” or “i have to disagree”. please note that i am not stating a fact, i am just displaying an idea.
how can you deny an idea to be possible?
bj0rn - chickens for sale…!
(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama
Here are two entries from the Merriam-Webster dictionary, 1997:
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The technical term “hypnosis” is defined here as “something that takes two people to accomplish”. It’s “induced by a person”. “Induce” means “cause to begin”. When an obstetrician “induces” a pregnant woman’s labor, it means “he causes her labor to begin.” When a hypnotic trance is “induced by a person”, it means “a hypnotic trance is caused to begin by a person”.
And it means “another person”. The act of hypnotism requires two people to participate: a hypnotist, and a subject. Hypnosis is something that somebody else does TO you. You can’t do it to yourself, not by looking in a mirror, or by twirling a watch in front of your own eyes, or by looking at words printed on a page. It takes two people.
I think that what you are talking about with looking at printed words on a page is “mesmerism”. Yes, you can become “mesmerized” by printed words on a page, but that’s not the same thing, technically, as a hypnotic trance. It’s a difference of technical definition, that’s all. A hypnotic trance has certain physical and mental characteristics that can be measured by brain scans and electroencephalographs (EEG), and things like that. The state of being “mesmerized” by printed words on a page or by the oncoming headlights of cars, also has certain physical and mental characteristics, that however are completely different from those of a hypnotic trance.
I’m sorry, Bjorn, but the only words I know of that say, “Mesmerism is not hypnotism” are the words, “Mesmerism is not hypnotism”. And when I say, “I have to disagree”, that is a polite way of saying that I disagree with the statement you just made. If this was the Pit, I would of course use much stronger language, not suitable for a family message board! 
The thing about the True/False test was that G.Nome wanted to know whether a hypnotist could implant a post-hypnotic suggestion telling you to fail a test. I was telling him that a hypnotist can’t make you do anything against your better judgement, so if it was an essay test, how could he make you give the wrong answers? When you write the answers to an essay test, it has to come out of your whole brain, out of your creativity, and I don’t think you can hypnotize somebody out of being creative. That’s like the hypnotist instructing the subject, “When you go to take this French history test, don’t think of four reasons why the French allowed Napoleon to come to power.” How could you tell someone that? How could you make someone do that, or rather, NOT do that?
Besides, you’d have to know what the questions were ahead of time, so you could say that. “You will write the following answers to the question concerning why the French allowed Napoleon to come to power.” So I suppose if you really worked on it, you could construct a scenario that would have somebody flunking a test because of a post-hypnotic suggestion, but I think the whole thing starts to sound like one of those “mad scientist” movies, you know? Or James Bond. And like I told G.Nome, don’t try that as an excuse for flunking a test! “Well, I was under the influence of a post-hypnotic suggestion that ordered me to forget the four reasons why the French allowed Napoleon to come to power…”
So I was saying that I supposed it was possible that with a multiple choice or true/false test, a hypnotist could tell you, “When you wake up and go into Civics class to take the test on the Constitution, you will give only ‘False’ answers on the entire portion of the True/False test.” I imagine that the teacher would be puzzled, but would figure that you just didn’t know the answers, so you went ahead and checked off “False” for everything, hoping to get at least half of them right, but the teacher would flunk you anyway, which would be the purpose of the post-hypnotic suggestion.
I wasn’t meaning to say anything metaphysical, like “all answers on all tests are false”. No “deep thoughts” here today.
I admit, I had a little trouble figuring out what G.Nome was getting at, too.
If you want to stop talking about hypnosis, I promise my feelings won’t be hurt. Please don’t feel you need to keep posting to this thread so I won’t feel left out! I don’t think G.Nome is coming back, and the others probably aren’t, either. I thought you had a good question about the difference between hypnotism and mesmerism, it just took a while to get around to it. Threads are like that sometimes.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
yeah, thanks for your last post, it was a very good one.
please excuse my persistance in this matter, but you do provide good answeres to my questions. so i have another one.
a subject is placed under hypnosis by a hypnotist, could the hypnotist have the subject read a book and belive the text in it as truth or lies?
bj0rn - i do know ALOT more about hypnotism now than when i started this thread.
(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama
You ask, “[if] a subject is placed under hypnosis by a hypnotist, could the hypnotist have the subject read a book and belive the text in it as truth or lies?”
I’m also learning a lot about hypnosis in this thread. I would have to say that the answer to that question would be “no.” Everything I’ve learned about hypnosis says that it takes place at the top level of your brain, at the superficial level of thinking. Deciding whether what you are reading is “true” or “false” would take place at a deeper level of thinking, one that the hypnotist wouldn’t be able to access.
Or maybe I don’t mean different level of thinking. Maybe I mean it would involve your “judgement”, and the books say that a hypnotist can’t make you do something against your better judgement.
He could hypnotize you to answer “no” whenever someone asked you whether you believed such-and-such a book was true, but he couldn’t really “change your mind” about it.
If it were possible to hypnotize people on such a deep, judgement level, then all testimony in court would be suspect, because somebody could have just hypnotized the witness into stating that yes, indeed, he saw Colonel Plum in the library with a pipe wrench. (Do you play Clue?)
That’s the best I can do.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
…Colonel Mustard.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
judgement?
what about situations where you could not judge what is right or what is wrong? like if the subject were to read the bible or the koran. which one should he “belive” in? which one is “true”? or any other situation where both or all statements might be “true”?
could the hypnotist influence the “judgement” of the subject?
bj0rn -
(You know, I find it helps to copy it to WordPad and then fix all the punctuation errors, etc., so they’re not so distracting. Then I usually light some incense, sacrifice a chicken to the spirit of Kate Turabian, and get really drunk. Then it actually starts to make sense.) - notthemama