“…that you wouldn’t do anyway.”
Any truth to this old saw?
“You will renew your subscription”…
My dad was a medic in the Army. He says he was taught hypnosis as a way to stop pain.
He says “yes” to the OP.
FWIW, I saw a show on PBS (Nova?) where some ‘experts’ deny hypnosis exists at all. Convincingly.
I’ve also heard that it’s easy for a hypnotist to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do through the power of suggestion. For example, let’s say you are an attractive and strong-minded young woman who wouldn’t normally consider for a minute taking off your clothes in front of strangers. It’s my understanding that a hypnotist could persuade you to do so by hypnotizing you and telling to to envision yourself alone on a hot, muggy desert isle…miserable from the heat…and that you want to remove your clothing in order to be more comfortable, etc.
I watched an episode of Bulls#!t on Showtime dealing with hypnosis, it stars Penn and Teller, and is kind of a debunking show. The DVDs are worth checking out.
Anyways, they showed footage, did research etc. The bottom line, in their words is that hypnosis is really only suggestive. The people that go onstageat a show to pretend like they’re chickens, would do it, but only if they could blame the “trance” they were in. They offered to be volunteers because they are exhibitionists (or at least closeted ones).
I was recounting this part of the show to a friend in a bit more detail, after I was done he told me that he stopped smoking as a result of hypnosis. I thought I might have offended him by telling him how Penn and Teller mocked hypnosis. He told me that everything I had said was true (at least in his case).
He went to a hypnotist to quit smoking, and paid for the service. Clearly he wanted to quit. A little subliminal coaxing might not have even been needed, but it also may have allowed him to ignore the nagging part of him that wanted to stay addicted.
I digress severely, my apologies. Back to the OP.
If you were at a comedy club and told your girlfriend to go up onstage and pretend that she’s a chicken, she would not do it, at least not normally. If she were picked or volunteered to be part of a hypnotism show, the situation might differ. However, if your girlfriend was a very strict vegetarian, and was told to eat a steak while under hypnosis, she might very well balk at it.
So, one is unlikely to behave in a manner that they find abhorrent, but one might relax or ignore boundaries that might restrict one’s behavior while under hypnosis.
IANAH BTW
[sub]Yes! First Doper ever to claim to not be a hypnotist in acronym form. [/sub]
Girlfriend? Whose OP were you reading?
I’ve volunteered for stage hypnosis shows twice. The first time I went into what I’d consider for lack of a better term a “half-trance” in that I was extremely relaxed, but when it came time to perform (in this show, go “deep-sea fishing”) I snapped out of it. The second time I felt no effect whatsoever. I don’t think I’m particularly exhibitionistic…
Anyways, what inspired the question was a re-read of The Manchurian Candidate. (spoiler for the book and original movie) The lead brainwasher, in discussing Raymond Shaw, says that many hypnosis experts claim that one can’t be forced to do something he otherwise wouldn’t but that it isn’t true. In that context, the thing Shaw wouldn’t otherwise do was commit multiple assassinations.
I know “brainwashing” isn’t the same as hypnosis, but the “can’t be forced” sibboleth appears often enough in fiction and “common wisdom” that it raised the question.
So sorry, one’s girlfriend. We all know that I couldn’t have been talking about a girlfriend of yours.
Really? As the saying goes… “If you can’t fake deep-sea fish with the rest…”
Have you seen evidence to the contrary? What sort of proof would you require from a person that claimed to have made a person do something abhorrent via hypnotism?
I somehow wonder why the woman has to be attractive. Anyway…
That’s precisely the kind of thing the on-stage hypnotist who hypnotized me once said couldn’t be done (I think he precisely used this example, actually). He said that there’s no way an hypnotist could made someone do something he normally really wouldn’t want to do.
But, it’s completely obvious that the sort of things anyone would normally want to do are tied in to their circumstances. So I guess the followup question is, “how effectively (if at all) can hypnotic suggestion confuse someone about their circumstances?”
Here are the facts.
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A stage hypnotist does not, and cannot, creatre or induce any sort of trance, sleep -state or altered state of mind, although he may wish to create the entertaining illusion that he can. All he can do is give people ideas for things to do. Some people will go along with those ideas, and some won’t. Those who go along with it may do so for various reasons, such as being able to be the ‘star’ of the show and the centre of attention / being able to break some behavioural norms with impunity / for a laugh / because it’s fun or interesting / because they are given licence and encouragement to be like a playful, imaginative child.
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There is no evidence whatsoever that any act of so-called ‘hypnosis’, be it stage hypnosis or clinical, creates or induces any kind of trance or altered mental state. For many years the stage entertainer Kreskin offered a big cash reward to anyone who could prove that such a ‘trance’ state did exist.
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Clinical hypnosis, such as that used to treat eating disorders or smoking or phobias, consists of just two stages: (a) creating a situation wherein the client can feel safe, calm, very relaxed and very focused, (b) encouraging the client to focus on their own mental attitudes towards whatever problem they are dealing with, and thereby attempting to strenghten their own awareness of the problem, and their own desire, resolve and determination to adopt a different behaviour and set of responses. Anyone can do it. It doesn’t achieve any more that you could get by having a very sympathetic friend have a supportive chat with you in a quiet, relaxed frame of mind. If this suggests to you that so-called clinical hypnosis is ‘money for old rope’, you would be absolutely right. It is.
However, this is not quite the same as clinical hypno-therapy. If someone has some formal training in some particular school of therapy, and one for which there is empirical evidence of practical efficacy, then it may be the case that seeing this person can provide a therapeutic benefit which you wouldn’t get by just having a pleasant chat with a wise and sympathetic friend. But on a personal note, I still think the ‘friend’ route is better as well as being cheaper, and I still regard ‘talking cures’ as extortionate hogwash. Anyone who wishes to take issue with this verdict simply has to do one thing: prove that it works.
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So-called ‘subliminal’ influence is a separate question, and there are different kinds. There is the theory that you can hide ‘subliminal’ messages at a barely audible level within taped speech or music, the theory being that you won’t consciously perceive the message but will do so subconsciously. There is no evidence whatsoever that this works. Similarly with the belief that a single image edited into a reel of movie footage can have an advertising effect, or that hidden or embedded images in stills advertising can appeal to the subconscious without the recipient being aware. Wilson Bryan Keys wrote several books arguing that advertising literature contains subtle ‘hidden’ messages which trigger a subconscious response. There is no evidence whatsoever to support this theory.
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Machurian Candidate… brainwashing… post-hypnotic commands to perform a specific action… all good, entertaining fun in a fictional story, but there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that this can actually be achieved.
Some good reading for you: ‘They call it hypnosis’ by Robert A. Baker, and any of Jeffrey Masson’s books about Freudian analysis.
That’s just what the hypnotist wants you to believe!!
He hypnotizes you, forcing you to commit some dark deeds, you take the fall, and he gets off scot free!! Are we so blind that we listen to a what a hypnotist tells us?
hh
A good friend of mine is a hypnotist. He tried to hypnotize me one time but I told him it wouldn’t work on me, that I couldn’t be hypnotized. And I tell him the same thing every Saturday when I go to his place to wash his car.
Years ago, when my dad’s company went to a smoke-free workplace, they paid for him and his smoking co-workers to see a stop-smoking hypnotist.
When he got home, I asked him if it worked. “No,” he said, “I don’t think he put me out, and I still want a cigarette as badly as ever.” But, he never smoked again after that session (and this was after many failed attempts to stop).
So I don’t know if he was really hypnotized (I kind of doubt it), but apparently the experience gave him enough willpower to quit. (Or maybe he didn’t want to be relegated to smoking in the parking lot).
I’ve gone to a hypnotist. (Quit smoking, one session, 1983).
The conventional image folks have of hypnotism is that the hypnotist “puts you under” and then tells you how things are or how they’re gonna be, and you believe what you are told and/or do as you are told.
I would say instead that the hypnotist helps you to relax and gets your mind into a mode where you can focus on things with great clarity or exclusivity, and then helps you focus on perceiving things a certain way (which will be in accordance with things you’ve previously discussed with the hypnotist, i.e., you aren’t likely to be surprised, and it is generally with both your prior and your current consent that you accept that suggested perception).
If the hypnotist says you are on a desert island and it’s very hot and muggy and you’re uncomfortable and want to take your clothes off, your mind retains the awareness that you are nowhere of the sort. Even if you’ve agreed beforehand that the hypnotist is to take you to a hot muggy desert island, the suggestion that you want to take your clothes off should thow a red flag: “Wait, this isn’t part of the script, what’s going on here?”
Hypnotism doesn’t obstruct or oppose your will. It’s a method of intensifying it.
From my one experience as a stage hypnotism volunteer I agree with this, except for one particular piece of evidence (which doesn’t mean I’m disagreeing, just that I find it curious). I, along with about 15 others on stage, were told, under hypnosis to act out various silly acts. I certainly never felt like I was in an altered state and I really only complied to not make the hypnotist look bad.
BUT, at the end he asked me and about 3 others (while still on stage) how long we thought we’d been up there. We all replied somewhere in the ball park of 15-20min. We were actually on stage for over 2 hours!
I’m very cynical about stage hypnosis. I’ve seen the Penn and Teller episode, read about it from time to time, and experienced it, and everything meshes quite nicely with your description with the exception of that one little piece of evidence to the contrary. I’d be interested to hear comments.
About 10 years ago I remember watching Philip Zimbardo’s (famous for the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment) documentary series on concepts in psychology. In the episode featuring hypnosis I remember two demonstrations which I found interesting
- while under hypnosis a girl was given an onion but told it was an apple. She took a big juicy bite into it and didn’t even flinch.
- two people, one under, one not. Two bowls of ice water. The task was for each to put their arm in the water and keep it there as long as possible. They were to rate their level of pain at any given point on a scale of 1-10, calling out numbers as the pain progressed to each consecutive level. So they both began by reciting “one”. The non-hynotized guy went on to “two, three…nine” and finally when he could stand it no more he shouted “ten” and took his arm out. The other guy, remaining completely cool and calm throughout, was still on 1.
Not sure where this fits in to Kreskin’s challenge exactly?
I agree this is interesting, but it isn’t necessarily anything to do with hypnosis. Most of us know that our perception of time can be very subjective and unreliable - nice times seem to pass quickly, boring times seem to drag out forever. Maybe during a typical stage hypnosis act, the time spent focusing, imagining and play-acting tends to impair one’s awareness of the passage of time. It’s the same when you get absorbed in a really good movie or other form of entertainment that grips you a lot – the time seems to pass very quickly.
Most people could, if they wanted, take a bite out of an onion and not flinch. We tend to imagine it would be much more awful than it really is, and in everyday life most of us just won’t try the experiment to find out. But if we did try it, most of us could do it. It doesn’t actually tell us anything about hypnosis.
Let me give you another example in similar vein, from my own life. Would you try undergoing root canal surgery without anaesthetic? Not many of us would willingly want to try the experiment, and most of us imagine it would be unberably painful. If you saw someone surviving this using only hypnosis as an analgesic, you’d think ‘Hey wow, hypnosis is amazing’. Well, I have been through exactly this experience more than once. I won’t say it was pleasant, but it was bearable and endurable, without anaesthetic, and without hypnosis. And in East European countries, people routinely undergo many more dental operations without anaesthetic of any kind than we tend to do in the West.
In short: it pays to be cautious before attributing some analgesic or other effect to ‘hypnosis’, because our own expectations and awareness of what is and is not bearable / enudrable might be flawed.
Pretty much as above. Most of us could survive as long as the ‘hypnotised’ guy if we wanted to or had to. But we usually don’t want to, and don’t have to. One guy knows he’s expected to survive longer than the other, so he does. One guy knows he’s expected to feel pain and chicken out soon, so he does. Assessment of ‘ice water’-type pain ‘levels’ are entirely subjective, and the two guys are going to give responses pretty much in line with what the authority figure hypnotist tells them they are going to report.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. I’ve only been to a couple of stage hypnotist shows but in one case, the hypnotist had a guy forget the number 7 and then count the number of fingers on his hands. In another, the hypnotist convinced a girl that she had lost her belly button and that it had dropped somewhere in the audience. In both cases, the participants said that they genuinely believed those facts to be true after the performance. I knew both of them moderately well and saw no reason that they would lie about it just to maintain the illusion of hypnotism. They both seem to believe that they were genuinely hypnotised.
Another, decidedly subjective and unreliable piece of evidence is that people who are put under hypnosis just don’t seem to be behaving as if they are acting. Put simply, most people are really bad actors. If you tell them to believe something, they will exaggarate, play for comedic effect and generally act like people who have been told to believe something. People under hypnosis seem to genuinely believe what they are told. Their actions seem much more natural and unforced. Granted, it could just be observer bias.
Hmm… I’d like to see the 2-hr movie that’s so engaging I perceive it as 20 min. That seems a pretty dramatic distortion of time to me, without use of psychedelic drugs. But OK, I’ll buy that.
This could easily be controlled for by seperating them and having one guy’s arm covered in some sort of completely inactive, placebo cream.
Wasn’t Raymond Shaw specifically chosen because he was already a screwed-up, friendless, mother-warped individual?
I agree with you that the distorted perception of time, as you originally reported it, is intertesting, and maybe it means that I’m wrong about hypnosis. However, without any disrespect to your recall of what happened to you, it’s a good idea not to place too much weight upon a single anecdote.
Here’s what I’d like to see, to investigate this further. Have a stage hypnotist do his usual thing with a typical selection of volunteers. Tell them at the outset that afterwards, they will be asked to estimate how long they were on stage. The hypnotist is allowed to do whatever he wants to do to affect this judgement. Afterwards, say to each volunteer ‘We now want you to evaluate how long you were on stage. We’ll give you a signifcant cash reward if you get it right to within 10 minutes, and in fact there’s a sliding scale of cash rewards - down to zero if you are hopelessly wrong.’
My prediction, based on my views and understanding of hypnosis, is that the volunteers would all be able to produce a reasonably accurate estimate, and that the hypnotist wouldn’t be able to do anything to prevent this. But of course I could be wrong.