Text 4 hypnosis

Hypnosis is a social interaction in which the responses of one person (the subject) to the suggestions of another person (the hypnotist) result in altered perceptions, memories and voluntary actions. This is very different from the popular concept of hypnosis, in which the hypnotist controls the action of the subject, who is compelled to do the hypnotist’s bidding.

To anyone who has watched a demonstration of hypnosis, the state of a hypnotized person resembles that of a sleepwalker – someone who has lost touch with waking awareness but who can stand, move, see, hear and talk. Yet the sleepwalker and the hypnotized person differ in dramatic ways. For one thing, during sleep, oxygen consumption gradually decreases, but during hypnosis it remains unchanged. For another thing, the sleepwalker and the hypnotized person behave differently. Sleepwalkers seem unaware of that other people are around and they will not follow instructions; hypnotized people are aware of others and will follow most instructions. Finally, memory functions differently. On waking, sleepwalkers can not recall their wanderings; on emerging from hypnosis, hypnotic subjects remember the details of the experience unless they have been instructed to forget.

Although hypnosis is named after Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, hypnosis is obviously not sleep. Yet, after years of research, psychologists still cannot say exactly what hypnosis is.

An early version of hypnosis, known as “mesmerism”, was used by Franz Mesmer to treat patients with psychological disorders. He believed that the shiftings of a magnetic fluid within the body was responsible for the health or sickness of mind and body. In order to readjust his patients’ magnetic fluid, Mesmer placed them in an artificially induced, sleep like state in which they were highly susceptible to suggestion. Many of his patients improved, in a demonstration of the power of suggestion in curing mental disorders.

After Mesmer’s death, mesmerism developed into the technique of hypnosis and was used by a number of French physicians to treat psychological disorders. As a young physician, Sigmund Freud encountered the technique when he studied with the famous French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot. Back to Vienna, working with a physician named Josef Breuer, Freud used hypnosis to enable patients to discuss their problems freely, they believed that while they were in a hypnotic state patients could express unconscious conflicts that were inaccessible to waking consciousness. Although Freud later discarded the technique, its use set him on the path that would lead to the development of psychoanalysis.

Text 5 can hypnosis force people to act against their will?

Researchers Martin Orne and Frederick Evans (1965) demonstrated that hypnotized subjects could be induced not only to perform an apparently dangerous act (to briefly dip one hand in fuming acid) but then to throw the “acid” in a research assistant’s face. When interviewed a day later they exhibited no memory of their acts and emphatically denied they would follow orders to commit such actions.

Had hypnosis given the hypnotist a special power to control these people against their will? To find our, Orne and Evans included a control group in their experiment – six subjects who were pretending to have been hypnotized. The laboratory experimenter was unaware of their presence and treated all subjects in the same manner. The result? In this situation, all six of the unhypnotized subjects performed the same acts as the hypnotized ones.

So an authoritative person in a legitimate context can induce people – hypnotized or not – to perform some unusual acts. Hypnosis researcher Nicholas Spanos put it somewhat more succinctly: “The overt behaviors of hypnotic subjects are well within normal limits”.

Similarly, another hypnosis researcher, Eugene Levitt reports that most hypnotized subjects can be induced to cut up an American flag or deface a Bible, but that people asked to simulate hypnosis are no less likely to perform the same acts.

As Orne put it 20 years after his acid experiments, “Hypnosis turns out to be a powerful way to alter experience, but not a powerful way to alter behavior”.