Apr 04 2007

Read This Blog…Read This Blog…

One of my favorite old SNL skits was a commercial for a stage hypnotist featuring numerous people all droning in monotone, I loved it, it was much better than Cats. Im going to see it again and again. The humor, of course, lies in the fact that hypnotism does not really work that way. But what is hypnotism?

This remains a tricky question. We know what it isnt. Hypnotists do not put people into a trance or altered state of consciousness. When someone is hypnotized they are awake and their brains appear to be functioning normally (despite the youre getting sleeeepy.. cliche).

Being hypnotized seems to be linked to suggestion. Psychological experiments show that humans in general have a measurable degree of susceptibility to suggestion. Our thoughts and memories can be influenced by having facts, words, or claims suggested to us even if we are not consciously aware of the suggestions. For example, numerous experiments have shown the following: expose a group of subjects to an event (in writing, in video, or even live in front of them), then ask them a series of questions about the event. The details of their recollection can be statistically influenced by making subtle suggestions such as asking what she was wearing; suggesting that a cloaked person whose sex was not apparent was in fact female. In lectures I often show the audience a list of words and ask them to remember them, then I show them words one at a time and they are asked to raise their hands if they remember the word. Words that are related to (suggested by) the original list of words but were not on that list are included and most people report remembering seeing that word, and some even say they can visualize the word on the list.

If you want further evidence of the suggestibility of people take a look at these videos on Youtube of mentalist Derren Brown. I have seen similar performances live by skeptical mentalists such as Banachek, so I think they are genuine.

It is also true that not all people are equally susceptible to hypnotism. Some people are highly suggestible and easily hypnotized while others are highly resistant to suggestion. Yesterday I wrote about the fantasy-prone personality, and research has shown that FPP types are also highly suggestible and easily hypnotized in fact this is how FPP first came to be recognized.

Again we ask the question is this a learned personality trait or inborn brain hardwiring? The evidence suggests that it is hardwiring, and again relates to that part of the brain that systematically evaluates the reality of what we think we perceive. In fact there seems to be people who have little or no filter between suggestion and belief.

Knowledge of suggestibility and the nature of hypnotism, as well as the existence of those who are highly susceptible, is a critical tool in the skeptics bag of tricks. It is one more thing that separates skeptics from believers skeptics have a broader repertoire of ways to explain apparent anomalous events than believers. Believers tend to dismiss a few straw men or obviously unlikely mundane explanations and then leap to a paranormal or unusual explanation. Trained skeptics, rather, will go through a much more exhaustive list of alternatives. We may even be able to match a specific psychological explanation to a particular event. Savvy believers are now aware that such phenomena as suggestibility exist, but they dismiss them as explanations without adequate justification.

Hypnotism is used in several ways. The first is as entertainment by stage magicians – in my opinion the only legitimate use. I have been to several of these acts, the first was The Amazing Kreskin when I was a teen. First, some stage or street hypnotists cheat – they use confederates to act out the supposed suggestions. But many, like Kreskin, do not. Typically they will screen the audience for those who are susceptible to suggestion, then run those through several filters until they wind up with 5-10 people who are highly suggestible. They then employ social pressure and fear of embarrassment to encourage further compliance with the act. And finally they will employ to some degree (depending on their skill) techniques for embedding suggestions in the subjects. This is all presented with the flare of a stage mentalists – in other words it is shrouded in deception and BS to make a good show.

The second use is therapeutic. This is a long topic in and of itself and I will not go into detail here. The bottom line is that the evidence is mixed and generally weak for any therapeutic effect for hypnotism. There is no credible evidence that it can be used as a “healing” modality, or for anesthesia or any major intervention. Much of what it is used for is psychological – like weight loss or smoking cessation, and these are amenable to generic therapeutic effects (as I discussed on my previous blog on NLP). So anyone trying to quit smoking who employs any method will have some success because they made the decision to try. It is also plausible that using techniques of suggestion and persuasion may push some people over the top so that their will power wins out over their cravings. I am not, however, compelled by claims for hypnotism or NLP that simple suggestive techniques can make long lasting and meaningful changes in our personality, mood, or behavior.

The final use of hypnotism – and the one of most relevance to skeptics – is as an interview technique. Perhaps the most infamous long term use of this was by Budd Hopkins, a painter who came to believe that he uncovered an epidemic of alien abductions. Typically, people would come to him because they heard of him through UFO circles, and later because they read his book. So subjects were pre-selected for a desire to believe or an interest in the topic, and certainly had pre-existing knowledge of what constitutes a standard UFO abduction scenario. Hopkins would then use hypnosis techniques and question them in this state, using direct and blatant suggestion, and of course it is no surprise that many of his subjects “remembered” being abducted under his ministrations.

A better interpretation is that Hopkins was systemically implanting false memories into his subjects by using techniques of suggestion and imagery. Many of his self-selected and willing subjects needed the barest nudge to “remember” their abductions. It is incredible that the UFO community largely accepts this as evidence for alien abductions – and again starkly highlights the dramatic differences in methodology between believers and skeptics.

I think the best light in which to understand the phenomenon of hypnotism is as a type of magic trick. Magicians exploit knowledge of how people typically act, perceive, and process information in order to deceive them and thereby carry out their illusions. Mentalism is a subset of magic that uses the same kind of techniques to pretend to have psychic or fantastical mental powers. Cold reading is an example of this. Suggestion and the various techniques of hypnotism also exploit aspects of brain function and information processing to create quirky psychoneurological effects – such as compliance to commands, or ideas being implanted without one’s conscious knowledge (again, see the Derren Brown videos for dramatic examples).

The same techniques can be used, either deliberately or unwittingly, to generate apparent psychic or paranormal abilities or events. But like all things paranormal (at least so far) a little knowledge of human nature, science, or statistics enables us to peek behind the curtain and see a very mundane and unimpressive figure working the controls.

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