How to Unlearn a Disease | Hacker News Reader

How to Unlearn a Disease

m.nautil.us

60 pointsthemantra51415 comments

As a practicing hypnotherapist (converted from former skeptic), I can confirm the thinking in this article is right on the money.

I constantly see people for all kinds of interesting medical issues that aren’t being solved by medicine.

Most people know about smokers quitting with ease and without withdrawals.

I had someone who would hear the word “cat” and break out in hives.

Another person who had irritable bowel go away after getting over some traumatic experience from their past.

Even my own experience with debilitating migraines gone with just a few minutes of work with a trained professional. They haven’t come back since.

It’s of course not a cure all. You probably won’t reverse blindness or anything. But it works for more than you’d expect.

Medicine is wonderful. So is the mind. Use both to get better.

Isn’t a simpler justification for the first story (epileptic seizures during recitation of a poem) that the particular synapses the student was using to recite the poem had a problem (demyelination?) that provoked seizures when used? Like a CPU core that has flawed silicon, or a road with a pothole, the system as a whole can work fine if you avoid it, but it’s a fatal flaw if you don’t.

Er, no. The initial reaction was caused by unconscious stress or rage brought on by public speaking and the subsequent incidents were a learned Pavlovian response.

I am always recommending The Mindbody Prescription on here and have no idea why you lot refuse to read it. There is no excuse, this topic is too important. And it would stop silly comments like yours dead in the water. Everything the article mentions make perfect sense from the perspective of unconscious emotion, and moreover, this perspective gives you great understanding of psychology and curative and even predictive capabilities.

A friend's cat hated being pilled, and even the attempt would trigger a gag reflex. Eventually, just rattling a pill bottle -- any pill bottle, would trigger the response.

Hello. I am the resident asshole here and I am calling bullshit on your claim that you always recommend the Mindbody Prescription. You don't. Three pages of your comments have one reference to the book. These pages do paint an somewhat arrogant picture of you, though. You might find it easier to get your point across if you don't sound as superior.

That being said, your comment is spot on.

Reminds me of the infamous "Five Minute Phobia Cure": a simple algorithm for reprogramming your brain to not have a phobia anymore.

The fascinating thing about phobias is that they are such an intense and durable one-time learning. A phobic person never "forgets" to have the response.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGUXQRubBrY

edit:

I realized he doesn't actually detail the process there. I can't find a good link right now but here's a live demo of reprogramming a bad memory that includes some of the same elements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_RQxt0Wcgk

I hadn’t heard of this before - very interesting. I need to reframe a few memories.

NLP catches a lot of flak (some of it deserved perhaps) for being pseudo-scientific but it gets results and has a pretty rigorous (if nonscientific) basis.

I attended a seminar given by Dr. Bandler about fifteen years ago and volunteered for an on-stage demonstration (of hypnosis and some other techniques). I don't remember much, and my subjective sense was that I was up there for only a few moments, but I was told by a friend afterwards that it was several minutes. During that time, whatever he did, I was relieved of a severe depression that had ruined my life up to that point. Let me be clear: I had suffered from years of vicious depression that kept me from living a normal life. It went away and never came back.

Do you know what was done/said to you?

No. I went up on stage, sat down in a chair and closed my eyes. Dr. Bandler started talking and I remember him saying something like, "Oh I love it when they fight me." and that's the last thing I remember. There was the dark pink/grey light you see when your eyes are closed and then I was "waking up" and stepping off the stage. I hadn't been asleep but I did not consciously remember anything.

It was only later, during a break, when someone told me that it had been several minutes, and that I had flushed dramatically and had other reactions during the process. I have no memory of any of that. From my POV it was just a few moments.

There may even be video available of the seminar. I don't remember the year but it was maybe 2004, the seminar was a week long and in Chicago, and I think it was technically DHE (Design Human Engineering), not NLP, if you want to try to track down the actual incident.

After my depression was cured I kinda lost interest in NLP.

You improve what you measure. And right now, we don't measure our brain waves at all. I can see a future where everyone has access to their brain patterns in real time and is much better at exerting conscious control over their emotions and physiological reactions.

That would be really useful.

Right now it's like trying to debug a malfunctioning program except in addition to not being able to see the source code, you also don't have access to the logs.

Most programming problems are pretty easy to solve once you know what the problem is and print statements / logs help a ton here.

Plus you have only the most general idea of the output. Try to compare how depressed you are one day against another and you’ll end up with only the roughest estimations.

Can this work with something like depression?

Probably. For example, transcranial magnetic stimulation is already being used to help treat depression, and there's likely a lot more that can be done among these lines.

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