The Medical Power of Hypnosis
bbc.com
bbc.com
Most of the public discourse around hypnosis has to do with whether it's a distinct state of mind and whether it has any real effect. In my opinion, this is already settled (yes and yes). The unanswered questions, and problems to solve, have to do with what you communicate to somebody who is hypnotized so that you are giving them helpful thinking that will improve their quality of life, rather than fantasies that vanish once they open their eyes. This is the work of philosophy, and it's where the most interesting work lies ahead, even if many people (even practitioners) are not recognizing it yet.
If people stop smoking once they adopt the worldview of a nonsmoker, feel socially comfortable once they believe they're fundamentally an equal to the other people in the room or sleep better once they're satisfied that they're perfectly safe and secure, perhaps these problems are not as medical as we frame them.
If we recognize hypnosis as a highly suggestible state, it follows that hypnosis is not very good for recalling memories, and better for adopting new perspectives. This is supported both by research and my own professional experience.
At summer camp, confined to cabins on stormy evenings, there was a great interest in the occult, in seances and such. I was encouraged to try hypnotizing someone in a dark room, with a dozen people watching. Right where (I'm thinking "Young Frankenstein" here) their arms should have started floating up, our concentration was shattered by a spectator falling over.
I now remembered the lessons from the skeptical book. You can't buy publicity like that. As word got out, I possessed a great power.
Back in high school I taught a few friends, discovering the "high", "low" susceptibility scale described in this article. A "low" made the best hypnotist, at least deploying the principles I taught.
At a party, a friend had hypnotized a classmate prone to drama, off in another room. She presented a psychotic break and wouldn't "wake up". Meanwhile there was a Freshman-Home-From-College who had taken intro psych, and was intoning for anyone who would listen how dangerous our activities were. Again, according to the principles of my favored book, you can't buy publicity like that.
I sensed that our drama queen needed a theatrical rescue, and made as big a show as I could of saving my apprentice, taking over the hypnosis. All was again well.
A "Rashomon" look back at this sees no contradiction in the idea that hypnosis could be real, and yet the principles are best learned from a skeptical book. They've also helped me in public speaking. Watch any motivational speaker; it's the same game.
Props to your quick thinking!
Which to my memory seemed to suggest hypnosis, and the states of altered consciousness associated with it, as people being affected by good storytelling. (don't think this was explicitly stated as such, but it the biggest takeaway I recall)
I suspect the social persuasion take here can be interpreted in a similar way; We are telling a story in concert with the people around us, and in that exploration of a narrative we assume roles that affect our perception. Or at least our own telling of this perception, which in turn may have effect on our retelling of it (both in terms of the rationalization we're doing internally, and in how we anchor the memories of what happened)
Going by that also, the knock-on is that regardless of whether it was "real" we will live our lives after based on our recollection of it, and assume in a sense that it was "real". Meaning that the results are more or less equivalent of it being real.
Typically I avoid hypotism as a topic as it's kind of creepy, but as an amateur synth musician, things like Max Richter's "Sleep," which uses binaural beats both from synths and as the effect of classical instruments, and just recently discovering Wagner's apparent use of similar intentional harmonic and interference effects (e.g. the das rheingold prelude on headphones, depending on conductor), and remembering Spiritualized's early "laser guided melodies," and "pure phase" albums - I'd suspect we may be closer than expected to codifying hypnosis through some novel discovery, possibly into something automated.
Using white noise generator apps for babies is apparently a huge thing now, but what really caught my attention was the option of using pink noise (1/f) in these systems for putting kids to sleep, as it's essentialy fractal noise. I've generated some 1/f music (using a fractal sequencer), and it can be uncannily close to what a person might compose, which is to suggest that if hypnosis is really a thing, and it is related to concepts like pink noise, binaural beats, and harmonic content, there may be algorithmic approaches to it, and therefore a machine to do it at scale.
(There is however another theory, which states this has already happened.)
—- > A later study expanded on the same hypnotism vs. faking it question, this time using an MRI scanner, which gives more detail when looking at soft tissues. This time, the researchers saw the motor cortex – part of the brain which controls body movements – showed activity in the patients under hypnosis. This suggests the hypnotised people were really preparing to try to move their limb, despite achieving no more movement than the group who were faking limb paralysis. —-
So one part of the brain was trying to move the limb, but another part accepted the suggestion that the limbs are paralyzed. Fascinating !
There’s still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about hypnosis, though. Among hypnotists as much as anyone, including the “medically credentialed” ones the article likes.
But not bad!
It repeats some common nonsense, like the idea of "highs" and "lows". Everyone is going in and out of trances all the time. The "hypnotize-ability" of a person isn't some intrinsic thing, it's a quality of the relation between the two nodes in the network. In Cybernetic terms, when you connect two devices (like two people in conversation) the element with the greater variability will be the control element. In the case of "lows" the "patient" is hypnotizing the "therapist".
Anyway, one the one hand it would be awesome if the knowledge and skill of operating your own mind became more mainstream. Ever since Ben Franklin debunked Mesmer there's been this antagonism in Western Scientific thought for hypnosis, so it's been largely ignored or even ridiculed.
On the other hand, once the current semi-underground art of hypnosis starts to go mainstream we see people, like the author of TFA, advocating for government intervention and regulation. I think that's extremely sketchy, because we are essentially talking about the structure of your own mind. You're probably familiar with the idea of "the war on general purpose computing", eh? Well, imagine that but for your own thoughts. We could see patents on "algorithms" that run wholly in the mind.
Based on your guitar and hocus-pocus comment I reckon that you know about as much about meditation (guitar or not) as a Chicken Soup For The Soul reader knows about theology.
> I'd say that the main difference
Is definitely the practices themselves.
[1] https://www.reveri.com/ [2] https://hubermanlab.com/dr-david-spiegel-using-hypnosis-to-e...
Yes, depression has been cured by hypnotherapy. But you have to find someone who knows what they are doing. Even most professional hypnotherapists don't really know what they're doing, so your friend shouldn't be afraid to try different ones until they find someone effective. I suffered from depression and was cured by a hypnotherapist, but he is arguably one of the greatest therapists in the world. Meeting him wasn't cheap, but it gave me my life, so it was literally priceless. Not every therapist can do that. (Although the guy spends a large amount of his time teaching seminars all over the world to transfer his knowledge, yet his work is called "pseudoscience" and ignored or dismissed by academia.)