Look into my eyes: The power of hypnosis | Hacker News Reader

Look into my eyes: The power of hypnosis

newscientist.com

22 pointsdimas13 comments

I have my doubts, but my wife has successfully used hypnosis to quit smoking and get over a fear of the dentist. I think it's placebo, but I don't tell her that -- if it works for her, I don't want to risk undermining the effect.

If there was a way for companies to patent the placebo effect, it would have a lot more research behind it!

There are a fair number of classic studies on the placebo effect, but nothing recent that I'm aware of. For example:

- Apparently the placebo effect has become more pronounced over time: an analysis of the placebo arms of various clinical trials showed that more recent ones tend to be more reliable

- Similarly, placebos are more potent in trials of new drugs, than in trials re-assessing the effects of older drugs

- The all-time classic is the study that shows that the placebo effect works even if the patient knows that the pill has no medicine in it.

I'm not familiar with the studies you are referring to, so what I am about to suggest may have been controlled for, but I wonder if the apparent increase in strength of the placebo effect is simply due to recent drugs being less effective (with respect to placebo). Or alternatively, perhaps there are more new drugs these days for treating conditions where it is quantitatively difficult to measure the outcome-- think: anxiety or depression not high blood pressure or pneumonia.

This result was mentioned previously on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912

Apparently, not only are some new drugs failing to pass a test showing that they are more effective than placebos, but old drugs that previously passed a placebo test might fail if they were tested today.

They give a number of possible reasons in the article why this might occur. One hypothesis was that suitable trial patients are not as sick as they used to be, since the really bad cases today would be on drugs that didn't exist back then (which makes them ineligible for the trial). Another hypothesis was that trials today are performed in more third-world locations, where the quality-of-life difference between standard medical care and a drug trial is more pronounced, amplifying the placebo effect. But no one knows for sure why it's happening.

Another possibility is that people simply trust medicine more than they used to, which seems as though it would directly affect magnitude of the placebo effect.

Isn't that most of advertising? None of it really says anything real about the product. It is all about sticking an idea in our heads.

According to Penn and Teller, there's not nearly as much power as advertised. I don't want to link to copyrighted material, so here's a link to a google search: http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&safe=off&q...

If we're looking to magicians for this stuff, why not go straight to the man himself? James Randi is very critical of hypnosis, and has quite a track record as a skeptic.

British illusionist Derren Brown does a lot of stuff with hypnosis and subliminal influencing of people ... there are a ton of 5 to 10-minute-long YouTube videos of his sketches. He never goes into what he thinks might be the science behind what he does, but some of the results are fascinating.

He claims to use neuro-linguistic programming, subliminal messages etc. There are some videos in which he tries to explain what he does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg

Danger, danger, illusionist alert! Derren Brown is a 'mentalist', that is he performs illusions under the guise of mental tricks, psychology, the power of the mind etc. In reality this is just a guise, and when for example his professed method is hypnosis, it probably isn't, and instead misderection, slight of hand, gimmicks etc are involved. It's just another way to wow the public, and the public loves to believe it. Read '13 Steps to Mentalism' by Corrinda, it is one of the classic texts on mentalism and will get you wise to a lot of this stuff. That said, Derren is one of the masters in this field...

Most of the fun with Derren Brown stems from wondering what is a real effect and what is just elaborate trickery. He's taken that to a new level by often explaining in detail how the manipulation works--but then the explanation itself might as well be a misdirection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com