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Hypnosis Gets Positive Recognition
An anonymous reader writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that, despite its negative history, hypnosis is now getting some favorable attention from neuroscientists. From the article: "These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face."
You are very sleeeepy...
"Piter, too, is dead."
Guy: It didn't work, i still think its a crock.
Oh, well I tried
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
...Open source is the best solution for everything. I will use open source, O great slashdot ...
Perception is reality. Which is why two people can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions. Change the perception, change the reality. A marketer's dream.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
"What you see is not always what you get"
Sound familiar?
...
"because what you see depends on a framework"
.net framework, anyone?
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
If it works to get the ladies barenaked, I'm all for it.
It works. Really.
In light of the above, reading A Rimbaud is illuminating. Rimbaud forced himself to see what he thought of as his poetic vision. He would stare mercilessly into a pool until he saw a fabled city. William Blake is another who willed visions. Rimbaud gave up poetry at a very early age and turned to gun running, but also later spoke of science as the only worthwhile pursuit.
My newest DYI project is an EEG machine to compliment my interest in neurobiology and slow wave sleep. For those who want an in to hypnosis, biofeedback and sleep "EEG.pl is an open repository for software, publications and datasets related to the analysis of brain potentials: electroencephalogram (EEG), local field potentials (LFPs) and event related potentials (ERP)"
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Will there come a day where the study of hypnosis, or other forms of cognitive suggestion, is abused by firms for marketing? Perhaps some allready are. What kind of privacy law would restrict this?
From a cold steel rail..
"The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue. " Hypnotised subjects recognised the words more often than unhypnotised subjects.
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Also psych experiments use very small samples and have to use the repeated measures statistical technique. This can identify significance but is restricted in other information it can provide.
as a flower or a hammer
yup...
hammers always get my attention
Anybody try any of the self hypnosis software like Virtual Hypnotist successfully? I've tried a few opensource/free programs, and they don't seem to work.
Note that I'm interested in self hypnosis purely from the scientific-curiosity/entertainment/skeptic point of view. Not looking for serious therapy stuff here (Office Space comes to mind).
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Don't think about polar bears!
+++ATH0
I remember talking to a psychologist once who, once learning that I was a computer guy, suggested that combining a form of auto-entraining hypnosis with some creative input devices you could easily make an immersive environment with today's technology. The only problem is that by allowing yourself to be hypnotised you're putting yourself into a highly suggestive state (duh, that's how it works) and as such you really need to trust the creator of the experience that you are being fed. If, for example, you're experiencing an online environment, you're allowing random unknown people to have intimate access to your mind. Not exactly something I'd be interested in doing. But consider the fiction of Neuromancer: "a consensual hallucination". That's what we're talking about here. The dangers experienced by Case were real and could lead to his death if he took on a system he couldn't control. Regardless, Case accepted the risks because the rewards were so great.. perhaps that kind of attitude is something we should strive towards. Our aversion to risk is limiting our sensory perception of our shared experiences. We're limited to screens and keyboards. Sure, our screens have gotten bigger and more colourful and we've got joysticks and mice, and surround sound, but the experience of cyberspace is so poor compared to meatspace. And that's not getting any better.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Perception is reality. Which is why two people can look at the same facts and come to opposite conclusions. Change the perception, change the reality. A marketer's dream."
*Geeks are getting laid!*
Sorry chief, it doesn't work.
Hypnosis might have a negative reputation if you buy the movie "mind control" version, which has nothing to do with reality, and shame on anyone who even thought it was. It has long been a testable theory, and research has shown that every 90 minutes or so the brain goes into a slightly hypnotic state, daydreaming if you will. This is a natural process of the brain. It's still not known how or why this happens, but the effect has been known for a long time.
It's a very weird thing to demonstrate to someone who's long held the negative "its' a crock of shit" view based on what they've seen on movies or in stage hypnosis.
I'll give you an example of something that a psychotherapist (long story) did for me. When you get into that relaxed state, that's not quite as relaxed as sleeping, but its still a very numb relaxing pleasant feeling, the hypnotist "tests" your state in numerous ways. The most popular one is telling you your eyes are glued shut and no matter how hard you try you cannot open them... then a few minutes later asks you to try, but you will not be able. Every time this happens to me, I *KNOW* I can open my eyes, I'm fucking positive about it, I *KNOW* they're not glued shut, I *KNOW* the hypnotist is a lying bastard, full of shit.. but you know what... I don't wanna... I like them shut. It's difficult to explain, but you just find yourself wanting to go along with fun little things like that.
That's a crude little insight into what a hypnotic state feels like and the level of "control" anyone has over you. Try it yourself, you dont have to believe in it. If anything, its just a great way of relaxation. I use it at night as a cure for insomnia. A guided session helps me get to sleep within about 10 minutes. You might argue that this is just the power of suggestion, or the placebo effect... but that's exactly what's its meant to be.
I also make my own mp3's depending on what I'm looking for.. If preparing for a job interview I run through the interview over and over again in a hypnotic state. It's a great way of mental rehearsing something. Better than just doing it in front of a mirror....
The whole idea of 'top-down' or cognitive drive for the sensory systems is very addictive, since among other things, it allows you to explain perception as some type of baysian method. However it is simply untrue. The visual system is replete with examples, from the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet illusion, to stuff like Julesz' Random Dot stereograms (that CANNOT have top down effects), that defy a top-down framework.
Even with effects that might be top-down modulated (like illusory contours) the physiological evidence is totally towards these things happening in the early nervous system. Although there is definitely some feedback present even in this area, one has to consider that RC constants for most neurons are about ~10ms, and much of our perception takes place in ~100ms. These timeframes are VERY well studied, and generally accepted.. and of that 100ms, about 50ms of the time is the signal travelling from the retina to the cortex (see Bullier & DeAngelis, among others). That doesn't leave much room for dramatic top down feedback for general sensory perception.... Your visual system, bottom up, manages to figure out edges, what colors to fill them in with, various levels of depth, what's moving (in relation to your eye movements.. no easy challenge.. how can you tell when your eye moves whether you're looking at a pen, or a moving streak?) and in relation to what else, all within 100-150ms of the stimulus. That just doesn't leave time for very dramatic 'high level' feedback like this article assumes.
Although I've only mentioned vision, there are similar issues in all sensory modalities except audition, which is a special case, since audition is optimized for temporal accuity, but it has its own issues that make it look like much of your perception happens without much top-down activity.
From our current understanding it appears that top-down activity does two things: 1) Equalize 'gain' in the sensory system.. if the amplification levels across you're visual field were different, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a line was something that had to do with the outside world or noise. And 2) Modulate acuity for attention.. which is very complicated in and of itself, but there is good evidence that most early perception occurs even in areas we aren't attending to.
The main 'evidence' in this article is from a 'brain scanner' which is probably fMRI. As one of my professor's liked to say, "In fMRI we show people a picture of their ass, then a picture of a hole in the ground, and subract them." Most fMRI statistics include averaging across areas... which is nice, until you remember that our brain isn't on a sphere, but something with fissures in it, and so you just averaged two things that were (cortically speaking) in other worlds (since because of the fissure they might be centimeters apart! Remember the Cortex is a laminar archiecture around the surface)... so I'm highly skeptical, to say the least.
I really thought the summary said something about a "hammer in the face". It got my attention at least.
In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.
Ever drink too much IPA and wake up with a killer hangover and an amputated limb? Ah.. good times.
For a subject to follow an instruction he has to have a lack of responsibility on that subject. F.ex. you never see a person jump out of the window as he (usually) have a bit more responsibility then killing himself off like that.
The problem with hypnotism is that it installs commands in the mind. The hypnotist does then not remove the first command, he installs a second command telling it to ignore the first.
Subsequently whenever the first one is restimulated the subject will have this conflict going on. - Follow / Don't follow the command.
Not really what you want to have going on, having urges that some hypnotist installed in your mind, for the rest of your life.
The point is that people see what they THINK they see, not what the retina records.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Me and my two sisters were delivered by a D.O. who was also a hypnotist. Our mother had no pain-relieving drugs, but felt no pain during any of the three births. The D.O. had been working with her during her pregnancies implanting the suggestion that she would feel no pain, and that it would be a "beautiful experience". This was back in the very late 50s to the early 60s (I'm 46).
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
You know, it may be true that hypnosis is real, but it's still a field populated in large part by liars & kooks.
hard core geek-ware
is dark-sided.
I, and my two sisters, were delivered by an Ostopath/hypnotist. Our mother said she felt no pain but had no drugs during any of the three deliveries. He had worked with her during preganecies, implanting the suggestion that she would feel no pain and that "it would be a beautiful experience". Pretty effective, as my younger sister was a breach presentation, and the doctor was able to move the baby around so that a Cesarian was avoided.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
now I'm thinking about thinking about polar bears!
By the crappiness of System Of A Down's latest album.
Well, I guess the last 2 tracks are a temporary period of conciousness.
All hail the hypno toad!!!!!!
Right, mod this up. +1 insightful. +1 funny. +1 interesting. +1 i-want-to-have-your-babies
3, 2, 1 ... you're back in the room
...look them both up on Google, and your favourite peer-to-peer file sharing thingumy, and I'm sure you will find both quite enlightening to, um, "play with".
/J
There are some very interesting/good MP3s and AVis by Bandler -- and Milton Erickson's material is also worth spending some time over.
Deep techies -- programmers in particular -- will likely find some of the NLP techniques quite interesting, especially if "O'Reilly's Mind Hacks" seemed like an interesting title.
Enjoy!
Nice to see this topic finally getting some more mainstream media coverage -- hypnosis is almost magickal, isn't it?
Bon Voyage...
Someone really doesn't like nyud.net. Parent post is a direct link to a 4.2 MB media file. A crappy WMV3 format that'll require Windows Media Player at that. Sorry nyud.net, I tried to mod AC overrated, but hey, here comes the +5 funny...
That wasn't a very good article actually. Top down this...flashing lights/colors that - close to the same old hypnosis as gimmick POV. Hypnosis in one form or another is at the heart of what is called "mental Illness". Even healthy people struggle with mental tapes that play over and over in the mind. A kid getting upset after being yelled at by her parents and called "no good..lazy..a floosey etc" the parents is actually getting set up for hypnotic conditioning. Any shock suspends what hypnotists often call an individuals "critical factors" or the ability to maintain reason, focus, objectivity etc. When critical factors are suspended the door to the sub conscious is accessed and able to receive suggestions. A kid called "no good" while being stressed and upset will find those thoughts in the mind and struggling with them will make them worse since concentration is a function of hypnosis and all struggle deepend the psychic funk. One reason people can't break habits is because they worry, struggle and analyze the problem too much. Indeed, one reason therapy often backfires is because the client is asked to get deeper into focusing on what is wrong instead of becoming objective to it. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is essentially a hypnotic problem. People under severe stress react and the traumatic elements get inside a person's subconscious where they re-animate again and again. A persons conditioned reflex response mechanism which is like the body's memory can feel pain from an ordeal that they were not even aware of when the traumatic event was taking place. Many soldiers and others subjected to stresses that they are shocked by have a consciousness that is overwhelmed as if like a conductor falling into an orchestra. When people dont know how to handle their emotions, or are subject to extreme stresses,they lose some conscious awareness and fall into the gears of their own cognitive and emotional machinery. That's the root for a tremendous amount of mental suffering. Not surprisingly many of the original psychic ruptures take place at home and in the schools when people are kids and get upset by the cruelties, neglects, family problems etc. Media, marketers and politicians etc use these mechanisms (even if only indirectly aware of what principles they are using) by emotionalizing groups of people and then giving them ideas and suggestions. WHen adds play that energizing music and give people feelings and ideas they are trying to condition them hypnotically. People will accept such motivations as if it came from them. Hypnotic elements are all around us and yet it's hardly recognized for what it is. A lot more people can be hypnotized that that article states. One reason people can't be hypnotized is because they are hypnotized already by lifes events and stresses. The correct way to use hypnosis to get someone to stop smoking would be to "un-hypnotize" them. Thats why when a person tries hypnosis for smoke cessation it only works for a little while. Hypnotists don't hypnotize people as much as take over a pre existing state. A fact people don't realize about hypnosis is that intellectual people and people who use their imaginations a lot are the best subjects for hypnosis. People who study a lot are used to focusing their minds and they tend to be sensitive to authority ( a good hypnotists greatest asset is a authoritarian manner) - all good conditions for hypnotic manipulation. One reason artists and such suffer is because they are very open in their own minds to all sorts of forces taking their objectivity captive.
"What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face."
Sort of begs the question, how do you get the original experiences that everything is based on? ie, how can you ever recognise that a dog is in fact a dog?
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
At least temporarily? Smoke a big fat blunt. Pot effects your memory, and to some extent takes you off the "auto pilot" associations that you have formed to familiar stimuli. It can be helpful in giving one a fresh look at his assumptions, and also helps one notice features that he may not have payed attention to before.
Arstechnica's Nobel Intent section recently had an article titled Is cannabis good for your brain? , citing a new research study that says marijuana leads to neurogenesis in the hippocampus. This jives well with my experience smoking - I've thought for a while smoking roots roots one in nature. It brushes away some of the cultural veneer at least temporarily, and sometimes you notice things in this state you might have otherwised gotten used to judging more narrowly.
I keep my books on hypnosis out of sight because I don't like the questions that follow when my friends see them. If you would like to learn more, start with some works by Milton Erickson. Anything is possible once you realize that your brain *makes* your reality.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Neuroscientists and mental health professionals long ago renamed hypnosis to 'guided imagery' because of all the circus act connotations that hypnosis had. Guided imagery is invaluable for certain conditions in which hyperarousal and difficulty forgetting are a problem. These are conditions like Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Post Traumatic Distress Disorder. Also, many mental health professionals do not advertise or call it hypnosis because of the kooky patients it brings in once it is known that someone practices it.
Basically the profession did a mv hypnosis guided-imagery long ago.
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
...the use of hypnosis to recover repressed memories?
I think the validity of that is still in question.
I have personally experienced the medicinal effects of hypnosis.
My doctor cured my migraines as a child through hypnosis. He has also cured
asthma through the same techniques with other children. If the disease involves
the mind, hypnosis is very effective.
When you think that the placebo effect is quite effective, consider being able
to influence the subconscious in order to clear symptoms that were artifically
created by the patient. Consider psychosomatic illnesses, where it's all in
the person's head. The symptoms could potentially be cleared through
hypnotic suggestion.
Consider smoking. As a smoker I know my triggers are certain situations.
Hypnosis could be used to 'nullify' these situations so that a person
could get enough willpower to quit.
I see many posts which make fun of hypnosis, but as someone who has benefitted
from it, I just see ignorance. Try it and then make an informed decision.
I'm a psychologist. Have the degree and everything to prove it. For full disclosure to any other psychologists out there, I'm a mixture of the neo-Freudian and sociocultural schools, with a dash of biogenetic. Personally, I view this as a good thing. There's been alot of bashing of hypnosis by both the scientific and the nonscientific communities for either it's 1) percieved goofiness (you're getting sleeppyyyyy...) or 2) the suggestability it causes. However, I find it to be a good tool if it's handled by somebody who is actually qualified to do it in a scientific manner. Most of the suggestability accounts are done by non professionals pretending to be professionals. They're mostly shame artists. But for a real hypnotist, the real value of hynopsis is not in recovering deep dark secrets, but for use as a tool of self-honesty, in bringing issues to light that people really know, but keep back by a thin layer of repression. If you dig any deeper than that, then you risk falling into the suggestability catagory.
Took them long enough. Maybe in another decade they'll conclude that meditation is a good way to relieve stress. Seriously, I wish people would read about these things before adopting negative stereotypes about them. Of course, a stereotype, by definition, is an uninformed opinion.
Experts: We don't believe in hypnosis.
Hypnotists: Yes, you do.
Experts: Okay.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
at the time of writing it says..
"Write yourself a threatening letter and pen a defiant reply."
erm.. will pass.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
"...to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face."
Confusion there would explain what happened to me last Thursday - I don't remember it of course, but the cops tell me I gave my girlfriend a new hammer and then chased my ex-wife around the block swinging a dozen roses... weird.
"We loved it. It was better than Cats. We're going to give it favorable attention again and again."
UTF-8: There and Back Again
What you're talking about is a person's interpretation, which is based on their biases, preferences, interests and other such factors. Reality is reality.
Take the recent invasion of Iraq, for instance. It is _fact_ that innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by American soldiers and American bombs. That's reality. However, the interpretation of the situation by different people may differ. If you ask a neo-con or a redneck, chances are they'll justify the killing, for whatever reason. A conservative or a libertarian, on the other hand, would most likely point out that it is wrong to kill innocent civilians.
Of course people will have differing interpretations of reality. But reality itself is just that: reality.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
They used to make great album covers and sleeves (e.g., Pink Floyd Wish you Were Here).
I have been coming to the same conclusions lately ever since I heard that what a room really sounds like when you're in it is just like what others listening on a speakerphone would hear, but our brains have software to make it sound nice. I think there are visual things that do the same thing. A friend took a picture of me and I thought "hell, am I that fat? I don't look that fat in the mirror." And I took a picture of this girl I'm sweet on, and the picture didn't look as good as she does in real life. Maybe real life is an illusion, as the buddhists say. So now the trick is finding girls who have the same software in their heads that I do in my head to filter out the pudgy cheeks and improve my hairline! And meanwhile my brain is filtering out their saddlebags and everybody's happy.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
... these are not the droids I was looking for!!
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Erickson was one of the first people to discover and utilise covert hypnosis.
l
Since he was an MD reportedly getting miracle results, the medical board assumed he was a crank and tried to remove his license. Twice.
The meetings both went the same way. Erickson would start talking in his monotonous drawl, which would be the only thing board members would remember, apart from letting him keep his license.
So much of what Milton did is mindblowing. One of his patients wanted to lose weight. Erickson hypnotised her so that, whilst eating, she would experience time going so slowly that each spoonful would subjectively take an hour to reach her mouth.
Perhaps one of the most interesting of his papers was his collaboration with Aldous Huxley.
There is a copy here, third item down:
http://www.geocities.com/franzbardon/erickson.htm
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA. I did get hypnotized back in August for smoking cessation purposes. Was a 1-2 pack a day smoker for about 10 years. Tried the patch (didnt work), the gum (tasted like crap), wellbutrin (gave me hives and made me not care about anything). Finally I tried hypnosys. Granted, I went into it believing it was going to work, and it did. Two 40 minute sessions later and I havent had a smoke and best of all, I wasnt irritable at all.
So prove to me you are part of "reality" and not just a figment of my imagination (perception).
"...And all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be." - Pink Floyd
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Damn!!!
OR:
"It didn't work; I still think it's a crock. Well, here's your $500; I'm off to wax your car. See you tomorrow?"
Seriously though, my Psychology 1101 professor did research into hypnosis for pain control. She did an in-class demonstration showing (apparently) that a guy she'd been working with could endure having his hand in ice water for a longer time after hypnosis than before. She said the goal was to help people for whom pain medication isn't enough - like burn victims whose skin must be scraped over and over.
I wonder how this relates to dreams and lucid dreams.
Who else read that line "As a flower or hammer to the face!"
Smaaaaaaaash!
-Nick
Progressive relaxation? Rings a bell!
The story: some moronic gangsters tried to steal my portable a couple of years ago. They didn't expect a geek willing to defend it with his life, and the beat me up severely. I managed to keep my portable because I managed to maneuvre myself in the middle of the street blocking all traffic and drawing too much attention.
Anyway, since then I'm much more afraid, and have a panic attack once in a while. Eventually I went to see a psychologist and she learned me this "progressive relaxation". It helps, but I'm still not the person I once was. I do the excercises before going to bed, because I have troubles falling to sleep, and relive the attack frequently.
It's really cool, after the excercise I feel detached from my body and really really calm. Quite often I fall asleep before finishing the complete set of excersises. I didn't know it was related to self-hypnosis though.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Do you know kung fu?
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
A dentist friend of mine used to hypnotize patients to reduce their stress and pain.
The effect of the hypnosis lasted for a few hours.
He stopped when an angry husband threatened him, because the wife always came back home from the dentist soooo relaxed.
He tried to explain to the jaleous husband it was just hypnosis and nothing else. Apparently he didn't convince him, and never saw the patient again.
Many Lives, Many Masters - Brian Weiss, MD A little out there but I really enjoyed it for some reason. Basically this Dr hypnotized someone to the point where they remembered their past lives, and everything in between.
"I don't need drugs to enjoy this, just to enhance it" - Otto
Pleaso, don't try it althought you think you can do it.
My city: Barcelona.
I'm still smoking 2 packs a day so those tapes were nothing but bullshit. Yet, oddly enough, I feel compelled to keep purchasing the tapes every month to quit smoking.
I initially read that as: "as a flower or a hammer to the face."
I should hope you'd know the difference between a flower and a hammer to the face!
This is one of the main ideas in Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Good to see science acknowledging what many have believed for a long time.
If you're talking the age of Mesmer, then yes, hypnosis had a somewhat negative history. But in the past few decades it's become much better understood and it's used to good effect in several medical fields.
Go to your favorite book search site and look for hypnosis in pain management. There's a lot of very well researched scientific literature out there. (Also a lot of crap, but that doesn't make the good stuff any less valid.)
A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time studying hypnosis and I brought up the subject with my stepfather, who's been practicing medicine for over fifty years. When I mentioned pain managment, he told me that he'd used hypnosis once to induce an anesthetic state in a patient in order to set a broken leg. I asked him why he didn't use it more often, and he said "Well, it's cheaper and probably safer than anesthesia, but it took me two hours to get him under enough to pop his bone back in." It's a lot faster to just shoot the patient up with lidocaine.
You can see a few examples. I guess Undercover Marketing is the term for this when you're not supposed to notice it. Product Placement.
Pretty much all television and radio advertising uses principles of hypnosis. The subject is not put into a sleep state, but becomes hyperattentive. Your trance induction is via the program you are watching. You pay rapt attention to this, and frequently allow your perception of reality to be at least partially suspended in order to imagine a fictional world. Then in this vulnerable state of mind you get advertisements uploaded into your brain, over and over again.
"Nobody's ever going to make any money on the internet"
--VP of the company I worked for, circa 1995
Researchers are quoted as saying, "Hypnosis is great! It is better than 'Cats'. I'm going to see it again and again."
But we don't really know that the above is true, since the brain's circuitry still hasn't been traced and the function of the various components determined. The article is merely speculating about what is happening.
The new information given in the article is that the brain operates differently when under hypnosis. But there is no insight into exactly how the brain actually works (with or without hypnosis.)
Darth Vader: "I find your lack of faith disturbing."
[Uni]verse, scripture;
[KJVAV1611] Hebrews 11:1,
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Clearly, the aforementioned post of this thread has shown a faith with reprovable substance and evidence. Are we not allowed to have faith in the five tenets of the Scientific Method pillar?
without prejudice
What was amazing about Erikson was that he noticed that life is rife with trance states, most of them shallow, temporary, and skilfully deployed for survival purposes. Think about this the next time you get home from a tense commute without really remembering exactly how you operated the car.
He found somewhat more suggestible cases, and took advantage of what he saw as our natural facility with trances, and of our heavy reliance on metaphor to get through the day. (Of course, I oversimplify.) Plus he was a damn good psychiatrist. Basically, a prodigy. He would find ways of putting people into trances of various depths, for various lengths of time, using freaky techniques like the rhythm of his voice tuned to the listener's body responses, and barely noticeable emphasis on certain words, not unlike fictional characters in the Dune series. Not easy to reproduce.
His ideas later led to NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming... YMMV.
Damn those pesky terrorists
This is not how I am
I have become comfortably numb
For everyone who states that hypnosis doesnt exit in the replies above: you obviously have never worked with it. It works even better than advertised in the article. Unfortunately scientists use very bad trance inductions (supposedly because they are "scientific", but in fact because they don't know better. (By the way I don't consider psychologists scientists at all so disregard their remarks immeadetely. Neuroscientists do all the real stuff.) I have a private practise (http://www.tiouw.com/) where I treat people for anxity, depression and anger problems. I work on a no cure, no pay basis. I use hypnosis and cure over 90% of my clients with two or three sessies of two hours. (I stop seeing them if they are not well after three sessions.) Of the 200 people I saw this year everyone went into a trance. No exceptions. They only question is how deep will they go.
This article made me recall a TV ad from a few years ago:
1) $subject is holding a lemon in his hand
2) "Imagine... that you're eating a nice, juicy pear...." >:D
(3) profit?)
If you want to use those "repressed memories" as legal evidence - absolutely not a good idea.
When used as therapy it's ok. As long as the client thinks that he's uncovered the reason for his problems and it results in improvement who cares if these memories are 100% accurate? Of course, this needs to be done responsibly. You don't want someone believing they have been sexually abused by someone who is innocent.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Here is the original article by Amit Raz et al, published in 2002.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
In Soviet Russi....ahhhhhh...never mind. Sorry....
The only way to load a world view quickly into your brain is to import it from other people. To do this efficiently, your brain must be capable of entering a mode where it uncritically accepts information provided in spoken form (probably mostly from your parents, but other people may play a role). To avoid the risk of abuse, there must be some instinctive criteria that determine when this uncritical uploading of new information should occur. Hypnosis occurs under conditions which mimic the circumstances that satisfy these criteria.
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
Hypnosis has never worked on me and people have tried. IMO if you can
be hypnotised so you can't open your eyes or do all these other crazy
things that you see on stage and elsewhere then theres a fault in your
brain. Perhaps the wirings screwed or something similar , but a brain
that can be put into a state whereby it can't control its own body
definately has a bug.
I did at one point do a few weeks on hypnosis during a psycology course, hypnosis is over complicated by people.
There is no deep dark secret of how it works (Even stage hypnosis), its just simply getting a person to trust you and be relaxed enough with you for their mind to take what you're saying as true and not need to "vet" or check the information.
So if you tell a person when their in a hypnotic state that they don't need to smoke, and that they dont want to smoke. Their mind will just accept it, it bypasses the concious thinking process.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Hypnosis found to alter the brain: Subjects see color where none exists http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/08.21/hyp nosis.html
Your psychological and emotional states are united by neurotransmitters. For every psychological state you enter (building a stairway), emotional states corresponding to that state are created by neurotransmitters (satisfaction, accomplishment etc.) This process gives you your connection to reality. There is a one - to - one relationship between your emotional and psychological states. The emotional state is supposed to follow the psychological state but if the situation is reversed (drugs, hypnosis, religious bafflegab,) an incorrect reality will be created because of the one - to - one correspondence.
I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality , whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it.
After that, I sopped doubting that it works. The only question is, on whom and what % of the time.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I can think of a few good uses for hypnosis... 1. Hypnotise women to peform all kinds of lewd acts on me. 2. .... can't think of another.
Hmmm.
I believe what you experienced was not a hypnotic experience, but a bad dream. Any good dream analyst and interpreter will tell you that the meaning behind your vivid hypnotic-like nightmare means something like the following:
You have a fear of open-source and despite your mental protest, you still want to participate in what you view as a frightening experience.
He forced his cock into my mouth In your dream you realised that the masters of open source are the only ones that can shut your mouth.
my mouth seemed almost eager to.. Your mind actually accepted the correction and your mouth started to evalgelize the truth behind open source.
But , due to your incompetence, you still could not get to grips with the freedom of Open Source.This was only the start
That was only the start as Open source continued to rape you mentally because you could not see the full potential. You also mention anal (getting screwed from behind where you cannot see the (open)source of your discomfort) and jerk-offs (lending a hand to contribute to the development of OSS). All of this was taped and traded amongst my master's friends. This is the best part because this is the part in your dream where you realise that it was clear to everyone that you made an ass of yourself and will never accept OSS and the entire Open source community is laughing at you.
I hope that clears it up.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
If so, that could make a nice ingredient of some visual prosthesis.
These are not the marketdroids you are looking for...
My last research into the matter was about 5 years ago and the materials may have been old then, but as I understand it, hypnosis doesn't remove the pain, but allows you to ignore it. This is an important distinction, as some of the physical reactions of the body occur in reaction to the pain. Also, there are some drugs which destroy the human body's ability to ignore pain. (They think... it works on people who claim to "be able to ignore pain.") They did a test (which sounded incredibly funny and sadistic) where they asked a well known hypnosis anesthesia guy and asked him to do tests. They had him induce trance, applied pain, nothing, applied more pain, nothing. Injected the drug and the guy started screaming his head off as all of the pain rushed in.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The patients will report feeling "pressure", but not pain.
The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
And to add on to that...
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As this subject rarely comes up I would like to also point out Simulated Reaity and Brain in a Vat theories:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-in-a-vat_theor
The first basically adheres that reality could possibly simulated and everything is mearly conjured in a simulation and the second is the same but more on the lines of reality is nothing more than information fed into your brain.
Based on what consciousness is we have to assume that everything that we perceive is physical and adheres to rules.
The laws of physics for all we really know are just assumptions based on observations of reality. Our observations in turn actually are not the laws of physics. If reality spontaneously changed then our observations and perceptions would be incorrect interpretations of reality, however we would most likely continue (or at least attempt) to grasp on to our previous notions of the laws of physics.
But as I said previously, our behavior is based on our perceptions and hence what we do because of our behavior affects physical reality. Nothing is independent.*
*But if you wanted to be Buddhist about it then neither reality or perception is truly dependant of each other because both could exist without the other (ie all living organism in the universe died but the universe continued with no one to observe it... Or the reverse, as a person that has become trapped in a vegetative dream like state unable to interact with physical reality. They could still perceive their dreams, thoughts, and mind but no more than that.) Whoa I just had a moment of enlightenment here... At work no less.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I never really understood that comment. It's kind of like saying, "That thinking thing? You're not really thinking... you just believe you are. It's all in your mind."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Have any of you tried this? I did and it was really freaky, especially the advanced test. www.wendi.com/hypnoquiz Hypnogirl
What is at issue is a matter of derivation. Our perceptions are filtered subset of the potential stimuli that our sensory system pass along. A study of neurology reveals that a large portion of the "events" that could stimulate us never make it past preliminary filters that are in place to insure that we only percieve what you might say is "important." Presumably this is evolutionarily defined so that we see the predators creeping up rather than being distracted by other less significant stimuli. Our understanding of reality is thus biased. It is derived from what we have evolved to understand as important.
That, however, does not mean that our perceptions establish or in someway "define" reality out side of our consciousness. Our perceptions don't establish natural law. You can step in front of a fast freight or jump off of a tall building and establish just why we have these biases. Our perceptions highlight important parts of the present reality to our awareness. If we ignore those aspects of reality our survival is at risk. Inertia and gravity operate whether we believe in them or not. So does chemistry as evidenced by those who every year MISTAKENLY percieve a toxic fungus as an edible mushroom.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
You can.
http://www.seduction.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Jeffries
http://www.bitme.org/ (RJ videos)