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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."
Hypnosis indeed works.
Primarily, I use an open source (GPL) program called "Virtual Hypnotist. It took time to get it to work for me (close to a year using it daily), but now I can under when I want to.
I've primarily used it so far to help overcome my shyness, especially around women. So far it's been working. I've also been using it assist with lucid dreams.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Here you go. :)
It takes a while, but VH does in fact work. I recommend using the Spiral Induction for a while. Having something visual seemed to help me. After I got used to it, though, I can just use regular hypnosis mp3s, too.
Also try the demo to NeuroProgrammer2. That program is good.
If you want to try things that are a bit out there, there is a really good site. It's not worksafe and there are disturbing things here (slavery, etc), but there are some really good files (TrainMMO [multiple orgams], FemaleOrgasm (awesome), LucidDreams, TrainNotShy etc). Here the url which is not worksafe: Warp My Mind.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
...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...
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
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.
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.
You have a great future as a slashdot editor...
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.
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
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.
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.
well done! sexual contact without consent is *definately* a matter to be joked about... ... -rape.html]
[URL:http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21112005/140/f
I seriously hope the parent doesn't get modded as 'funny'. it's this sort of attitude that gets geeks our (unfair) reputation in some circles.
First, full disclosure: I am a trained hypnotist.
Pretty much anyone can be hypnotized, if they have enough functioning brain cells to hypnotize in the first place. The fact that you are able to operate a PC well enough to post on Slashdot pretty well indicates that you should be able to pass that particular criterion.
However, hypnosis is a consent state. You have to want to go into trance, you have to go along with it, you have to CHOOSE to follow the hypnotist's instructions. If you don't want to be hypnotized, there is not a lot that I, or anyone else, can do about it.
Further, even if you have agreed to go into hypnosis, even if you have gone into hypnosis, neither I nor anyone else can make you do anything you don't want to do. If a hypnotist tries to give someone a suggestion that they really don't want, they pop out of trance. Depending on the suggestion the hypnotist attempted, their first reaction on coming out may very well be to deck the hypnotist.
The guy who trained me mentioned that he learned VERY quickly to stand on the side of the subject where the guy COULDN'T deck him easily if this happened. He admitted to having learned this the hard way.
People naturally go into hypnosis, on their own, a minimum of twice a day: on their way to falling asleep, and on their way from sleeping to wide awake. It is an absolutely natural state of mind.
Give your stepfather a copy of "Hypnotherapy", by the late Dave Elman. (Amazon is your FRIEND.)
Elman's primary focus was on hypnosis for medical applications. He went to some trouble to develop rapid induction techniques, on the principle that doctors and dentists couldn't AFFORD to spend hours hypnotizing patients; they HAD to be able to do it in minutes.