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."

Comments

Re:It works!

[Shawn is an Asshole]

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.

Re:Self hypnosis software?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

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.

NLP and Richard Bandler...

[Frogg]

...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".

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... /J

From a psychologist's perspective...

[Sigmund Dali]

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.

How they get you

[Nerdposeur]

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.

Dr Milton Erikson

[gobbo]

This is interesting, but, as usual, an art in the hands of a highly skilled practitioner gets lost in the search for reproducibility. Dr Milton Erikson kind of set things off for modern hypnotherapy, but he was extraordinarily perceptive, and generally only took on cases that would work for his methods, so had a resounding success rate.

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.