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

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.