Various Psychological Phenomena
The most important psychological change – so important that it is often considered definitional of hypnosis – is hypersuggestibility. In fact, since very few hypnotic phenomena are spontaneous, but only occur at the suggestion of the hypnotist, you could say that most of them depend on increased suggestibility.
Time-distortion: Along with catalepsy, this is the other most common spontaneous phenomenon of hypnosis. Half an hour passes as though it were five minutes. Sometimes, time-distortion can lead to the ability to perform supertasks. In one experiment, a woman successfully counted 862 cotton balls in three seconds. She even had time to check under the leaves of the plants to make sure she hadn't missed any.
Superlearning and creativity: Experiments behind the Iron Curtain in Soviet Russia suggest that hypnotized subjects can learn between 120 to 150 new words in a foreign language in an hour. The teacher has to speak in a special way, alternating gentle speech with a commanding tone of voice, and a background of soothing music helps create the environment within which such superlearning can happen. A more reliable way of using hypnosis to improve learning, however, is to get the client to relax, and to remove the anxiety or whatever it is that is blocking learning. In this way, latent talents can be revealed. The evidence as to whether hypnosis can enhance creativity is currently ambiguous. One of the most intriguing theories is that of psychologist Pat Bowers. She argues that hypnosis triggers networks in the brain which are beyond our conscious control (leading to the feeling of effortlessness which hypnotized subjects often experience). In these deep networks new associations are made, and the making of new associations is just another way of describing creativity.
Spontaneous age-regression: I have already mentioned the use of age-regression as a therapeutic technique, but it is worth mentioning that it can occasionally happen spontaneously during a hypnotic trance. Just as Marcel Proust found the taste of madeleine the trigger for recall of events in the past, so in a trance something can trigger the memory of childhood, and the subject will find herself there. It is easy for the hypnotist to recognize when this has happened, because the subject's voice and phrasing will become more childlike.
Paranormal phenomena: Occult researchers, especially in the nineteenth century, supposed that paranormal phenomena could be the result of tapping into the deeper layers of the mind under hypnosis: the most common such phenomena which were supposed to happen were telepathy, precognition (seeing into the future) and clairvoyance. Nowadays, however, these are generally discounted. If such phenomena exist, they are not manifested markedly more by hypnotized subjects than by others. However, if it could be shown – and the idea is not in itself implausible – that hypnosis increases the ability of subjects to enter the non-focused state, similar to daydreaming, which parapsychological research has shown improves the chances of psi abilities, then the relation between hypnosis and paranormal abilities would have to be reassessed.
I should briefly mention here the phenomenon of triggering psychosomatic healing and even achieving control of some organic functions, such as bleeding, bodily temperature and salivation. These are genuine phenomena of hypnosis, and are so important that I reserve discussion until Chapter 11, when I will go in far more detail into modern hypnotherapy and the theories about how it works.
Hypermnesia and Amnesia
Hypermnesia is the phenomenon whereby a hypnotized subject can remember things he couldn't consciously recall. I'll have more to say about memory in Chapter 8, but for the time being I have a suggestion as to what the mechanism is. As I've said, hypnosis involves a reduction in the critical faculty. Fragments of memory that would usually be considered too approximate and unreliable to be taken seriously can now get through the critical filter, and are taken to be accurate. Hypermnesia is very hit and miss, then: you might remember something that really happened, or you might still be unable to remember something, or you might mistake a false memory for truth.
Amnesia is another famous phenomenon of hypnosis, with much use made of it in fiction and films. Unfortunately for the fiction-writers, though, spontaneous amnesia is actually quite rare, and is mostly confined to those who can enter a very deep trance. More commonly, the therapist might induce suggested amnesia for some therapeutic purpose. Spontaneous amnesia is no more weird than forgetting your dream the morning after; you know you've been dreaming, but can't quite put it into words or pictures. One teenager I interviewed who was hypnotized by a stage hypnotist and made to perform unusual but not degrading actions, such as curling up into a foetal position, said that afterwards she didn't remember much about it, until friends said: ‘Don't you remember doing such-andsuch?’ She described the experience, in this respect, as a bit like the morning after a night of heavy drinking. The occurrence of spontaneous amnesia may sometimes be related to the fact that the deeper you go, the more likely you are to touch on material that has been repressed into the unconscious, which the conscious ego does not want to look at; alternatively, it may be brought on by autosuggestion, in the sense that some subjects believe that amnesia is usual, and so induce it in themselves.
Post-hypnotic Suggestions
It is remarkable that a person can act, some time later, on a suggestion seeded during the hypnotic session. All the other hypnotic phenomena we've discussed can be induced post-hypnotically, especially negative and positive hallucinations. Post-hypnotic suggestion is, of course, popular with stage hypnotists, who tell a hypnotized subject that even after they wake up, when they hear the word ‘Thursday’ they will jump to their feet and wave their hands in the air. The trigger word is then deliberately introduced. A good stage hypnotist will have several subjects all simultaneously responding differently to different trigger words. The therapeutic use is to suggest to a client who wants to give up smoking, for instance, that he will find the taste of cigarettes disgusting. It has often been noted that subjects who act on a post-hypnotic command find their own justification, if they can, for what they do. At a simple level, if you were told to scratch your left knee, you will genuinely feel an itch there which needs scratching; in more complex cases, if you were asked to open a book at a certain page and read it, you might say that you were trying to find a passage of which you are particularly fond.
Post-hypnotic suggestion is not infallible. If a subject is asked to carry out an action at a specific time, he may not carry it out at all, or he may carry it out at a different time, or only the impulse to carry it out may arise. The subject always has the choice whether to go along with the suggestion. But it works more often than not. It is arguable that at the time of carrying out a post-hypnotic suggestion, a subject is back in a trance state, similar to the alert trance state explored by psychologists such as Eva Banyai. One of the legitimate worries about stage hypnotism is that the hypnotist, having returned his victims with their implanted post-hypnotic suggestions to their seats, might then let them leave the theatre without taking steps to remove the implanted suggestion. How long might it linger? Work colleagues might be surprised to find someone jumping up and waving their hands in the air just because they said: ‘What about lunch on Thursday?’ Post-hypnotic suggestions can last for a long time. A hypnotherapist I have heard of told one of his patients, who was also a friend: ‘When I touch you on the finger you will immediately be hypnotized.’ Fourteen years later, at a dinner party, he touched him deliberately on the finger and – clunk – his head fell back against the chair.
Psychologists like J. Milne Bramwell have also experimented successfully with getting subjects to guess the passage of time, with only small margins of error: ‘After 21,400 minutes you will perform such-and-such an action.’ As William James pointed out in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) these experiments are important because they show that we have unusual talents, beyond the ordinary. There is a subconscious part of our mind, for instance, that is able accurately to assess the passage of time. Quite a lot of people know the experience of saying to the
mselves before going to sleep: ‘I must wake up at 6.00’, and, without resorting to an alarm clock, doing just that.
The Hidden Observer
I've already mentioned that psychologists researching hypnosis occasionally make use of automatic writing. Here is one such experiment, a very famous one. Professor Ernest Hilgard of Stanford University was puzzled by the fact that when hypnosis is used to block pain, the subject reports feeling no pain, but the usual involuntary indicators of pain (such as GSR, galvanic skin response) are still present. He induced sleeve anaesthesia, so that his subject could hold her arm in a bucket of iced water without feeling any pain. He asked her what she felt, and she said: ‘Nothing; no pain.’ But he had also asked her to use her other hand to register any pain she felt, on a scale of 1to10, and with that other hand, even while denying out loud that she felt any pain, she was writing a series of rising numbers, showing that the pain was increasing as you'd expect from having your hand in a bucket of iced water. Hilgard deduced from this, and from other experiments by himself and his associates, that we have what he called a ‘hidden observer’ – a part of us that is awake even during altered states of consciousness. The hidden observer doesn't feel the pain, but it is aware of the pain, which has been blocked or concealed behind a barrier of amnesia.
Hilgard himself was always very coy about the meaning of the hidden observer. He would never commit himself to saying – in fact, he positively denied – that his experiments showed that there is a deeper part of oneself that is always awake, and of which we can sometimes become aware. In fact, in his experiments he found that only about half his subjects manifested a hidden observer, and only then if they were ‘highs’ – people who are highly hypnotizable. He speculated that ‘highs’ are more adept at dissociation than most people, and so are more likely to be aware of the dissociated hidden observer.
But experimental and anecdotal evidence is mounting that everyone has a hidden observer, and this is certainly what I believe myself. Meditators know the feeling, as does anyone who has experienced what is called ‘lucid’ dreaming, in which you are dreaming and simultaneously aware that you are dreaming. The phenomenon of ‘surgical memory’, whereby anaesthetized patients hear comments passed by surgeons, especially if those comments are liable to be traumatic, is widely acknowledged in the medical community, and has led to surgeons being much more careful about what they say, to ensure that post-operative healing is helped by a positive frame of mind from the patient. Those who have been in a car accident often report that a ‘higher’ part of themselves seemed to click into operation, and to work at such a speed that events appeared to move in slow motion. (Perhaps this explains how the woman mentioned a little earlier was able to count so many cotton balls in such a short time.) These are all forms of dissociation. Here is part of one hypnotized subject's description of the hidden observer:
The hidden observer is analytical, unemotional, businesslike … The hidden observer is a portion of Me. There's Me 1, Me 2 and Me 3. Me 1 is hypnotized, Me 2 is hypnotized and observing, and Me 3 is when I'm awake … The hidden observer is cognizant of everything that's going on; it's a little more narrow in its field of vision than Me 3, like being awake in a dream and fully aware of your actions … The hidden observer sees more, he questions more, he's aware of what's going on all of the time, but getting in touch is totally unnecessary … He's like a guardian angel that guards you from doing anything that will mess you up … Unless someone tells me to get in touch with the hidden observer I'm not in contact. It's just there.
Sometimes, especially at critical junctures of your life, a pattern impresses itself upon you. ‘If I hadn't gone to just that kindergarten, I wouldn't later have met Bobby's sister, who then introduced me to Martha, which led to me going to Exeter that day and meeting the woman who was to become my wife’ – that kind of thing. There seems to be a hidden part of oneself that manages your activities on a lifelong scale, not in moment-by-moment detail. Although Hilgard was able to evoke the hidden observer in only about half his subjects, I guess that it is always there. Perhaps they were too used to it to think they were looking for something so familiar; perhaps it is too deeply buried and too delicate a matter to be easily perceived.
A Speculation and a Warning
In surveying the phenomena of hypnosis, something quite strange strikes me, and forces me to hazard a speculation. Hilgard's experiments on the hidden observer led him to the conclusion that the way hypnosis affords relief from pain is that it hides the pain behind what he called an amnesia-like barrier. This links three of the important phenomena of hypnosis: the hidden observer, anaesthesia and analgesia, and amnesia. Now, not only is analgesia related to amnesia, but it is also related to catalepsy. You could not hold your arm out at shoulder height for fifteen minutes if you were not inhibiting the pain. So that brings four hypnotic phenomena together in a kind of network.
Moreover, compression of time is arguably linked with amnesia. There is no such thing as ‘time passing slowly’; there is only ‘time passed slowly’. That is, you can only look back on a stretch of time and assess whether it passed slowly or quickly. Time is compressed, then, so that half an hour passes like five minutes, when you look back on the half hour and can remember events only for five minutes, while being amnesic for the rest. In hypnosis, it helps that your attention is narrowly focused, which limits the quantity of experienced events.
I speculate that there could soon be a kind of analogy within hypnotic phenomena to the ‘unified field theory’ sought after by physicists. Some single phenomenon of hypnosis will be seen to explain at once all the other phenomena. At the moment it looks as though the ability to dissociate or to shift states is the best bet. Most of the other phenomena of hypnosis could be brought under the umbrella by the suggestion that you make a shift to another part of the mind which involves a different kind of reasoning and a greater facility with imagery.
However, to talk like this of these phenomena, both subjective and objective, begs an important question, since it makes it sound as though the hypnotic trance is a definite, distinct, recognizable state, an altered state of consciousness (ASC) with its own signs and symptoms. This is in fact a highly controversial idea. Although it was taken for granted in the last century (and still is unthinkingly assumed in some circles) that hypnosis is such an ASC, there has been intense debate about this and related questions in academic circles in the last fifty or sixty years. In fact, it is safe to say that among professional psychologists there is probably nothing that impinges on their field that arouses more contrasting and contradictory views. They disagree not just about what hypnotism is and what is involved, but even about whether there is such a thing (some prefer to surround the word with scare quotes); they disagree about the best measures of susceptibility, and even whether such measures are worth anything; they disagree about induction techniques; they disagree about what and how much it can achieve; they disagree about whether other practices, such as acupuncture, are really hypnotism. It is so hard to prove the existence of hypnotic trance that, as a publicity stunt, the magician Kreskin (George Kresge) has offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who can do so, and has already beaten off in court two hopeful claims. By the end of this book I won't have made you able to claim the reward, I'm afraid, but I hope to have convinced you that there is such a thing as the hypnotic state.
* Sources for quotations can be found on pages 426–31.
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In the Beginning
In the beginning (or pretty close to it, anyway) was … hypnosis, possibly. We read in Genesis 2:21: ‘And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.’ Of course, this isn't a reference to hypnosis, although it has been cited as such by one or two over-enthusiastic writers, because even if we were to take it as literal fact, there is no mention of how the Lord God put Adam to sleep. He might have used drugs growing in the Garden of Eden, for all we know. But had this been relevant to hypnosis, it would also have been the fir
st mention of hypnotic surgery, since while asleep Adam undergoes the rather painful operation of having a woman created from his spare rib!
Joking aside, one invariably reads, within the first chapter or even the first paragraph of a book on hypnotism, something along the following lines: ‘Hypnotism is an ancient art, whose secrets were known to the Egyptians and Greeks, and have been transmitted down to our own times.’ Of course, it is a natural tendency for enthusiasts to try to invest their favourite subject with an aura of respectable antiquity, but it is to be hoped that truth has a larger claim than such partisan concerns. Unfortunately, these statements are never supported by footnotes and references to relevant texts and authorities. We need to look at the matter afresh, which means re-examining the texts. There are few enough of these, and most are ambiguous. In short, the prehistory of hypnotism in the West, in the centuries preceding Mesmer, is poorly documented and hard to excavate.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 7