State-dependent Memory: We have met this facet of memory before. In an interesting experiment much earlier this century, the Swiss psychologist Edouard Claparède (1873–1940) read his subjects ten bizarre words when they were deeply hypnotized, and ten equally unfamiliar words while they were awake. These twenty words were then jumbled together with a number of other words. The subjects, after being dehypnotized, were then asked which words they recognized. They always recognized only the ten they had heard while awake, and never the ten they had heard while hypnotized. Unhypnotized people can only pretend not to recognize the words. Post-hypnotic amnesia is a genuine, state-dependent phenomenon, which makes it look as though the hypnotic state is genuine too.
Resistance to Pain: It is not just that hypnotized subjects can resist pain. Experiments have shown that unhypnotized subjects can also resist pain, either under conditions of distraction, or because they are suitably motivated and so on. There are of course subjective elements to the sensation of pain: everyone knows that some people have a higher pain threshold than others, and surveys show that soldiers resist the pain of wounds better because for them a wound is a good thing (it allows them to go home with honour), whereas for a civilian a wound is usually a bad thing, and so he feels it more acutely. Part of the problem here is that Barber and his colleagues rely heavily on experimental evidence and tend to ignore the downand-dirty evidence of hypnotists who have performed surgical operations. But some of the surgical operations performed under hypnotism are extremely painful, and extremely protracted. Even if people had higher pain thresholds in Esdaile's day, it is still unthinkable that an eight-hour operation could be performed under hypnosis, that patients would lie still for amputations, the removal of breast cancers, scrotal growths and so on. Not all of them did, but a good 50 per cent did. Esdaile had the definitive response to the doubters, and it still rings absolutely true:
I have every month more operations of this kind than take place in the native hospital in Calcutta a year, and more than I had for the six years previous. There must be some reason for this, and I can only see two ways of accounting for it: my patients, on returning home, either say to their friends similarly afflicted: ‘Wah! brother, what a soft man the doctor Sahib is! He cut me to pieces for twenty minutes, and I made him believe that I did not feel it. Isn't it a capital joke? Do go and play him the same trick.’ … Or they say to their brother sufferers, – ‘Look at me; I have got rid of my burthen (of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, or 80 lbs., as it may be), am restored to the use of my body, and can again work for my bread: this, I assure you, the doctor Sahib did when I was asleep, and I knew nothing about it; – you will be equally lucky, I dare say; and I advise you to go try; you need not be cut if you feel it.’ Which of these hypotheses best explains the facts my readers will decide for themselves.
Or consider this case. Once a worker in an aluminium plant slipped and immersed his leg up to the knee in molten aluminium, with a temperature of 950? C. Under the hypnotic suggestion that his leg would not be inflamed and would be cool and comfortable, the man needed nothing more than a relatively mild painkiller, and he was discharged from hospital after only nineteen days, with new skin already growing well over the injury. If this is role-playing, or imaginative involvement, or response to social cues of any kind, it is quite remarkable. Whereas the non-state theorists frequently claim that they are the ones wielding Occam's razor, in this kind of case it seems more economical to think that a special state is involved, one which activates the naturally remarkable powers of the mind.
Remarkable Effects: Going back to some of the supernormal capacities detailed in an earlier chapter, what is remarkable is not just the ability to defy pain, but the ability of the body of a hypnotized person not to bleed when pierced, or not to blister when scalded and so on. Or again, there was an experiment in which the hypnotized subjects were told they would not be able to hear, out of the whole range of sounds, a tone with a particular frequency (575 cycles per second). When this sound was played loudly in their ears, they showed no measurable physiological reactions. I challenge any unhypnotized person to do any of these things, or a whole host of other strange feats. I certainly don't know of any experiments that have shown that any of these effects are possible under non-hypnotic conditions.
Post-hypnotic Suggestion: If a subject will display behavioural changes after the hypnotic session, when the hypnotist is no longer present and the subject has no knowledge that his or her behaviour is being monitored, how can hypnosis be compliance, role-playing, or the desire to please?
Trance Logic: In repeated experiments using unhypnotized control subjects (‘simulators’) as well as fully hypnotized subjects (‘reals’), a distinctly dreamlike form of mentation was displayed by the reals, but not by the others, even if they were instructed to do their best to simulate a trance state. For instance, everyone is told to hallucinate a figure sitting on a given chair in the room. They do so, and they all describe the figure with equal vividness. But then they are asked to describe the back of the chair; the simulators say that they cannot see the back of the chair, since there is someone sitting in it, but a fair proportion of the reals have no difficulty in seeing the back of the chair. Non-state theorists try to explain this difference by saying that the reals, but not the simulators, were imaginatively involved in the task they had been set, but this smacks to me of a weak response – a plea born of desperation, like others among their arguments. For instance, in one experiment state theorists proved that some subjects remained amnesic after hypnosis despite explicit instructions to remember everything; non-state theorists tried to blunt the force of this experiment by arguing that it was just that the subjects did not want to lose face, since they believed that good hypnotic subjects would be amnesic.
The Hilgards wrote in 1975:
In summary, hypnotic phenomena appear to have a rather robust quality; they survive repeated attacks upon them and upon the manner in which they are conceptualized. Continuing controversy is valuable in that it demands ever better proof to replace conventional lore. The study of hypnosis is strengthened as it survives attacks by its critics and makes advances through critical, systematic research free from prior commitments to one or another position on controversial issues.
I can only agree.
All sceptical and positivist positions seem to me to be liable to the same logical objection that I raised earlier. The fact that some people can reproduce the effects of hypnotic phenomena without being hypnotized, by the use of their imagination or whatever, does not disprove the reality of hypnotism at all; it just proves that the same or similar phenomena can be produced by other means as well (though, as I said before, I think they should distinguish between deep and light trances). In 1844 Edgar Allan Poe wrote, at the beginning of his short story ‘Mesmeric Revelation’: ‘Whatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt are your mere doubters by profession – an unprofitable and disreputable tribe.’ Nothing has changed.
But I feel that I have given the doubters short shrift in this section. Their arguments are too many, and too scientifically sophisticated, to be reproduced in this book or easily summarized. They often appear to have reason on their side: ‘The view expressed in this chapter is not that all hypnotic behaviours are “faked”, that hypnosis does not “work” or that hypnotherapy is useless. It is rather that the processes responsible for hypnotic effects are more readily explicable by reference to familiar psychological processes than to a unique hypnotic process [i.e. a trance state].’ There is indeed a great deal of ambiguity in trying to decide whether there is such a thing as a hypnotic trance, or whether ‘familiar psychological processes’ such as compliance, role-playing and so on are enough to explain all the phenomena. But let me repeat what I see as the central point: this ambiguity is precisely a reflection of the ambiguity sensed by the hypnotized subject himself, and referred to in Chapter 1 as ‘parall
el awareness’. I feel that the definition of the hypnotic trance should include a reference to this feeling. Both the doubters and the state theorists are right.
Ernest Hilgard and Neodissociationism
Since Erickson, the most prominent spokesman in North America who has resisted this broad alliance of doubters is Ernest Hilgard. Hilgard regards hypnotic phenomena as being linked in a way which may fall short of being an actual, distinct ASC, but certainly makes up a ‘domain’ of a particular kind, or a ‘special process’. Neodissociationism, the theory he has developed to account for hypnotic phenomena (among others), is quite a mouthful of a word, but quite easy to understand, at least at a basic level. (There are, though, certain differences of opinion between even those scientists who call themselves neodissociationists, which I will have to more or less ignore here.) Neodissociationism, then, ‘postulates a hierarchy of control systems operating at any one time in a given individual, and sees hypnosis as modifying the hierarchical arrangement of these controls, so that some become segregated (dissociated) from others’.
We all have the ability to function in our lives in an infinite number of ways, large and small. The kinds of example Hilgard gives range from trivial responses such as brushing a fly off the face, to longer-lasting tasks such as writing a letter, to more complex and open-ended activities such as raising a family and holding down a job. At any given moment, some of these abilities, which he calls ‘subsystems’, will be active, others latent, and a ‘central control structure’ is needed to monitor and marshal the hierarchy of subsystems. Dissociation is the separation of subsystems from one another, or from the central control system. This is no big deal. We all (except for President Jimmy Carter in the famous joke) have the ability to do more than one thing at the same time. Hypnotic induction prepares us for dissociation by making it seem as though one part of us is acting beyond the control of another: our eyes, for instance, seem to close ‘by themselves’. Then we pass over ‘executive function’ to the hypnotist. So hypnotic induction brings about such dissociation, leading to lethargy, submission to the hypnotist's suggestions, involuntary behaviours and all the other phenomena of hypnotism.
We have already met Hilgard earlier in the book as the proposer of the important and interesting theory that we have a hidden observer inside us which monitors our activities and can register pain, for instance, even in a hypnotically anaesthetized arm. We can now see how this fits in with his broader views. The hidden observer is precisely the central control system of the human mind. It observes all the various neurological subsystems. Hypnotic analgesia is to be explained as the hidden observer diverting the pain behind an ‘amnesia-like barrier’ before it reaches consciousness; it is still accessible to the hidden observer itself, but not to the conscious awareness of the subject. In simpler terms, normally conscious experiences are concealed, but not lost – and so they are still noticeable by the hidden observer.
An easy way to understand the contrast between Hilgard's views and those of the doubters is this. According to the anti-state theorists, ‘hypnosis’ is distraction: you do really feel the pain, but you distract your attention away from it and so are able to cope with it. According to Hilgard, however, hypnosis is disattention: the act of focusing attention which constitutes hypnotic induction creates dissociation or a new source of attention.
Now, it is clear even to a layman that a great deal of this is highly speculative, and needs a lot of extra work before it can be regarded as certain. Hilgard himself is now too old to undertake such work (he was born in 1904, but is still alive as I write), and so it will have to wait for future generations of psychologists and neurologists. His opponents gleefully pounce on the fact that in order to study the hidden observer, Hilgard has to suggest to his subjects that there is such a thing monitoring the pain or whatever. In other words, they say, the hidden observer is only elicited by such a suggestion, and doesn't exist in its own right. They have, of course, pinpointed a weakness in Hilgard's experimental methods, but they do not have it all their own way. In the first place, Hilgard finds that only about 50 per cent of his subjects respond with hidden-observer phenomena; since hypnotized subjects are supposed to obey the suggestions of the hypnotist, why don't all of them come up with a hidden observer? Secondly, there are other kinds of experiments which point towards the hidden observer, experiments which do not rely on the operator eliciting the phenomenon. In one experiment, for instance, it was found that hypnotized subjects who negatively hallucinate that a chair isn't there still avoid bumping into it. In other words they do still see it – even though they don't see it! In another experiment subjects were found to have the appropriate physiological responses to an electrical shock, even though they didn't feel anything. One subject even reported, about herself: ‘I don't feel anything, but she seems uncomfortable.’ Whatever it is that enables a hypnotized subject to avoid a chair and think of herself in the third person might as well be called the hidden observer.
Hilgard himself has famously pointed out that from the experimental point of view it makes little difference whether or not there is such a thing as the hypnotic state: there are certain behaviours that are typically manifested by those who are hypnotizable and not by those who are unhypnotizable. He chooses to call this set of behaviours the ‘domain of hypnosis’ rather than a state, but this makes little practical difference. If the kind of dissociation he is talking about cannot be described as an altered state of consciousness, I don't know what can.
The writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) had an intense interest in ASCs. A number of his novels show this, but most readers will probably be more aware of his experiments with the hallucinogenic drug mescalin, written up in The Doors of Perception (1954). He used to spend hours in a self-induced trance state he called Deep Reflection. In this state, he could function in the world, but was perfectly amnesic afterwards for the things he had said and done. At a famous meeting in 1950 with Milton Erickson in Huxley's home in Los Angeles, Erickson hypnotized him and he displayed all the usual features of a deep trance state, which was in fact identical to his Deep Reflective state. He was not task-motivated: he had nothing to prove. He was not play-acting: why would he have done so? There is no reason not to think he was in a distinct state of consciousness we can call the hypnotic trance – and therefore there is no reason not to think that others can go there too.
The Neurophysiology of Hypnosis
So far I have argued, on philosophical grounds (so to speak), that there is more evidence in favour of there being a special state of hypnosis, and that the doubters are on shaky ground. The arguments on both sides had to be philosophical, because there were no objective reasons for preferring a state theory to a non-state theory. This is no longer the case. Neurophysiological research, starting especially in the 1980s and gaining momentum all the time, has come up with objective evidence that something is going on inside the brains of hypnotized subjects which does not happen to non-hypnotized subjects.
The technology involved is amazingly complex. Gone are the days of simple EEG scans, which were notoriously a blunt instrument. For instance, it is possible for someone under the influence of LSD to register a normal EEG. As anyone knows who has ever taken LSD in a sufficiently high dosage, you are definitely not in a normal state of mind. Researchers now study event-related potentials (ERPs). When the brain is stimulated – say, by seeing a tree – a train of electrical responses can be registered in the appropriate part of the brain, showing not only the brain's initial reception of the stimulus (the first glimpse of the tree), but also its continued attention to the stimulus. In addition, there are sophisticated machines called positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, which employ gamma rays to monitor brain activity, by tracing the movement of a radioactive tracer substance injected into the bloodstream. It may sound gruesome, but it works. It shows how much energy is being used by various parts of the brain in a given situation. Using this modern technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint brai
n activity more precisely than the old EEG technology, and they have come up with some remarkable results.
An experimenter hypnotizes a dozen people, and has a control group of another dozen unhypnotized subjects. He sets them all the same task. Let's say that he tells them to imagine that there is a chair in the room, when there is no such chair. All twenty-four subjects equally report that they can see a chair, but the part of the brain that governs sight is not activated in the unhypnotized subjects, while it is in the hypnotized ones. Conversely, the task they are set involves a negative hallucination: they are not to see a chair, because they imagine a screen between themselves and it. The relevant part of the brains of the hypnotized subjects, but not those who remain unhypnotized, shows a decrease in activity.
In another experiment, the colour areas of the brain were activated when hypnotized subjects were asked to perceive colour both when the colour was really there and when it wasn't. And these areas showed reduced activity when they were asked to see mere grey both when it was there and when there were more vivid colours there. In yet another experiment, the relevant brain activity increased and decreased depending on whether the hypnotized subjects were told to feel or to block the feeling of pain. Or again, high susceptibles show the neurophysiological correlates of habituation to a task, and focused attention, far more and more quickly than subjects who are either merely relaxed or hardly susceptible to hypnosis.
Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis Page 40