I've just realised that this is my 100th post! Wahey, go me!
Recently I did some hypnosis with a friend who had never been hypnotised before. This was quite a special session for me because it made me realise just how what I've learned during my own efforts at improving my own abilities as a subject is transferrable to taking the role of the hypnotist, and so I will share some of the highlights with you here.
My friend, whose name isn't Sarah, had expressed quite a strong interest in hypnosis ever since she heard about the time about a year or so ago when I hypnotised the guy who is now her boyfriend. It was clear to me, from the particular way in which she insisted that I simply had to hypnotise him again in front of her, that she really wanted to experience it herself at the next opportunity.
As we live quite a distance apart the opportunity was several months in coming, but recently on a holiday with a group of mutual friends I got the chance. You'd think that the chance to see some real hypnosis first hand would be a popular party trick but amongst our friends, a group of pilots, it turned out that this simply wasn't the case. Sarah, her boyfriend and I went back to our cottage, sat quietly by the roaring open wood fire and I took things from there.
I have found that pilots, by the way, are just about the worst bunch of people to try to pedal hypnosis to. There's an aura of egotistical control-freakery that seems to come hand in hand with the skills required to fly an aeroplane and this is added to the analytical mindset of the usual type of individual who decides to learn. This is not an ideal peer group of a hypnotist, much as I like my friends, but there is perhaps at least some consolation, which is their lack of desire to spontaneously close their eyes, go completely limp, and fly into the side of the nearest hill.
So anyway, I opened the session with my usual introductory routines of magnetic fingers and magnetic hands. Sarah did what quite a few people tend to do with magnetic fingers, which was to try to physically hold her fingers apart and I did what seems to work best in such cases, which was to tell her not to force it, but relax and go with it.
"Relax and just go with it, trust your instincts" is a good phrase I think.
You can always tell when someone is forcing their fingers apart simply by virtue of the fact that their fingers aren't moving together. When they relax simple physiology causes the fingers to move together on their own; hypnosis has nothing to do with it. Indeed, when a subject has done magnetic fingers I usually explain this, that it's not hypnosis, but what it has just done is show me that they are able to follow instructions and concentrate.
Next I moved on to magnetic hands. I like this because it follows on nicely from magnetic fingers, but it does rely on suggestion to work. Sarah responded well, always a good sign, and I made sure I continued to encourage her and pre-empted her hands touching. Pace and lead.
It's been a while since I hypnotised a new subject and so I decided that in light of this, since I wasn't feeling amazingly confident, I'd use the rehearsal induction next. I'm not such a fan of the term "induction" because from my own experiences I'm more inclined to see hypnosis not as something that one is in or not, but as a continuous scale from fully aware to deep trance. Sarah was a subject who was enthused about hypnosis, her hands had come together pretty quickly so she was clearly already in the foothills of hypnosis and I thought the rehearsal induction would be the best way to intensify the state.
I find it amazing how naturally the patter comes to me in the moment, and it's a good feeling when the words simply roll off my tongue with little effort. I explained to Sarah that as I raised her arm she would let herself relax and go into trance, and as I brought it back down she would come back to the room, and went through this process several times. I like this induction because it is a nice progressive progress which allows for plenty of feedback, and I was able to judge that Sarah was responding well and went into deepening the trance. Her facial muscles loosened and her breathing became slower and steadier, then she laughed.
Novice hypnotists take note here; a laughing subject is a good thing. This is a point worth mentioning because I've heard hypnotists say that they've had to re-start their inductions because their subject was laughing.
When, as a hypnotist, you are hypnotising someone what you are trying to do is get them into a state where their conscious mind is giving way to their subconscious mind. Assuming this, how can it be a bad thing if they are unable to hold back their own instinct to laugh? When a subject is amused, or if they start laughing, it means that the right part of their mind is calling the shots; they are letting their subconscious dictate their behaviour. This is exactly what you want to see from your subject! Commend them, and utilise it!
"You're laughing, that's excellent! Your instinct was to laugh and you went with it, you couldn't stop yourself doing it. That's exactly what we're looking for!"
One could even go further and tell the subject that they can't stop laughing, and challenge them to try to stop laughing. It is a good convincer, especially if you follow that by saying "okay, now become calm, let all your muscles relax, and go deeper" and the forced grin simply melts from their face.
With Sarah I actually tried to get hand levitation from her instead. Frustratingly, whilst I felt her hand getting lighter, I never really managed to get it to levitate. This was quite unusual because otherwise all the signs were good. I decided to switch to making her arm too heavy to lift instead, and this was where my inside knowledge as a subject proved to be quite invaluable.
I told sarah she could not lift up her hand, that it was stuck to her, and sure enough when I challenged her to lift her hand up she did not. Excellent, I thought, and so I told her that any time I told her to sleep she would go straight back into trance, reiterated that her hand would remain stuck to her leg and then brought her back up.
Her hand was indeed still stuck. "But," she said, "I can still do this."
And then lifted her hand up.
Now, back when I started out as a hypnotist and such phenomena were just things that happened to other people I would have become upset and demoralised by this response. I would have felt that the magic clearly wasn't working with this subject and given up. This time, however, having been through that experience, I knew I could hazard a pretty good guess at what she was thinking and carry things on.
"Ah!" I said, "but it took you a while to move your hand didn't it!"
She smiled.
I said, "A lot of people expect hypnosis to be very unlike what it actually is. You found it difficult to move your hand then, you had to resolve to do it, and what you're going to find from now on is that it becomes increasingly more difficult."
Then I told her to sleep.
As with a lot of new subjects she closed her eyes as though instinctively, but quickly opened them again. This is another of those situations where I know, as a subject myself, that what is usually going on in the subject's head when they do this is simply that they are looking for confirmation from the hypnotist. Of course the hypnotist who knows this, has confidence and keeps going will win through.
"See how your eyes closed then?" I said, "You're good at this, now let this happen, I can see you want to close your eyes."
Am I a mind reader? No, but I've had these experiences myself. I appreciate that the mind has to recognise, and to learn, how each phenomenon works in order to do it. Sarah's brain was actually very quick on the uptake especially, as she told me later, once she realised what it was I was trying to do as I deepened her. As soon as she made the link between states of mind she'd experienced in the past and hypnosis she was able to embrace the process and go into a deeper trance much more easily.
Something I may have said before is that I don't think it is ever necessary to feel that one should have to "trick" or otherwise deceive ones subjects into hypnosis. All you need to do is be honest, understand what they are experiencing, and use feedback to give them suggestions that work for them. In Sarah's case she even commented that in the past she'd visualised things to help her relax, like walking down some steps into water, so I immediately took notice of that and used it to deepen her.
We returned to the hand sticking suggestion a few times and, whilst on a couple of occasions she was able to lift up her hand again, it became a more and more difficult process each time to the point where she genuinely couldn't do it. Likewise the instruction to sleep became more effective each time. I also did a few fun suggestions such as getting her to laugh uncontrollably when I clicked my fingers, and took her to quite a deep level of trance.
If anything this episode revived my enthusiasm and confidence as a hypnotist, and I am very grateful to Sarah for letting me borrow her mind for an hour or so. Most of all though, it has strengthened my belief that the best thing hypnotists can do to understand the hypnosis their subjects are experiencing is to go there themselves and experience it first hand. It's the inside knowledge every hypnotist should have.
Monday, 12 April 2010
Saturday, 27 March 2010
The March Meet
There's not really much to say about the March meet. We, the last thursday group, are still meeting each month and once again this was a fun social occasion.
There was a lack of hypnosis, generally speaking, and I think we're all looking forward to warmer months when we can go out and perhaps approach people in parks. Crashing people's after work drinks and trying to do hypnosis in a loud bar doesn't seem to be quite so good.
The guys are meeting up again next week, but unfortunately I am going to be away on holiday. Ho-hum...
There was a lack of hypnosis, generally speaking, and I think we're all looking forward to warmer months when we can go out and perhaps approach people in parks. Crashing people's after work drinks and trying to do hypnosis in a loud bar doesn't seem to be quite so good.
The guys are meeting up again next week, but unfortunately I am going to be away on holiday. Ho-hum...
Friday, 26 March 2010
Legal clarification
You may recall last summer the slight stir that came out of a certain hypnotist trying to cast the legality of street hypnosis into question.
Recently Jonathan Chase wrote this article on his website, explaining that he'd contacted his MP, who then in turn contacted the house of commons library for clarification.
To quote Jon:
"The general conclusion seems to be that street hypnosis is busking and as such does not need a licence – unless there is a local by-law specifically insisting on one and that calling it research in a pub would be seen as dubious by the courts."
So the word here from central government is that, subject to local bylaws of course, hypnosis on a public street probably does not require a license.
The second point in that statement refers to performing formal hypnosis stage shows without a license on licensed premises and calling it "research" in order to circumvent the licensing laws. This is something for which the hypnotist who was trying to stir up the trouble is known to do. My feeling after reading the above article is that this particular loophole is one that would be likely to close like a noose around his neck if he ever had to put any weight on it, something that would be immensely satisfying to watch.
I would like to thank Jonathan Chase for doing the obvious and clarifying this point for us all.
Also, whilst we're on the subject, be sure to tune into his new podcast radio show, the first episode of which is today, and can be found here.
Recently Jonathan Chase wrote this article on his website, explaining that he'd contacted his MP, who then in turn contacted the house of commons library for clarification.
To quote Jon:
"The general conclusion seems to be that street hypnosis is busking and as such does not need a licence – unless there is a local by-law specifically insisting on one and that calling it research in a pub would be seen as dubious by the courts."
So the word here from central government is that, subject to local bylaws of course, hypnosis on a public street probably does not require a license.
The second point in that statement refers to performing formal hypnosis stage shows without a license on licensed premises and calling it "research" in order to circumvent the licensing laws. This is something for which the hypnotist who was trying to stir up the trouble is known to do. My feeling after reading the above article is that this particular loophole is one that would be likely to close like a noose around his neck if he ever had to put any weight on it, something that would be immensely satisfying to watch.
I would like to thank Jonathan Chase for doing the obvious and clarifying this point for us all.
Also, whilst we're on the subject, be sure to tune into his new podcast radio show, the first episode of which is today, and can be found here.
Sunday, 28 February 2010
The February Meet
This month I made it to the meetup in London, which was great because it's been a long time since I met up with the London hypnosis crowd. Far too long.
We've chosen a new venue recently and it seems that our choice is also the choice for a lot of people to meet up for a drink after work. I managed to find Ben, who had found a table and was sharing it with a nice couple of young women, and about 15 minutes later I was even able to get us some drinks. It was pretty crowded
Later on however, once the surge in work leavers was over, this began to feel a bit less mad. I was able to catch up with Ben and chat with the ladies about hypnosis, to the usual interested but wary response that a swarm of hypnotists will tend to get, and a swarm we were, well a small swarm anyway, when Chris, Darren and Pete showed up.
Sometimes attractive women in pubs are really up for trying hypnosis, but sometimes they aren't. Ben settled for getting a phone number instead.
Overall the feel of the meetup was social rather than all of us feeling the immediate intention to go forth and zap people. The general feeling was that wandering around in parks in the summer when people are lazing around in the sun is better than disturbing them over dinner, although Darren and Ben did have a go.
The only hypnosis really worth mentioning was when Darren caught me musing about the hand clasp and managed to stick my hands together, dammit! He then proceeded to stick my drink to the table and to tell me that the drinking straw was white hot and would burn when I touched it. This had a fairly interesting result, which was that I went out of my way not to touch it, even though I knew I probably wouldn't feel anything if I did. As the conversation went on, I picked up one of the menus on the table, folded it, and used it to carefully lift the straw out of my drink and discard it onto the table.
The only other thing really worth mentioning happened later when Ben was explaining something to Darren. Ben likes to go into talking about deep concepts - in this case "everything we think is a metaphor" - and Darren likes to be perplexed by such abstract wordy... ness. Chris was looking on.
Here I saw an interesting pattern of behaviour that gets repeated at all of our meets, the Ben-Chris-Darren triangle, which I like to call the "that's bollocks!" exercise. Ben (B) stands facing Darren (D), whilst Chris (C) stands between them a couple of steps back, listening to the conversation. B explains something highly conceptual and confusing to D who protests that he is just talking nonsense. C stares into middle distance with one eyebrow raised and a half smile on his face, then chuckles when he judges that the conversation between B and D has become incensed.
Good to see everyone again. Same time next month then!
We've chosen a new venue recently and it seems that our choice is also the choice for a lot of people to meet up for a drink after work. I managed to find Ben, who had found a table and was sharing it with a nice couple of young women, and about 15 minutes later I was even able to get us some drinks. It was pretty crowded
Later on however, once the surge in work leavers was over, this began to feel a bit less mad. I was able to catch up with Ben and chat with the ladies about hypnosis, to the usual interested but wary response that a swarm of hypnotists will tend to get, and a swarm we were, well a small swarm anyway, when Chris, Darren and Pete showed up.
Sometimes attractive women in pubs are really up for trying hypnosis, but sometimes they aren't. Ben settled for getting a phone number instead.
Overall the feel of the meetup was social rather than all of us feeling the immediate intention to go forth and zap people. The general feeling was that wandering around in parks in the summer when people are lazing around in the sun is better than disturbing them over dinner, although Darren and Ben did have a go.
The only hypnosis really worth mentioning was when Darren caught me musing about the hand clasp and managed to stick my hands together, dammit! He then proceeded to stick my drink to the table and to tell me that the drinking straw was white hot and would burn when I touched it. This had a fairly interesting result, which was that I went out of my way not to touch it, even though I knew I probably wouldn't feel anything if I did. As the conversation went on, I picked up one of the menus on the table, folded it, and used it to carefully lift the straw out of my drink and discard it onto the table.
The only other thing really worth mentioning happened later when Ben was explaining something to Darren. Ben likes to go into talking about deep concepts - in this case "everything we think is a metaphor" - and Darren likes to be perplexed by such abstract wordy... ness. Chris was looking on.
Here I saw an interesting pattern of behaviour that gets repeated at all of our meets, the Ben-Chris-Darren triangle, which I like to call the "that's bollocks!" exercise. Ben (B) stands facing Darren (D), whilst Chris (C) stands between them a couple of steps back, listening to the conversation. B explains something highly conceptual and confusing to D who protests that he is just talking nonsense. C stares into middle distance with one eyebrow raised and a half smile on his face, then chuckles when he judges that the conversation between B and D has become incensed.
Good to see everyone again. Same time next month then!
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Curious minds
It's time for a quick update about what I've been up to recently.
I'm pleased to be able to report that I am definitely improving as a subject. It's a slow process, but I am definitely getting somewhere. If you recall, back in December I was able to report that I had successfully been given a post hypnotic suggestion that I had no conscious awareness of and of course I'm not the kind of person to leave it there.
A friend and I have been able to successfully repeat the experiment several times since and confirm that yes it is absolutely possible to give me post hypnotic suggestions that I'm not aware of, which I will act on.
Who would have thought it? Me of all people!
It's worth mentioning that the process of hypnotising someone whilst they are on the edge of sleep seems to be quite effective. The lesson here is to be careful who you share a bed with; indeed one would imagine that this is knowledge that most people wouldn't want their partner to know about. Well, unless they rather like the idea of their partner messing with their head as they sleep; I've met a least a few people who fall into that category.
This could lead to paranoia of course, and causes me to recall someone I met in the past who insisted that people were sneaking into his house at night and hypnotising him in his sleep. Perhaps a good subject for a horror movie, but in my opinion pushing paranoia into the lands of delusion. This individual got rather angry when he was asked "Why don't they just give you complete amnesia and program you not to get suspicious?" and extremely angry when asked "Do you have any evidence, other than your belief, that they were there at all?"
I'm diverging from my theme so I digress.
What does it feel like to follow a post hypnotic suggestion without knowing what it is? It's actually quite bizarre and yet like most hypnotic phenomena I find it's very familiar too.
Everybody has occasions where they just do something on impulse, especially those who are used to acting spontaneously a lot of the time. I'm prone to thinking things through before I act, but even I have such "act now, think later" moments - a bit like rationality on credit. To me that's what an un-known PHS is like; I'll think "I know! Let's just do this!" and do it. It's only later I'll be told that the idea wasn't my own.
I've found that learning to be a good subject means learning to trust ones instincts a lot more. Why do that? Well, that's how in my experience hypnosis seems to manifest itself; following a suggestion is a kind of pseudo-instinctive behaviour. One could indeed argue that the kind of people that hypnosis works better on are people whose behaviour is more instinctive.
I heard Darren recently refer to the conscious mind as the "Curious mind" and to me this is something that makes a lot of sense. One way of looking at the process of going into a nice deep trance is see it as stripping away all of ones curiosity. I can feel myself getting better at that, and it feels good.
Why am I motivated to seek out this state? It almost seems paradoxical to seek out a state of zero curiosity for the sake of curiosity.
Perhaps I just think too much, and this is the backlash.
I'm pleased to be able to report that I am definitely improving as a subject. It's a slow process, but I am definitely getting somewhere. If you recall, back in December I was able to report that I had successfully been given a post hypnotic suggestion that I had no conscious awareness of and of course I'm not the kind of person to leave it there.
A friend and I have been able to successfully repeat the experiment several times since and confirm that yes it is absolutely possible to give me post hypnotic suggestions that I'm not aware of, which I will act on.
Who would have thought it? Me of all people!
It's worth mentioning that the process of hypnotising someone whilst they are on the edge of sleep seems to be quite effective. The lesson here is to be careful who you share a bed with; indeed one would imagine that this is knowledge that most people wouldn't want their partner to know about. Well, unless they rather like the idea of their partner messing with their head as they sleep; I've met a least a few people who fall into that category.
This could lead to paranoia of course, and causes me to recall someone I met in the past who insisted that people were sneaking into his house at night and hypnotising him in his sleep. Perhaps a good subject for a horror movie, but in my opinion pushing paranoia into the lands of delusion. This individual got rather angry when he was asked "Why don't they just give you complete amnesia and program you not to get suspicious?" and extremely angry when asked "Do you have any evidence, other than your belief, that they were there at all?"
I'm diverging from my theme so I digress.
What does it feel like to follow a post hypnotic suggestion without knowing what it is? It's actually quite bizarre and yet like most hypnotic phenomena I find it's very familiar too.
Everybody has occasions where they just do something on impulse, especially those who are used to acting spontaneously a lot of the time. I'm prone to thinking things through before I act, but even I have such "act now, think later" moments - a bit like rationality on credit. To me that's what an un-known PHS is like; I'll think "I know! Let's just do this!" and do it. It's only later I'll be told that the idea wasn't my own.
I've found that learning to be a good subject means learning to trust ones instincts a lot more. Why do that? Well, that's how in my experience hypnosis seems to manifest itself; following a suggestion is a kind of pseudo-instinctive behaviour. One could indeed argue that the kind of people that hypnosis works better on are people whose behaviour is more instinctive.
I heard Darren recently refer to the conscious mind as the "Curious mind" and to me this is something that makes a lot of sense. One way of looking at the process of going into a nice deep trance is see it as stripping away all of ones curiosity. I can feel myself getting better at that, and it feels good.
Why am I motivated to seek out this state? It almost seems paradoxical to seek out a state of zero curiosity for the sake of curiosity.
Perhaps I just think too much, and this is the backlash.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
Against their will
Another month, another rambling post I'm afraid. I was looking forward to the meet in London last month but I managed to catch the dreaded man-flu and couldn't make it.
This post is about something on which I feel I have been misquoted, which is my answer to the question that is often asked of hypnotists, namely this:
"Can a person be hypnotised to do things against their will?"
If you ask a stage hypnotist the answer will almost certainly be "No, of course not. Hypnosis is only suggestion and the subject can say no at any time."
It's a useful answer that I believe is true for most people. I think it is also a nice safety net in that it is arguably self-fulfilling if you suggest it to a subject before the formal part of the hypnosis begins. If you subsequently bring a subject up on stage or approach them in the street and hypnotise them for the sake of the experience of hypnosis they will probably be quite happy with the idea of being unable to speak, or being stuck to the floor, or such gimmicks. If you tell the same subject to strip off all their clothes or give you all their money the chances are they will refuse. In my experience at least the subject will come to their sense and say something along the lines of "Eh what? No!"
However, as this is a question about the very nature of people and how they act I don't think there can be a definitive answer to this question and the more you look at it it's easy to see it as a grey area. People are by their very nature varied and to say that people are incapable of acting in any particular way would not be very reflective of the real world. If you look for long enough there are people who would indeed rip their clothes off if the hypnotist asked them to, or likewise be trusting enough to hand over their wallet.
Making accurate generalised rules about what it is possible to influence people to do through hypnosis is, I think, analogous to making generalised rules about what it is possible for people to believe, and what some people will believe never ceases to amaze me.
In any case I think this question, like the acting dilemma, is intrinsically flawed. To me at least it conjures up images of a hypnotist clicking his fingers and the subject being forced by some sinister outside energy to dance and cluck like a chicken. They don't want to do it, but hypnosis forces them to do it, against their will not to.
To me I the flaw is that the question presupposes the assertions that free will is something that is firstly definitive, and secondly that it is a fixed point in space, neither of which I think are true.
I think that "free will" is a bit of an idealistic concept, to my mind idolised by those who like to believe the myth that all of their decisions are rational. I personally see behavioural decisions as being some kind of tug-of-war between a whole mish-mash of different and often contradicting internal arguments, some rational and some irrational.
So imagine, when someone is offered a bar of chocolate various thoughts bounce around inside their head such as "I'm hungry", "mmmm chocolate tastes nice!" and the perhaps more rational "but it's nearly dinner time". I believe that the final decision is a product of the balance between these factors. The individual wants to eat the chocolate bar, but they also don't want to lessen their enjoyment of their dinner by already having eaten. On some level they are willing to do either course of action, but in practice they have to choose one or the other.
Hypnosis does certainly have the power to cause people to act in a way that they normally wouldn't because, as I understand it, it influences the above decision process and can make less rational courses of action seem more attractive. A useful hypnotic principle to remember is that people do things because they want to do things, and because doing so will make the feel good. People will not do what they don't want to do; things that will make them feel bad. What I am saying here is that whilst a hypnotist can influence what somebody chooses to do, they can only choose from the menu of things that someone is willing to do.
Sometimes of course hypnosis will provide an extremely shy or repressed individual the excuse to vent something that they have always wanted to do. I think it is a common mistake of hypnotists to claim to have created it, rather than simply releasing it.
On a darker note I know of at least one hypnotist who insists that it is possible to hypnotise someone to make them do anything, even something horrific like killing their own child. My answer to this extremely distasteful proposition is the same as above, hypnosis will not make someone go against their will.
The only way it would theoretically be possible would be to arrive at the outcome through a circuitous means, such as giving the subject a gun and convincing them that it isn't loaded, or that it's only a toy like a water pistol. In such a case it isn't hypnosis as such that has caused the harm, rather it's a case of deliberate deception and violation of trust.
Consider this scenario. The same subject comes to the hypnotist and asks to borrow some sugar so they can make sweets for their child. The hypnotist, without using any hypnosis, gives them lethal poison in the form of a white powder and tells them that it's sugar. Same principle, same effect, and probably easier to achieve too.
The subject is most definitely not willing to shoot their child or feed that child poison, nor are they willing to be hypnotised by or to accept food from someone they know to be a murderous psychopath. Their mistake is misplacing their trust, and I'm glad that most people have enough intuition to recognise the warning signs before anything like the above could happen.
"Come into my bunker. Could you switch the light on please? It's the red button on the wall there. Thanks... Haha! Fooled you! That button doesn't turn on the light, it starts World War III! You pressed it, so it's all your fault!"
To anyone who read my last post (the one in which, by the way, I advised caution anybody wanting to take part in hypnosis online to be careful when putting themselves in the hands of an anonymous stranger) and came to the conclusion that what I'm telling people is that hypnosis is harmless so go nuts I say this. I will say it again, hypnosis in itself is harmless but as with any activity involving trust the laws of common sense apply when choosing who to do it with.
To those who think hypnosis is a way for people to take over the minds of others, in true Svengali style, I say this: Where are all the brainwashed hypno-slaves? Surely whoever could do such a thing would have taken over the world by now?
The truth is that in practice during a trance the vast majority of people do seem to maintain the ability to become suspicious of what's going on or to snap out of it if they start hearing things they aren't happy with. Of course that's not true for everybody, but with people no form of behaviour is universal.
Of course, incessant suggestion over longer periods of time will influence people and start to change their world view. I can think of two names for this form of legalised brainwashing and these are "Advertising" and "Religion". Note the lack of mind control rays; fiction has a monopoly on those.
This post is about something on which I feel I have been misquoted, which is my answer to the question that is often asked of hypnotists, namely this:
"Can a person be hypnotised to do things against their will?"
If you ask a stage hypnotist the answer will almost certainly be "No, of course not. Hypnosis is only suggestion and the subject can say no at any time."
It's a useful answer that I believe is true for most people. I think it is also a nice safety net in that it is arguably self-fulfilling if you suggest it to a subject before the formal part of the hypnosis begins. If you subsequently bring a subject up on stage or approach them in the street and hypnotise them for the sake of the experience of hypnosis they will probably be quite happy with the idea of being unable to speak, or being stuck to the floor, or such gimmicks. If you tell the same subject to strip off all their clothes or give you all their money the chances are they will refuse. In my experience at least the subject will come to their sense and say something along the lines of "Eh what? No!"
However, as this is a question about the very nature of people and how they act I don't think there can be a definitive answer to this question and the more you look at it it's easy to see it as a grey area. People are by their very nature varied and to say that people are incapable of acting in any particular way would not be very reflective of the real world. If you look for long enough there are people who would indeed rip their clothes off if the hypnotist asked them to, or likewise be trusting enough to hand over their wallet.
Making accurate generalised rules about what it is possible to influence people to do through hypnosis is, I think, analogous to making generalised rules about what it is possible for people to believe, and what some people will believe never ceases to amaze me.
In any case I think this question, like the acting dilemma, is intrinsically flawed. To me at least it conjures up images of a hypnotist clicking his fingers and the subject being forced by some sinister outside energy to dance and cluck like a chicken. They don't want to do it, but hypnosis forces them to do it, against their will not to.
To me I the flaw is that the question presupposes the assertions that free will is something that is firstly definitive, and secondly that it is a fixed point in space, neither of which I think are true.
I think that "free will" is a bit of an idealistic concept, to my mind idolised by those who like to believe the myth that all of their decisions are rational. I personally see behavioural decisions as being some kind of tug-of-war between a whole mish-mash of different and often contradicting internal arguments, some rational and some irrational.
So imagine, when someone is offered a bar of chocolate various thoughts bounce around inside their head such as "I'm hungry", "mmmm chocolate tastes nice!" and the perhaps more rational "but it's nearly dinner time". I believe that the final decision is a product of the balance between these factors. The individual wants to eat the chocolate bar, but they also don't want to lessen their enjoyment of their dinner by already having eaten. On some level they are willing to do either course of action, but in practice they have to choose one or the other.
Hypnosis does certainly have the power to cause people to act in a way that they normally wouldn't because, as I understand it, it influences the above decision process and can make less rational courses of action seem more attractive. A useful hypnotic principle to remember is that people do things because they want to do things, and because doing so will make the feel good. People will not do what they don't want to do; things that will make them feel bad. What I am saying here is that whilst a hypnotist can influence what somebody chooses to do, they can only choose from the menu of things that someone is willing to do.
Sometimes of course hypnosis will provide an extremely shy or repressed individual the excuse to vent something that they have always wanted to do. I think it is a common mistake of hypnotists to claim to have created it, rather than simply releasing it.
On a darker note I know of at least one hypnotist who insists that it is possible to hypnotise someone to make them do anything, even something horrific like killing their own child. My answer to this extremely distasteful proposition is the same as above, hypnosis will not make someone go against their will.
The only way it would theoretically be possible would be to arrive at the outcome through a circuitous means, such as giving the subject a gun and convincing them that it isn't loaded, or that it's only a toy like a water pistol. In such a case it isn't hypnosis as such that has caused the harm, rather it's a case of deliberate deception and violation of trust.
Consider this scenario. The same subject comes to the hypnotist and asks to borrow some sugar so they can make sweets for their child. The hypnotist, without using any hypnosis, gives them lethal poison in the form of a white powder and tells them that it's sugar. Same principle, same effect, and probably easier to achieve too.
The subject is most definitely not willing to shoot their child or feed that child poison, nor are they willing to be hypnotised by or to accept food from someone they know to be a murderous psychopath. Their mistake is misplacing their trust, and I'm glad that most people have enough intuition to recognise the warning signs before anything like the above could happen.
"Come into my bunker. Could you switch the light on please? It's the red button on the wall there. Thanks... Haha! Fooled you! That button doesn't turn on the light, it starts World War III! You pressed it, so it's all your fault!"
To anyone who read my last post (the one in which, by the way, I advised caution anybody wanting to take part in hypnosis online to be careful when putting themselves in the hands of an anonymous stranger) and came to the conclusion that what I'm telling people is that hypnosis is harmless so go nuts I say this. I will say it again, hypnosis in itself is harmless but as with any activity involving trust the laws of common sense apply when choosing who to do it with.
To those who think hypnosis is a way for people to take over the minds of others, in true Svengali style, I say this: Where are all the brainwashed hypno-slaves? Surely whoever could do such a thing would have taken over the world by now?
The truth is that in practice during a trance the vast majority of people do seem to maintain the ability to become suspicious of what's going on or to snap out of it if they start hearing things they aren't happy with. Of course that's not true for everybody, but with people no form of behaviour is universal.
Of course, incessant suggestion over longer periods of time will influence people and start to change their world view. I can think of two names for this form of legalised brainwashing and these are "Advertising" and "Religion". Note the lack of mind control rays; fiction has a monopoly on those.
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
Online hypnosis
Well it's time I posted something.
First, let me say Happy New Year everybody! I wish you all the best for 2010, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century.
This is a post that's been brewing for a while, so I thought I should finish it off and put it up.
Back in 1998 I discovered a curious little application for my parents computer called "MSN messenger". Installing it kick started my own discovery of all that the Internet had to offer, including chatting to people I'd never met before in person. This was in the dark primeval days of dial-up, a time when MSN was a nice tidy little application, as opposed to its latest incarnation which seems to aspire to be the illegitimate lovechild of an advertising billboard and facebook's idiot younger brother.
I now own a Mac and refuse to use Microsoft's own software to access MSN, much to the betterment of my life in general. (In my experience an Apple computer is to a PC what a flying saucer is to an aeroplane: It's faster, shinier, can better everything the plane can do and even do things an plane never even thought of doing, but if you use one people look at you like you're from another planet.)
Even so it is my feeling that even the last twelve years or so the Internet hasn't changed much at all. Yes, I know what you're thinking, back then there was no facebook, no YouTube, I'd never even heard the word "Google", and the phone call to gain access was charged by the minute. Perhaps so, but what I was thinking about was the content written by the other people on there; the online community so to speak.
There are still people trying to sell all manner of things, even if only their own blinkered and misguided opinion. There are still lots of desperate men foolishly trying to find women using the Internet. There are still plenty of amateurishly coded websites that hurt the eyes and crash Internet explorer. There are even a few sepecialist websites with useful information. My point is that whilst the web may have grown by several orders of magnitude the nature of the protagonists has barely changed, and an enormous proportion of what's out there is just junk.
I remember going to chatrooms at the tender age of about 16 in the hope of meeting single women. I wasn't meeting any single attractive women in my day to day life and I made the mistake so many people have made before and since then, which was to see the Internet as a vast reservoir of potential for finding them. I won't say my illusions were shattered, but they were at least bruised by what I actually came across.
Under the banner of anonymity offered by the Internet many people will do things that they will not necessarily dare to do in real life. I remember being asked by others on these discussion forums the question "wanna cyber?", which in short meant whether I wanted "cyber sex", or rather to enter into a text only role play describing a sexual act with the other person. I was a teenager and overflowing with hormones, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the heck I'd want to do that. I had also once witnessed what the other end of one of these supposedly risque conversations was like; a female acquaintance of mine and her friend, sat with about 10 different chat windows open at once, responding to each guy's attention and laughing at how sad and pathetic they all were. The men on the other end of the conversation were, however, quite fortunate as they were talking to actual women (albeit not single or taking anything seriously) as opposed to men pretending to be women, which is also a very common phenomenon.
Now, I have made a number of friends over the Internet, some of whom I have subsequently met up with. I have also used MSN to a great extent to keep in touch with friends whilst at university and of course since then. I won't say that I didn't try to use the Internet over many years to find myself a girl, one interested in conversation not entirely related to body parts, because that would be a lie, but as time went on I became quite disillusioned by the whole thing. They say that you can be whatever you want on the Internet, but what they don't add is that it's only you that sees you that way; everyone else will most likely think you're deluding yourself, to put it politely. It came as no great surprise to me when my first girlfriend appeared in my life in a way that was completely unrelated to the Internet.
Something that caught me completely by surprise much more recently was the concept of online hypnosis, via voice or instant messaging, and just how many people there are out there doing it. It is of course not a topic that I am intimately familiar with, but today I'm feeling sufficiently misguided and blinkered of opinion to pass comment on it.
I realise I've been rambling on about the topic of men trying to find women online, and this is because I feel that there are many similarities between approaching people and hypnotising them and approaching someone one is attracted to and, say, asking for their phone number. It takes confidence and strength of character to overcome ones fear of rejection and to approach someone in person and ask for their phone number; those who don't have these attributes sit at home and go on the Internet. Likewise I think it takes a similar strength of resolve to hypnotise someone who's sat right in front you; but fear not, if you don't dare do that you can always go on the Internet and pretend to be a hypnotist.
The trouble is that hypnosis is based upon hypnotic rapport between hypnotist and subject; it's an interpersonal relationship. I don't think that an instant messaging program is comprehensive enough to convey all that a hypnotist is communicating to the subject, especially tone of voice and body language.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against hypnosis by text and I don't doubt that it works, but I do get the feeling that there are people out there calling themselves hypnotists whose sole body of experience is in that medium, and having seen some transcripts I get the impression those people sometimes forget that there's a person on the other end of it.
At the lighter end of the range of such individuals one will find the kind of people who pop up on sites like uncommonforum from time to time. These are the ones who ask others to read through their online hypnosis scripts to check they're using the best possible wording. Treating hypnotic triggers they want to install like programming functions, "when I say 'play hypnogame2' begin this game" and going through all of their syntax to make sure there won't be any errors or ambiguities when the trance code is parsed, like changing "when I say" to "when only I say".
I feel sorry for any subject on the other end of a trance from such an individual, indeed I hope they respond with the vengeful sword of sarcasm; something like "error: float 'tranceDepth' not declared."
(It's fair to say I would have studied computer science at uni, but I really didn't have the social skills)
The more worrying side of these online hypnotists are the ones who are into the whole mind control fetish scene, and have trouble telling the difference between their ill-conceived fantasies and reality. The best place to see the works of such individuals is on YouTube. You can recognise them by their awesome presence, so powerful that they must hide behind the visual of a headache-inducing spiral, and their commanding voice, which sounds suspiciously like the emotionless MS Windows computer voice. The voice tells the watcher that they are becoming a mindless slave, that pleasure is obedience, obedience is pleasure, etc. What a worthy individual for the title of hypnotist... I don't think.
Thankfully hypnosis is not the mind control ray out of the wet dreams of such online perverts, but the disturbing thing is coming across other videos of young girls watching such videos; it's just wrong.
Thankfully hypnosis is, for the most part, fail safe because it is based on trust between hypnotist and subject, and by virtue of the fact that it is really only suggestion, not mind control. Every so often one comes across case of an online pervert trying to use hypnosis like it's a magical power to try to take over and reprogram the mind of some unsuspecting individual, and most likely it doesn't work because becoming a slave or whatever else is being suggested isn't what the subject is interested in, and as soon as they realise what the hypnotist is doing they decide that they really don't want to play any more.
I remember a friend I once had commenting that for every good hypnotist there were 19 evil ones. To me, knowing the individuals I see at the last Thursday group, I found that hard to imagine, but of course those are hypnotists who need to be nice people for the subject that they approach to trust them, whereas it is not hard to believe that sad losers as two-a-penny on the Internet. In a text conversation, deprived of all non-verbal telltales, one is likely to take longer to realise just what the hypnotist is interested in doing, especially if ones own mind is filling in the gaps with what one wants the other person to be like.
Online hypnosis is something which potential subject should approach with caution, unless the hypnotist in question is known to them. To agree to experience hypnosis from a stranger one has met in a pub or bar, face to face and in the presence of ones friends, is more or less completely safe. To agree to the same but over the Internet to a stranger one hasn't met, and alone, is at least a little bit foolish in my opinion.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're one of these people who only does hypnosis online by all means do hypnosis that way with your friends, and use the Internet to make new friends with the same interests, but for goodness sake get out there and hypnotise some people face to face. If you don't do that you may forget that you're dealing with other human beings, and if that happens you don't deserve to call yourself a hypnotist.
First, let me say Happy New Year everybody! I wish you all the best for 2010, the last year of the first decade of the 21st century.
This is a post that's been brewing for a while, so I thought I should finish it off and put it up.
Back in 1998 I discovered a curious little application for my parents computer called "MSN messenger". Installing it kick started my own discovery of all that the Internet had to offer, including chatting to people I'd never met before in person. This was in the dark primeval days of dial-up, a time when MSN was a nice tidy little application, as opposed to its latest incarnation which seems to aspire to be the illegitimate lovechild of an advertising billboard and facebook's idiot younger brother.
I now own a Mac and refuse to use Microsoft's own software to access MSN, much to the betterment of my life in general. (In my experience an Apple computer is to a PC what a flying saucer is to an aeroplane: It's faster, shinier, can better everything the plane can do and even do things an plane never even thought of doing, but if you use one people look at you like you're from another planet.)
Even so it is my feeling that even the last twelve years or so the Internet hasn't changed much at all. Yes, I know what you're thinking, back then there was no facebook, no YouTube, I'd never even heard the word "Google", and the phone call to gain access was charged by the minute. Perhaps so, but what I was thinking about was the content written by the other people on there; the online community so to speak.
There are still people trying to sell all manner of things, even if only their own blinkered and misguided opinion. There are still lots of desperate men foolishly trying to find women using the Internet. There are still plenty of amateurishly coded websites that hurt the eyes and crash Internet explorer. There are even a few sepecialist websites with useful information. My point is that whilst the web may have grown by several orders of magnitude the nature of the protagonists has barely changed, and an enormous proportion of what's out there is just junk.
I remember going to chatrooms at the tender age of about 16 in the hope of meeting single women. I wasn't meeting any single attractive women in my day to day life and I made the mistake so many people have made before and since then, which was to see the Internet as a vast reservoir of potential for finding them. I won't say my illusions were shattered, but they were at least bruised by what I actually came across.
Under the banner of anonymity offered by the Internet many people will do things that they will not necessarily dare to do in real life. I remember being asked by others on these discussion forums the question "wanna cyber?", which in short meant whether I wanted "cyber sex", or rather to enter into a text only role play describing a sexual act with the other person. I was a teenager and overflowing with hormones, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the heck I'd want to do that. I had also once witnessed what the other end of one of these supposedly risque conversations was like; a female acquaintance of mine and her friend, sat with about 10 different chat windows open at once, responding to each guy's attention and laughing at how sad and pathetic they all were. The men on the other end of the conversation were, however, quite fortunate as they were talking to actual women (albeit not single or taking anything seriously) as opposed to men pretending to be women, which is also a very common phenomenon.
Now, I have made a number of friends over the Internet, some of whom I have subsequently met up with. I have also used MSN to a great extent to keep in touch with friends whilst at university and of course since then. I won't say that I didn't try to use the Internet over many years to find myself a girl, one interested in conversation not entirely related to body parts, because that would be a lie, but as time went on I became quite disillusioned by the whole thing. They say that you can be whatever you want on the Internet, but what they don't add is that it's only you that sees you that way; everyone else will most likely think you're deluding yourself, to put it politely. It came as no great surprise to me when my first girlfriend appeared in my life in a way that was completely unrelated to the Internet.
Something that caught me completely by surprise much more recently was the concept of online hypnosis, via voice or instant messaging, and just how many people there are out there doing it. It is of course not a topic that I am intimately familiar with, but today I'm feeling sufficiently misguided and blinkered of opinion to pass comment on it.
I realise I've been rambling on about the topic of men trying to find women online, and this is because I feel that there are many similarities between approaching people and hypnotising them and approaching someone one is attracted to and, say, asking for their phone number. It takes confidence and strength of character to overcome ones fear of rejection and to approach someone in person and ask for their phone number; those who don't have these attributes sit at home and go on the Internet. Likewise I think it takes a similar strength of resolve to hypnotise someone who's sat right in front you; but fear not, if you don't dare do that you can always go on the Internet and pretend to be a hypnotist.
The trouble is that hypnosis is based upon hypnotic rapport between hypnotist and subject; it's an interpersonal relationship. I don't think that an instant messaging program is comprehensive enough to convey all that a hypnotist is communicating to the subject, especially tone of voice and body language.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against hypnosis by text and I don't doubt that it works, but I do get the feeling that there are people out there calling themselves hypnotists whose sole body of experience is in that medium, and having seen some transcripts I get the impression those people sometimes forget that there's a person on the other end of it.
At the lighter end of the range of such individuals one will find the kind of people who pop up on sites like uncommonforum from time to time. These are the ones who ask others to read through their online hypnosis scripts to check they're using the best possible wording. Treating hypnotic triggers they want to install like programming functions, "when I say 'play hypnogame2' begin this game" and going through all of their syntax to make sure there won't be any errors or ambiguities when the trance code is parsed, like changing "when I say" to "when only I say".
I feel sorry for any subject on the other end of a trance from such an individual, indeed I hope they respond with the vengeful sword of sarcasm; something like "error: float 'tranceDepth' not declared."
(It's fair to say I would have studied computer science at uni, but I really didn't have the social skills)
The more worrying side of these online hypnotists are the ones who are into the whole mind control fetish scene, and have trouble telling the difference between their ill-conceived fantasies and reality. The best place to see the works of such individuals is on YouTube. You can recognise them by their awesome presence, so powerful that they must hide behind the visual of a headache-inducing spiral, and their commanding voice, which sounds suspiciously like the emotionless MS Windows computer voice. The voice tells the watcher that they are becoming a mindless slave, that pleasure is obedience, obedience is pleasure, etc. What a worthy individual for the title of hypnotist... I don't think.
Thankfully hypnosis is not the mind control ray out of the wet dreams of such online perverts, but the disturbing thing is coming across other videos of young girls watching such videos; it's just wrong.
Thankfully hypnosis is, for the most part, fail safe because it is based on trust between hypnotist and subject, and by virtue of the fact that it is really only suggestion, not mind control. Every so often one comes across case of an online pervert trying to use hypnosis like it's a magical power to try to take over and reprogram the mind of some unsuspecting individual, and most likely it doesn't work because becoming a slave or whatever else is being suggested isn't what the subject is interested in, and as soon as they realise what the hypnotist is doing they decide that they really don't want to play any more.
I remember a friend I once had commenting that for every good hypnotist there were 19 evil ones. To me, knowing the individuals I see at the last Thursday group, I found that hard to imagine, but of course those are hypnotists who need to be nice people for the subject that they approach to trust them, whereas it is not hard to believe that sad losers as two-a-penny on the Internet. In a text conversation, deprived of all non-verbal telltales, one is likely to take longer to realise just what the hypnotist is interested in doing, especially if ones own mind is filling in the gaps with what one wants the other person to be like.
Online hypnosis is something which potential subject should approach with caution, unless the hypnotist in question is known to them. To agree to experience hypnosis from a stranger one has met in a pub or bar, face to face and in the presence of ones friends, is more or less completely safe. To agree to the same but over the Internet to a stranger one hasn't met, and alone, is at least a little bit foolish in my opinion.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're one of these people who only does hypnosis online by all means do hypnosis that way with your friends, and use the Internet to make new friends with the same interests, but for goodness sake get out there and hypnotise some people face to face. If you don't do that you may forget that you're dealing with other human beings, and if that happens you don't deserve to call yourself a hypnotist.
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