# Hypnosis shows, Hoax or not?



## presto (Jun 17, 2011)

I’ve always been very sceptical about it, seeing it on the TV I’ve always felt it just looks so bizarre and unreal for it to actually be really happening to people.
But on holiday I’ve had to completely rethink my views on it.
On our recent Majorca holiday we had an Hypnosis night were volunteers were asked up on the stage to take part if they wanted. 
The hypnotist didn’t get enough people so he asked the rest of the audience to lock their fingers together and raise their arms and concentrate on their middle finger while stretching the arms up high, my wife and I did this, I played along.
After a minute or so he told us that our fingers were now glued together and then told us to try and pull them apart.
I pulled mine apart without a thought and thought "What a load of rubbish!" But when I turned to look at my wife she still had her arms in the air and was struggling to pull her hands apart, I was quite shocked I knew she wasn’t making this up.
The hypnotists came down tapped her on the shoulder which released her hands and she then went up on the stage to join the 12 or so people that were sitting there for the show to start.
What I then witnessed was utterly amazing and even now I still cant get my head round it.
Over the next 5 minutes he reduced the 12 down to a final number of 6 which my wife was one of, and had complete control over them all getting them to act in amusing and strange ways. 
Seeing someone you know inside out and love very much behaving in a completely alien manner was both amusing and unnerving.
After the show we spent most of the night talking about it. My wife is a very down to earth easygoing person and she said it was the strangest experience she had ever had in her life.
I will certainly take it very seriously now!


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## Polednice (Sep 13, 2009)

Be very wary of your worldview being affected by personal experience.


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## regressivetransphobe (May 16, 2011)

There must be some weird element of self-suggestion involved. I'm feeling like your wife put herself under some kind of mental spell, rather than the hypnotist doing it.


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## jalex (Aug 21, 2011)

Well in a sense it does work, I'm sure your wife wan't making it up.The question is whether it works because it puts the 'victims' in to an altered mental state or because of a simple mixture of psychology: peer pressure, audience compliance, susceptibility to suggestion etc. I am inclined to be very doubtful of the first explanation unless substantial evidence appears for it. It's amazing how potent the second technique can be.


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## Almaviva (Aug 13, 2010)

It definitely works, for some people. It is possible to perform surgery with the patient under hypnosis in the absence of anesthesia. Hypnosis is regularly taught in some medical schools and is a technique that had its day in the history of psychiatry. The problem is, not all subjects are able to be hypnotized.


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## jurianbai (Nov 23, 2008)

interesting. what would be the factors for the subjects able or unable to be hypnotized?


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## presto (Jun 17, 2011)

After that experience have no doubt in my mind being hypnotised is very real.
My wife wasn’t playing along, I could see in her face that she was somehow different and somewhere else.
Though the show was amusing I could however see a dark side to this, if the hypnotist had told her to hit someone, would she had done it? I don’t know, but the 6 people on the stage were doing exactly what they were being told to do!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I've heard of people being hypnotised to give up smoking & it has worked. But I suppose, as Almaviva says, whether it works depends on individual factors of the patient. These people have told me that when they were hypnotised, they were pretty much fully conscious, there was none of the "watch my clock going from side to side, you are getting sleeeeepy, etc." kind of stereotyped stuff from the movies. From what I've heard, it's not very wierd or "sexy" at all. But I think the context you saw it in, member presto, was for entertainment, not to treat a problem (addiction) like smoking, so it's a whole different ball game...


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

presto said:


> I've always been very sceptical about it, seeing it on the TV I've always felt it just looks so bizarre and unreal for it to actually be really happening to people.
> But on holiday I've had to completely rethink my views on it.
> On our recent Majorca holiday we had an Hypnosis night were volunteers were asked up on the stage to take part if they wanted.
> The hypnotist didn't get enough people so he asked the rest of the audience to lock their fingers together and raise their arms and concentrate on their middle finger while stretching the arms up high, my wife and I did this, I played along.
> ...


Interesting. I've always been a bit skeptical of hypnosis too. I don't understand it from a scientific point of view. But I've never been under hypnosis to discover if I can be under its "spell" or not.


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## presto (Jun 17, 2011)

Sid James said:


> I've heard of people being hypnotised to give up smoking & it has worked. But I suppose, as Almaviva says, whether it works depends on individual factors of the patient. These people have told me that when they were hypnotised, they were pretty much fully conscious, there was none of the "watch my clock going from side to side, you are getting sleeeeepy, etc." kind of stereotyped stuff from the movies. From what I've heard, it's not very wierd or "sexy" at all. But I think the context you saw it in, member presto, was for entertainment, not to treat a problem (addiction) like smoking, so it's a whole different ball game...


Yes, the show was lightweight and I imagine there must be varying states of hypnosis but all the same it was still a very powerful experience.
Especially when she was told the seat she was sitting in was going to get to 100 degrees hot when he clapped his hands.
Now this was early on in the show and by the time he did clap his hands you would have thought with all the things going on in-between my wife would have forgotten about it but when he did she jumped out of that seat instantaneity without any anticipation whatsoever, to her that seat was 100 degrees hot and at that precise moment!


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## itywltmt (May 29, 2011)

I remember seeing an episode of "Urban Legends" on TV last year, recounting a child "locked" in a position (hands above his head) as a result fo watchiong a TV hypnotist and his parents turning opff the tube before the hypnotist snapped his fingers... ER physicians were unable to free him, and had to find the TV hypnotist to remove the suggestion - an apparebntly TURE story, and not an urban legend...

By the same token, my then 16 year old daughter attended a show at the Calgary Stampede and went on stage to partake in a hypnosis stunt, and was sent back to her seat because she couldn't get hypnotised...

So, I think there are people who are pre-dispositioned to respond favourably to such stunts, and iothers not so much... I do believe, however, hypnosis and hypnotic suggestions are not a hoax - can't say the same of all showmen hypnotists!


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

presto said:


> ... I pulled [my fingers] apart without a thought and thought "What a load of rubbish!" But when I turned to look at my wife she still had her arms in the air and was struggling to pull her hands apart...
> The hypnotists came down tapped her on the shoulder which released her hands and she then went up on the stage to join the 12 or so people that were sitting there for the show to start.
> ...
> Over the next 5 minutes he reduced the 12 down to a final number of 6...


Hypnosis is a real phenomenon, medically explained and, indeed, used therapeutically.

The use of it for entertainment can be questionable in my opinion, but only because of the risk of not respecting volunteers from the audience - making them look foolish for our amusement or, if you're Derren Brown, scaring them for our pleasure.

Hypnosis relies on a mental characteristic we all possess: suggestibility. We are all suggestible to a greater or lesser extent. It just means that, if someone suggests something is true, we tend to believe it. The more suggestible you are the more likely it is you'll believe it. Stage hypnotists rely on suggestible members of the audience coming forward. Volunteers will be up for the experience and are more likely to be suggestible.

In the event Presto describes, the hypnotist needed more people than came forward, so he did a simple test to identify the most suggestible ones in the audience: they would be the ones who couldn't unlock their fingers when he told them they couldn't. Presto is clearly not very suggestible, his wife is. The ones who inadvertently identified themselves as the most suggestible were presumably led onto the stage.

Note that the next part is for the hypnotist to weed out the less suggestible of the volunteers, so he ends with a core of good people to work with.

The other aspect of hypnosis is the trance. A lot of misunderstanding surrounds this. In truth, when we listen attentively to a piece of music we are in a different place than where we are when negotiating city traffic. That's different again from when we are talking with a loved one; different again to the self-absorbed reverie we fall into when, looking out of the window, our mind wanders. These are all mental states and the hypnotic trance is just another state - in fact, it is an enhanced version of the last mentioned reverie.

Hypnosis - whether used for entertainment or therapeutically - relies on the suggestibility of the subject allowing the practitioner to induce a hypnotic trance in which it is then easier to talk to the subject's subconscious. This is more effective than talking to the conscious part of our mind which, all too often, is full of reasons why we shouldn't do something. When used therapeutically, for example to help people change a behaviour such as smoking, most practitioners will use NLP processes such as the "six step reframe" to engage the subject in a dialogue about their motivation to continue or change the behaviour. The stage show technique in which the hypnotist "implants" commands requires a degree of suggestibility (hence the weeding out process) which is not always available to the hypnotherapist confronted with a real patient in need (but not very suggestible).

Regressivetransphobe makes an important point: you can't be hypnotised against your will. In effect, the process works because the subject is colluding with the practitioner, sometimes blatantly (playing along).

Jalex: hypnosis puts the subject into an altered state (as explained above). There's a huge body of medical evidence around this. Of course, in a stage show, the atmosphere, the audience all contribute to the effect though I would have though they would have been counterproductive.

I should add that I have been hypnotised dozens of times (not on stage!). I can assure you that you don't feel out of control. There is a concept of deepness: on a number of occasions the practitioner would say "you are going deeper" (or similar) and down I would go. Then, you do feel less inclined to voluntarily break out of the "spell" but, actually, if the fire alarm went off, you'd be out of the room as fast as the next person! It basically feels like being very relaxed and out of it (as in the reverie I described above).

I have also used hypnosis as a student in supervised training sessions (I am not an accredited hypnotherapist) and it is surprisingly easy - it's just that, if you're not good at it, it takes a long time - unfeasibly long for a professional to get the desired result. I find NLP processes, like "anchoring", if delivered with hypnotic language (ie the sort of thing the hypnotist says without the intention of putting the client into a trance), works well enough for my sort of client.


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## HarpsichordConcerto (Jan 1, 2010)

Jeremy Marchant said:


> Hypnosis relies on a mental characteristic we all possess: suggestibility. We are all suggestible to a greater or lesser extent. It just means that, if someone suggests something is true, we tend to believe it. The more suggestible you are the more likely it is you'll believe it. Stage hypnotists rely on suggestible members of the audience coming forward. Volunteers will be up for the experience and are more likely to be suggestible.


Thanks for your notes. I figured for myself hypnosis would probably be along those lines, though interestingly I didn't think of the word "suggestibility" but I intuitively thought of it as "willingness/openess" to being hypnotised. I figured a person like me would never want to be hypnotised unless I have a real medical reason for it (which I currently don't), so it probably wouldn't work on me.

As for the use of it for entertainment, I can never quite see what's so entertaining about it. A person letting someone else guide them into doing stupid things for entertatinment; really.


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## Fsharpmajor (Dec 14, 2008)

Almaviva said:


> It definitely works, for some people. It is possible to perform surgery with the patient under hypnosis in the absence of anesthesia. Hypnosis is regularly taught in some medical schools and is a technique that had its day in the history of psychiatry. The problem is, not all subjects are able to be hypnotized.


This is pretty much what I think, although I've never been hypnotised and never tried be. Certain external stimuli can set up patterns in your brain. Epileptics need to avoid strobe lights for this reason. and acupuncture possibly works for this reason. Homeopathy, if it works at all, probably works for this reason.

While I wouldn't want to condone it, because it's illegal, quite frankly the best way of getting a handle on this subject is to experiment with LSD.


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## Almaviva (Aug 13, 2010)

Fsharpmajor said:


> This is pretty much what I think, although I've never been hypnotised and never tried be. Certain external stimuli can set up patterns in your brain. Epileptics need to avoid strobe lights for this reason. and acupuncture possibly works for this reason. Homeopathy, if it works at all, probably works for this reason.
> 
> While I wouldn't want to condone it, because it's illegal, quite frankly the best way of getting a handle on this subject is to experiment with LSD.


What does LSD have in common with hypnosis?


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## Almaviva (Aug 13, 2010)

jurianbai said:


> interesting. what would be the factors for the subjects able or unable to be hypnotized?


 What Jeremy Marchant said.


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