3 students die after principal hypnotizes them

casebro said:
hmmm, isn't there usually a lead in speech by the hypnotist telling the volunteers that hypnosis is relaxing? Maybe some of the motivation is "I'm nervous here on stage. I can go into a relaxing trance."
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I guess anything is possible. Difficult to say for sure what is going on in the mind. Maybe Mikado has some insights. His description of his own personality is quite typical of an excellent subject, except for the "control freak" part. I always sensed that as a hypnotist I had to subtly dominate and reassure the subject with linguistic cues or it wouldn't work.
 
Yeggster said:
i'm sure
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You are sure that I don't follow your cryptic post? Ok.

the kids were hand selected to participate "randomly" .... and they were acting.
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If you don't explain, I can't help. I think you are trying to say that you are certain that all the subjects were acting and not hypnotized. If they were "hand selected," how could that be random? You seem to mean that the kids were all in on it, in cahoots with the hypnotist? Then it wasn't hypnosis was it?

If that is what happened, then that is what happened. I wasn't there. It certainly is not relevant to the whole field of hypnotism.

ETA: My point was that "random" selection of subjects is not a very efficient method when doing a stage show. It is better to use a method to narrow down to those in the audience who at least are subject to suggestion.
 
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Senex said:
Skeptic Ginger, have you ever used the powerful tool of hypnosis to make you a better person and if your answer is no why not?
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Scarecrow; stating that the evidence shows that one version of something exists does not equal endorsing all aspects of all other versions of it.

Varanid said:
I once saw someone overcome with the spirit of the lord in an Appalachian church. So I guess we now have evidence that god is real and spends his time possessing random idiots?
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Scarecrow; the actually equivalent claim in this situation would be that if you could monitor the brain activity of the church members while doing this, and observed a difference from when they're not doing this, then you'd have evidence that they're experiencing a real, actual, altered state of mind.
 
Lithrael said:
The degree of realness of hypnosis is one thing. "I know hypnosis is real because why would my teenage brother misrepresent something" is a very very nother.

I would not crap on someone for having a well researched opinion on the former; it has lots of woo-ish window dressing that makes everyone's skeptic sense ping like crazy, but it's not impossible to study at all either. Personally I would expect it to be similar to meditation: almost always overstated but still a genuinely useful/interesting thing for the right people in the right circumstances - easily faked - and of course worse than useless when used for something it's not actually good for.

"I think hypnosis is real because I saw this thing my teenage brother did and he didn't fake it; why would he fake it" on the other hand has got to be very nearly the most ridiculous thing one can say on a skeptic discussion board.

"I'm interested in hypnosis because I saw this thing my brother did and it was very convincing to me" is, IMO, the more sensible thing to say in a place like this.
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^This.
 
Delvo said:
Scarecrow; stating that the evidence shows that one version of something exists does not equal endorsing all aspects of all other versions of it.

Scarecrow; the actually equivalent claim in this situation would be that if you could monitor the brain activity of the church members while doing this, and observed a difference from when they're not doing this, then you'd have evidence that they're experiencing a real, actual, altered state of mind.
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What you describe would be evidence; SG described an observation. That was my contention. I was being sarcastic.

WTF is "Scarecrow?" I am not familiar with that.
 
Varanid said:
What you describe would be evidence; SG described an observation. That was my contention. I was being sarcastic.

WTF is "Scarecrow?" I am not familiar with that.
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I'm guessing he means "straw man".
 
From a storytelling standpoint, I find the idea of a hypnotist giving a show to a bunch of young children and accidentally - or intentionally - doing something innocuous in context that causes several of them to commit suicide many years later to be intriguing.
 
Checkmite said:
From a storytelling standpoint, I find the idea of a hypnotist giving a show to a bunch of young children and accidentally - or intentionally - doing something innocuous in context that causes several of them to commit suicide many years later to be intriguing.
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Sounds like a mediocre Stephen King novel
 
Checkmite said:
From a storytelling standpoint, I find the idea of a hypnotist giving a show to a bunch of young children and accidentally - or intentionally - doing something innocuous in context that causes several of them to commit suicide many years later to be intriguing.
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Many a comic book and soap opera relies on this for stories!

Old school Superman even had a super power where he could not be hypnotized because no hypnotist or machine could outthink his speedy superbrain.

He could hypnotize himself, though, so he could fight Mohammed Ali. Ahh those were the days, when he was so awesome he could take on the heavyweight champ without using any super powers.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
You weren't there and no there wasn't. My friend was not smart enough to have come up with that.

But you can continue to believe BS about hypnotism, like a climate change denier.
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Hypnotism isn't magic. It's self-induced receptiveness to suggestions. There's no way the hypnotism caused these deaths.
 
Beerina said:
Many a comic book and soap opera relies on this for stories!

Old school Superman even had a super power where he could not be hypnotized because no hypnotist or machine could outthink his speedy superbrain.

He could hypnotize himself, though, so he could fight Mohammed Ali. Ahh those were the days, when he was so awesome he could take on the heavyweight champ without using any super powers.
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But he still ducked when bad guys threw guns at him.
 
Checkmite said:
Is it possible that there's a completely coincidental correlation between skepticism of hypnotism and an inability to be hypnotized? Yes. I consider it an extraordinary proposition though.
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If entirely coincidental, it would be extraordinary. But if it's cause-&-effect then it's completely, mundanely ordinary.

What thing that people can do, particularly things which call for some kind of concentration or effort or deliberate choice, has ever existed that was not affected by whether or not they thought they could do it?

Checkmite said:
if I were to be convinced that hypnotism is genuine, would that shift in belief physically change my brain in the ways necessary to allow me to be hypnotized?
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I don't know exactly what you mean by "physical" or why you figure it's necessary, but, skipping around that word, yes, believing that a particular altered mental state can really exist and can be entered voluntarily under certain circumstances does, in fact, increase one's odds of being able to do so. I sometimes choose to go into a state that I can only describe as having certain traits in common with sleep but not others so it's really distinct from both that and being awake. I originally discovered it in circumstances where I was sleepy and probably about to go completely asleep but was also very time-constrained and needed to be awake soon, and whether it would happen or not in any given instance was at first sporadic and accidental. Only after I started thinking of it as a third state, neither truly awake nor truly asleep, that was more likely to happen in one situation than in another, did I gain enough control over it to be able to do it practically at will as long as the circumstances aren't too thoroughly wrong for it. I obviously couldn't do that if I didn't believe the third state exists; even if I tried, the doubt in my mind would mean my mind wasn't really doing what it needs to do to get it to happen; I'd just be pretending. It's pretty obvious, really: of course you couldn't alter your own mental state if you didn't think you could. The concept of putting your mind in a state you don't believe exists doesn't even make any sense. It would be essentially trying to tell yourself to agree with an idea you don't agree with.

Senex said:
Oh yeah, well you find yourself on the side of Skeptic Ginger and Yeggster then. Good luck with that.
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You seriously could not get any more perfectly ad hominem than that, which means your argument could not get any more perfectly invalid than that. Try making an actual point on the actual subject. Find and point out actual flaws in the actual neurological studies. Who told you about them and linked to them simply could not possibly count.
 
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