3 students die after principal hypnotizes them

marplots said:
I was disappointed to see that Kreskin didn't so much win the 1986 court case as the other party lost on a technicality.

"But the judge ruled that the challenge that Waylock had accepted from Kreskin no longer was in effect at the time she had accepted it. In August, the mentalist revoked his longstanding challenge and, in a new challenge, offered $100,000 to anyone who provided scientific proof that there is a hypnotic state.

Because Waylock could not prove she had ever accepted the $100,000 challenge, Judge J. Gilbert Van Sciver Jr. ruled in favor of Kreskin." (from http://articles.philly.com/1986-01-15/news/26056648_1_kreskin-hypnosis-hypnotic-state)

Not really a decision about hypnosis at all.
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:thumbsup:
 
marplots said:
When I click you link, I don't get "links to studies," I get links to articles about the same study. Singular. And Wiki. And an article from 1992 in Psychology Today that mentions this gem before going on to suggest hypnosis doesn't "really" exist:

" Hypnosis is used in an effort to dislodge deeply buried memories relating to past events. Therapists employ "hypnotic regression"--mentally taking a subject back in time to reexperience the past. The thinking is that hypnosis affords direct access to unconscious memories without resistance or distortion, making it an exceptionally reliable tool for exploring long-forgotten details of early childhood and a powerful investigative tool for drawing out critical details of crimes." (https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200910/the-trouble-hypnosis)
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That Google search is not the links I posted. Those are upstream.

The link I cited in the thread you are quoting was merely showing that there was a lack of studies where the empirical evidence failed to be seen.
 
marplots said:
That's how it sometimes goes with "natural" experiments.

It would be cool to see the issue revisited with the fMRI data in hand. At some point, I think he'd have to just have to confess he no longer understood the science.
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Or not admit it. ;)

But I think you hit the nail here about not understanding the science, or at least not being current with where the science is, like a lot of people in this thread. :)
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Or not admit it. ;)

But I think you hit the nail here about not understanding the science, or at least not being current with where the science is, like a lot of people in this thread. :)
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I admit I'm not. But I'm more interested in the claims being made for hypnosis rather than arguments about whether an hypnotic state exists. Plainly, we have lots of variations possible in our own mentation - ranging from fully attentive, to "zoned out," to asleep. One might even say that any strong emotion was an "altered state."

So the meat of it for me are the claims about what can be accomplished with hypnosis, regardless of what exactly the cognitive state may be. What's it good for? Just how good is it? Those kinds of questions.
 
marplots said:
I admit I'm not. But I'm more interested in the claims being made for hypnosis rather than arguments about whether an hypnotic state exists. Plainly, we have lots of variations possible in our own mentation - ranging from fully attentive, to "zoned out," to asleep. One might even say that any strong emotion was an "altered state."

So the meat of it for me are the claims about what can be accomplished with hypnosis, regardless of what exactly the cognitive state may be. What's it good for? Just how good is it? Those kinds of questions.
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And what do you think about the induced hallucinations? Can you relax yourself into having hallucinations?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
And what do you think about the induced hallucinations? Can you relax yourself into having hallucinations?
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No, at least not out of the blue. There's a half-awake dreamy state I sometimes get in between the third and forth "bop" of my clock-radio alarm, but not really hallucinations.

Do you suppose the ability to induce hallucinations will have some use?
 
Checkmite said:
Unlike sleep, hypnosis allegedly must be induced; and unlike sleep, the person must have not only an a priori belief that hypnosis is or might be a real thing
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Just a lack of belief that it's impossible. That's different from a belief that it is. The former would include people who have no expectation one way or the other and even people who've never heard of it, and the latter would not.

Checkmite said:
Continuing the comparison - a person can use chemical or physical interventions to prevent sleep to a point (and suffer for it), but sheer force of will isn't enough on its own to prevent sleep from eventually overtaking you. Contrarily, if you don't believe in hypnosis, it simply doesn't exist for you. It doesn't even take an active "force of will" to resist an induction - it just does not work.
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That's why sleep is the wrong comparison to make. Anything that can't be done voluntarily and can't be avoided voluntarily either is obviously not much of a counterpart for something that can. That's why I brought up an alternative which is a matter of conscious choice, and is not a simple binary "it happens or it doesn't" but somewhere on a sliding scale of odds that it will happen, with the odds being influenced by what one thinks about it: to show that such a thing is a possibility and can not be dismissed as impossible a prioir. Some other thing that isn't like that, like normal sleep, does not refute that.
 
I can make myself weepy by listening to a series of very sad songs and "buying into" them. Is that hypnosis? Like hypnosis? It's at least an induced, altered state.
 
Jules Galen said:
My next door neighbor hypnotized my late brother - convinced him he was a dog. Every day when my little brother would get home from school, he'd open a can of Dog food and chow down - he wouldn't eat anything else although there were several brands of dog food he liked. Eventually, this believing he was a dog killed him.
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The exact same thing happened to my older brother but the hypnotist convinced him he was a chicken. It was embarrassing to say the least to have my brother going around quaking everywhere and flapping his elbows. I begged my mom to let us go back to the hypnotist so he could reverse the suggestion but my mom said no, we needed the eggs too badly.
 
Senex said:
The exact same thing happened to my older brother but the hypnotist convinced him he was a chicken. It was embarrassing to say the least to have my brother going around quaking everywhere and flapping his elbows. I begged my mom to let us go back to the hypnotist so he could reverse the suggestion but my mom said no, we needed the eggs too badly.
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If your brother was producing eggs, he was probably your sister all along.
 
Olowkow said:
As vice president and engineer in a small electronics firm, my partner and I worked for several years with the inventor, a well known psychologist, on the design and construction of the cardiac vagal tone monitor. This device calculates and displays as a digital value the relationship between cardiac arrhythmia and breathing rate, known as "vagal tone".

As we breathe in and out, the heart rate varies slightly to varying degrees depending on various factors which have been studied. Its value as a research device was investigated in many fields including SIDS in infants, neurotoxin level identification in crop dusters, polygraphy, hypnosis and other areas.

A lot of academic publications appeared world-wide as we built about 50 of these units. Here is one article I happened to find which this professor has co-authored which relates to hypnosis.



There is no shortage of papers on the relationship of EEG to various factors such as hypnotic analgesia.
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So can this gizmo tell the difference between someone who is under a "hypnotic trance" from someone who is faking it? It seems to me that would win Kreskin's 100 grand.
 
Delvo said:
The issue had been raised, of whether belief that an altered mental state was a real thing could affect someone's ability to enter that state. I answered that it could and illustrated with an example. Your response was to pretend to be completely unfamiliar with either the idea of answering questions with examples, or the use of analogies... while trying to insult me into submission... instead of addressing the actual subject. This is a very common type of behavior for people who have realized that they have no case they can make in support of a position they've taken.
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Franz Mesmer was born in 1734 and your sleep stories and these articles are the best you got to prove it is an altered state of consciousness :boggled:
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Again, you are not looking at what I've said.

First, it was my brother that hypnotized people, not me.
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I never said otherwise.
Second I only said the research now supported the conclusion the hypnotic state is a real phenomena. Hypnotized people are not faking it.
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I never said hypnotized people are faking it or hypnosis isn't a real phenomena (I believe you don't look at what I've said). I've said/saying it isn't an altered state of consciousness like sleep.
Third, the fact hypnosis is real is a separate question from whether there is any therapeutic uses for hypnosis.
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Hypnosis is a real thing. I've practiced it enough to know that. I also believe it can be therapeutic. Our difference is if it is an altered state of consciousness.
There is promising research in areas of pain control. I'm not familiar with the current research in using hypnosis in the psychiatric field. But mostly the research into the therapeutic benefits of hypnosis are only in their early stages.
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Hypnosis has been studied a long time.
And it's been refuted that one can recover lost memories with hypnosis. If such memories can be recalled they are too muddled with false memories to be of any use.
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It's been refuted because hypnosis is not an altered state that gives you abilities to retrieve past memories or past lives.
 
marplots said:
I can make myself weepy by listening to a series of very sad songs and "buying into" them. Is that hypnosis? Like hypnosis? It's at least an induced, altered state.
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Luckily we have an expert in this thread who can tell whether or not you're faking this reaction.
 
marplots said:
I can make myself weepy by listening to a series of very sad songs and "buying into" them. Is that hypnosis? Like hypnosis? It's at least an induced, altered state.
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If so, the porn must be one of the most powerful and effective forms of hypnosis known to man. Its physical effects can even be scientifically observed and measured!
 
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