Hypnosis: had any experience of it?

[Pup]

You drank the first beer from a glass, and the rest from cans. Any chance the can was responsible for your impression of the horrible taste?

It's possible, but since I drank the beer from the can immediately on opening it, I don't think it would have gotten any "canny" taste the way things sometimes do in open cans. Normally I'm fine with drinking from cans--I'm drinking a chocolate shake from a can right now, actually--so I'm not primed to dislike things just because of cans.

The flatness vs. carbonation also didn't seem to be the issue, because pouring it could certainly change that. But it was definitely the flavor. I've always said that beer tastes to me like horse pee smells, whether canned or bottled (the beer, not the horse pee).

 

[Pup]

LOL, This always amuses me, no-one ever has a past life as an uneventful transylvanian turnip farmer, born, raised, farmed, possibly married and had kids, died.

Oh no, Everyone is the reincarnation of Rasputin, or Gandhi, or whatever.

Wish I could remember the title of the book, but I read a paperback years ago, written by a hypnotist who had done hundreds of past life regressions of clients. She (I think she was female) had categorized them, and by far the majority were remembering anonymous people, whose lives were demographically just what you'd expect for their eras, nasty brutish and short. They also fit the global population, so even though she was doing regressions in the U.S. (I think, maybe England), there were plenty of African and South American lives in obscure tribal villages.

It's not really worth trying to remember the name of the book, though, because all it would do is show that a hypnotist who wanted a bias toward proper demographics could suggest it in her subjects, so it doesn't really prove anything, but it was an interesting change from the usual famous people.

There's also the even more cynical conclusion that if a hypnotist wants to present examples of genuine past lives that can't be easily dismissed, it's easier for the average person to answer questions as if they were a girl who died at the age of 10 in a jungle in 5,000 BC, than as if they were, for example, Henry Clay.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Exactly. You're nearly getting it.



Agreed, with an edit in red.



Straw Man. No-one's saying she's faking it. If she believes it, she believes it.

What mechanism makes hypnosis different from "consensual role-play that your brain convinces you is real"?

This is a bizarre semantics argument to me. How are you splitting hairs here because I don't see the difference between believing one is on the ceiling and not really being hypnotized only believing one is?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

What fascinates me about hypnosis is:

I witnessed a friend under hypnosis develop blisters on his skin from a piece of cork. The hypnotist suggested the cork was a glowing ember and placed it on his arm.

The explanation for this neural mechanism is what I would like to hear.

After coming out of hypnosis, was the blister painful like a thermal burn? Did it go away? What happened to it?

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

While past life regressions have been debunked, there are plenty of non-famous lives recalled in these fantasies.

 

[Olowkow]

I have heard this "blister" claim pretty often, and I even tried it a few times on good subjects, but I have never seen it happen. I suspect it is a myth.

There was a JREF thread on this subject a while back:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34272


http://www.innertalk.com/articles/mind_and_hypnosis_intro.html

[FONT=Geneva, Arial][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]A hypnotist can suggest a burn, place an ice cube on the arm, and a blister will almost immediately appear. As a practicing hypnotherapist, I personally witnessed phenomena that illustrates the mind's control over the body to the degree that suggesting a simple runny nose is, as Sherlock would say, "Elementary!" But in order to tie this suggestibility of alpha states in to the problems posed by television viewing, we should also take a look at another area of scientific enquiry that may surprise you.[/FONT][/FONT]

But this PhD guy seems to know a fair amount about the subject, and he kind of claims he witnessed it. So who knows?

 

[Olowkow]

There is all kinds of literature out there about suggestions and blisters, if one is interested. A quick skim reading of this article might be worthwhile. The summary of results gives examples of blisters under various conditions, but they took 11 hours or thereabouts to form...not instantaneously.

The Production of Blisters by
Hypnotic Suggestion: Another Look

This paper presents a critical evaluation of reported attempts to produce nonherpetic
skin blisters through hypnotic suggestion. Even though the majority of these reports are
grossly lacking in controls, experimental design, etc., and are subject to alternative explanations,
the author concludes that skin anomalies have been produced by suggestion
in some instances. Additional studies of psychogenic vascular changes add credence
to the possibility of central control of these phenomena. It is also concluded that these reactions do not appear to be limited only to hypnotized [subjects]

 

[Skwinty]

I witnessed this blistering about 25 years ago. When the subject was told about the "hot cork" and touched on the arm, he yelped and withdrew his arm

After the hypnosIs, there was a reddish spot and he kept complaining about the burn.

I saw a blister on his arm the following day.

I have wanted on many occasion to be hypnotised but to no avail.

I think that the answer is that some people have the ability to allow the subconcious mind to overIde the concious mind and hypnotists exploit this in the susceptible.

 

[quarky]

Is there a slow version of hypnotism?
Like, brain-washing?

what caused me to drink the Kool-Aid?

i think it was the pitcher and the red coloring in the commercial.
Without the added coloring, would anyone drink the Kool-Aid?

Well, who knows.

(I'm off to save lots of money on my car insurance. later, gators.)

 

[leon_heller]

When I studied for a psychology degree at Birkbeck, University of London, many years ago, psychology wasn't mentioned once and there were no books on it in the college library. I have met psychologists subsequently who claimed that it existed, and one even offered to hypnotise me. I declined the offer.

 

[Olowkow]

When I studied for a psychology degree at Birkbeck, University of London, many years ago, psychology wasn't mentioned once and there were no books on it in the college library. I have met psychologists subsequently who claimed that it existed, and one even offered to hypnotise me. I declined the offer.

Not much of a cheese shop is it!

 

[leon_heller]

I don't think it was mentioned in any of the text books I read at the time, either.

 

[Pyrts]

Has anybody here been hypnotised? I haven't and would like to know what it's like.
Do people enter a different state of 'reality' or what?
For example a stage hypnotist made one guy believe that an onion was an apple, and the guy happily ate it.
When they're brought out of it do they remember what they did and said while under it?
Any possibly harmful long lasting sde effects?

I researched it, I learned how to do it, and I was hypnotized.

It's a very subjective thing -- in general, the "hypnotist" is actually just putting you into a trance state; the kind of trance you fall into if you start staring at an aquarium full of fish or a lava lamp (for example) or any other sort of similar state.

Depending on where your "locus of control" is, you can be easy to hypnotize or hard to hypnotize. I'm very hard to hypnotize (I like to be in control, in other words.)

It's a consensual state -- if the hypnotist makes a suggestion that is "wrong" somehow, you WILL snap out of it immediately. The wrong imagery (talking about a beach when you loathe the water, for instance) will also push you out of a trance.

Some people (hypnotized or not) will go along with what a stronger personality suggests. We see this on crime stories in the newspaper all the time and we see it with "pack behavior" in crowd situations and in the famous Stanford "prison" experiment.

It can help you modify your behavior (strengthen your "will" to do something.) It can help you overcome pain. I had hypnosis because I'm pretty resistant to anesthetics and I *have* awakened during two separate operations. This was no fun. Hypnosis helped with keeping me in a "sleeping" state during another surgery, and I would use it again if faced with another surgery.

 

[Jontg]

What mechanism makes hypnosis different from "consensual role-play that your brain convinces you is real"?

From one perspective, there is none--that's exactly what hypnosis is. It's the deliberate and ritual invocation of the placebo effect for medical, psychiatric, or recreational purposes. What's interesting is just how far this effect goes.

I'm currently headdesking over my failure to keep a record of this conversation, but not too many months ago I hypnotized a woman who later got into a traffic accident and suffered a concussion and associated memory loss. The post-hypnotic triggers I had planted in her mind were gone, as was her recollection of the trance itself, among other memories leading up to the crash.
After a few tries, I was able to guide her back into a trance--and all of the above came flooding back. I honestly have no idea how this happened, or what mechanism explains it, but I know that I was getting all-hail-hypno-Christ jokes out of it for weeks.

 

[Jeff Corey]

.
...Some people (hypnotized or not) will go along with what a stronger personality suggests. We see this on crime stories in the newspaper all the time and we see it with "pack behavior" in crowd situations and in the famous Stanford "prison" experiment.
...

You are wrong about the so called Stanford "experiment". This makes me doubt anything else you claim.
People who want to know what actually happened in Phil Zimbardo's non-experiment can read this. http://www.prisonexp.org/

 

[Jeff Corey]

Not much of a cheese shop is it!

Wensleydale?

But seriously. the poster meant to type "hypnotism" but wrote "psychology" instead, because of a post hypnotic suggestion.

I call BS on the blister raising right after ice cube, whatever, touching the skin with the suggestion that it was a burning hot object.
My search of a bunch of peer reviewed journals shows absolutely no evidence for this claim.
So I request that I be enlightened by anyone who can provide scientific evidence for the claim.


Where is Claus Flodin Larsen when I need him?

 

[Biscuit]

When I was in college a hypnotist came to our dorm for a performance. I was one of the lucky ones called on stage. I recall knowing I shouldn't be doing this silly things he was telling me to do but doing it anyway. It was a weird experience.

 

[Jeff Corey]

Did he turn you into a mime?

 

[quarky]

I may like cake.

 

[Halfcentaur]

When I was in college a hypnotist came to our dorm for a performance. I was one of the lucky ones called on stage. I recall knowing I shouldn't be doing this silly things he was telling me to do but doing it anyway. It was a weird experience.

And the funny thing is someone with no experience at hypnotism with no technique at all can get the same effect by putting someone on a stage in front of an audience, someone that is having fun and willing to do things for fun, simply by putting you under the impression they are doing something we call hypnosis.

It's like how Ouija boards work sort of I think.

It's not easy to talk about hypnosis in skeptical contexts because we can't really say or agree on what the claim is in the first place.

If you (not you Biscuit) want to tell me someone is going to get physically burned by cork, I am not going to accept it is truthful without some extra blue evidence. Not just any evidence, but evidence that is blue, and extra blue. Sagan knows what I'm talking about.