Hypnosis Works


By Michael Abrams, Dan Winters|Thursday, November 25, 2004













To Kirsch, this still wasn’t enough to prove the power of trance, but Stephen Kosslyn  was willing to be convinced. Kosslyn is an exceedingly polite man, with a gray, philosophical beard and perpetually raised eyebrows. The hypnosis literature is rife with examples of subjects aping what they believe is hypnotic behavior, he says. Such “demand effects” are exactly what make placebos so effective. As for the brain-wave study, other events in the lab—such as interaction with the investigators—could have caused the shift in the subjects’ state of mind. “Is it just playacting?” Kosslyn wondered, when he first saw Spiegel’s data. “Or is there something really going on in the brain?”


The first step was to find the right study subjects. Only a small fraction of the population—known as highs in hypnotic circles—can enter a deep trance, just as only a few people cannot be hypnotized at all. The rest of us fall on a spectrum in between. (See “Can You Be Hypnotized?” page 60.) Spiegel and Kosslyn selected eight people from a pool of around 120 subjects, then Kosslyn’s team ran the experiment at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. As in the previous studies, subjects were put inside a PET scanner, shown a slide with color rectangles, and their brain activity was mapped. Then they were shown a black-and-white slide and told to imagine its having a color. Both tasks were repeated while under hypnosis.



“Technically, he’s right,” Kosslyn says. Because the eight subjects were all highly hypnotizable—or at least highly suggestible—Kosslyn and Spiegel were afraid that if the subjects were told to see the color, just as they had been when hypnotized, they would slip into a trance. Kosslyn doubts that changing the wording would have made a difference. “The hypnotized people would tell you that they could literally see. ‘Lows’ couldn’t even do the task. They simply couldn’t do it.”






Lang has since bolstered those findings with two other ongoing studies, involving more than 330 patients. Once again, the hypnotized patients used less medication, recovered faster, and spent less time in the hospital than those with standard care.


The kidney operation Lang performed that day at Harvard was a good example. The 80-year-old patient came out of her trance at one point—“What is this rubbish about the beach?” she said—but the doctors soon put her under again with a simple hypnotic suggestion: “Your eyes won’t close until your inner mind gives you permission.” If hypnosis is ever to work its way into the mainstream, physicians will need to overcome their reluctance to say such things, knowing there is solid science behind what sounds like mysticism. “I think it should be based on data, not on belief,” Spiegel says. “But in the end it doesn’t matter why it works.”

Can You Be Hypnotized?

In the 1960s, Herbert Spiegel developed one of the first tests of hypnotizability, known as the Hypnotic Induction Profile. The test has two parts. First, the subject is told to look upward. On a scale of zero to four, the more the whites of his eyes show, the more easily he can be hypnotized. Studies have yet to confirm this correlation, but many practicing hypnotists rely on it. Next, the subject is told to imagine that his left hand is a balloon floating toward the ceiling. Once again, the hypnotist rates his reaction from zero to four. Subjects rated zero keep their hands firmly planted on the chair. Those rated four feel their hand suddenly grow lighter and lighter until it lifts into the air.

Hypnotists often also give their subjects a personality survey. Here are a few sample questions. The answers in red are those that highly hypnotizable subjects tend to give.



This version is from www.webhome.idirect.com/~kehamilt/psyhypno.html.

1. As you concentrate on watching a movie or a play, do you get so absorbed in what is going on that you lose awareness of where you are?

    a) Yes    

    b) No     

    c) Depends on situation

If so, do you ever get so absorbed that when the curtain comes down you are surprised to realize you are sitting in a theater?

    a) Yes    

    b) No     

    c) Depends on situation

2. In general, as you perceive time, where do you focus more of your attention?

    a) Past         

    b) Present        

    c) Future         

    d) All three equally

3. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has a mind which the brain does not understand.” He said there are two kinds of minds: the heart-mind and the brain-mind. Which of these do you give priority to?

    a) Brain-mind

    b) Heart-mind       

4. How do you relate to another person? 

    a) Prefer to control the interaction

    b) Prefer to let the other person take over as he or she wishes

    c) Depends on situation

5. Regarding your tendency to trust other people, where on average would you place yourself on a scale?

    a) Above average  

    b) Below average

6. How do you tend to learn something new? 

    a) Judge it critically at the time you are learning it

    b) Accept it and perhaps judge it critically at a later time

7. Sensing your responsibility for what you do, where do you place yourself on a scale?

    a) Above average

    b) Average

    c) Below average

8. If you are learning something new and you know in advance that it’s of such a nature that you can learn it clearly, safely, and equally well using either sense below, how would you prefer to learn it? 

    a) Through touch    

    b) Through sight

9. When you come up with a new idea, there are two parts to it: One is to dream it up and the other is to figure out how to do it. Of these two parts, which gives you a greater sense of fulfillment?

    a) Dreaming it up

    b) Figuring out how to do it

10. As you come up with or work out a new idea, which is more necessary?

    a) Writing notes

    b) Feeling your way through without writing

Comment on this article