A magazine for and about Stage Hypnosis. ©
Ramelle Macoy
Central Pennsylvania--Mifflitown
.
Several years ago the Committee for the Scientific Investigation
of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) devoted a segment of its annual convention
to a panel discussion titled "Controversies in Hypnosis". While I
was unable to attend, I did listen to the tapes of the discussions.
.
Before commenting I should confess my own lack of credentials.
I have done no studies--at least no formal studies with appropriate controls.
I have been a stage hypnotist for the past thirty years and have hypnotized
thousands of volunteers and while I am as disinclined as the next CSICOP
member to be much impressed by anecdotal evidence, perhaps experience and
observation is not without some value. It might at least suggest
useful areas for research.
.
The woman in the audience who exhorted CSICOP not to deny the reality
of the mystery was, I thought, right on target. There is a mystery
and it is a mystery, I think, that will continue to be extraordinarily
difficult of illumination. The variables are so numerous that in
practice they may be impossible to control. Suggestions that may
have been given a subject prior to an experiment together with varying
interpretations of the same suggestion by different subjects--or by different
interpretations of the same suggestion by the same subject at different
times--may well combine to render reliable replication impossible.
Most of the routines that I do on stage I have done hundreds or thousands
of times and yet in almost every show I encounter a reaction that I have
never seen before.
.
The crucial and most important disagreement among the panelists
seemed to be whether or not persons allegedly hypnotized are in any kind
of special "state" or "trance". In passing I would like to suggest
to Kreskin that he immediately claim his own $100,000 prize for himself.
The man whom Kreskin reported as having thought he had been talking to
him for three or four minutes when in actuality his arm had been "floating"
in the air for one hour and twelve minutes was, I submit, in some sort
of state or condition substantially different from what most of us regard
as the normal waking state.
.
While the evidence is anecdotal, I assume that Kreskin believes
it and I believe it (with appropriate allowance for some possible embellishment
to which we entertainers are prone). I believe it because I know
it to be a phenomenon common to hypnosis. Frequently when I have
had a group of volunteers on stage for an hour or more someone will ask
the volunteers how long they think they have been on stage and their estimates
will usually be under ten minutes.
.
What we call such a "state" is not important. I call it a
hypnotic state rather than a hypnotic trance because I think most people
find "state" less mysterious and scary than "trance". But since "hypnosis"
does imply sleep, and since it is emphatically not "sleep", I would, to
satisfy the nit pickers, be happy to settle for "state of heightened suggestibility".
What is important is that we try to agree on terms. I find it a little
incongruous for people to deny the existence of such a thing as a hypnotic
state while all the while referring repeatedly to "high hypnotizables".
.
For my own part I use the terms "hypnosis" and "suggestion" virtually
interchangeably. The difference between a "hypnotic suggestion" and
a "suggestion" is, I think, simply a matter of degree. One of the
panelists argued that the apparent benefits of hypnosis had nothing to
do with hypnosis but were simply the results of relaxation and suggestion.
It was, I would argue, the hypnotic state that produced the relaxation
and rendered the suggestions more reliably effective than an ordinary suggestion.
.
What's going on in hypnosis? My own guess is that through
suggestion we can produce an extraordinarily relaxed state during which
it is possible to reliably communicate with the sub-conscious.
.
Freud's theory states, if I remember correctly, that it is possible
for the human mind to contain information--and for a person to act on that
information--without being aware of the information. It was hypnosis
that Freud pointed to as proof of the theory. I think there is additional
evidence.
.
It takes an incredibly long period of time for us to consciously
initiate many motor functions. Something like seven-tenths of a second
(again, if I remember correctly; in any event, a long time) is required
for my finger to begin to move after I make a conscious decision to move
it. The reflex time for the same finger motion is a fraction of that.
Obviously all manner of seemingly simple but really very complicated activities
like walking and riding a bicycle would be clumsy and difficult or impossible
were they dependent on conscious decisions. Equally obvious, or so
it seems to me, a great mass of data and information for automatically
controlling and regulating such actions must be stored in the brain someplace
and I don't think we have any direct access to that information or are
even aware of its existence in any meaningful way.
.
Damage to specific areas of the brain can sometimes result in a
"blind spot" in a person's field of vision. I am not talking about
hysterical blindness. The person is actually physiologically blind
in that spot or area. And yet in carefully controlled experiments
it has been found that if objects are held in the blind spot such persons
can, by "guessing", identify the objects with an accuracy approaching 100%.
.
One of the routines that I do on stage is to have a person negatively
hallucinate a certain person, normally a friend who happens to be present
in the audience. The subject will give every indication of being
unable to see the invisible person (and have on occasion slapped me in
the face when I had the invisible person pinch her on the fanny) and yet,
on some level and in some way, must be able to see the person in order
to identify whom it is that they can not see.
.
When the invisible person is seated in one of several otherwise
empty chairs and the subject is asked to "imagine" who would be seated
in each of the chairs if there were someone seated there, he or she will
usually "imagine" the invisible person in the chair in which they are in
fact seated.
.
I find it difficult to resist the conclusion that the visual information
in both cases is stored in more than one area of the brain and that we
have conscious access to the information in one area but not the other.
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Can everyone be hypnotized? My answer would be a rather tenuous
"yes". Given the right circumstances, a sufficiently skilled hypnotist
and enough time (how's that for a "non-falsifiable" hypothesis?), I tend
to think that everyone could eventually be hypnotized. I think so
because I believe that everyone is to some degree suggestible and that
people's brains function in very similar fashions.
.
I frequently hypnotize groups of from 20 to 30 people. I call
it relaxation and it is very non-threatening and over the past several
years my success rate with such groups has been well over 90%. No
selection is involved. On stage, with groups of 10 or so, the success
rate is frequently l00% but there is some selection--or at least I hope
there is. I work only with volunteers and my untested assumption
has always been that highly suggestible people are more likely to volunteer.
But such is certainly not always the case. A goodly percentage of
the volunteers are people eager to "prove" that they can not be hypnotized.
Such people frequently turn out to be excellent subjects and it is interesting
to me, if not to the audience, to see them struggling mightily--sometimes
successfully; usually not--against a suggestion.
.
Can anyone induce hypnosis? The man from whom I learned the
trade, Richard Hazley (whose claim to the title "The Amazing", incidentally,
antedates and is more euphoniously valid than that of either Kreskin or
Randi), used to answer that question with a question: "Can anyone
play the piano?". An excellent answer. Few of the tips to aspiring
stage hypnotists that I have seen give sufficient stress to the importance
of practice. I feel confident that I am a better hypnotist today
than I was five years ago. After more than a quarter of a century,
five additional years of practice has still made a difference.
.
Those who claim that "no induction" is fully as effective as an
induction procedure are, I suspect, basing their conclusion on a comparison
of "no induction" with an induction procedure by an unskilled hypnotist.
In the first place, I'm not sure how the "no induction" portion of the
experiment could be arranged. If people are asked to volunteer, or
are offered pay, to participate in an experiment and then given suggestions,
that may in itself constitute an induction procedure. The induction
does not have to be complicated or follow any particular format.
One of several induction procedures that I use is simply to walk into the
audience and tell a person that when I touch their nose they'll close their
eyes and go to sleep. It is not a terribly effective procedure but
for me, so far, it has been infallible and I take care that it remain so
by employing it sparingly and only when I know it will work.
.
If you want to study the effectiveness of induction, first find
yourself a good hypnotist. Simply saying the words is not enough.
If you insist on doing it yourself, start off with several years of practice
and then when you're fully confident that you have mastered the art, give
yourself a test by walking out in front of several hundred skeptical people
in an auditorium and giving a demonstration.
.
I agree fully with the reservations expressed about the unreliability
and potential dangers of memories and testimony elicited under hypnosis.
Many subjects do strive to please the hypnotist (others try equally hard
to challenge him or her) so that memories may be unintentionally suggested
or imagined and such memories may seem so real to the subject that they
become very convincing when recalled in a court room. I would imagine
that such a witness would pass a lie detector test without difficulty.
.
Past lives regression I regard as blatant nonsense. When people
insist that such memories, even if inaccurate, must be evidence of reincarnation,
I reply by suggesting to a subject that he has just returned from the planet
Venus with a young Venusian girl who speaks no English but who has taught
him Venusian. The two will then proceed to invent a language (mostly,
but not always entirely, gibberish) and give confident answers and translations
to all manner of questions about life on Venus. I'm not sure that
the demonstration is terribly effective with the reincarnation kooks, or
that they even see my point, but it seems abundantly plain to me that past
lives remembered under hypnosis are fully as unlikely as that the couple
in front of me were really on Venus last week.
.
I would ordinarily place absolutely no importance on the reports
of hypnotized subjects. Most subjects remember little if anything
that happened. Others remember almost everything and many, I think,
remember part and think they remember everything. The best and what seems
to me the most accurate report I have ever seen is contained in the autobiography
of one of my subjects, the late Richard Feynman's, "Surely You're Joking,
Mr. Feynman".
.
Nobel Laureate Feynman, a man with serious credentials for both
skepticism and critical thinking, reported that while he was fully aware
of the absurdity of the suggestions I had given him and was convinced that
he would not comply with them, somehow found himself complying and
concluded that that was what hypnosis is.
.
Few people ever think they were hypnotized. To make that point
to a class of college students, I once turned to a member of the
class, Doug Smith, and asked him if he had ever been hypnotized.
Doug was a super subject and everyone in the class had observed him when
hypnotized. While I confidently expected him to insist that he had
never been hypnotized, Doug surprised me by answering "Yes". I asked
him how he knew and after a moment's reflection he replied: "I guess
because of the things people have told me."
.
Mentioning Doug reminds me of another super subject, Ted Hansen,
who provided dramatic testimony to the reality of the mystery. Ted
was fond of cats and I had several times given him the post-hypnotic suggestion
that upon awakening he would be petting a cat. One evening I decided
not to remove the suggestion but to simply wait and see how long it would
take to wear off. For more than half an hour Ted sat comfortably
and contentedly in a chair stroking the cat before turning to me and, as
he hefted the imaginary cat, saying: "This is mind boggling.
I see the cat. I feel the weight of the cat. I feel the warmth
of the cat. I feel the texture of the cat's fur. I feel the
moistness of the cat's nose. And yet I know there is no cat."
.
Is it necessary for the subject to "believe" in order for hypnosis
to work? I don't think so. It seems that with some subjects
we communicate only with the subconscious while with others there is simultaneous
communication with both the conscious and the subconscious. I assume
that the former remember nothing of what is said while the latter remember
some or all. With subjects of the latter kind I may give the post-hypnotic
suggestion that when I touch my mouth they will be thirsty. When I touch
my mouth a typical response is: "Oh, no. It didn't work with
me. I wasn't hypnotized. I know that you said when you touched
your mouth I would be thirsty. It didn't work with me. But,
damn, I'm thirsty. But it doesn't have anything to do with you touching
your mouth; I'm really thirsty."
.
And I think they are really thirsty. Just as I think the warts
and migraine headaches really disappear and concentration and relaxation
really improve and compulsions to eat or smoke or bite the nails really
diminish.
.
To write it all off as "merely suggestion" seems to me to miss the
point. I think it not "merely suggestion". I think it's all suggestion.
I think that's what hypnosis is. And I think a lot of other things--acupuncture
(which I frequently duplicate; using my index finger instead of a needle),
placebos, transcendental meditation and witchcraft among them--are also
suggestion...or hypnosis.
.
I also think there's quite a bit of suggestion (or hypnosis...or
witchcraft, if you prefer) in modern medicine. Many nurses who have
patients in intense pain but to whom they can give no more morphine, sometimes
administer injections of distilled water and find that the suggestion of
a morphine injection is often as effective as morphine itself. And
several pharmacists have told me that they fill many, many prescriptions
for placebos. "Take one before every meal"...and the suggestion is
clearly implied that it will make you feel better...and sometimes it does.
.
Some medical doctors have told me that they would consider it a
violation of medical ethics to prescribe a placebo. Yet the efficacy
of placebos--for some people, for some things--is proven by a staggering
amount of carefully documented data. Placebos are cheap and have
no side effects. Why not use them? Because they don't always
work? What medication does? I feel certain that hypnosis will
remove warts and sometimes cure or relieve or prevent colds. Both
are viral infections. What about other viruses? I have no idea
but certainly think investigation is warranted.
.
I have a self-hypnosis tape (I call it a relaxation tape) that thousands
of people use for a wide variety of purposes: smoking, diet, stress,
migraine headaches and other pain, nail biting, insomnia, complexion, childbirth,
phobias, etc. I will not bore nor strain the credulity of SCICOP
members with a recitation of
some of the benefits claimed. The tape is available from me.
.
Since I value skepticism so highly, I tend to be cheered, almost,
by the skepticism of my audiences (why can't they be equally skeptical
of such rubbish as astrology, ESP, reincarnation and water witching?).
What they see is so very hard to believe that most audiences tend to explain
it as "acting" or "faking".
.
I seldom encounter faking and if they're acting then my suggestion
to any Hollywood talent scouts out there is to follow me around for a while.
What talent they will discover. I recently gave a young man a pair of "X-ray
glasses" that permitted him to see through people's clothing so that everyone
appeared nude. I momentarily turned my attention to another subject
and when I turned around found that the subject with the glasses had walked
to the front of the stage, sat down with his legs hanging over the edge
of the stage and was ogling the audience with lascivious and unconcealed
delight. I asked him to return to his chair and as he stood up I
saw immediately why he had sat down. He was wearing tight jeans and
was in what must have been a most uncomfortable predicament. Faking?
Acting? Please.
.
Macoy
Email macoy@nmax.net
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