The best way to assess someone's susceptibility to hypnotism is simply to hypnotise them and see what happens. There are various defined scales - such as the Stanford hypnotic susceptibility scale - that rank a person's hypnotisability based on their response to a dozen suggested tasks under hypnosis - from feeling your hands being drawn together as if by magnets, to feeling your arm being lifted by a balloon. A strong indicator of how someone will perform on such tests is simply how susceptible they are to suggestion under normal circumstances.
People who lose themselves so completely in movies or books that they believe the characters to be real, who go into a kind of trance when doing endurance sports, or who had imaginary friends as children, are usually hypnotisable. The motivation to be hypnotised also helps. We are now able to see that the brain scans of people genuinely hypnotised are different from those pretending and there is some reliable researchome studies hint that our hypnotisability is deeply ingrained. When 50 people were re-tested on the Stanford scale after a 25-year gap, their scores stayed remarkably consistent. James Horton at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has even found physical brain differences: highly hypnotisable participants had a 30 per cent bigger rostrum, a part of the brain thought to help focus attention. A few studies have shown that hypnotisability may be hereditary, and some researchers - including Amir Raz of McGill University in Montreal, Canada - are trying to track the genes involved. Hysterical blindness (the person cannot see but has no perceptible damage to their eyes or brain), hysterical paralysis (an inability to move a part of the body despite having no physical injury - the same limb may move while the person is asleep), prosopagnosia (an inability to recognise faces despite having good sight), alien limb syndrome (the feeling that an arm or leg is acting of its own accord), visual neglect (total lack of awareness of half of the visual field) and Capgras syndrome (a delusional belief that a loved one has been replaced by an imposter) are all conditions that may be recreated in healthy people using hypnosis. Many of them are somatoform disorders, in which people develop physical symptoms in the absence of an identifiable physical cause. All are rare, and when they occur it is often in people with other problems, such as depression or schizophrenia, making them hard to study. Anyone know anything about this kind of stuff rather than the routines of 'The Amazing Foreskin' (whomever) conning audiences in theatres - I use a pseudonym as I nicking this particular joker for fraud involving an old lady? There is no doubt the brain lights up under hypnosis and I wonder whether some of this might move our notions of consciousness and abilities with it (though one can see dangers). --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/minds-eye?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
