This article first appeared in Issue 19 of our digital magazine CURIOUS.
Nobody on stage has ever been hypnotised in the history of the world.
– The Amazing Kreskin, veteran mentalist and showman, 1994
It was midnight, in the Palace of Westminster, UK in December 1994, and hypnotism was in trouble.
“Stage hypnotism has been a long-standing concern of mine since I was alerted to its dangers by one of my constituents,” announced Colin Pickthall, then British Member of Parliament for West Lancashire, on the floor of the House of Commons.
“Some years ago, her daughter[…] was hypnotised at a club,” he told the assembled lawmakers. “At the end of the trance, she was told to come out of it as if she had had a 10,000-volt electric shock. Her husband took her home in a somewhat dazed state, and five hours later she died.”
Was this a case of death by hypnosis? The MPs were convinced – enough so to prompt a Home Office investigation into whether laws surrounding the practice should be reformed. But others found the idea laughable: “The whole concept [of hypnosis] is a fantasy,” University of Liverpool psychology professor Graham Wagstaff said at the time. “A cultural invention.”
In fact, Wagstaff went even further. Not only was stage hypnosis bunk, but so were the practice’s supposed therapeutic benefits. Hypnosis for pain relief, he said, was probably down to an individual patient’s high pain threshold rather than some psychological brain hack; behavioral changes induced by a hypnotist were the product of wishful thinking and the desire to show off, nothing more.
Three decades later, and we’re still not sure who was closer to the truth.
You are getting sleepy
Let’s be clear: hypnotism, when performed by a trained practitioner who knows their patient, will not kill you. But equally, there’s some pretty good evidence that it’s more than just the result of exhibitionists looking for an easy answer.
“Hypnosis remains among the most widely misrepresented practices in psychology and allied disciplines,” wrote experimental psychologists Steven Jay Lynn, Madeline Stein, and Devin Terhune in the journal BJPsych Advances last year. “In particular, there is a pronounced discrepancy between how hypnosis is used in clinical settings and understood within contemporary scientific research and how it is portrayed in popular culture.”
So, how is the practice understood in science? Well, to be honest, science isn’t exactly sure.
“For over a hundred years, this question has been hotly debated,” wrote therapist Claire Jack in a 2022 article for Psychology Today. “’State’ theorists believe that there is a unique state of hypnosis and that achieving this state is integral to a positive therapeutic outcome. ‘Non-state’ theorists, on the other hand, believe that people ‘take on’ the role of someone who is hypnotised, in much the same way as someone takes on a variety of other roles in their lives.”
It’s not that anybody is play-acting, Jack stressed; the person being “hypnotized” really does believe it’s happening to them – but non-state theorists would argue that any effects they experience will be due to more prosaic factors than some altered state of consciousness. As Lynn, Stein, and Terhune put it: “[T]here is no robust neurophysiological evidence to demonstrate that hypnosis is a special or unique state […] It is more parsimonious to consider hypnosis as a set of procedures in which verbal suggestions are used to modulate awareness, perception and cognition, rather than to unnecessarily invoke ‘special states’.”
When I click my fingers
Whatever the truth of the matter, one thing is for sure: hypnotism is more than just a trick.
“We identified three brain regions whose activity and functional connectivity change during hypnosis,” wrote a team led by Stanford Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences David Spiegel in one 2016 paper. “The findings were evident in the two hypnosis conditions among high but not low hypnotizables, and they were different from the memory and rest conditions.”
Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes.
Under hypnosis, they had discovered, activity in a region known as the dorsal anterior cingulate – part of the network in the brain responsible for noticing things – is decreased. So, too, are connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network – likely representing a disconnect between the hypnotized person’s actions and their awareness of those actions, Spiegel suggested.
“In hypnosis, you’re so absorbed that you’re not worrying about anything else,” he said in a statement at the time. “When you’re really engaged in something, you don’t really think about doing it – you just do it.”
Meanwhile, connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula – an area of the brain usually linked to more emotional or sensory functions – increased. Altogether, it paints a picture of a brain happy to go along with external suggestions, and not too concerned with spending time or energy being self-conscious about it – and empirically not of somebody merely strutting around for attention.
“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,” Spiegel said. “In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”
You will squawk like a chicken
It’s more than just brain scans that hint at the authenticity of hypnotism. While many of us would likely balk at a surgeon who suggested we forgo general anesthetic during surgery in favor of hypnosis, evidence suggests that adding the latter option may be a good option in terms of pain relief and healing time.
“It helps patients to reduce anxiety and stress, to alleviate pain and also to promote recovery after the procedure,” said Mareike Holler, a student at Jena University Hospital and part of a team performing a huge meta-analysis into the potential benefits of hypnosis as a surgical intervention.
“In the evaluation of the studies, hypnosis proved to be an effective intervention,” she confirmed.
Should doctors be faced with a patient whose suggestibility to hypnotism is low, there are even peer-reviewed methods to increase hypnotizability using deep-brain stimulation.
Meanwhile, specialist hypnotherapy has been recognized for decades now as one of the most efficacious treatment options available for irritable bowel syndrome, alleviating symptoms in more than half of those with the condition in one meta-analysis. It can be extremely effective for relieving chronic pain, too – and should doctors be faced with a patient whose suggestibility to hypnotism is low, there are even peer-reviewed methods to increase hypnotizability using deep-brain stimulation.
“As a clinical psychologist, my personal vision is that, in the future, patients come in, they go into a quick, non-invasive brain stimulation session, then they go in to see their psychologist,” Afik Faerman, a clinical neuropsychology postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and lead researcher on the latter project, said in a statement. “Their benefit from treatment could be much higher.”
And you’re in the room
It’s undeniable, then, that hypnotism is “real” in the sense that it produces observable, measurable changes in the brain and body. But, the skeptics among us may protest, so do sugar pills. Could this not all simply be a manifestation of the placebo effect?
Short answer? Yes, it could. Long answer? It’s… complicated. After all, it’s certainly well accepted that hypnotism has much in common with the placebo response – both rely on manipulating a patient’s expectancies in order to provide a therapeutic effect. And despite the popular image of placebos requiring deception to work, so-called “open-label placebos” – in which the patient is outright told they are receiving a sugar pill – have repeatedly been shown to be effective at treating various illnesses.
So what, if anything, does separate the two?
Potentially not much. With the placebo response, “an ineffective drug or therapeutic treatment is beneficial purely because we believe it will work,” write Terhune and Lynn in The Conversation. “In this light, perhaps hypnosis isn’t so bizarre after all. Seemingly sensational responses to hypnosis may just be striking instances of the powers of suggestion and beliefs to shape our perception and behavior.”
“What we think will happen morphs seamlessly into what we ultimately experience.”
Click.
CURIOUS magazine is a digital magazine from IFLScience featuring interviews, experts, deep dives, fun facts, news, book excerpts, and much more. Issue 22 is out now.
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