Oddworld Forums - What are your thoughts on Hypnosis?

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What are your thoughts on Hypnosis?

Hypnosis?

I admit that I am terrified of hypnotism. But I got the idea for this topic when I invited a couple of friends over. We all thought it would be a funny idea to try and hypnotise me (I was with friends and I was in my own home. Not being hypnotised by a stranger while in town). I was willing because it was just for a laugh really. I was successfully hypnotised (One of my friends did the induction and the other did the suggestions).

I was hypnotised into falling into a trance everytime someone said 'blue rose' (When I was awake) and another funny thing was when I went downstairs, I would tell everyone that I was 'part chicken' and I ended up doing that.

The suggestions were taken away from me before they left but it was all a laugh.

What are your thoughts on it?

I HAVE PSYCHIC ABILITIES.

I usually fight would-be hypnotists with psi-balls. Or I make them smell my balls. I can't remember which.

Ghost: Lmao
OANST: Nice to meet you

Lmao to you too, chap.

Interestingly, you cannot hypnotise someone into doing something they would never do under normal circumstances, such as give you all their money, or kill themselves or others. Their will is far too strong.

Like in the Curse of the Jade Scorpion.....

I never really had much to do with hypnosis, but it seems like an interesting subject. Not that I'd be very willing to actually...yeah.

I read a book on hypnosis a while back. Stage hypnotists do a test on their volunteers to see who are the attention-seeking schmucks who will follow instructions; they're not in the control of the hypnotist, they're just overactors.

This may sound stubborn, but refuse believe to hypnosis works until it's preformed successfully on me. I don't care what other people say, even those who have the truth, I simply do not believe it to be possible.

Gruzelier and his colleagues studied brain activity using an fMRI while subjects completed a standard cognitive exercise, called the Stroop task.

The team screened subjects before the study and chose 12 that were highly susceptible to hypnosis and 12 with low susceptibility. They all completed the task in the fMRI under normal conditions and then again under hypnosis.

Throughout the study, both groups were consistent in their task results, achieving similar scores regardless of their mental state. During their first task session, before hypnosis, there were no significant differences in brain activity between the groups.

But under hypnosis, Gruzelier found that the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus than the weakly susceptible subjects. This area of the brain has been shown to respond to errors and evaluate emotional outcomes.

The highly susceptible group also showed much greater brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex than the weakly susceptible group. This is an area involved with higher level cognitive processing and behaviour.

The full article can be found here.

i dont know if its true, but i heard that some people that go under successful hypnosis end up having black-out's later on in life.

not scare-mongering, but i think a bloke who was hypnotised on telly had black-out's a few years later, the only link being the hypnosis.

That could be due to hypnosis. Or it could be entirely unrelated, people get blackouts for all sorts of reasons, and I don't see that it would have anything to do with a brief period of induced suggestibility many years before.

i have an opinion of hypnosis but the people how care already know it...

Hypnosis is real that's for sure. However, testimony in terms of being brought into consciousness based on hypnotherapy such as information revealing abuse in people's very early childhood or other stuff, tends to not be so reliable because of suggestion from a therapist or hypnotist can heavily influence such vague or fragmented memories. Furthermore, long term memory does not usually start creating episodic content until language skills are to some extent developed too. Average onset of clear childhood memories that can be clearly recalled years later is around 4-6 years old. Granted there are always exceptions to these norms such as major life changing events or hospitalization, etc.

That's a good point, Al. I read in an article that hypnosis does not actually improve memory recall but it makes people more confident of their inaccurate memories.