Understanding Hypnosis and Meditation: Key States of Consciousness

the topic of this lecture is other states of consciousness so the first other state of

consciousness we're going to talk about is something called hypnosis so hypnosis involves a systematic

procedure that increases suggestibility hypnosis has a special near and dear place in my heart because hypnosis is

what event what initially got me interested in psychology when I was a high school student as a

senior I my high school offered an elective psychology course and so I took it I didn't know anything about

psychology at the time the social studies teacher who happened to teach my psychology course in high school was

happened to be a part-time hypnotist so on the side he had a little hypnosis stage show that he would do

and so the class was not very good to to be perfectly honest because the basic uh a typical day would be us coming in he

would tell us to read certain pages while he sat at his desk and read the newspaper that was our typical day in in

that High School psychology class however occasionally he would tell us some stories about his uh his hypnosis

and so for example he would tell us he's horribly unethical stories about he didn't like his mother-in-law very much

when she would come to visit he would sneak into her bedroom at night and try to hypnotize her into leaving early he

told us this story about how he had some sort of minor medical procedure and instead of receiving normal anesthesia

he convinced his surgeon to let him engage in self-hypnosis instead of using anesthesia

so there were all these stories he also did a uh he also did a little demonstration at the end of the semester

where he worked with a couple of students in the class uh during the course of the semester and then put on a

little stage show in front of a few classes at the end of the semester I can't imagine that that sort of thing

would be it would be allowed today but it's what was happening in the what I guess uh early 90s

so anyway so I I thought psychology has a lot to do with hypnosis um when I started college then I was really

interested in learning more about hypnosis because it just seemed really interesting

um when I started taking my first uh intro psychology course of course that you guys are currently taking I quickly

realized that hypnosis uh made up a tiny little fraction of the content we were covering but I fell in love with the

other sorts of ideas and became really interested in Psychology for reasons that have nothing to do with hypnosis

um as you'll see uh gnosis which we'll talk about for the next couple of minutes this will be pretty much all we

talk about hypnosis it just isn't a very big part of of modern psychology so hypnotic susceptibility refers to the

fact that certain individuals differ in their ability to be hypnotized some individuals are very susceptible to

hypnosis others not so much if you've ever gone on a long distance driving trip and as you're driving along

the interstate maybe it's a perfectly straight flat flat bit of Interstate not a lot of traffic around if you find

yourself kind of zoning out as the as the scenery is kind of going by as you're kind of watching the dotted line

in the middle of the the interstate if you find yourself kind of zoning out a little bit that's the sort of thing that

would make it more likely that you would be uh more susceptible to hypnosis right that those sorts of things like zoning

out easily is associated with hypnotic susceptibility there are some basic steps that tend to

be associated with hypnosis the the the particular strategies that hypnotists use differ a bit but for the most part

you see some common elements one of the things is that the person who's being hypnotized is told to focus on what is

being said to them the second thing is usually there's some sort of instruction for them to relax

and to feel tired often they're told to kind of let go and in some way it's communicated to them

that they said that they should accept suggestions relatively easily and they're usually told to use a vivid

imagination in some way there are some effects that can be produced through hypnosis for example

temporary Amnesia appears to be something that can be produced pain relief can happen

I mentioned earlier that my high school teacher would use a hypnosis when when he did this minor medical procedure so

that can happen also for other types of pain relief if people have chronic injuries hypnosis can be helpful in some

cases for those sorts of things it can lead to perceptual distortions um I mentioned that my high school

teacher did a little uh hypnosis display at the end of the semester one of the things he did to this one of his student

volunteers is he had them sit in the chair and imagined that there was a cat that jumped into their lap and so the

person would then start petting this imaginary cat and so there's this idea of perceptual

distortions relaxation can also take place I included this image over here because

this is not an unusual sort of demonstration for hypnosis where this person would have been lying on kind of

a plank or Gurney of some sort while being hypnotized in the hypnotist here puts them in a hypnotic State and then

removes the gurney from underneath them and sure enough they're able to do this amazing thing where they're able to

suspend their body in a perfectly rigid State just with their heels and their neck

um now this looks really impressive and you may think wow that only someone who's hypnotized could ever possibly do

that the reality is that you and I could do this if we wanted to

um there isn't anything magical or special about hypnosis that allows us to do that it's just that it's really

uncomfortable and most of us have never really suspended ourselves in such a way that we realize we can suspend our

bodies like this because it would be very unpleasant and painful but it isn't impossible right you and I could

probably do this right now if we wanted to I don't know about you but I'm not in any sort of particularly strong I don't

feel any sort of strong urge to suspend myself like that some of the things that hypnosis

absolutely cannot do at least there's no empirical support for these things is it doesn't give us any sort of superhuman

abilities right we can't do anything when we're hypnotized that we can't do when we're not hypnotized right it

doesn't unlock any sort of special abilities or anything of that sort one of the problems with hypnosis is

that it's frequently used in context where people want to remember something the problem is that hypnosis does not

improve our memories for events that have taken place now it might create the illusion that we remember things better

than we actually do so people may be more confident in their memories but the accuracy isn't any greater so for

example if you were to hypnotize me and ask me to remember things from like my second grade classroom right you may be

able to hypnotize me and ask me about the seating arrangement of my second grade classroom and maybe I could tell

you oh yes Susie sat here next to me uh Joey sat over there right I could probably come up with a seating chart of

what the classroom looked like however right if you actually went back and looked at the actual seating chart

records of my second grade classroom which I doubt those exist but if you actually went back and looked at them

there's a really good chance that my memory that I would now have more confidence in was not actually accurate

right and so what hypnosis can do is it can increase our confidence in a memory but it doesn't necessarily mean that the

memory is real uh also things like regression to Childhood people may behave in childish

ways when they're hypnotized but it isn't any sort of of true regression and any sort of real sense of the word it's

more play acting than anything also uh hypnosis there is absolutely no support that hypnosis unlocks uh past

lives or anything of that sort um it's another thing that uh popular media sometimes likes to talk about

there's absolutely no empirical support for the existence of past lives and hypnosis that there's nothing at all

suggesting that hypnosis can unlock uh past lives that we may have experienced there's just no support for that

whatsoever one of the things that still isn't clear about hypnosis is to what extent it's a

form of role playing how much is it that people are kind of following through on their expectations

um so for example I've never been hypnotized but I've certainly watched enough television and movies that I have

a sense of what a a hypnosis session looks like either in a therapist's office or on a Vegas stage show right so

I have certain expectations about what these things would be like now it's possible that if I were hypnotized I

might kind of play along with that not not in an overtly deceptive way but just as I become more suggestible maybe part

of is this me kind of going along with what I think I should be experiencing it's also possible that some of what's

going on with hypnosis really is some sort of altered state of consciousness right some sort of dissociative state

that we've kind of stumbled into through these sorts of uh hypnotic suggestions through the process of hypnosis

there's still a lot we simply don't understand about hypnosis I I don't think we'll be talking much

about hypnosis the rest of the semester so this will probably be one of the very few forays we'll have in hypnosis I

guess we'll mention it when we talk a bit more about some of Freud's ideas but we won't go into any sort of detail

about it the other sort of altered state of conscience I wanted to mention very

quickly is meditation meditation is the act of focusing on some sort of single Target usually it's

something like breathing or some sort of repeated sound or visualization to increase awareness of the moment

meditation involves a relaxed yet focused type of awareness meditation uh can can have some nice

benefits a Stress Management for example improving Sleep Quality things like pain management treatment of mood and anxiety

disorders can also be helped with meditation and the idea is that meditation may be unlocking to at least

some extent an altered state of consciousness but again research on meditation is still in the earliest

stages and so over the coming years hopefully we'll understand more and more about what meditation is actually doing