Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (48 page)

The Hilgards wrote in 1975:

In summary, hypnotic phenomena appear to have a rather robust quality; they survive repeated attacks upon them and upon the manner in which they are conceptualized. Continuing controversy is valuable in that it demands ever better proof to replace conventional lore. The study of hypnosis is strengthened as it survives attacks by its critics and makes advances through critical, systematic research free from prior commitments to one or another position on controversial issues.

I can only agree.

All sceptical and positivist positions seem to me to be liable to the same logical objection that I raised earlier. The fact that some people can reproduce the effects of hypnotic phenomena without being hypnotized, by the use of their imagination or whatever, does not disprove the reality of hypnotism at all; it just proves that the same or similar phenomena can be produced by other means as well (though, as I said before, I think they should distinguish between deep and light trances). In 1844 Edgar Allan Poe wrote, at the beginning of his short story ‘Mesmeric Revelation': ‘Whatever doubt may still envelop the
rationale
of mesmerism, its startling
facts
are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt are your mere doubters by profession – an unprofitable and disreputable tribe.' Nothing has changed.

But I feel that I have given the doubters short shrift in this
section. Their arguments are too many, and too scientifically sophisticated, to be reproduced in this book or easily summarized. They often appear to have reason on their side: ‘The view expressed in this chapter is not that all hypnotic behaviours are “faked”, that hypnosis does not “work” or that hypnotherapy is useless. It is rather that the processes responsible for hypnotic effects are more readily explicable by reference to familiar psychological processes than to a unique hypnotic process [i.e. a trance state].' There is indeed a great deal of ambiguity in trying to decide whether there is such a thing as a hypnotic trance, or whether ‘familiar psychological processes' such as compliance, role-playing and so on are enough to explain all the phenomena. But let me repeat what I see as the central point: this ambiguity is precisely a reflection of the ambiguity sensed by the hypnotized subject himself, and referred to in
Chapter 1
as ‘parallel awareness'. I feel that the definition of the hypnotic trance should include a reference to this feeling. Both the doubters and the state theorists are right.

Since Erickson, the most prominent spokesman in North America who has resisted this broad alliance of doubters is Ernest Hilgard. Hilgard regards hypnotic phenomena as being linked in a way which may fall short of being an actual, distinct ASC, but certainly makes up a ‘domain' of a particular kind, or a ‘special process'. Neodissociationism, the theory he has developed to account for hypnotic phenomena (among others), is quite a mouthful of a word, but quite easy to understand, at least at a basic level. (There are, though, certain differences of opinion between even those scientists who call themselves neodissociationists, which I will have to more or less ignore here.) Neodissociationism, then, ‘postulates a hierarchy of control systems operating at any one time in a given individual, and sees hypnosis as modifying the hierarchical arrangement of these controls, so that some become segregated (dissociated) from others'.

We all have the ability to function in our lives in an infinite number of ways, large and small. The kinds of example Hilgard gives range from trivial responses such as brushing a fly off the face, to longer-lasting tasks such as writing a letter, to more complex and open-ended activities such as raising a family and holding down a job. At any given moment, some of these abilities, which he calls ‘subsystems', will be active, others latent, and a ‘central control structure' is needed to monitor and marshal the hierarchy of subsystems. Dissociation is the separation of subsystems from one another, or from the central control system. This is no big deal. We all (except for President Jimmy Carter in the famous joke) have the ability to do more than one thing at the same time. Hypnotic induction prepares us for dissociation by making it seem as though one part of us is acting beyond the control of another: our eyes, for instance, seem to close ‘by themselves'. Then we pass over ‘executive function' to the hypnotist. So hypnotic induction brings about such dissociation, leading to lethargy, submission to the hypnotist's suggestions, involuntary behaviours and all the other phenomena of hypnotism.

We have already met Hilgard earlier in the book as the proposer of the important and interesting theory that we have a hidden observer inside us which monitors our activities and can register pain, for instance, even in a hypnotically anaesthetized arm. We can now see how this fits in with his broader views. The hidden observer is precisely the central control system of the human mind. It observes all the various neurological subsystems. Hypnotic analgesia is to be explained as the hidden observer diverting the pain behind an ‘amnesia-like barrier' before it reaches consciousness; it is still accessible to the hidden observer itself, but not to the conscious awareness of the subject. In simpler terms, normally conscious experiences are concealed, but not lost – and so they are still noticeable by the hidden observer.

An easy way to understand the contrast between Hilgard's views and those of the doubters is this. According to the anti-state theorists, ‘hypnosis' is
distraction
: you do really feel the pain, but you distract your attention away from it and so are able to cope with it. According to Hilgard, however, hypnosis is
disattention
: the act of focusing attention which constitutes hypnotic induction creates dissociation or a new source of attention.

Now, it is clear even to a layman that a great deal of this is highly speculative, and needs a lot of extra work before it can be regarded as certain. Hilgard himself is now too old to undertake such work (he was born in 1904, but is still alive as I write), and so it will have to wait for future generations of psychologists and neurologists. His opponents gleefully pounce on the fact that in order to study the hidden observer, Hilgard has to suggest to his subjects that there is such a thing monitoring the pain or whatever. In other words, they say, the hidden observer is only elicited by such a suggestion, and doesn't exist in its own right. They have, of course, pinpointed a weakness in Hilgard's experimental methods, but they do not have it all their own way. In the first place, Hilgard finds that only about 50 per cent of his subjects respond with hidden-observer phenomena; since hypnotized subjects are supposed to obey the suggestions of the hypnotist, why don't all of them come up with a hidden observer? Secondly, there are other kinds of experiments which point towards the hidden observer, experiments which do not rely on the operator eliciting the phenomenon. In one experiment, for instance, it was found that hypnotized subjects who negatively hallucinate that a chair isn't there still avoid bumping into it. In other words they do still see it – even though they don't see it! In another experiment subjects were found to have the appropriate physiological responses to an electrical shock, even though they didn't feel anything. One subject even reported, about herself: ‘I don't feel anything, but
she
seems uncomfortable.' Whatever it is that enables a hypnotized subject to avoid a chair and think of herself in the third person might as well be called the hidden observer.

Hilgard himself has famously pointed out that from the experimental point of view it makes little difference whether or not there is such a thing as the hypnotic state: there are certain behaviours that are typically manifested by those who are hypnotizable and not by those who are unhypnotizable. He chooses to call this set of behaviours the ‘domain of hypnosis' rather than a state, but this makes little practical difference. If the kind of dissociation he is talking about cannot be described as an altered state of consciousness, I don't know what can.

The writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) had an intense interest in ASCs. A number of his novels show this, but most readers will
probably be more aware of his experiments with the hallucinogenic drug mescalin, written up in
The Doors of Perception
(1954). He used to spend hours in a self-induced trance state he called Deep Reflection. In this state, he could function in the world, but was perfectly amnesic afterwards for the things he had said and done. At a famous meeting in 1950 with Milton Erickson in Huxley's home in Los Angeles, Erickson hypnotized him and he displayed all the usual features of a deep trance state, which was in fact identical to his Deep Reflective state. He was not task-motivated: he had nothing to prove. He was not play-acting: why would he have done so? There is no reason not to think he was in a distinct state of consciousness we can call the hypnotic trance – and therefore there is no reason not to think that others can go there too.

So far I have argued, on philosophical grounds (so to speak), that there is more evidence in favour of there being a special state of hypnosis, and that the doubters are on shaky ground. The arguments on both sides had to be philosophical, because there were no objective reasons for preferring a state theory to a non-state theory. This is no longer the case. Neurophysiological research, starting especially in the 1980s and gaining momentum all the time, has come up with objective evidence that something is going on inside the brains of hypnotized subjects which does not happen to non-hypnotized subjects.

The technology involved is amazingly complex. Gone are the days of simple EEG scans, which were notoriously a blunt instrument. For instance, it is possible for someone under the influence of LSD to register a normal EEG. As anyone knows who has ever taken LSD in a sufficiently high dosage, you are definitely not in a normal state of mind. Researchers now study event-related potentials (ERPs). When the brain is stimulated – say, by seeing a tree – a train of electrical responses can be registered in the appropriate part of the
brain, showing not only the brain's initial reception of the stimulus (the first glimpse of the tree), but also its continued attention to the stimulus. In addition, there are sophisticated machines called positron emission tomography (PET) scanners, which employ gamma rays to monitor brain activity, by tracing the movement of a radioactive tracer substance injected into the bloodstream. It may sound gruesome, but it works. It shows how much energy is being used by various parts of the brain in a given situation. Using this modern technology, researchers have been able to pinpoint brain activity more precisely than the old EEG technology, and they have come up with some remarkable results.

An experimenter hypnotizes a dozen people, and has a control group of another dozen unhypnotized subjects. He sets them all the same task. Let's say that he tells them to imagine that there is a chair in the room, when there is no such chair. All twenty-four subjects equally report that they can see a chair, but the part of the brain that governs sight is not activated in the unhypnotized subjects, while it is in the hypnotized ones. Conversely, the task they are set involves a negative hallucination: they are not to see a chair, because they imagine a screen between themselves and it. The relevant part of the brains of the hypnotized subjects, but not those who remain unhypnotized, shows a decrease in activity.

In another experiment, the colour areas of the brain were activated when hypnotized subjects were asked to perceive colour both when the colour was really there and when it wasn't. And these areas showed reduced activity when they were asked to see mere grey both when it was there and when there were more vivid colours there. In yet another experiment, the relevant brain activity increased and decreased depending on whether the hypnotized subjects were told to feel or to block the feeling of pain. Or again, high susceptibles show the neurophysiological correlates of habituation to a task, and focused attention, far more and more quickly than subjects who are either merely relaxed or hardly susceptible to hypnosis.

If the brains of hypnotized subjects show such activation, while those of unhypnotized subjects do not, it looks as though there is something real going on. The role-players, complying with the operator's instructions but without being hypnotized, can simulate
the experience verbally, but their brains cannot lie. Doubters, the anti-state theorists, suggest that these neurophysiological results are no more than the traces of the cognitive strategies subjects come up with which enable them to comply with the operator's instructions (to see a chair, or whatever). But this response is looking increasingly implausible. Both the reals and the simulators were responding to the same set of instructions, yet the neurophysiology of only the reals showed the appropriate response. It very much looks as though there is a real ASC which is hypnosis. The Holy Grail of identifiable brain activities which are
unique
to the hypnotic trance still remains elusive, but they're getting closer to it.

If there is such a thing as the hypnotic trance, what kind of a state is it? Milton Erickson's definition, penned for the 1954
Encyclopedia Britannica
, seems admirable. It is

a special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially, and characterized by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary state, a level of awareness termed, for convenience in conceptualization, unconscious or subconscious awareness.

The ASC which is the hypnotic trance is not a state that
makes
anything happen; it is a state
in which
certain things happen – chiefly absorption, dissociation and suggestibility. These phenomena allow direct access to the wisdom (as Erickson would put it) of the unconscious mind.