Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (7 page)

But we are not all susceptible to the same degree. In the Introduction, I said that there were three key components of hypnosis: absorption (or focal attention), dissociation and suggestibility. ‘Highs' – highly hypnotizable people – are simply those who are good at all three of these things. The first faculty, the ability to be absorbed or imaginatively involved in tasks, is interesting. It means – and this is important – that hypnotizable people are those who are good at deploying their attention. We can all be put into a light trance, but in about 10 per cent of cases it would take so many repeated attempts to do so that it is just not worth the effort, and so we can say that for all practical purposes about 10 per cent of the population are unhypnotizable. About 30 per cent can readily enter a light trance; about 35 per cent can go into a medium trance; and about 25 per cent can go into a deep trance (though others place this figure as low as 5 per cent).

Academics make use of ‘susceptibility scales', multi-question tests to assess hypnotizability by both objective and subjective standards. I know of eighteen of these scales (the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, etc.), and I don't propose to weigh up their pros and cons, except to
say that one of their chief benefits is that they have given some stability to psychological experiments on hypnosis. You can make up groups of subjects who score the same on the same scale of measurement, prepare control groups of ‘highs' or ‘lows' and so on.

If a hypnotist insists on using just a single technique, he will sometimes fail, because not everyone is susceptible to the same technique. He has to be flexible. Even reluctant patients, with whom all other procedures have failed, may be put under by a confusional technique, in which, for example, a lot of suggestions are given in rapid succession about different parts of the body feeling light or heavy. I will briefly look at other ways of overcoming resistance in a later chapter, when I talk about the work of Milton Erickson, because this was one of his special gifts.

It is often said that children between the ages of seven and fourteen are more susceptible to hypnotism than adults, with a peak at around nine or ten years of age. There may also be some truth in the modern perception that fantasy-prone individuals, those who are capable of losing themselves in a book or a film or a private fantasy, and who played highly imaginative games when they were children, are more susceptible than the rest. Hypnosis involves dissociation, and fantasy-prone people find it easier than the rest to dissociate, to separate off a part of themselves into imaginary zones, while the outside world becomes less real.

There does seem to be good anecdotal evidence that it is hard to hypnotize people who are insane. The more a subject can concentrate on a single sensory input, such as the hypnotist's voice, without getting distracted, the easier the induction of hypnosis will be. This perhaps explains why crazy people are hard to hypnotize. But don't worry: if you aren't a good hypnotic subject, that doesn't mean you're crazy!

Hypnosis is not a single phenomenon; it may well be a combination of a number of things, including the ability to fantasize and play roles, that makes a person more susceptible. If it has this complex nature, it would be foolish to look for simple correlates between susceptibility and personality types. In Victorian times, people were convinced that women were easier to hypnotize than men. Recent tests have not confirmed this finding; it was due to
nineteenth-century prejudice about women being the weaker sex, along with the notion that hypnosis involves the dominance of will.

Contrary to the popular view that you have to be stupid to be hypnotized, there is evidence that hypnotizability is correlated with intelligence, or at least with the ability to concentrate. But the idea is put to great comic effect in the 1949 film
Abbot and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff
. Costello is suspected of murdering people in the hotel where he works as a bellhop. Karloff, a mystic, tries to hypnotize him, but Costello is just too stupid to be hypnotized. Self-esteem is actually a more important variable than intelligence: those with a low self-esteem are going to be harder to hypnotize, presumably because they are either more apprehensive, or less curious about exploring themselves and less willing to be treated.

On the whole, then, it has turned out to be hard for psychologists, try as they might, to correlate susceptibility with personality types. It used to be thought that hypnotizable people are more in touch with their right brain than the rest of us. Briefly (except for left-handed people), the right side of the brain governs the left side of the body, and spatial and holistic functions, while the left side governs the right side of the body, and verbal, logical, linear thinking. We draw actively on the left side, but have to surrender, as it were, to the right side. One might expect an artist to rely more on the right side of the brain, and a university professor on the left. For most of us, the left side is dominant. Some recent experiments on people who are good hypnotic subjects have indicated that they are significantly better at right-brain tasks than non-hypnotized people.

However, more is going on in the brain during hypnosis apart from the shift to the non-dominant hemisphere. This shift does not seem to occur in all cases, but more in those who are highly hypnotizable. Moreover, the dominant hemisphere is also activated during hypnosis: which hemisphere is activated depends probably on the kind of task the hypnotized person is being set. This suggests that hemisphere-shifting may not be an explanation in itself, but part of the general capacity of highly hypnotizable people to shift from one state to another – to dissociate. Work is still in progress on the relations between brain activity and hypnosis. For instance, early research seemed to suggest that hypnotizable subjects were those
who could easily enter the alpha state. Brainwaves in the alpha spectrum (8–13Hz) are ‘the noise the brain makes when it is alert but doing little' – for instance, when someone is awake but has her eyes closed. But now it seems that the slower theta rhythm (4–7Hz), associated with a deeper level of drowsiness, is more typical of hypnotizable subjects and perhaps of hypnosis in general.

Experimental findings have suggested that people can get better at being hypnotized, as if it were a skill that could be learnt. But in the experience of working hypnotherapists this is due to the overcoming of initial resistance. It is not so much that their patients learn a task as that they become less fearful and suspicious of the therapist and his practice. Another view – a powerful and interesting theory – suggests that we are all easier to hypnotize when our natural bodily rhythms are in relaxing mode.

Is it possible to resist hypnotism, perhaps as Kim did in Rudyard Kipling's novel, published in 1901, by reciting multiplication tables to himself to keep his mind off the hallucination he was being asked to see? Of course it is. You have to want to be hypnotized, otherwise it just isn't going to work. There are ways of overcoming resistance; as I said, Milton Erickson was a master at this. But in order for him to have successfully overcome resistance, the client must have unconsciously wanted to be hypnotized, however much his conscious mind was protesting.

Sometimes resistance to hypnotism can take quite extreme forms. On a famous occasion in 1978, during the World Chess Championship, defector Victor Korchnoi claimed that Russians from the camp of his opponent, Anatoly Karpov, were trying to hypnotize him from a distance, to put him off his game. But this was probably paranoia – a probability that is increased by the consideration that Korchnoi took to wearing one-way reflecting spectacles, to deflect any rays that they might be beaming at him, and to carrying a Geiger counter to detect such rays! Karpov won anyway.

Hypnotic phenomena can be divided into various categories. First, there are alterations in involuntary muscles: your breathing may deepen, your stomach gurgle, your eyes water, a few muscles twitch, your heart and pulse rate increase or decrease. You will feel listless, and your arms and legs may feel heavy. These phenomena are easy to understand. They are features of the light trance, or simply of relaxation. But as the trance deepens, more extraordinary phenomena begin to manifest: alterations in voluntary muscles, alterations to the senses, delusions of the senses and certain psychological phenomena. These phenomena are not unique to hypnosis by any stretch of the imagination: they can all occur spontaneously, or may be produced by drugs, for instance. But they do all occur through hypnosis, and have played an important part in the story of hypnosis through the ages.

Catalepsy
is the state when a muscle or group of muscles becomes rigid or hard to move. Many hypnotists say, quite early on in the induction: ‘You cannot open your eyes. However hard you try, your eyelids are as if glued shut.' This eye-closure test is one of the ways in which a hypnotist can tell whether the induction has been successful. The muscles of the eyelids have become cataleptic. Full-body catalepsy is when the whole body goes rigid, and this is what stage hypnotists exploit in the trick I've already described called the ‘human plank'. In between, it is possible for the hypnotist to suggest catalepsy of the arm or leg or whatever. The opposite effect, abnormal plasticity, is also sometimes induced.

Other alterations in the voluntary muscles are
relaxation
, as a natural result of settling comfortably into the hypnotic environment, and
increased muscular performance
. The famous British psychologist
J.A. Hadfield tested the strength of three men under normal, waking conditions. Their average grip was 101lbs. He then hypnotized them, and told them that they felt weak; their average grip fell to only 29 lbs. Still under hypnosis, he suggested to them that they were very strong – and their average grip rose to 142lbs. They had been able to increase their strength by about 40 per cent. The applications of this to sports hypnosis are plain. Although plenty of other researchers have been able to test this phenomenon, it does not seem to be an invariant phenomenon of hypnosis, and many psychologists now believe that any extra strength is given by the subject's increased motivation, rather than by anything intrinsic to hypnosis itself. However, in favour of trance states enhancing such abilities are reports that entranced shamans can perform astonishing feats of strength.

There are two main kinds of alteration which can affect any of the senses. First, they can become super-acute. The technical name for this is
hyperaesthesia
. Sometimes the effects are quite remarkable, and may explain some of the apparent paranormal phenomena so beloved of nineteenth-century researchers. A hypnotized subject, for instance, may appear to be able to detect words written on a piece of paper he has never seen, when it is being looked at by someone else; what he is actually doing is reading the reflection of the words in the other person's eyes. Stage hypnotists used to take handkerchiefs from several members of the audience, shuffle them up and get their subject to return them to their owners: perhaps the subject was using a heightened sense of smell. Tiny differences in temperature have been accurately noted, and differences of weight as small as a few grains have been detected. What is remarkable about all this is not the ability in itself. If you blindfold yourself and walk around a strange room, you will find that in a few days you can begin to use your hearing to tell where the obstacles are. So hyperaesthesia is within the capability of anyone. But what is remarkable is the speed with which hypnotized subjects gain the ability. Perhaps this is a result of the narrow focus of attention.

The other important changes to the senses are
analgesia
and
anaesthesia
. The first term is generally used for local loss of sensation, and the second for unconsciousness, with its byproduct of total loss of physical sensation. This phenomenon is familiar from TV and stage shows. We all know that a hypnotized subject can be pricked with a pin or burnt with a cigarette and not feel a thing. The stage uses are obvious, as are the medical ones, particularly in the days before reliable anaesthetics, or with patients who are allergic to anaesthetics, or who prefer to avoid chemicals. Before inducing anaesthesia, a hypnotist will probably test the patient's susceptibility by inducing what is called ‘glove anaesthesia' – that is, anaesthesia restricted to the hand – or ‘sleeve anaesthesia' on the whole arm. This ability not to feel pain is probably the freakiest and, in a medical context, the most important of the phenomena of hypnosis, and I'll return to it from time to time in this book.

Delusions of the senses are
hallucinations
. Hallucinations may be either positive or negative. A positive hallucination is perceiving something that isn't there; a negative hallucination is failing to perceive something that is there. Both kinds of hallucination are easily induced by the hypnotist's suggestions. Again, this is a favourite of stage hypnotists: ‘You are holding a bunch of flowers. Why don't you go and offer it to that girl over there?' Hallucinations can sometimes be induced by post-hypnotic suggestion too. Their chief therapeutic use is to induce abreaction, the cathartic emotional release I've mentioned before. Suppose a patient is afraid of spiders; hallucinating spiders may force him to face this fear and overcome it. In Ambrose Bierce's ‘The Realm of the Unreal' (1890) hypnotized people see things and even whole episodes that never took place. Although the phenomenon of hypnotic hallucination is well established, it requires the operator's suggestion, and cannot happen as instantaneously and as unprompted as in Bierce's short story.

The most important psychological change – so important that it is often considered definitional of hypnosis – is
hypersuggestibility
. In fact, since very few hypnotic phenomena are spontaneous, but only
occur at the suggestion of the hypnotist, you could say that most of them depend on increased suggestibility.