Could you be hypnotised?
As an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of The Pregnant Man and Other Cases from a Hypnotherapist’s Couch, Deirdre Barrett gives us an insight into the benefits of hypnosis and who might be susceptible to hypnotic suggestion
Are there any factors which determine whether you’re more or less susceptible to hypnosis?
Yes. There’s a little bit of research that suggests it may have some biological element. Identical twins seem to have some correlation between their hypnotic susceptibility. We certainly think that a lot of it is learned behaviour or just variables that we don’t completely understand. Susceptibility or absorption – meaning absorption in imaginative involvement – questionnaires are the best predictors. They are basically questions that have to do with experiencing informal trance-like phenomena at other times, such as did you ever have an imaginary companion as a child? When you imagine something, can you picture it very vividly? When you are focused on reading a novel, does someone have to call your name much more loudly or repeatedly before you hear them? It’s about vivid imagination and about tuning out the real environment or sometimes experiencing physiologic sensations such as queasiness, cold or hotness as somebody suggests them or you’re looking at a visual stimulus about them. That sort of scale predicts response to a formal hypnotic induction quite well. People may not realise quite how much they can do this, but in a sense they’re already tending to do that sort of thing to informal suggestions, and the ability is manifesting itself in everyday life in milder ways.
Why do people forget what’s happened during the time they are hypnotised?
Most people do remember what’s happened. If the hypnotist suggests that you will not remember anything, the average person will remember. It’s people in the top ten per cent of hypnotisability that are able to have suggested amnesia. It’s an even smaller group that seems to have spontaneous amnesia, and of those you can hypnotise a person and suggest that they’ll now recall what happened. Then there are a few people that just never recall, and yet presumably something was registering. People sometimes have psychologically caused amnesia to very traumatic sudden events. There are psychological disorders in which people don’t remember certain kinds of material, so it’s something that the human brain is capable of, but that we don’t usually have on-demand control over.
How effective is hypnosis in treating lifelong behavioural issues such as smoking?
Hypnosis is a really dramatically effective treatment for people who are highly hypnotisable. It’s really having no more than a bit of a placebo effect for people of low hypnotisability. For things like habit changes, there are two things that predict how well the treatment will go, and one of them is how hypnotisable the person is, but also motivation, how badly the person wants to quit, how willing they are to apply willpower to this. There may be some people who go into a very light trance and only get a bit of help in resisting urges to smoke, but are nevertheless very motivated in the general sense, who will then quit smoking. However, for the high hypnotisables you really get to tune out the physiologic withdrawal. Just like with pain control, it doesn’t do anything dramatic for most people, but you can tune out extreme pain if you’re a high hypnotisable. I have worked with and seen high-hypnotisable patients who were lifelong smokers who after one session just said they had no desire to smoke. They reported disgust at cigarettes and no cravings.