Hypnotism: Does It Really Work?

Does hypnotism really work? This question has baffled many people for many years; even those of us that have witnessed hypnosis in progress may question whether or not what we were seeing was real. We should also all be familiar with the over-exaggerated image of the hypnotist telling the subject they’re getting sleeper while waving a pocket watch back and forth in front of their eyes until the subject becomes like a zombie, doing foolish things, like clucking as if they were a chicken. While this type of hypnotism most definitely does not work in most cases, the fact is that there is such a thing as real hypnotism; and when it works, the effects can be powerful.



The Truth about Hypnotism



Psychiatrists have come to understand quite a bit about hypnotism over the last two centuries. The experts have characterized hypnosis as a trancelike state in which the subject is highly imaginative, relaxed and suggestible. The subject is not asleep; it’s more like daydreaming or getting lost in a movie to the point where you don’t notice what else is going on around you. The deepest hypnosis is comparable to the state of being that lies right between sleep and waking.



Research on Hypnosis



Although people have had an interest in hypnosis for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the 1700s that any scientific research was performed to understand this hypnotic trancelike state more fully. An Austrian physician named Franz Mesmer did the most substantive early research, but his findings were not exactly scientific. Mesmer believed there was some sort of mysticism or magic that flowed from the hypnotist. This is where we get the term "mesmerize."



More research has been done since Mesmer’s work, and scientists now have a better understanding of hypnotism. In the 19th century, it was actually given a name based on the Greek "hypnos," which means sleep. There are several schools of thought, but the predominant theory is that hypnosis directly accesses the subject’s subconscious mind and sidesteps all the voluntary thoughts and decisions that occur in the conscious mind. While the conscious mind acts after deliberation, the subconscious thinks things through before we even have a chance to realize it. It often handles the things we do automatically. The dominant theory is that hypnotism subdues the conscious mind so that the hypnotist can get right to the subconscious and control the brain in a new way. In many cases, it appears to work.



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