Recently, a scientific paper has been released that claims to have found a test that confirms hypnosis . . . it’s all in the eyes. Any hypnotist worth their salt should be able to describe what are known as hypnotic signs and eye focus is one of many signs that hypnotists watch for – not the only sign but one worth noting. The recent news of this new paper which seems to confirm the existence of an independent hypnotic state and a test that is not possible to fake by poseurs has a lot of hypnotists excited and others skeptical of the results. Here’s io9’s quirky coverage in their piece “Have you been hypnotized? Find out, using a simple scientific test” (do note that their category attribution for the piece is “Debunkery” which is a less than friendly take):

Hypnosis, and the many things it can do, has been studied for a long time. Many scientists have assumed that people can be hypnotized, but have struggled to figure out who is hypnotized, who is pretending, and who just wants to believe. It looks like now they’ve managed to distinguish between the three. In the movies, getting hypnotized can stop you from smoking, make you act like a fool on camera, get you to remember past lives, force you to tell the truth, put you in touch with ghosts, leave you with the unconscious urge to murder someone, and anything and everything else required to make the plot interesting. While plenty of people have been hypnotized in the real world, others have just pretended to be. Scientists have been looking for ways to tell the difference and have found one: a terrifying, nonreactive, dead-eyed stare.

Hypnotism produces real changes in how the brain works. The most disturbing is the metaphoric detachment of the front area of the brain from the rest. This is the area that controls decision making, problem solving, emotions, and consciousness. With this part disengaged, someone could make the suggestion that you are in fact Spock, and the part of your brain that screens that suggestion for obvious problems of logic will not come online. The rest of the brain will receive the unfiltered suggestion and act on it. Then again, the suggestion could go through that frontal part of the brain and approved (for whatever reason – maybe you like the idea of being Spock), without an observer being any the wiser. There was no external way to be sure.

One of the problems with the process of hypnosis is the fact that it comes with suggestions like, “You are getting sleepy,” and, “You will be relaxed and suggestible.” These kinds of phrases have an effect on the conscious mind, and render people more likely to pretend they’re hypnotized when they’re not. The first step was to strip that hoopla away, and so scientists at the University of Turku in Finland conditioned someone to fall into a hypnotic state when they heard the simple word ‘hypno.’ They then took footage of that person going into and out of the hypnotic state, and compared them to footage of people trying their best to fake being hypnotized.

While other people were able to fake hypnotism with their features and their lack of expression, only the one woman had hypnotized eyes. Her eyes didn’t shift, didn’t blink, and didn’t even react to motion or changes in light. The researchers had to stop regularly to remind her to blink so her eyeballs didn’t dry out. (No one ever mentions shriveled little raisin eyeballs as one of the side-effects of hypnosis, but they should!) People don’t have conscious control over the state of their pupils, and have little control over the urge to blink. It’s reflex for the eyes to respond to motion, to words, and to shifts in light, with a change in the size of pupils. Only the truly hypnotized person would have that disconnect between action and reaction. The woman’s state was compared to that of a lobotomized person. Hypnosis might give you superpowers, but it seems to give them to you through a temporary lobotomy.

See http://io9.com/5854098/have-you-been-hypnotized-find-out-using-a-simple-scientific-test.

Some issues with this report is that the sample size is small. Also, the wall eye look may not be difficult to “fake” when measuring dilation but it is possible to fool folks through a trick of unfocused vision (a method I use sometimes to lead a person into trance). This also does not take into account waking suggestion which has all the hallmarks of deep trance phenomena accompanied by hyper-awareness, a different kind of hypnotic experience but hypnosis nonetheless.

I am not trying to rain on anyone’s parade and I am certainly happy to see something most hypnotists have known for centuries confirmed in even a small experimental test, but I am looking forward even more to further work with larger sample sizes and critical testing.

All the best,
Brian
http://www.briandavidphillips.com