In lucid dreaming, hypnotic regression, mental flow, religious ecstasy, mystical visions, and psychic states {exceptional human experience}, people can feel unity with nature [White, 1990].
When awake, people can perform skilled or random behaviors without consciousness {automatism}|. People cannot remember automatisms. Deep sleep or disoriented state can follows automatism.
Epileptic mental state lasts for several minutes, is in temporal lobe, impairs awareness or has unconsciousness, and involves chewing, smacking lips, moving arms or hands in organized but purposeless patterns, laughing, acting scared, and using isolated words.
Sleepwalking is automatism [Callwood, 1990].
After hypnosis, people can perform skilled behaviors on command.
Obsessive love can involve excited mental states {ecstasy, state}.
Mental states {higher consciousness} can have higher-than-normal alertness, sensation, perception, and awareness. Inspiration is awake and conscious but unaware.
People can go into trances {hypnosis, state} {mesmerism}, in which they are susceptible to dissociation and/or suggestion [Lynn and Rhue, 1991]. Perhaps, hypnosis involves dissociation [Janet, 1929] [Prince, 1906]. Newer theory {neo-dissociationist theory} {neo-dissociation theory} attributes hypnosis to dissociation. Conscious perception and/or behavior have inhibition, but unconscious perception and action continue [Hilgard, 1986].
biology
Nerve signals reach cerebral cortex and cause normal-amplitude electrical responses, so only conscious sense responses decrease or dissociate. Electroencephalograms are similar to awake EEGs and do not resemble sleep EEGs. Suggestion can lower anterior-cingulate-cortex activity and lower pain. Sulfones and urethane cause hypnosis.
effects
Hypnosis can influence human performance and provoke sense deception, hallucination, anesthesia, analgesia, and post-hypnotic amnesia. Dissociations, not suggestions, cause hypnotic anesthesia and analgesia. Suggestion can affect waking state, as well as hypnotic state. Hypnotized subjects do not perform actions against their morals.
When hypnotized, people seem to suppress self. Hypnotist can assume executive control. When hypnotized, selves {hidden observer} still know what hypnotized body is doing and feeling.
Hypnotized people know everything but do not let the knowledge into consciousness. In hypnosis, nerve signals reach cerebral cortex and cause normal-amplitude electrical responses, so only conscious sense responses decrease or dissociate. When hypnotized, people unconsciously know what hypnotized body is doing and feeling. Hypnosis is conscious and experiences sense qualities but is unaware.
Hypnosis does not increase long-term memory retrieval. Long-term memories retrieved under hypnosis are unreliable. Memories about early infancy are probably not true. People can remember what happened while under hypnosis.
Hypnosis can cause physical effects. Stomachs can swell in phantom pregnancies. Limbs can become stiff. Blisters can appear where people think that heat was. Stigmata can appear on hands. Itching can start.
Hypnosis does not confer special strength or abilities.
Hypnosis cannot cure organic nervous or mental illnesses.
behavior
Hypnotized people explain strange actions by rationalizations {trance logic}. Hypnotized people do not introspect.
Hypnotized people can choose not to do suggestions and can stop hypnotized states. People act as they think they should.
Hypnosis often involves playing roles, and roles can be just acting. Perhaps, hypnosis involves role-playing or faking. If people have hidden observers, they are also role-playing or faking [Colman, 1994] [Spanos, 1991] [Wagstaff, 1994].
properties
Hypnosis has enhanced suggestibility. Hypnosis has sustained mental concentration. Hypnosis restricts attention to small field. Hypnotized people have less time sense. Hypnosis voluntarily suspends initiative and will. Hypnotic trance involves identification with others. Hypnosis has incomplete contact with reality. Hypnosis reduces self-consciousness and critical appraisal.
Hypnosis is a social situation with subject and hypnotizer. Hypnotic trance involves rapport between subject and hypnotist. Hypnotist personality does not make much difference.
requirements
Medical hypnosis requires sympathetic but authoritarian relationship between doctor and patient and cooperative attitude by patient. Hypnosis requires passivity. Hypnotic trance involves ability to pretend and fantasize.
Hypnosis susceptibility correlates with treating fiction works as real, identifying with parents strongly, blurring fantasy and reality, pretending, and believing people. Alternatively, hypnotic susceptibility increases if people have same temperament as opposite-sex parent, equally in males and females. Leisure-activity similarity is more important than work or professional-value similarity. If people do not identify with either parent, they are not susceptible to hypnosis.
Motivation is not enough for hypnotizing. Hypnosis does not require relaxation. Imagination has no relation to hypnotizing.
factors
Children between 8 and 12 hypnotize more easily than older or younger children. Children below age 8 cannot concentrate. Children above age 12 are more critical. Women and men are equally hypnotizable and hypnotize to same depth [Lynn and Rhue, 1991]. Personality type does not correlate with hypnosis.
comparisons
Hypnosis is not like sleep or dreaming. Hypnosis involves lethargy, drowsiness, and diminished contact with reality, like sleep. However, muscles do not relax, and reflexes are normal.
Both hysteria and hypnosis involve dissociation.
After prolonged low stimulation, people feel stress, have poor eye focusing, lose visual size constancy, lose visual shape constancy, have hallucinations, and become disoriented {sensory deprivation state} {sensory deprivation reaction}. Sensory deprivation states are conscious, with experienced sense qualities, but unaware. The "I" or self persists through sensory deprivation. Sensory deprivation can cause mental confusion, paranoid delusions, fear, and panic, but some people welcome sensory deprivation. People can see subjective phosphene sparks or light patterns after deprivation.
From coldness or drugs, body functions can slow greatly {suspended animation}|.
Hypnosis-like or automatism-like states {trance} can be conscious, with experienced sense qualities, but unaware. Tribal shamen can go into trances. Hypnosis and sleepwalking are trances.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225