jpbrooks

Granted there is little or no behavioral difference between a "hypnotized" person and one who is simply relaxed and cooperative. But how can things like the apparent "implantation" of false memories be accounted for if there is no experiential difference between a "hypnotized" person and one who is not "hypnotized"?

[ March 03, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Corey Hammer

Simple...

You don't have to be hypnotized. Remembering is a reconstructive process. Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated that false memories can be created simply by giving a person a small seed (e.g., do you remember the time you got lost in the mall?). I haven't looked at her studies in a while though, so I don't recall correctly what she did, but she somehow and in some way had the parents of a teenaged boy use that statement. After a while, he started "remembering" things that the parents hadn't told him. After debriefing the boy, he still insisted that it happened.

The point is that memory is not some static storage device like a hard drive. As a result, memory is better classified as remembering since each time you review a memory you asre literally reconstructing it, exposing to the likelihood of mutation from what happened. Even the implantation of real events into the long term store is subject to the stereotypes and prejudices that an individual holds.

Kachana

People's memories are very malleable (much more malleable than people think, which is why faulty eyewitness identification is the leading cause of death penalty verdicts that have subsequently been overturned by DNA evidence, juries have too much misplaced faith in memories), and hypnosis just plays on this malleability. The chances are that if you take one of your favourtite anecdotes, one that you have told over and over, and were to suddenly see a video tape of it, you would be startled at how the video deviates from your memory due to the way you have reconstructed your memory via your retellings.

Hypnosis is a state in which these biases occur in response to suggestion rather than from internal biases, I don't think the mechanism behind it is well understood.

Some experiments have compared hypnotised people with non-hypnotised people pretending to be hypnotised to see if there is anything more to hypnosis that people just thinking they are hypnotised and conforming to the perceived norms of hypnosis. For instance, there is a vase of flowers on a table, and the hypnotised (or pretending to be hypnotised) person is told there is a big screen in front of the table. They are asked what they can see behind the screen. The pretending to be hypnotised people say 'I can't see, there's a screen in the way', whereas the hypnotised people say 'A table with flowers on'.

liquid

Yes, I have read that there are distinct differences between those that are hypnotised and those that aren't, but are pretending.

For instance, a chair is aplced in the middle of a room, and the subjects are directed to walk across the room, and that the chair is invisible. Pretending subjects almost invariably collided with the chair. Really hypnotised subjects walked round the chair, and then asked why they walked round the chair, would simply say 'what chair?'.

Another example, which is similar to the screen, was demostrated in a show I saw. A hypnotic subject was told that she could see everyone in the audience naked, and asked which one she liked. She pointed at someone (looking incredibly embarrased, going red, giggling), and said 'the man in the white shirt there'.

It appears that the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts (chair in the way/invisible, man naked/clothed) is not uncommon.