• Question: when people are hipnotised the enter an sleep like state to what exstent can the human mined become minipulated and could this be an worry?

    Asked by 12parrk to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 21 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Peter Balfe

      Peter Balfe answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      It is thought that hypnotism is a mixture of sleep and dreaming, where the person is persuaded to act out a dream suggested by the hypnotist, but I don’t really know.

    • Photo: Ee Lyn Lim

      Ee Lyn Lim answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      Ooh…I watched a TV programme about this once. Hypnotism is actually where a person is persuaded to become so…very…relaxed…that his or her brain just follows whatever you tell them to do, without thinking for themselves. In this TV programme, they tried to hypnotise people and then tell them to do things that were really unnatural – like get angry for no good reason, or take their clothes off in public. Some people were easier to hypnotise than others – some of the participants just followed the orders immediately, but some of the others just stared at the instructor like he was crazy – they were obviously not hypnotised at all! So it does depend on how your own brain works.

      But from there it gets a bit tricky to study. How do you know if a person is really being hypnotised, or if they’re just doing whatever you tell them to and pretending to be hypnotised? This is really the concern because a lot of criminals SAY they were hypnotised when they get arrested, but how do we know if they really were, or if they were actually just robbing a bank because they wanted to?

      They did one last test, where they hypnotised a man and told him, ‘You are not feeling cold, you are feeling just fine.’ And then they dunked his whole body into a tub of ice water. His pulse and blood pressure dropped immediately, and he was starting to turn blue, but he just sat there, perfectly calm and happy. It’s really hard to fake that!

      So the conclusion is that, yes it’s probably possible to hypnotise someone, to the extent that you can tell them what to feel and how to act. But it won’t be possible with everyone, and we still can’t tell if everyone who says they were hypnotised actually was. I think this would be quite a real worry for the police!

    • Photo: Katy Brown

      Katy Brown answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      I find it really hard to believe in hypnosis but it does seem to be real in some cases. Here is a good article about what is true about hypnosis and what isn’t: http://ebookbrowse.com/truth-and-the-hype-of-hypnosis-scientific-american-5-18-2005-pdf-d85729029

    • Photo: Paul Waines

      Paul Waines answered on 25 Jun 2013:

      The human mind is very easily manipulated. We are influenced every day by things we see and hear, without even realising it. For example, a lot of the advertising we see is designed to enter our brains without us even realising it!

      Some people are very skilled at manipulating people’s minds- they may do this to entertain (e.g. hypnotists) but they may also do this to a lot of people in order to change their behaviour to suit themselves.

      Brain surgeons nowadays know an awful lot about how the brain works, and are able to use surgery to manipulate the way people’s brains work.

      So whilst the mind is an amazing thing, when you think about it, it is also possible to manipulate it in many ways!

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