Is Self Hypnosis Really Effective?
The effectiveness of hypnosis has been reported in Newsweek ("Rethinking Hypnosis" September 27, 2004.) and Discover Magazine ("Hypnosis Works" November 25, 2004). Although the field of medicine has been reluctant in the past to accept hypnosis as a viable treatment modality, it is now welcoming hypnosis and self-hypnosis as an effective tool for everything from pain relief and anesthesia to relief from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
There are those who claim that hypnosis is very effective and there are those who believe it is all just a game and people are only "faking it", either to impress the hypnotist or to just play along. To determine if hypnosis really can be effective, we need to look around at the scientific studies that have been done.
In behavioral studies involving two trials (Kirsch et al., 1989; Perugini et al., 1998), participants were hypnotized and given tape-recorded hypnotic suggestions. During one trial, a researcher was present and during the other trial, no researcher was present; the subject assumed he or she was alone in the room. However, what these participants did not know is that they were being videotaped by a hidden camera during both sessions. This allowed the researcher to assess their behavior when they thought they were alone.
The logic behind these studies was that if people were "faking it" to please or impress an experimenter, they would drop the pretense when they thought they were alone. And when this procedure was tried with people who were instructed to "fake" being hypnotized, they did in fact drop the pretense when there was no one else in the room. Instead of responding to the tape-recorded suggestions, they looked around the room, or read magazines that had been left. They did everything but respond to the suggestions that were being played over the tape recorder.
The behavior of the people who had been hypnotized, however, was quite different. They petted imaginary kittens, they swatted non-existent mosquitoes, and they nodded their heads to silent music. In fact, they were just as responsive to the suggestions when they thought they were alone as when there was an experimenter in the room.
There are also solid physiological data indicating that people really do experience hypnotic suggestions. Brain-imagining studies have shown that when a person is hypnotized and given suggestions, their brain activity is the same if the experience were real. In other words, the human brain reacts exactly the same way whether we are having a hypnotic experience or having a real experience (Kosslyn et al., 2000; Rainville et al., 1997).
Whether you are a believer or a skeptic, the behavioral data and the physiological data are the same. They both indicate that hypnotized subjects are not merely faking when they display the effects of hypnotic suggestions.
Kirsch, I., et al. The Surreptitious Observation Design: An Experimental Paradigm for Distinguishing Artifact from Essence in Hypnosis. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 98 (1989): 132-136.
Kosslyn, S. M., et al. Hypnotic Visual Illusion Alters Color Processing in the Brain. American Journal of Psychiatry 157 (2000): 1279-1284.
Perugini, E. M., et al. Surreptitious Observation of Responses to Hypnotically Suggested Hallucinations: A Test of the Compliance Hypothesis. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 46 (1998): 191-203.
Rainville, P. D., et al. Pain Affect Encoded in Human Anterior Cingulate but Not Somatosensory Cortex. Science 277 (15 August 1997): 968-971.
