"You are growing verrrr-yyyyy sleeee-ppy." You may have heard Hollywood's version of hypnosis. This week, "The Infinite Mind" explores the science behind hypnosis and how it really works. We look at how and why medical doctors, dentists, therapists, and police investigators use this powerful tool to soothe pain, lose bad habits, reconstruct memories, and even solve crimes. Experts in hypnosis separate science fact from science fiction, answering questions like "Could a hypnotist make someone fall in love through hypnosis?" and "Could an unscrupulous person use hypnosis to make someone commit a crime?" Guests include Dr. David Spiegel, Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine; Jane Parsons-Fein, Director of the Parsons-Fein Institute for Hypnosis and Psychotherapy; Alan Scheflin, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University; and forensic psychologist Dr. Melvin Gravitz. Plus commentary - with a nod to Dick van Dyke - from John Hockenberry,
In an introductory essay, Dr. Fred Goodwin says most of his knowledge of hypnosis has been vicarious, through his wife, a psychiatric social worker who occasionally uses hypnosis therapeutically. He says she's never hypnotized him, "at least not to my knowledge!" Maybe it's the association to entertainment that kept hypnosis towards the periphery of science, says Dr. Goodwin. Screenwriters for television and movies have long been fascinated with hypnosis. They've exploited the idea of total access to the unconscious and the possibility of manipulating others, often to bizarre or comic effect. In recent years, hypnosis has found a more respectable place in the mainstream of science, says Goodwin. Scientists are gaining a richer understanding of how hypnosis works, and the many ways it can be used in medical and therapeutic settings.
What does a hypnosis session really sound like? Federal Communications make it illegal to air an entire session (listeners might actually get hypnotized!), but The Infinite Mind's Devorah Klahr gives us a report, with a few excerpts, from a recent hypnosis session. Allison, age 36, wants to stop biting and picking at her finger nails. After trying a few other tactics to stop biting her nails, Allison recently decided to try something new - hypnosis. She turned to psychiatric social worker Jane Parsons-Fein, who regularly uses hypnosis in her psychotherapy practice. Parsons-Fein asks Allison about herself and what she makes of her nail-biting. Then she prepares to help Allison enter into a hypnotic trance. Allison sits with her hands facing each other as Parsons-Fein guides her to ask her unconscious mind to help her with her stress level. "If your unconscious is willing, then let your hands move closer together. And if not, let them move further apart." It takes awhile, but eventually, Allison moves her hands together. She sits in a light trance as Parsons-Fein guides her through a series of suggestions. Parsons-Fein tells her to remember what it feels like to be relaxed and to appreciate her hands and "to memorize those good feelings" for when she needs them. After the session, the therapist says she thinks Allison will stop biting her nails and will find better ways to handle stress. However, she says, it may take awhile. A few days after the session, Allison says she's feeling more relaxed, but as for her nail biting, she can't tell if she's biting them any more or less than usual.
Next, Dr. Fred Goodwin interviews Jane Parsons-Fein and Dr. David Spiegel. As well as being a therapist, Parsons-Fein is the Director of the Parsons-Fein Institute for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis. Dr. David Spiegel is Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Spiegel says that hypnosis is a form of intense and focused concentration. He compares the level of concentration to a telephoto lens. Accompanying the high level of concentration are a high level of disassociation- putting aside or blocking awareness of what's not in focus - and a high level of suggestibility. Parsons-Fein, who trained with Milton Erickson, says that people frequently enter hypnotic trances in daily life, without necessarily realizing it. Examples of these sort of everyday trances include daydreaming and hyperfocusing on an exam. Dr. Spiegel says about one quarter of the population is not hypnotizable, and a tenth of the population is very hypnotizable, with most people (including himself) falling somewhere in between. A person's degree of hypnotisablity doesn't change much over his or her life time. Hypnosis is used to allay pain in medical settings, including dentists's offices, burn wards, and surgery. Hypnosis has been shown to lead to a decrease in use of pain control medication by patients, or to no use of pain medication at all. Hypnosis is also used to help patients control their anxiety about surgical operations, contributing to faster procedures.
Parsons-Fein says that to help a client enter a hypnotic trance she asks him or her to focus intently on one spot. Then she uses metaphors or stories to guide her client to draw on her unconscious reservoirs of creativity. Dr. Spiegel talks about his approach to smoking cessation. David Spiegel's approach is modelled on the work pioneered by his father, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, with whom he co-authored a text book about clinical applications of hypnosis. Dr. David Spiegel says he suggests that a patient imagine himself relaxing, for instance in a bath or a hot tub ("hot tubs are big here in California.") Then a patient is asked to think of three things "To my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body trust and protection."
Dr. Spiegel has recently researched how the human brain responds to hypnosis. When highly hypnotizable subjects are asked to change their sensory perception, he has documented changes in brain activity in the part of the brain associated with that sense. For instance when a subject is asked to reduce his or her perception of pain, the part of the brain that monitors feelings in the body, the somatosensory cortex, decreases its level of activity. In one experiment, highly hypnotizable subjects were asked to look at a colored grid and imagine it in black and white. Obeying the suggestion led to a reduction of activity in the lingual gyrus, part of the brain that processes color vision. He also documented an association between response to suggestions through hypnosis and an increase of activity in the part of the brain that is involved in focusing attention, the anterior cingulate gyrus, located near the frontal cortex. Hypnosis offers a way to filter and alter perception and to control motor function and behavior. Parsons-Fein says it's a way to get in touch with the part of one's self that is profoundly creative.
To reach Dr. David Spiegel or learn more about his work, visit his faculty web site at Stanford University. Or write to him at Stanford University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences 401 Quarry Road Stanford, CA 94305-5718
To reach Jane Parsons-Fein or learn more about her work, visit the web site for the Parsons-Fein Training Institute for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis. Or write to 275 Central Park West (4B), New York, NY 10024. Tel: 212-873-4557 Fax: 212-674-3271
How do police investigations use hypnosis to solve crimes? Next, Dr. Goodwin interviews Alan Scheflin, Professor of Law at Santa Clara University; and psychologist Melvin Gravitz, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University. Dr. Gravitz has trained hundreds of police and federal investigators in how to use hypnosis to help witnesses retrieve memories. In a dramatic example of how hypnosis can work, Dr. Gravitz hypnotized a convenience store clerk in a case for the Secret Service. Under hypnosis, she recalled an incident five years previous, in which she had glanced out the window at the convenience store's parking lot where there was a car driven by a man who was a murder suspect. She was able to describe the car, which allowed investigators to nab him. He was convicted for the murder of not less than twenty women, and is behind bars now. All memory, hypnotically retrieved or not, is prey to unreliability, caution Scheflin and Gravitz.They say hypnosis should be used as a method of last resort, after traditional questioning efforts have failed. However, the problems with hypnotically retrieved memory have been overstated in some cases, says Scheflin, which is why in one third of the United States, memories retrieved under hypnosis are not admissible in court. They agree that forensic hypnotists must be carefully trained, and it's important for sessions to be videotaped so that other experts can confirm that the hypnotist did not ask leading questions or inadvertently suggest a "memory." In recent years, what's been called "false memory" has been at the center of legal controversy. Clients have sued therapists who had convinced them that they "remembered" events - typically of child abuse - that in reality had never occurred. Scheflin says that in the first wave of such cases, juries tended to favor the prosecution, but in recent years they've tended to be more supportive of the defending therapist.
To reach Melvin Gravitz, write to: GWU Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 2150 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20037 (202) 994-1712
To reach Alan Scheflin or learn more about his work, visit his faculty web site at Santa Clara University or write to him at Santa Clara University, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Click here to order his book Memory, Trauma Treatment, and the Law (co-authored with Daniel P.Brown and D. Corydon Hammond)
"Hypnosis was for sitcoms; amnesia was the soaps." Concluding the show, commentator John Hockenberry recalls an episode of the Dick van Dyke show in which Rob Petrie was hypnotized to act drunk every time someone said something ordinary like "How do you do?" As a kid, Hockenberry says, he fantasized about using hypnosis to find the secret control panel in his parents's heads. He imagined how great it would be if all he needed to do was say "Mom, Dad, can I borrow the car?" and have them robotically respond "Sure, son. Here are the keys. Take as long as you like." Eventually, Hockenberry grew up and gave up on finding his parents's control panels, let alone his own on some days. Then one day, his mother quit smoking. She'd been a two pack a day puffer for as long as he could remember. So how did she do it? he asked her. "Hypnosis." It turned out someone had found his mother's "control panel" after all.
