Serious Scientific Proof of the Reality of Hypnosis

I don't have any lingering concerns about the reality of hypnosis, now that I have had firsthand experiences. First and foremost, all those hours I've spent hypnotizing people and being hypnotized would be extremely boring if nothing was happening. Second, I've seen people respond to suggestions completely unselfconsciously, in a way that would be out of character for them to fake. And then there was this experience.

But before I had any experience of hypnosis, I longed for objective proof of its reality, taking a particular form: showing that hypnotized people can do something unhypnotized people can't. This is more convincing than showing that a hypnotized person can't do something, since they just might not be trying hard enough. But if someone not in a trance can't do it, then it can't be faked.

I recently ran across a paper by chance that has that very evidence, Kallio et al. 2013. Luckily it's in an open-access journal, so you can read it easily. This paper shows that one highly-hypnotizable participant can make eye movements, while in a trance, that unhypnotized people, and herself out of trance, can't make. In one task, participants look at a dot in the center of a computer monitor, while their eye movements are recorded. Then the central dot disappears, and another dot appears, and they must look at this new dot. Their hypnotee, TS-H, when hypnotized, instead of moving her eyes right to the new target, would move her gaze in intermediary short jumps towards it. The control subjects were told to mimic this pattern as well as they could. They absolutely could not. Most of the time their eyes went right to the new dot when it appeared. And the same thing went for TS-H, in those trials where she wasn't hypnotized. You can watch videos comparing the hypnotized eye movements with the unhypnotized.

The second thing TS-H could do while hypnotized that unhypnotized people couldn't imitate was to avoid responding to sliding black and white vertical bars with what is called an optokinetic reflex. This is a pattern of eye movements where even though you are trying to keep your eyes still, they still slide with the background, then jump back into place. You can see it in action in the movie of the control subjects (who were, again, consciously trying to imitate the hypnotized eye movements), and then be amazed at the movie of the hypnotized TS-H with the grating, showing a reduction or elimination of this reflex. And again, she was unable to reproduce the result herself while not hypnotized.

There were a couple of other dramatic observations they made of the hypnotic state which don't fall into this unfakeable category. TS-H's blink rate slowed down to 10% of normal, and her pupils were actually slightly - but significantly - smaller. All these results are making me want to experiment more with what they call the Hypnotically Induced Stare - I generally don't have my hypnotees open their eyes, and when they do I haven't been paying so much attention to the blink rate and eye movements. It's not clear whether all hypnotized people are supposed to have this phenomenon, in fact they make some muddy statements about this.

The subtext for me is the fact that they found someone with such a powerful, reliable hypnotic state that they could do precise experimentation with it. TS-H is literally off the charts hypnotizable, and able to go in and out in a split second. In the experimental trials where she was supposed to be hypnotized, all they did was to give her the post-hypnotic trigger word "hypno" immediately before. You can watch the intriguing video of her going in and out of trance on command. She also has spontaneous amnesia of all of her trances, which seems to be quite unusual - and useful in another cool study from Kallio's lab, where she is meant to be blinded to which hypnotic condition she is operating under (conditions such as "the square shapes will appear blue". Success with posthypnotic visual hallucinations are another rarity!)

Yes, they have done at least a half dozen studies with this one participant, often with all the hypnotized data coming only from her. A strange relationship, reminding me of many long term scientist-case-study relationships. While it's hard to say how applicable her behaviour is to the hypnotic states most people experience, I find this evidence objectively convincing that it is a distinct state. And it would sure be fun to trance with someone that insanely hypnotizable.