Light Fiction

this might be kind of rambly, on account of the vicodin i took 6(?) hours ago. Freakin’ disease. But i’ll try and keep it concise and reasonably lucid. If it’s not, and you find it interesting, you should let me know and i’ll re-write it with actual structure and a clear point. Also I haven’t done any fact checking yet. When I have checked all my facts I will remove this sentence. Until then (and after) please hassle and degrade me for my incomplete grasp of the world wherever you can find it. I’m just letting you know that this is even more tenuous than usual for the aforementioned reasons. 

There is an article in November 2005’s scientific American called the neurobiology of the self, which is mostly about the general accretion of knowledge re: the brains construction of the “self” which we experience. All the various little bits, and maybe a couple sections where the get combined into bigger bits. Maybe. The relevant part of the article for this ‘discussion’ is that part where they talk about the way that hypnosis acts upon the brain.

Now, Penn & Teller (not the authors of the article) in their show “Bullshit” think that hypnosis is, well, Bullshit. They’re cool guys. They come right out and say it. They don’t actually make a very strong case for it. They make a decent case for the idea that people voluntarily undergo hypnosis, and that everything that they do under hypnosis is done voluntarily. For example, at one point there are a bunch of college students hypnotized to think that their (right?) shoe is a cute puppy, and they all treat it like one: awwww, look at the puppy, lick me! Lick me! Hahaha it’s so cute! Anyway. After the clips of the puppy/shoe thing (which was kind of funny. There were better moments) they showed clips of an interview with this girl who said (and I’m paraphrasing and on drugs, I’ll go back and check for accuracy and delete this parenthetical when I do) “I knew that it was a shoe, but it also looked so much like a puppy. And it seemed like it would be fun to go along with/pet it” Ha! Hypnosis is bullshit! Well, no. That’s not they’re point, either. They’re not just bastards, they’re bastards on the watch for money-grubbing bastards, and making money while they do it.

In the same bullshit episode they focus on some chick named Wendi.com. She makes a living selling bullshit, they mean hypnosis, just like the guy who convinced the college kids to let their shoes lick them. The problem is that, unlike the shoe thing, which is funny and harmless, she had tapes for penis and breast enlargement (which is also funny and harmless) and curing cancer (which is not). Also she hypnotizes girls to cum easier, which is funny and hot and probably even beneficial. That might actually do something. Because, you know, orgasm is a mostly psychological phenomenon (which, according to the science article makes it a wholly biological phenomenon expressible only as psychology, but those distinctions, interesting as they are, don’t really belong here).

So, have you ever heard of Stanley Milgram? If you went through the correct one of Linda’s classes at concord you should have a least a vague idea of his experiments (don’t ask me, I was gone by the time she started teaching that BS). He ran his experiments shortly after WWII, I believe in the 50s. Basically he was trying to determine how much harm a standard person would be willing to do to other people, people who by the end of the experiment were screaming in pain, begging to be let out of the chair, and eventually unconscious; with no coercion other than three phrases one of which was approximately “science needs you to do this” and the strongest was, also approx. “you have to keep going”. The pain was administered in ever-increasing voltages (up to 450 or 500 I think) and the participant was told that he was participating in a study on “how pain helps people learn”. The only subject of the study was the guy administering the volts (by flicking switches) the guy getting electrocuted was an actor and the scientists were all scientists.

The surprising thing about the study was that it was only extremely abnormal people who did not administer the full dosage of voltage. I’ll check the stats later, but I think that in the initial run something like 97f Americans (from college students/professors to construction workers) kept on applying the voltage until well after the learner had “died”, many of them crying while they did it. This was far beyond shocking to the psychological, indeed the entire intellectual community. God knows how much of the public has even heard about it. Not enough, is my opinion. He managed to show that people will do a lot more than they think they are capable of if they think that they are not responsible for it occurring. Can you see where this is going?

Hypnosis is a very strong surrendering of autonomy to another person. It’s so strong that in the SciAm article that I started with, while they are discussing the way that brains react to things happening to them versus the way that brains react when they actively do something, the fundamental difference being that when the brain does something it sends two signals: one is the signal to your arm/hand say, and that signal tells you arm/hand to move and grasp the doorknob. It sends essentially the same signal to the perceptual part of your brain, though. This second signal is basically a preview of what is about to be experienced. If you’ve ever opened a doorknob then your brain has a fundamental idea of how that feels, and so this second sensation acts as a “check” to make sure that your hand does, in fact, come into contact with and turn the doorknob. Here’s the freaky part though, some scientists hypnotized some subjects and told them that a lever and pulley were lifting their arms. Their brain moved the arm, but reacted to the arm movement as though it had been caused by something else. The brain reacted to its own action as though it had been done by someone else.

Hypnosis is voluntary. It’s not possible (as far as I’ve ever heard or read, I’d be dying for some information contrariwise if you have any) to involuntarily hypnotize someone, and you cannot make someone do something that it is fundamentally against their nature to do. Apparently it is possible to convince someone’s brain that something which it is doing is merely happening to it. That is a fairly extreme jump from the Stanley Milgram study, where people simply ignored their conscience in favor of perceived responsibilities. That’s a sort of rough circumlocution of point one.

The other thing concerns the whole “bullshit-ness” of hypnosis. All the science that I’ve ever read about hypnosis suggests that it does have an effect upon the brain. That at the very least people are significantly less inhibited. Hypnosis works. When you’re hypnotized, you’re bloody well hypnotized. And the more you let yourself be hypnotized the more you’re going to be. Which is kind of silly-sounding, but it’s just the same way everything else works, however much you let yourself fall in love, be afraid, to a lesser extent get drunk, that’s how far you’re going to get in that endeavor. There is, however a limit. I’m not sure where that limit is. I personally believe that all diseases are psychosomatic enough (even my present, horrible piece of shit one) that they may be curable if you’re extremely gullible and you submit to hypnosis. Extremely gullible. And probably you have to actually have something worth living for, as well. But you do see instances of spontaneous remission in cancer (And I wonder what the statistics of that are compared to the percentage of people that successfully overcome addictions). I have spent too much of the last day thinking about it though, I doubt that I could cure shit with it now. Or maybe ever again. Here’s hoping though. But I seriously doubt anyone is submissive enough to be able to survive on the surface of the sun without a significant space rig, no matter how much hypnosis they go through. Gene therapy, cyborg-ation, sure. Hypnosis? I’m pretty sure that’s past the limit. That’s the kind of shit that I’d only expect some particularly hardcore Tibetan or Hindu monks to be able to pull off.