YOU ARE GETTING SLEEPY...VER-R-RY SLEEPY
By Sandra L. Nagy, Clinical Hypnotherapist
Many people, upon hearing the word "hypnosis" immediately think of a swinging pocket watch or, more often, of being made to cluck like a chicken. But in reality, hypnosis has come a long way since the days of the swinging watch, though admittedly a stage hypnotist might still make you cluck like a chicken...but only if you've always wanted to cluck like a chicken in front of a lot of people.
Hypnotherapy has been used for years by professional therapists, MD's and dentists for everything from losing weight and stopping panic attacks to surgical anesthesia. But, until recently, no one seemed to know how or why it worked...only that it did.
After a long, and sometimes wary, history in medicine and entertainment, hypnosis is now receiving some new respect in the field of neuroscience. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on hypnotic suggestions, their brains show profound changes in how they process information. According to Scientific American magazine, experiments using brain imaging showed that people who were hypnotized actually "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at ordinary English words and thought that they were gibberish. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
In November, 2005 Dr. Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and an expert on attention, told reporter Don Hogan Charles of The New York Times, "The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations is fundamental to the study of cognition, but now we're really getting at the mechanisms."
Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, fears and phobias, trauma and a variety of social and psychological issues. In the public eye, however, there is still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is.
Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering from all manner of unexplained medical problems. Using dim lights and otherworldly music, he infused them with a secret, invisible "magnetic fluid" which mysteriously cured them of any and all ills. The word "mesmerize" is still with us today, although with a slightly different usage. Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited; however, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body.
In 1842, Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist, revived the phenomenon calling it hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep. Although Dr. Braid put people into trances by staring at them intently, he did not have a clue as to how it worked. Under this veil of mystery, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, all to the amusement and delight of the rest of the crowd.
However, within the 19th century medical community, hypnosis was a serious matter. In India, physicians were using it as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.
Now, according to Dr. Posner and others, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing an important view into the actual workings of normal brain function.
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