(no music) HYPNOSIS | Trivia Tuesday | LMBYTS #1361 | 27th May 2025

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name's Jason Newland and please only listen when you can safely close your eyes. Close your eyes. Yeah.

And what else? So this is Trivia Tuesday. Oh yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes it is.

Yes it is. So basically what I do on Trivia Tuesday is I think of a subject and then I ask ChatGPT to do the research for me and come up with or ask for 100, okay, or for I think 20 to 30 facts about a subject. And today I'm going to talk about hypnosis.

I mean, I could probably do quite a few facts off the top of my head, but they might be wrong. The ones I give you may also be wrong. So I'm not, you know, I take no responsibility for anything that is incorrect.

However, I thought it'd make a mildly interesting, boring recording. Oh yes. The thing is, I'm using the ChatGPT advanced reasoning and it's taken a while.

It probably would have done it by now if I'd just used a normal ChatGPT 4. But I wanted to get, I wanted to go a little bit more in depth, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean, innit? So today is Tuesday, the 27th of May, 2025. Vinnie's in the background chomping on a boney thing.

It's been very windy today. You might actually hear the wind in the background because I do have the window open. I was listening back to a recording from yesterday and I could hear the birds.

It would just let you know how loud the birds are because the microphone doesn't generally pick up much in the way of the birds singing. But it's that time of the year when they're all out and having fun, which is good. Well, I don't know, they might be not having fun, they might be rehearsing for an upcoming stage show and they might actually not be enjoying it at all.

Might that be enough and they just want to go to the pub? I don't know. It's been raining as well. But luckily, even though it's been raining on and off all day, I've managed to miss the rain.

So I've took Vinnie out twice and I haven't, I haven't got wet. Had a little bit of, a little few specks but other than that, no, it's been alright. Did, I actually start the day off by doing a new recording, which I don't normally do.

I don't normally do a recording first thing in the morning. But for some reason, I had the little urge. And what I did is I did a Let Me Bore Your Pain Away called Pleasant Memories.

And it was Let Me Bore Your Pain Away number 35. So yeah, I just did that for those that would like to watch it or listen to it rather. Yesterday I did two recordings as well.

Yeah, I did. I did a body scan. I also did Monday's Boring Objects dog walking.

So yeah, today's gonna be two recordings also. It's 6.37pm so I don't know if I'm gonna have a chance to upload or edit and upload this. I might do.

Because I don't, I don't really watch much TV in the evening. Not really. I don't, you know, I'm not really that routine that I used to have.

I want to talk about TV now. Should we talk about TV instead of hypnosis? Hypnosis is boring. Let's talk about televisions.

Oh, no, it's, it's done all this work. It seems a shame not to go along with it. Televisions I've had.

In fact, that could be a future boring objects recording. I can hear people. No, talk about the television.

I don't want to listen about hypnosis. Stop. Not allowed.

No. So yeah, I did that. Yeah, I don't have my whole, not my whole life.

But you know, when I was younger, younger, most things happened back then. When I was younger, I had like an evening protocol. Yeah, I get home from work, depending on what time I got home from work, depending on what I watched on TV.

But my whole evening would be based around watching TV. So if I got home at six o'clock, I would possibly watch the news. Maybe I'd watch Home and Away.

If I got home at 530, I'd watch Neighbors, then Home and Away. And then maybe Hollyoaks. I think it's in my memory, that was kind of the the order of the different programs.

And then perhaps I'd watch sometimes I would watch the Channel 4 News at seven. And then at 730, I'd watch EastEnders. And then, depending on what time of the of my life it was, there was a period when I'd watch The Bill at eight o'clock.

And there was a period of time when I'd watch Family Guy at nine o'clock every night. So that happened for a few years. That's when I moved here.

But for some reason, I just haven't, I just, you know, if I do like to check the news, just to see what's going on, generally, I don't get like hugely involved. Just to see what's going on. And I like, you know, if let's say I'm eating me dinner, I'd stick the TV on, and I'll look through the channels to see if there's any old shows on, like What Happened to the Likely Lads or the Kenny Everett Show or something from like the 70s and 80s, just a bit of light relief.

And if there's nothing on, I'll probably go to YouTube and just have a look at some of the channels I watch on YouTube, just to see what's going on there. I mean, sometimes I'll actually just go on YouTube to get the news anyway. It all depends, really.

According to my website, I've got 6000 episodes. 6000 recordings that you can listen to. Although I'm pretty sure that probably includes the 10 hour ones and the five hour ones, you know, so but 6000 is quite a lot, isn't it? Just going to have a quick look.

What's the statistics? So it's been a quiet day. I worked a little bit on the back end, doing some of the SEO, which is a search engine optimization stuff. You know, getting some stuff transcribed and all that stuff.

But it's, it's all right. It's okay, I suppose. Oh, no, that's not going to cancel that.

Reset. Cancel. I wonder if the the subscription transcription page.

Yeah, that's weird. Sorry, I'm just talking out loud. There's a new video software called what's it called? PO3, Neo3, Mio3, Leo3, Co3, To3, stuff like that.

And it can make really amazing quality videos, short videos, but really good quality in a very short period of time. Something that would have took hours and hours a couple of years ago, just to wait for it to come through and it still wouldn't be that good quality is now available in seconds. Which means based on that, probably in a couple of years, probably be able to put a movie together just by putting in a correct prompt.

And have been like an hour before we have a whole movie. Which is, I mean, it might be involved putting in a whole script, you know, but it's quite amazing. Because I do sometimes think after I've watched a movie, I sometimes think to myself, I need a wee wee.

But that's not really relevant to talk about it. I sometimes think to myself, I would have preferred for it to be different. I would have kept that character in, maybe got rid of the other character, maybe had them do something different.

And almost like I could have made that movie a bit better. For me, not for the overall audience, but I might have enjoyed it more if something else had happened. But then I'm not a director, I'm not a movie director.

And sometimes I see these movies, and I think, well, they get bad ratings, but sometimes and I'm just thinking, but the actors and the producers and the directors and the costume designers and the writers, you know, all the people involved, sometimes thousands of people, but at least quite a few people involved in making, putting a movie together, think it's good, or think it's worthwhile. So on that basis, I sometimes think to myself, well, it's worth giving it a go to watch it.

Because a lot of effort has been put in for this.

For it to be dismissed. Yeah, I got someone phoning me. Luckily, my phone is on mute.

I don't know why I used to love talking on the phone. Don't like it anymore. I don't know.

I don't like it all the time depends who it is. But I just can't. I don't answer the phone if I'm doing a recording anyway.

Unless it's like an important phone call. You know, I mean, if my if my dad rung, I'd answer it. Or my brother, but outside of that, I wouldn't generally.

Was I talking about something? I can't remember. So here we go. Hypnosis.

So how many facts have I got? How many trivia facts? Oh, did give me 100. Okay, cool. So I might be able to expand on more on it.

For my own knowledge, but maybe not. I might just give you the facts. So hypnosis is a 19th century word.

Scottish surgeon James Braid coined hypnotism. The word hypnotism in 1841. After watching mesmerists and deciding the state resembled sleep.

And sleep in Greek is hypnos. But was actually focused attention. So resembles sleep, but was actually focused attention.

So he came up with the word hypnotism. He tried, he tried to change the word twice. Apparently, because he didn't like the word hypnotism or hypnosis didn't like it, even though he kind of created it, or coined it.

Made it popular. And he tried to change it, but no one was having it. No, we like that word.

We're going to keep it. Now, mesmerists, you may have heard of the word mesmerism. It was, it's named after France, Franz Anton Mesmer, who treated patients with animal magnetism.

So in the late 1700s, what he did is he passed magnets over people's bodies, sparking Europe's first medical hypnosis craze, and given English the term mesmerize. So what happened to him is he became very famous and was loved by the royal family. I think he was French, and he was loved by the French royal family and some experts.

When you when you bear in mind, doctors in the late 1700s, the average person probably knows more about the body, potentially, and science than doctors did back then. Just, you know, because of the knowledge we've got, I mean, they didn't, they were still bloodletting people. It's like, that's what was still going on back then.

And what he did is he started, this is something I've got a memory of something I read. How it worked is he was doing the magnets. And he put it was bloodletting someone.

And he put the magnets over where the blood was coming out and the blood the bleeding stopped. And he thought, ooh. And then he started doing that and he used sticks.

And I think there was a he'd do lots of people at the same time. So to have them all holding on to big metal rods and stuff. So yeah, it's, but he was very popular.

And then he was challenged, like, prove it because he started talking about, it was the animal magnetism within the person. And the doctors or the surgeons at the time didn't agree. And so he invited them, go on, just find out for yourself, just, you know, do some research.

I welcome you to do it. And some notable people, including America's Benjamin Franklin, came along and they pretty much poo pooed what he was doing. And they said it was just suggestion.

Which kind of, you know, is still pretty much agreed is suggestion as far as kind of is in a way. And then Franz Anton Mesmer left the country, I do believe, and just had his own, had his own following elsewhere. I think he also liked eating ice cream, but I'm not sure about that.

Abe Farrier imported oriental hypnosis to Paris. This is 1813. The Indo-Portuguese priest demonstrated trance without magnets in 1813, arguing it was all in the subject's mind.

And okay, and James Ezdell. James Ezdell is very famous in the hypnosis world. Because, and this is something I used to have his book actually.

He performed is saying dozens, but hundreds is the the actual according to his book, he performed hundreds of surgeries in colonial India, using only mesmerism, which was like doing it using hypnosis. So this is 1845 to 1850. It listed major operations including all kinds of stuff.

And it didn't have any kind of pain relief at their disposal. So he came back, he wrote a book about it. And he's, yeah, he's down as being a really big, especially when it comes to pain relief, a big person in that no one had ever done that before.

Or at least he was the first person to become famous for it. Jean-Martin Charcot, so I find this interesting, turned hypnosis into a Parisian spectacle. He weekly demonstrated at the Salpêtrière, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, in 1880s, packed galleries with doctors, artists and writers, cementing hypnosis inside early neurology.

So he was big, I think he had a book as well. I think I used to have that. And so he was a, what kind of surgeon was he? I forget.

So the British, that was in France, the British Medical Association backed hypnosis in 1955. And it's called trance, a genuine phenomenon, useful for pain, neurosis, and obstetrics, whatever that is, recommending every medical student learn the basics, which they didn't, and they still don't, as far as I'm aware. And according to books I've read and information from doctors and all that stuff, during the training to become a doctor, they may get like one day of focusing on chronic pain or focusing on pain.

I don't know how true that is, it might have changed. But you'd think considering most of medicine, most of the reasons people go to doctors is because of pain. You'd think that that would be something that would be studied a bit more.

But I'm not a doctor, so I don't know if it's true or not. The British Medical Association, so why is it repeating itself? Oh, no, I'm repeating myself. The American Medical Association followed in 1958.

The AMA Council review labelled hypnosis a legitimate therapeutic tool and urged more research. Now, I think in America, you have to be part of an organisation and have a licence in order to practice hypnosis and hypnotherapy. In the UK, you don't.

It's not controlled in the UK. And stage shows in Britain do require a licence under the Hypnotism Act of 1952. So the law arose after sensational stunts raised safety worries, and local councils still enforce it today.

But you can practice as a hypnotherapist. But you can't do a live hypnosis act without getting a licence to do it. You have to get permission.

I think they're a little bit more open to it these days. But for a while, it's quite difficult. So let's have a look.

Milton Erickson, my mate Milton Erickson, revolutionised indirect hypnosis. So he was from Arizona. He wasn't from Arizona, but he lived in Arizona, Phoenix, Arizona.

But he ended up living there. So the Arizona psychiatrist used storytelling, metaphors, and permissive language. Techniques now copied in therapy, coaching and advertising.

It had a huge effect on hypnosis, and the way it was taught, and the way it was used. I've got probably about 10, 15 books on the man. Some written by him, some written about him.

The weird thing about Milton Erickson is that I'm just going to add my own little bit of information that I know about. He had polio as a child. He had it again when he was in his 50s, I think.

So he ended up in a wheelchair. But when he was a child, he had it. And he was bedridden, couldn't walk, couldn't do anything.

And couldn't talk or anything. He completely was pretty much wasn't able to do very much for quite a while. And he gained very good, he found, he studied the ways people were, because he had a big family, he studied the way that people in his family were interacting and communicating.

And how often they'd say one thing, but would mean another thing. Or how some of his brothers and sisters would lie. Or, you know, and he studied that.

And he realised that the unconscious communication is often different from the verbal communication. You know, there's incongruence. And he also found ways to get people to do things for him without talking.

And he noticed also how people matched each other, like rapport, when, you know, when people get on really well, and maybe they move their right hand, the other person maybe move their right hand. And when one was nodding yes, the other one might be nodding yes. And when the other one, one started to tap dance, and the other one started to tap dance, you know, things like that.

One fired, the other one fired. That was his parents. But you know, he just noticed, those things.

And then he became a doctor. He actually, what happened is he, he recovered. And then he became a doctor, and he became, and he had, but he had pain all his life, due to the polio.

So he found a way to deal with the pain using hypnosis. And then he, you know, as a doctor became a psychiatrist, started using hypnosis with psychiatric patients, before he was even allowed to. You know, that was before it was even kind of accepted to do that.

Because this would probably be in the, I think he did stuff with, he helped people with, if I remember rightly, during the war, they used to call it shell shock. Now it'd be called PTSD. There's shell shock, then it was, there was another name for it.

And now it's PTSD. And he used to help people with that soldiers and you know, the army, navy, etc. With that.

I'm partly making up some of this, I think it's true. And then he went on to be, he became a teacher. And he became very famous.

He had very bad, I think, asthma. So he needed to move to the desert, because of the air, the air was better for him. And he was in a wheelchair for the last probably, 30 years, 25 years of his life, always used to wear purple.

That was his favorite color. And constantly smiling. You know, he's, there's actually a local neighbor, who I think he walks his dog.

Probably because I don't talk to people unless they have dogs with them. Generally. It looks like Milton Erickson.

I said to him, you know, you look like some really famous. He said, what, George Clooney? I said, no. And he walked off.

But if he had stayed, I'd have said, no, Milton Erickson, who he wouldn't have known who Milton Erickson was, probably. He might have done. I'm not the only person in the entire world that knows who Milton Erickson is.

Now you know who he is, if you didn't already. He is. He's kind of like the Bruce Lee of martial arts.

The Bruce Lee or the Bruce Lee of hypnosis, if you want to go. So if you go to martial arts, no matter what martial art you're in, Bruce Lee is kind of at the top, even though he didn't do Jiu Jitsu. He wasn't Judo.

But you get into martial arts, Bruce Lee, you just watch Bruce Lee movies. It's the standard thing. At least it used to be.

I don't know if it's that case anymore. If you get into boxing, Muhammad Ali. He's the top.

There's no one above Muhammad Ali in the best or not. He's the most famous boxer that there's pretty much ever been. And with hypnosis, Milton Erickson or Milton H. Erickson is the most famous in hypnosis.

In the same way, you could say from a psychology perspective, Sigmund Freud was the most famous psychologist or psychiatrist. Still, even though he's been gone for... He passed away in 1939. He's still the most famous and runners up would be probably Jung.

And then you go to counseling, the most famous counselor, Carl Rogers. He almost invented counseling. So that's where Milton Erickson is on my personal opinion.

Other people may think, yeah, I like somebody else. I like Roger, who lives around the corner. He's much better than Milton.

And he might be. He's better than him now, isn't he? But yeah, he was an absolute phenomena. I've got audios of him and I've got, yeah, there's videos of him on YouTube.

Unfortunately, they're very old videos and they're very not good quality. Also, because when he'd had the polio thing and he was getting older, he couldn't speak particularly clearly in the way that he used to. So it's not always, perhaps wouldn't be easy for to hear what he's saying.

I think it's easier if she was in the room with him, but on a video, it doesn't come across very well. So Neuro-linguistic program in NLP, which I did study in, piggybacked on Erickson's work. So co-founder Richard Bandler taught rapid inductions that borrowed heavily from Ericksonian's pacing and language patterns.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, true. And yeah, can't argue on that one. There's no secret to that.

So it wasn't just, I mean, NLP, they studied Fritz Perls, they studied Milton Erickson, they studied, who else did they study? Family therapist, I forget her name. Richard Loveda, the family therapist lady. And so they studied lots of different people, but Neuro-linguistic programing was very much, they also studied language as well.

So, yeah, so much of NLP is hypnosis, and if you look at some of the old books, which I've got, I've got some and I've had lots, I'd like to get my library back, my hypnosis library back, because what I find amazing is you look back and you say, well, it looks like it's new, like this is an NLP that's only been around since the late 70s.

I mean, it's a long time now, I suppose, but if you go back, that stuff was talked about in the 1920s and 1930s and 40s in hypnosis books, the idea of imagining something like on a screen and changing it, rewinding it and taking the colour out, things like that to change a memory or change your reaction to a memory. If this sounds like a lecture, sorry, it's trivia, baby, it's trivia.

So, it's weird, because I kind of realised that I'm still interested in hypnosis. However, I don't want to do hypnosis in the traditional way. I want to do my own thing, hence the let me bore your pain away.

I don't want to have that restriction that I felt with hypnosis, and having it structured in that way. I quite like the freedom of going in and out of focusing on a subject and then talking about flip flops, if I want to, or talking about oh, made me feel hungry, let's talk about that and just still being myself, but also having that focus and the suggestions. I don't think we need people need to have super, super strong suggestions, in a sense of what Milton Erickson said is, you try and get the client or the patient to wrap their mind around an idea, wrap your mind around an idea.

And once that idea, especially if you go from lots of different angles, which I tend to do, it sticks, something will stick, something will change. And we're constantly changing and you remember certain things. You might, there might be something in this recording that you might remember, which might actually be useful.

Even though it's just me talking about stuff that you might not find particularly invigorating or interesting, which in a sense, you shouldn't be anyway, because it is a boring recording. You know, Let Me Bore You To Sleep. But at the same time, it might be useful, other than to just send you off to nod land, noddy land.

So this is something that you might have heard of before. Emily Coole's 1920s mantra became a self-hypnosis staple. And I remember hearing this in Pink Panther movie, and it was the Inspector Clouseau's boss, who just has had enough of Inspector Clouseau.

But I think it's the second movie, and he's back doing his job and he's trying to keep calm. And I think he's looking in the mirror, just repeating, every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. That's the first time I ever heard that.

So when I actually read those words, and I think I've got Emily Coole's book, it made me laugh, because I thought, okay, it was hard to take it seriously, because it was used in a comedy movie. So it was a basically auto suggestion. And he was the first person to kind of really have done that.

Charles Dickens moonlighted as a mesmerist. Oh, I didn't know this. So this might be the first I've heard of this.

So the novelist Charles Dickens treated friend's headaches with hypnosis, and once hypnotized his wife during a US lecture tour in 1842. Wow, I did not know that. But hey, the master of words, I guess it would be.

Wow, I really didn't know. CIA project MK Ultra experimented with hypnosis. So declassified files show 1950s efforts to combine trance with drugs for interrogation and covert missions.

Yeah, it's quite well known. They tried lots of different things, LSD, all kinds of things to try and get people to do stuff. Hypnotic testimony is usually barred from US courts.

So since the 1980s, most states exclude hypnotically refreshed memories as unreliable. I believe it was all because of the false memory issue. So I actually thought that it was never admissible or acceptable in any court of any country, to be fair, but maybe I'm wrong.

The UK hypnotic world record day happened online. So British hypnotist Chris Hughes drew over 30,000 participants to a Facebook trance session on World Hypnotism Day, 2011. I was going to try and do the biggest stop smoking hypnosis day in 2006.

And I went to I did all the advertising for it. Okay. Yeah.

And I went to rent out the hall, which was where bands would play big old place. And they wanted thousands of pounds. So I had to call the whole thing off.

And a fastest induction record claims a seven second handshake trance speed hypnotist Steve speed hypnosis specialist Jonathan Royal demonstrates the feet in a seminar videos. I did some training with Jonathan Royal in 1995. I think.

Next one is Chevrolet's Chevrolet's or Chevrolet's pendulum predates pocket watches. So chemist Michelle Eugene Chevrolet 1833 showed small unconscious muscle twitches can swing a suspended weight still taught in hypnosis classes today. So it's a little bit different for you know, when people you know, the old style, you know, she was she was a word trope, where you swing the watch in front of someone's eyes and say, we'll focus on the watch the watch.

You know, feeling sleepy, all that stuff. This was different. This was basically asking your you just speak directly to your unconscious mind.

So you have this thing, like a chain with a little weight, perhaps you do have a watch as well, on a chain. And just sometimes you'd have like a piece of paper on on the on the desk with yes and no. A little bit Ouija to be fair, but you know, you're not asking the spirits asking yourself questions.

Or you could just say, well, just switch from side to side for yes, and go around for no. And you can ask yourself questions. And because it's you're not purposefully moving the you're not making any movements on your own.

It's micro movements. And the idea is, you're asking yourself questions, in a sense, if you might be wondering, what kind of questions would you ask yourself? Where did I leave the keys? No, well, maybe, but it's more. Is it okay? I want to stop doing this particular behavior.

Are you are you willing for me to stop this? So you could ask your unconscious unconscious mind, so that you can be congruent. So your conscious mind, your unconscious mind, your whole body, your mind, your thoughts, your brain, whatever can all be in sync with what you want him to do. And that can have a positive effect.

There's other things that we've done for it as well. But that's that's a whole recording on its own. In fact, it's a whole book, I've got mind body connection or whatever.

And it's a huge book. And it's all about that. And you've got, it's not just idiomota responses, they call it.

This is like moving your hand, moving a finger, let the finger move. If it's a yes, or it's a no, or, you know, sometimes like raising your hand up, just let your hand raise up on its own. But let your unconscious mind raise up from your from your knee, for example, but don't do it consciously.

Let your unconscious mind just let it. And you talk to your unconscious mind, you know, let's say the other person. So I just move in that hand up now, bit by bit, slowly, but don't do it consciously.

And the hand moves. And then you can do something like, well, what you're going to do is move it up to your face slowly. And when it touches your face, you will become completely relaxed.

Or you're going to let it drop and when it drops down to your knee, again, you'll feel amazing. And you know, stuff like that can be used for lots of different things. I fixation inductions at our cinema classics for a reason.

Staring at a fixed point exploits our natural optic fatigue and was popularized by Victorian surgeons. Well, I can't remember who it was. There was a story.

Was it James Braid? There was, I think it was a dentist, I forget who it was. But he left somebody. Yeah, he said, I was gonna go go next door, and they have the person staring at the light.

And when he came back in, the patient was gone, like completely zonked out. And then he kind of experimented with it and got people to focus on a light or on a point on the wall, and stuff like that. And that's where that kind of came from.

So that was the eye fixation. It's causes natural fatigue of your eyes. It's, you know, if you just staring at a point on the wall, your eyelids will start to get heavy.

And you'll need to blink, we all need to blink. It's just natural, isn't it? But eventually, the more you blink, the more you want to close your eyes. And I'm feeling that now actually, which will be getting away a little bit because I can't see through my eyelids.

I can see the light through my eyelids. It's a different level of light. Because the eyelids are in the way, but I can't see the screen, where all this juicy information is.

But it's definitely a way to. And the weird thing about it is, by saying to someone, and as you stare at the wall, you'll notice your eyes are getting heavier. Now, that's just going happen naturally.

But it may seem like the hypnotist is almost creating that with their words. But actually, what else is going to happen? It's like saying someone, I want you to run around the building 10 times. And the more every time you run around, you're going to get more and more tired.

It's going to happen anyway, isn't it? The Spiegel eye roll test predicts trance depth in five seconds. Rolling the eyes upwards while closing lids correctly. Classified hypnotize ability in about 74% of 2000 psychotherapy tests places.

Now, there's a thing we say, close your eyes and look up. Now try and open your eyes. Now it's actually impossible to open your eyes when you're looking up with your eyeballs.

So by saying, I'm going to ask you in a minute to try and close your eyes while you're looking up. So your eyes closed, the longer they're closed, the more stuck they'll be. You look up with your eyeballs inside your eyes, you're looking up, you notice that your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier.

And you're going to try and open them in a minute. But you notice that the more you try, the harder it is to open them, blah, blah, all that stuff. But the fact is, if you're looking up, you can't open your eyelids while you're looking up.

It's actually physically impossible. Oh, am I giving the secrets away? But part of that, I think it's worth remembering if someone, you know, it's not so much manipulation, a little bit, I suppose. But if someone comes to a hypnotist or hypnotherapist, wanting help with something, then there's a degree of expectation that that person may ask them to close their eyes and do kind of a tester to prove that hypnosis exists.

And they made the right decision by coming for to that person, maybe. So it can be useful. Group testing is possible, Harvard proved.

So 1962 Harvard group scale, let researchers rate dozens of volunteers all at once, paving the way for mass screening studies. I mean, group testing is done at the beginning of a live hypnosis show, like a stage hypnosis show, where some of the things they do is to get people, for example, to put their hands together and, you know, do certain things and tell the people, you won't be able to hold, your hands will stay stuck together, and you won't be able to pull them apart.

And so everyone will stand up and do that.

And those that can pull their hands apart sit down. So the remaining people standing up, they'll get them to do something else, until they've done three or four, maybe five different things. And then you end up with, perhaps, I don't know, 25 people, or 20 people left, or four, maybe, I don't know, 30 people left.

So they get those 30 people on stage, and they do more stuff. And eventually when they whittle it down, so there's 15 people that are very, very, not just suggestible, but also suggestible, suggestible, but also willing. And they want to do it and they want to enjoy themselves and they want to be part of the show.

They don't want someone going up there who's trying to disprove it and that wants to cause problems. So that's why those shows are so much fun for the audience and for the participants as well, I guess. I've never been to a show, seen on TV.

I kind of know the routine of how it's done, but that was like 20 years ago I learned that. And I've read it in books, but I actually did a training course where they went through the whole thing on how to do the training, how to train them, how to actually do the whole show, which was interesting. So science of suggestibility, a Stanford scale remains the gold standard, six decades on.

So recent tests have shown that basically the results they got six decades ago is still reliable. There was a book on this and I didn't like it very much. It was very, yeah, I don't know.

I just, it's kind of, sometimes when they do tests, testing people for their suggestibility is, oh, there's a dog barking, almost seems a little bit like when they show a comedy show, they do a comedy screening to people that don't seem to like humour or, you know, so this cues the audience a bit more wisely sometimes, maybe. Genes matter. According to this, a COMT polymorphism tracks with hypnotize ability.

I didn't understand half of those words. Variants that influence dopamine in the prefrontal cortex partly explains why some people go deeper than others. Okay, so that's the science.

Theta brainwaves rise in trance. EEG studies link hypnosis to increased theta and altered gamma patterns tied to focus attention and imagery. So, ultimately, there's stuff going on in the brain, isn't it? That's what I take from that.

That's my scientific opinion. That's my doctoral prognosis. Functional MRI pinpoints the dorsal anterior circulate, cingulate.

Wow, there's a lot of very big words here. During hypnotic analgesia, oh, it's something I'm interested in, this pain processing hub quietens down while sensory areas keep working. So, basically, the danger signals become safe signals because that's all basically pain is a danger signal.

And when it's no longer experienced as danger, but as being safe, there's no problem. The person will just be relaxed and not be bothered. Hypnosis can restructure neural connectivity.

So, reviews show changes in default mode and salience networks, hinting at neuroplastic benefits beyond placebo. Now, salience is a word that I haven't used before. So, I'm going to look that up.

I kind of know what it means, I think, but I'm going to look it up anyway. Ask copilot salient, come on, explains the following in the context of hypnosis. Salience refers to the brain's ability to prioritize certain stimuli over others, determining what stands out in a given moment.

The surrounding page content discusses how hypnosis interacts with the brain's salience network, which is responsible for filtering information and focusing attention. Research suggests that hypnosis can restructure neural connectivity, influencing the default mode and salience networks. So, yeah, I hope that made sense to someone.

And I'm very interested in neuroplasticity, because the idea, there was an idea, you know, years and years ago, I remember when I was growing up. And, you know, you're fixed. This is your brain, this is what it is.

And, you know, you can't teach old dogs new tricks, all those cliches. When actually, the brain isn't fixed. And our brains are changing, the chemistry is changing, the neural networks are changing all the time.

The mind is changing now. Today, while I'm doing this, I'm learning new things. And I realized this isn't, I'm not, you know, I'm not doing this in order for me to learn new things, but I am anyway.

And it's changing. So the neuroplasticity is happening. And sometimes you can hear enough times, you know, that actually, you can relax.

And relaxing is easy and falling asleep is easy. And turning that danger signal to safe can happen all instantly. And sometimes just by hearing it enough times, you start to realize it's true.

And you start to realize that actually, relaxing is easy. And you perhaps weren't aware before, just how easily you can let go of everything and feel calm throughout your body and your mind. And maybe even experience pleasure, physical pleasure, and emotional pleasure.

So you know, it's interesting stuff. Now, placebo and hypnosis overlap, but differ. So both modulate pain, both modulate pain, yet fMRI, fMRI, I don't know, I know what MRI is, I don't know what fMRI, shows placebo leans on limbic opioid, placebo leans on limbic opioid circuits, whereas hypnosis recruits occipital and basal ganglia pathways.

I understand, I understood the word both in that sentence. And whereas recruits, that's a very big, lots of words in that sentence that was a big word. I can interpret it though.

Mm hmm. So placebo, there was this study, it's a famous study, where this man was, was in America, and he had a very serious condition, which was, you know, as serious as he can get. And he saw on the TV, on the news, that there was this new wonder drug that could be a cure for what he had.

And he asked, he asked the doctors, he said, can you just, can you put me on this medication? You know, can you just test me, test me with it? And they said, well, it's not really, you know, we do need, you know, it's not ready for the public, but we do need people to do some research with. So they allowed him to do it because there was, there's nothing to lose really.

And, and he was happy to be, I don't want to say the word guinea pig, but you know, he was happy to be, to be a test, a part of the test pilot thing.

It wasn't a pilot, it wasn't a test pilot at all, I don't know why I said that. Anyway, he might have been a test pilot, but he was, at that point, he wasn't, he was in hospital. And he had this medication and it worked, completely cleared up, all his ailments cleared up, everything, his body reversed, reversed, kind of went back to normal.

You know, I don't want to go into details, but everything kind of went back to how it was. And it was a magic, it was like a magic cure. He was still in hospital because he was like, you know, he was just having treatment, ready to leave.

And as he was ready to leave, he was like thanking the nurses. On the news came like, oh, it doesn't work after all. They'd done the studies and most of the people didn't have any, any use.

He went home and he's back in hospital within a week. So, what he got from that medication, which wasn't actually of any good, it wasn't useful, it wasn't, it didn't do the trick, but it did have a placebo effect on him. But as soon as he realised it was a placebo, he, yeah, it no longer had that effect.

But they've also, the placebo, there's, it's amazing the amount of people that get tested with medication. And the people with the placebo are often have just as much benefits as the ones, so they get a sugar pill instead of the actual real pill. They have just as much benefit as the person with the real medication.

Phenomenal. Belief is, I mean, I, you know, I talked about recently when I was working in a chip shop and the, I went to my boss's house, we had like this party, and they gave me alcohol-free beer. I didn't realise it was alcohol-free, they were giving it to me in a glass.

And I was drunk, genuinely drunk, until the end of night when they all decided to laugh at me and tell me, showed me all the cans that they'd been pouring in there. Everyone else had been on alcohol, I'd be the only one that was alcohol-free. And I sobered up pretty quickly.

And that's something I'll always remember. Well, I've remembered up until now, because I'm talking about it, aren't I? And I was, what, 16 at the time. And it was something that I remember because it was, apart from the fact that it was humiliating, it was also interesting from a psychological perspective, because I really believed that I was drinking alcohol.

And I'd had probably four pints, five pints, which I knew would make me drunk. Back then, probably two or three pints would get me drunk. Yeah, and that stayed with me, that did.

The rubber hand illusion gets stronger under trance, so highly hypnotisable volunteers reported greater ownership of a fake limb, suggesting suggestion can hack body maps. I'm not sure what that means. Highly hypnotised to report ownership of a fake limb.

There is a way to actually, there's this, it's probably not the same thing, but there's this technique where, let's say someone's got a pain in one hand. So what they do is, let's say it's the right hand and left hand's fine. So what they do, they get a mirror.

So you can see the left hand in the mirror. So the mirror's opposite the left hand. And the person starts moving the hand.

So, and they would poke, someone else would like, poke into the left hand with like, not a needle, but like a little stick or something. And I realised that the hand's fine. There's no, absolutely fine.

And they do that for not, for some people also that had maybe a missing limb, some amputee. It maybe had, you know, phantom, still a terrible phrase, but they call it phantom limb pain. And the pain would go because the brain had been, I don't want to say tricked, but the brain had sort of seen things in a way that kind of made sense, you know? So yeah, that's, that's something that can be done.

I don't think that's what they're talking about, the rubber hand though. I suppose if someone's in a deep trance and you say, okay, this hand is your hand and yeah, mess around with that. Catalepsy isn't just a stage gag.

So a 2024 pilot cut functional neurological disorder symptoms after eight hypnosis catalepsy sessions. I don't know anything about this. So I'm going to look this up.

I, this is the first I've heard of this. Anyone, anyone? This might be the longest recording I ever do because I'm only at number 28. So, okay.

A 2024 pilot study explored the effects of hypnosis combined with catalepsy. So catalepsy is pretty much where you just kind of, I mean, you can have someone cataleptic where their arm is just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just sticking out and it won't, it won't budge. It just stays there.

And if you remember, do you remember the Robert De Niro movie and Robin Williams and Awaken, Awakening, I think it was called, and Robert De Niro was in a cataleptic state where he just sat there and Robin Williams found a cure, before he found a cure, and he gave it to Robert De Niro and maybe chucked the ball and Robert De Niro caught the ball. So a study used a weighting list control design with 46 patients diagnosed with FND, a functional neurological disorder.

I don't know really much about that.

Participants underwent eight hypnosis catalepsy sessions, which resulted in a significant reduction in the symptoms severity. The study measured symptoms severity using the psychogenetic movement disorder, blah, blah, blah. Okay.

So that's it. There's more to that, but I just thought I'd just look that up because I never heard of that one before. Hypnosis can tweak immune cells.

So highly susceptible subjects show measurable shifts in B cell and helper T counts after a single session. There is a technique for certain disorders where, this is going back years, where they would imagine like a Pac-Man, you know, the old Atari, are they Atari? But they were like computer games. Pac-Man eating the cells, the bad cells or the cells that they didn't want in their body.

And imagine a Pac-Man going around and eating those. And it helped with recovery and helped with the treatment that was being given to some of those individuals. And there's a lot more to that.

I've never read, I don't think I've ever read a book specifically on that subject, but it is fascinating. And I think COMT isn't the only gene. What? OPRM1 variants also linked to trance and pain.

High hypnotisables often have an opioid receptor that blunts drug analgesia, hinting hypnosis using uses non-opioid routes. Because that's the thing, isn't it? Like we take medication and that is still the brain that's doing the work. It just activates those parts of the brain that then gives those feelings or causes that healing to take place or inflammation to reduce and all that stuff.

So it's not the actual, hypnosis can trigger those same receptors, but through non-drug routes. So it manages to push those buttons, but without the same buttons that maybe, I don't know, painkillers would press, but without the painkillers, without the medication. So it's a different route, but can still press those buttons, which causes the danger signal to turn into a safe signal.

High suggestibility correlates with vivid imagery and absorption. So psychometric studies place hypnotisability alongside flow, daydreaming and creative immersion traits. So flow is a really famous book called flow by Dumae Csikszentmihalyi.

It's very, very long. I think it's a Russian name, very long name. I can't pronounce it.

And it's all about being in the moment, being in a bit like me now, I'm very into what I'm doing right now, to the very focused on this and nothing else really. And although I may be scratching my crotch at some point, because there's a bit of an itch, I think the fleas have come back. So you've got daydreams, another one.

And so hypnosis, daydreaming is kind of the same ballpark in a sense of imagination, focusing on something. And, you know, if we daydream on feeling good and daydream about how nice it is to just relax and, you know, daydream and remembering times when you were relaxed, you start to become more relaxed. Hypnosis taps top down attention, not sleep.

So I'm not sure what that means. Modern non-state theories view trance as an agreed role that sharpens focus rather than induces unconsciousness. And but it also causes deep, deep relaxation.

And deep, deep relaxation can also lead to falling asleep. So, you know, there's quite a few people in the hypnosis world that would be very against the idea of hypnosis for sleep. But what hypnosis does, it causes, you can have focus, but also causes, can cause deep, deep relaxation.

And falling asleep is 99.9.9.9.9% relaxation. Feeling calm, letting go, having your body relax, your mind slows down, all that stuff. Maybe your mind wanders.

That's part of relaxation. Maybe daydreaming. So that's different from when you're focusing on something particular.

You're not necessarily going to fall asleep during that situation. But when you're relaxed, and you're feeling completely loose and floppy and all that stuff, then that's all really just leads to sleeping. So it's not really so much, you know, you will fall asleep, you must fall asleep.

When I say this, you'll fall asleep. That's not really how I've never really operated in that way. It's about relaxing.

And the more you relax, you just naturally, if falling asleep is the right thing, and that's what will happen. And also, in the same way as if you wanted to keep awake, by keeping your mind busy, that's a way to keep awake, isn't it? So if our minds are busy, and we want to go to sleep, we calm the mind down, and let go of stuff, let go of things.

And when you focus, so you use your focus, but if you start focusing on the different parts of your body, your mind starts to get bored with that.

Which means your mind starts to slow down. And when you're focusing on your hands, and then you're on your knees, and on your hips, and your shoulders, and your eyes, and maybe you're focusing on my words, for example, or some information that you've got no interest in, in like, you know, hypnosis, even though it's something that for some reason I'm interested in, you may just find it completely boring and be of no relevance or interest to you whatsoever.

I might as well be talking about my underpant collection that I've been collecting since I was five.

Hypnosis amplifies memory, so it can help to recall stuff. So yeah, hypnotic depth and placebo responsiveness partially overlap. So some scientists brand the intersection hypnobob or hypnobo, hypnobo, suggesting ethical hypnosis may harvest placebo like benefits without deception.

And yes, I mean, it has been said that hypnosis might literally just be placebo in a sense of belief is so powerful. And when you believe that, and also it's not just belief, it's based on previous experience. So there's a lot of people that have listened to me before, who know that when you listen to me, at the very least, you're going to feel relaxed.

You're going to feel calm, your mind will slow down, your body will relax. And you know, maybe you fall asleep when you listen to me. You feel better, you feel calmer, the stress is released.

Which means when you listen to me again tomorrow, to a different recording, you'll listen with that expectation, with that belief system built on previous experience of feeling relaxed, feeling calm, feeling peaceful. And maybe even experiencing the world in a nicer way and feeling more positive during the day as well. They're sleeping more easily.

Elite athletes use trance for recovery. So hypnotic scripts, speed, muscle relaxation, improved imagery and rehearsal, and cut perceived exertion in control trials. Improved imagery rehearsal is definitely something that's been used for years.

I've got books on helping people with golf, I think tennis. And they discovered, I say they, but it's been discovered that with trials that they got someone that actually practices, for example, hitting a golf ball. Someone that practices physically and someone that practices in their imagination, in their mind, and the person that practices in their mind can have just as much benefit as a person who practices physically.

And a person that doesn't practice at all, against someone that practices in their mind, is worse off than the one that practices in their mind. Performs better than the one that doesn't practice at all. And doesn't practice in their mind either.

So it's quite, again, down to belief. Again, down to expectation. And some would call that, I suppose, placebo.

I don't know. Hypnosis. Hypnotic suggestions can lower skin temperature.

It can also heat up skin temperature. It can. They've done research, they've done, you know, thermometers and that's part of the bio, is it biofeedback, biofeedback thing, where you can also reduce your pulse rate.

You can reduce your temperature by imagining an ice cube resting on the back of your hand or on the palm of your hand will reduce the temperature of the palm of your hand. The more you focus, the more you just imagine it's there. And you can imagine, you can turn down the speed of your pulse.

Or even, I think blood pressure, you know, there's all kinds of things that they're tested on. Genetics, attention style and expectation explain about half of hypnotic variability. The rest remains a fertile mystery for cognitive neuroscience.

I understood the words individually. Oh, yesterday, I helped this neighbor cut some weeds off from using one of those fly mows. And I seem to have damaged my left bicep.

Weird. It's strange because I do weights quite regularly, but I must have used the arm in a different way. That's weird.

So a 2019 review of experimental pain trials found hypnosis consistently outperformed no treatment controls. Okay. Hypnobirthing eases labor.

So this is, it's not new, but it's a relatively new thing, hypnobirthing, which basically you go through, you rehearse before the birth, you know, you rehearse going through the whole thing. And generally people seem to have a shorter, the whole thing seems to be shorter and needing less analgesia and also calmer parents. You've also got other things like hypno, what do they call that? Weight, weight loss thing, like hypnotic versions of those.

So instead of actually having the, the, the balloon put into your stomach, they actually, they hypnotize. There's hypnosis where you kind of imagine going through the process of having that done. And then the, you know, I've got some books on that as well, going on about how that would, you know, reduce appetite for those that needed to lose weight.

And apparently it's very, very helpful and useful. So yeah, there's a lot more here, but I think I've talked for way too much, man. So I got through about 40, I think nearly, yeah, about 40 different ones out of a hundred that came up.

Just going to have a quick look. If there's anything that's going to shoot out at me, that might be a virtual gastric band. So that's the one I was thinking about.

Hypnosis melts menopause or hot flushes even in men. A 94% reduction. 94.

Okay. So yeah. It helps with phobias, helps with so many things.

Wow. Wow. Okay.

So I think I want to be just interesting. Blimey. So yeah, it's, there's a lot here.

So much. Guided hypnosis apps form a 481 million market in 2024, projected to double by 2031. Where's my money? Wow.

I'm in the wrong game. Wait a minute. Guided hypnosis apps.

There's a lot of famous people also that have had hypnosis. That would have been probably more, maybe more interesting for you to listen to. If I was maybe talking about, that would be interesting for me as well.

Talking about famous people that have had hypnosis to help with various different things. Chicken hypnosis is really tonic immobility. So draw a line from a beak outwards and the brain may freeze for up to 30 minutes described in 1646.

So it's not, it's not hypnosis. It's just something else. Sharks can be flipped into a trance-like state too.

Orcas exploit tonic immobility by inverting great whites before having a snack. Wow. Snake charmers aren't hypnotising cobras.

The snakes track the flute's motion, not the music. Okay. Okay.

The largest mindfulness session lesson record. 1417 people. Hints at a mass trance logistics.

Though it wasn't technically hypnosis. That was a Guinness world record. Mindfulness is more, well it's meditation rather than, it's kind of in the middle really.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll just look at this.

I won't. Fast food ads. Fast food ads sometimes hide Ericksonian embedded commands.

A technique lifted straight from therapy handbooks. Yeah. The first people to use hypnosis really, and properly make use of hypnotic language was advertisers, especially on radio and then television in order to get people to buy stuff.

It's the language, that's where psychology, like the cutting edge psychology is used the most, and that's in advertising. Not just advertising, but also TV shows as well to get people to watch. So yeah, it's um, it's worth knowing that stuff.

I think it's very, very, very interesting. Apparently prestigious medical schools such as Harvard, Stanford, UCL now offer elective hypnosis training. In the fifties, there was a famous hypnotist.

Forget his name now. This is terrible, isn't it? But he used to specifically teach doctors and dentists and surgeons hypnosis. Never told Elman, David Elman.

He never taught. He had a book that was green. He wrote a book.

I also used to have his audio tapes as well, but I don't have them anymore. The, it only teach doctors wouldn't teach the public dentists and doctors so that they could, um, dentists especially really, but also to help calm patients down and things like that. So yeah, and he used to do much quicker trances.

Yeah, quite quick hypnosis because there wasn't time for long drawn out stuff. You know, because patients maybe only get like 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever back then, maybe half an hour. This was the fifties, fifties and sixties.

Maybe the forties, fifties, probably fifties and sixties. I'd say Dave Elman, because he used to be a radio presenter as well. I think he had some kind of radio show about hobbies and somebody came in to talk about their hobby, but their hobby was hypnosis.

And I think the, the, the person came in and did and hypnotized someone on a radio which it probably didn't work as about the same as doing a ventriloquist act, isn't it? On a radio, but he became fascinated and went to see this person on stage, went to see his training or whatever, I don't know. And then got into hypnosis himself. Oh, well, that's my little memory of him.

So I'm going to go. So thank you for listening. Remember to be kind to yourself because you do deserve to be happy.

Be gentle with yourself because you do deserve to feel safe. Lots of love. Bye.