Science Vs - Hypnosis

Episode Date: September 23, 2016

This week, we explore the science of hypnosis, and take Science Vs to the edge of consciousness. In the service of journalism, Wendy tries to get hypnotized at a comedy club and in a doctor’s office. We talk to comedian Jim Spinnato, Prof. Philip Muskin, Prof. Amanda Barnier, and Prof. Amir Raz. Credits: This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Wendy Zukerman, Caitlin Kenney, Austin Mitchell, Dr. Diane Wu, and Shruti Ravindran. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta. Music written by Martin Peralta and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Alex Blumberg for being the man that spoke pretty often in the end… and Jonathan Goldstein for being our CIA agent… and if you like his CIA agent you’ll love his new show Heavyweight. It’s out next week and you can subscribe now. Selected References2013 paper reviewing 100 journal articles on hypnosis Kihlstrom, JF, “Neuro-Hypnotism: Prospects for Hypnosis and Neuroscience,” Cortex, 2013.Is hypnotizability a genetic trait? Maybe, but it’s complicated Raz, A, et al. “Neuroimaging and genetic associations of attentional and hypnotic processes,” Journal of Physiology, 2006.Script for the Stanford test of hypnotizability Weitzenhoffer, AM and Hilgard, ER. “Stanford hypnotic susceptibility scale, Form C.” 1962.Highly hypnotizable people can be hypnotized to not recognize their own reflections Connors, MH et al. “Using hypnosis to disrupt face processing: Mirrored-self misidentification delusion and different visual media,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014.There's more to hypnosis than expectation Lifshitz, M et al. “Can expectation enhance response to suggestion? De-automatization illuminates a conundrum,” Consciousness and Cognition, 2012.Brain study of a hypnotized man responding to suggestion that his leg is paralyzed Halligan, PW et al. “Imaging hypnotic paralysis: implications for conversion hysteria,” The Lancet, 2000.1955 CIA memo on hypnosis, 1960 CIA report on hypnosis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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To answer these questions and so much more, I'm going to go on stage. I'm going to let people hypnotise me. And then we're going to pick apart the science. I just don't want him to make me balk like a chicken. people hypnotise me, and then we're going to pick apart the science. I just don't want him to make me balk like a chicken. I don't want him to make me do that. I want to do that in my own volition. Recently, a few of us from Science Versus went to a hypnosis show on stage at the Mohegan Sun Casino,

a sprawling complex in eastern Connecticut. Inside the casino, there is row after row of slot machines and craps tables. There's even a life-sized animatronic wolf perched on a fake cliff. Look at that! That's a wolf. That's a wolf. The wolf. The wolf just moved.

We were in for a great Sunday night. Ladies and gentlemen, to put it together for the world's greatest hypnotist, your buddy and mine, Mr Jim Spanato! We met our hypnotist, Jim, backstage before the show. He told us that he started out his career as just your standard magician until one day, a couple of decades ago, when he was asked to be the opening act for a hypnosis show. I didn't even know what that was. Then I watched his show and was like, whoa, what is this all about?

What made you go, whoa? Because I never saw people act like that on stage. You had people doing some crazy things. What kind of things? Well... Jim laughed like that because he was about to make a bunch of people do some of those very same crazy things. If you want us to come up on stage, just come, come, come, come.

Let's go. Come up on stage. And I'd already told him that I was going to up on stage. Just come, come, come, come. Let's go. Come up on stage. And I'd already told him that I was going to go on stage. Yeah, oh, yeah, come up. Happy birthday, baby. All in the service of journalism. Oh, yeah, keep coming. We need a bunch, need a bunch. Around 20 people, including me, walked on stage. And soon, Jim was casting his spell.

So let me ask you volunteers to sit back in your seats. Place your feet flat on the floor. Place your hands in your laps. Separate it, please. Yep. Close your eyes, volunteers. Just sit back and close your eyes. And just listen.

Just listen to the music of my voice. Really, really simple. All I want you to do is to roll your eyes to the top of the ceiling as far as you can go, as if you're trying to stare at the top of your own forehead, all right? And as I do that, you're going to feel your eyes begin to get heavy, so heavy that by the time I reach zero, they'll actually close. So I was sitting on this chair on stage, and at this point I felt really relaxed,

sort of like if you've ever meditated, and the whole world kind of melts away. My head rolled down and I started to lean forward. I actually thought my head was resting on my chest, but our producers, Caitlin Sori and Heather Rogers, who were in the audience, told me later that my head was practically in my lap. It was then that Jim gave us his first suggestion, to put our arms out and imagine that one hand is holding a heavy ball. Based on how low your hand dropped,

Jim decided who could stay and who had to go. He kicked about a dozen people off stage, leaving just seven, including me. All of us just happened to be women. It's always women here, so weird. Hmm. No faking. You can fake later on tonight if you want, but not up here.

Jim's hypnosis show is rated R. It's of the raunchy variety, so lots of swearing, lots of sex jokes, and with seven women on stage, he promised the crowd the entertainment would now really begin. Jim started off with something easy, suggesting that the person sitting next to us smelled unbelievably good. When do you smell that? Yes, no? Okay. You can't hear it, but I said no. I was a bit foggy and maybe I was starting to smell something sweet, but whatever state I was in, I snapped out of it immediately as soon as I saw the woman next to me leaping off her

chair and starting to sniff the lady next to her. But she didn't just sniff her like a regular person. She buried her head deep into her crutch. The crowd went nuts. That was the moment I realised I had to get off stage. So I did. But everyone else stayed on, and under hypnosis, they ended up giving the audience lap dances, they got high smoking imaginary weed, they rapped... Yeah, can't stop laughing! ..they heard noises coming out of their vaginas,

and real estate agent Lauren was sent roaming around the club looking for a lost poodle called Twat. Twat! Twat! So what in the world was happening on that stage? Were those women really just putty in Jim Spinato's hands, unable to stop themselves from following his every suggestion? Or were they just a bunch of attention seekers faking it for the crowd?

Well, the thing is, entertainers aren't the only ones who have been using hypnosis over the years. Some doctors and scientists have been hypnotising patients for centuries with the ultimate goal of improving people's physical and mental health as well as changing bad habits. Give them a suggestion to quit smoking and whammo, they're looking for a dog named Twat. Joking, obviously not.

Presumably the ciggies are in the trash and they never have an urge to smoke again. But does hypnosis really work like that? On today's show, we're pushing science verses to the edge of consciousness to answer the following questions. One, what is hypnosis? Two, can everyone be hypnotized? Three, what is happening in your brain when you're under? And four, what can hypnosis make you do? Like, how good is the evidence that it really can help you quit smoking? When it comes to mind control, there are lots of opinions.

But then, there's science. Let's start with the basics. What exactly is hypnosis? Professor Philip Muskin is a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York. The only thing you have to be careful with these chairs is they totally have a mind of their own. So if you move even a little, correct. For more than three decades, he has been treating his patients with hypnosis. And he says that even after all these years, he can still remember one of the first times he saw someone get hypnotised. It was a doctor who was being hypnotised by another doctor.

The hypnotist gave his subject a very simple but rather terrifying suggestion. You cannot separate your fingers. No force on earth will allow you to separate your fingers. When you open your eyes, your fingers will be fused together. You cannot separate them. Zane brought her out of the trance and her hands are like this and he gives her a cup of coffee and she goes to take it and just falls on the ground. I'm amazed. She then did a neurology residency here at the hospital I'm at now. And I ran into her one day. By then I was a psychiatry resident. So she was now a senior neurology resident. And I said, I've been meaning to ask you this for years. So here we are.

What was going on? She said, I don't know. He told me I couldn't take my fingers apart. I couldn't take my fingers apart. He gave me the damn cup of coffee. I made a mess. I was embarrassed, but I couldn't take my fingers apart. Seeing this astounded Philip. He went on to study hypnosis and now he regularly uses the technique on his patients for a variety of conditions like relieving pain and helping people with their phobias. Philip also teaches hypnosis to medical students. He showed us how to hypnotise someone. Look into my eyes. Nah, that was just his Dracula impersonation.

Okay, no, here it is. This is how you actually hypnotise someone, and you'll notice that the words that Professor Philip Musken uses are pretty similar to what Jim said on stage at the Mohegan Sun Casino. Roll your eyes up, roll them up as high as they'll go, and keeping your eyeballs up, slowly close your eyelids, take a deep breath, deep, deep, deep, deep. When I ask you to do this, all I want you to do is to roll your eyes to the top of the

ceiling as far as you can go. Philip says that you can do a lot of things to hypnotize someone. You don't have to roll your eyes up or take a deep breath. You can show them a spinning spiral or even dangle that old movie classic. The gold watch floating back and forth in front of your eyes. And those are all techniques that work. So they work. The gold watch works.

Sure. But they all work for the same reason, that the person starts to concentrate his or her attention in a very narrow focus. Philip says that when you're so focused and the rest of the world just melts away and all you can hear is the hypnotist's voice, you are entering a trance. Yep, that's seriously what Philip and other academics call it.

A trance. Now, Philip says there are a few components to hypnosis. Absorption, dissociation, and suggestibility. Absorption really means that you narrow your focus. You're absorbed. Dissociation means things that are normally one are separated. And suggestibility means that social cues that you might ignore, you're more open to them.

Once suggestibility kicks in, the hypnotist makes suggestions to you, like smelling the woman next to you or keeping your hands clasped together. Then the hypnotist basically wakes you up and ends the trance. Now, in a minute, I'm going to have you open your eyes. Don't do anything, just listen. At three... You can start to move around your seats a little bit. Why don't you do that now?

Just get a little bit of energy going on, okay? Four, almost awake. On the next number, your eyes will open. At that point, you'll be wide, wide, wide awake, feeling excellent. You'll feel refreshed, like you've taken a short nap. Conclusion. To put someone under, you first focus them, get them absorbed, then give them suggestions.

And finally, you wake them up. Oh, and other than the cocktails and the lap dances, what hypnotists do on stage can actually be quite similar to what doctors do in the office. Next question. Is everyone on stage and in Philip's office actually hypnotised? Because there is a problem that plagues hypnotists, and that is fakers. People pretending to be under and carrying out the suggestions

just because they want to. Either they want to please the crowd or maybe they want to please their doctor. And the thing is that even scientists have trouble spotting a faker. Even with fancy schmancy technology like MRI scanners that can map the brain, there is no consistent marker for when the brain is under a hypnotic trance. But a paper reviewing the current state of the science, which cited almost 100 articles published in 2013, concluded that the scientific consensus on hypnosis

reckons there is more to it than faking. Some people, they noted, do have genuine experiences of feeling in some kind of trance. So, while some people, when it comes to hypnosis, are surely faking, let's focus on what is happening to the people who aren't. Turns out that some are more likely to go under and follow suggestions than others. What makes these people so highly hypnotisable? Studies with identical

twins suggest that there is a genetic link between people who are highly hypnotisable. So it's a trait that could be inherited, but not all identical twins showed a strong genetic link. So there's probably more at play than genetics. And just like you can't use genes to pick out a highly hypnotisable person, according to Philip, you also can't look at someone and accurately guess who is hypnotisable. There are people who are very hypnotisable, but they wear three-piece suits. There are people who dress in a flighty way

and everyone thinks, oh, she's hypnotisable and she's anything but hypnotisable. You can be weak-willed and not be hypnotisable at all and extremely strong-willed and be very hypnotisable. And there are no biological tests for who is or isn't highly hypnotisable. There's no blood test or brain scan. The only way to know, say researchers, is to hypnotise people and then ask them to do a series of increasingly complicated tasks while they're under. It's a test, and based on what people do or don't do, the scientists give them a ranking of hypnotisability.

There are several of these tests. Two of the most frequently used are from Harvard and Stanford. And when scientists use these tests to rank hypnotisability, they've found that like most personality traits, being extroverted or neurotic, hypnotisability falls into a spectrum where most people are in the middle, 10 to 15% are highly hypnotisable, and then there are very few incredibly hypnotisable people. These are people who will follow extremely complicated suggestions. On stage, Jim's hypnosis didn't really work on me,

but I wanted to see how I would go in a clinical setting, you know, with a real professional. Look into my eyes. Philip gave me a short hypnotisability test and he used this simple scoring system from zero to five. Zero, not hypnotisable at all. Five, very hypnotisable. He put me under, then told me my arm felt tingly

and it kind of started to feel a bit tingly. Then, after a couple more suggestions, he got me out of it. Open up your eyelids. Open them up and bring them into focus. How do you feel? Yeah, I feel very, a little bit drugged out. Drugged out. The most similar to when I felt like this before.

Okay. Is it a good feeling or a bad feeling? It's like a little bit woozy-making. A little bit woozy. OK. As you could hear, I sound pretty groggy, and that really surprised me. For five minutes of just focusing my attention, for my head to go all foggy, that was odd.

And it led Philip Musken to tell me... You're actually hypnotisable. Sorry to disappoint you. What number? What number am me... You're actually hypnotisable. Sorry to disappoint you. What number? What number am I? You're at least a three. At least a three? Who wants to be highly hypnotisable? I want it to be a zero. I don't want people messing with my head in a way that's out of my control.

Which brings us to Amanda Barnier. I'm a professor of cognitive science in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. And she studies extremely hypnotisable people, people at the top end of that scale that Philip used on me. And she writes about them in peer-reviewed journals. So she told me about one case of a man called Blake, which isn't his real name.

She put him under hypnosis and then she gave him a rather remarkable suggestion. In a moment, I'm going to get you to look into a mirror and you're going to see a stranger, not yourself. And then I said, okay, lean forward, open your eyes and look in the mirror. And he opens his eyes and he looks in the mirror and then he looks around the room and he

looks at me and he looks around the room and I said, who is it and what do you see? And he said, it's not me. I said, do you know who it is? And he said, I think it's a guy that I used to go to school with. And I said, does he look like you? And he said, um, no. Amanda pushed Blake and he kept saying the person he could see in the mirror was definitely not him. He said, well, his eyes are smaller, his nose is bigger, he's got freckles. So, yeah, that's absolutely one of the most compelling sessions that I've ever sat in. And Blake wasn't the only one. In total, Amanda convinced 14 out of 22 highly hypnotisable subjects that they were seeing a stranger when they looked in the mirror. And of these, 10 said they had never seen this person in the

mirror before, two said they had seen the person before, and another two just weren't sure. She also tried this out on people with low hypnotisability and it didn't work. Conclusion. There is a spectrum of hypnotisability. Most people are in the middle, but there are a few super hypnos. Trademark science verses. These are incredibly hypnotisable people that can be made to not recognise themselves in the mirror. After the break, what's going on in the brain of a super-hypno? And how far can you take these highly hypnotisable people when they're under? Welcome back. So, what is happening in the mind of highly hypnotisable people?

Are they under some weird kind of mind control? Well, there is a much simpler explanation. Placebo. Like the way that taking a sugar pill that you believe is a painkiller can cure a headache. Could believing that hypnosis is real and magical make you experience it as real and magical? Professor Amir Raz is a researcher of cognitive science

at McGill University in Montreal. The whole hypnosis thing can be construed as some kind of a complex placebo effect where things happen just because you believe they're about to happen. And some academics do think of hypnosis this way. They point to studies which show that people's preconceived ideas about what happens when you go under

influence what happens when you go under. Think about those women on stage at the casino. They did all these things that comedian Jim Spenato wanted them to do. And under this placebo theory, they did those things because they went into the comedy club expecting that that's what being hypnotized would be like. But there is debate here. Other researchers argue that expectation and placebo isn't so important in hypnosis, and they have studies to back up their opinions. It's this conflicting evidence that led Amir to build what he calls the funny room. There's a system, a clandestine system, a hidden system of some speakers in the ceiling, and we told them that only highly hypnotisable people can hear a mosquito flying in the room. Then Amir pretends to hypnotize these subjects.

And then he starts to play recordings of mosquitoes flying very faintly through these hidden speakers. And then they say, you know, goodness. So picture it. People think they are deeply hypnotized. They're not. And they hear a buzzing sound that they think they're hearing because they're under hypnosis. But really, it's just playing on the speakers. And Amir says this is just the first step of the experiment. When they come out of the funny room, they are sort of empowered to think that they're highly hypnotizable.

And we wanted to see if when we empower people to be highly hypnotizable, regardless of whether they are or aren't, if they would then perform like a highly hypnotizable. And we wanted to see if when we empower people to be highly hypnotizable, regardless of whether they are or aren't, if they would then perform like a highly hypnotizable person. So after all this trickery, Amir actually hypnotized the participants and gave them suggestions. He then repeated the experiment in a variety of ways, all with one goal, to answer the question, would people who expect to be super responsive to hypnosis perform like people who actually are highly hypnotisable? And the answer is that they don't. That is, they didn't do all the things that Amir asked, things that truly hypnotisable people would do. Meaning that people's expectations don't fully explain how they react to real hypnosis.

Which has led Amir to believe that hypnosis cannot be completely explained by placebo. I can very emphatically say that a large part of what hypnosis is, is placebo. But then again, I'm not for a second of what hypnosis is, is placebo. But then again, I'm not for a second claiming that hypnosis is only placebo. A 2006 experiment, charmingly titled Expect the Unexpected, which came from a different team of researchers, also found that expectation could not fully explain how people respond to hypnosis. They wrote that the idea that it's all expectation,

quote, seems too extreme, end quote. Conclusion. The placebo effect can explain some of why hypnosis works, but it appears that it doesn't explain everything. So, what else is going on in these highly hypnotisable people? For decades, researchers have probed the brains of these people, trying to answer this very question using brain scanners, MRIs or PET scanners.

And some of these small studies have found that the brains of people who are experiencing something under hypnosis look an awful lot like the brains of people who are actually experiencing the real thing. Let me give you an example. So there was this study of a man who was hypnotized and told that he couldn't move his leg. And the researchers found that the activity of two areas in his brain looked really similar to a person who actually had this condition known as hysteria paralysis.

It's a rare psychological condition where you can't move a body part, in this case, a leg. The paper was published in The Lancet. In another study, researchers scanned the brains of eight highly hypnotisable people while they played them an audio recording of a generic sentence with no particular significance. This is what it was. The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say.

And they played it over and over and over again so that it would get stuck in the subject's mind. The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say. Then the people were hypnotized and told that they were hearing the recording again. But they weren't. They were just hypnotised and thought they were hearing it. Finally, the people were told to imagine hearing the line. No hypnosis this time, just thinking about it. The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say. The researchers found that when the people heard the recording, a particular area of their brain lit up. And when they were hypnotised, that same area also lit up, just like when they were hearing

it. But when they were told to merely imagine the recording, when they weren't hypnotised at all, that part of the brain stayed dark. The same effect has been seen when people are hypnotised and told that they're feeling pain, and even when they're told they can't see colour. Now, within these brain studies, there's a particular area of the noggin that comes up over and over again.

It's called the anterior cingulate cortex. It's a hook-shaped node in the middle of the front of the brain. And it seems to affect how we perceive the world around us. There's even evidence suggesting that it affects how we perceive our own pain. So if this area gets tweaked during hypnosis, it kind of makes sense that it would change a person's perception of reality. Here's Amir again. If the anterior cingulate cortex begins to monitor behavior differently and decides that something is sad when it's not so sad, or the other way around, that something

is really funny when it's not so funny, this would bring about a very dramatic change in behavior. Very dramatic. Now, all this research suggests that a hypnotist is kind of controlling people's minds. But there are problems with these studies. For one, they're often really small. Plus, it's really hard to interpret the brain. Yes, areas of the brain light up in particular patterns, but the brain is lighting up in different ways all the time and it's very hard to control for these variables,

particularly when you have so few people in a given study. So, for example, when we look back at that leg paralysis study where the man's brain lit up in two areas, just like a real patient with hysteria paralysis, well, recently that same group of researchers looked at 12 other people, repeated the general experiment, and couldn't replicate their results. And just to make my brain hurt and maybe your brain hurt a little bit more,

while those leg studies that we talked about used PET scanners, many others have used MRIs. And a study out this year found that some computer programs used to interpret MRI scans are actually spitting out unreliable results, making areas of the brain look like they're lighting up when actually they aren't. The implications of this work are still being nutted out and the results of that study will need to be replicated. But meanwhile, here's how Philip summed up our current knowledge of the brain under hypnosis. So we can look at the brain and we can, to some extent, look at the brain functioning.

But there's a lot that goes on we don't have a clue about. Conclusion. Some studies suggest that the brain is affected in powerful ways under hypnosis, but there can be real issues with interpreting some of these studies. So for now, the hypnotised brain remains a mystery. Next question. So even though we don't know what is happening in the brain under hypnosis, there is still this question of what we can actually make people do when they're under.

Now, one way to answer this question would be to push people to their limits, really make them do something under hypnosis that they would never want to do. Amanda Barnier pushes her subjects pretty far. He said, it's not me. But even she has her limits. I don't know how far and I don't know that it's not ethical to test how far that mind control will go. I haven't tested and I don't know where the limit is.

There's going to be a limit somewhere. I don't want to test it. Ugh, academics with their pesky ethics. Well, there's one organisation that doesn't have to worry about those. The CIA. And in fact, in the 1950s, they looked at how far you could push hypnosis using covert programs with adorable names like Project Bluebird,

Project Artichoke and the less adorable MK Ultra. A partially redacted CIA memo summarized their thoughts on the potentials of hypnosis. 5th of May, 1955. Subject, hypnotism and covert operations. I apologize for submitting a document as long as this one. The subject is highly controversial, and even this treatment, which may appear long, is abbreviated. Don't, just get to the important bit.

Is this a part of, like, our, is this what we're doing? Is this a part of, like, us acting? Yeah. Okay, because that really surprised me. The possibilities are not only interesting, they are frightening. A kind of double-think Orwellian world of hypnosis, while unlikely, is not utterly fantastic. The CIA knew this Orwellian world was unlikely because of studies they cited in their declassified documents, like this one, where researchers told a deeply hypnotised woman to stab and poison several people.

She did so without even hesitating. But when they told her to undress, she snapped out of her hypnotized state and refused. The thing is, she knew the murders weren't real. And they weren't. The researchers had used rubber daggers and sugar pills for the poison. But the undressing? That was real. And she could tell the difference. Which is why, in 1960, the CIA concluded in a declassified report...

It appears extremely doubtful that trans can be induced in resistant subjects. So that's the CIA. And 50 years later, Jim Spenato and his R-rated hypnosis show also ran up against those limits. He got those women to do some pretty weird stuff on stage when they were under. Here's Lauren, the real estate agent.

F***ing f***ing mother f***er! She did most of Jim's suggestions, but not one. Jim suggested that she go nuts making out with her husband when Jim would say the words. Pinkies, pinkies, pinkies, pinkies, pinkies! Jim said that she wouldn't be able to control herself with her husband. Now, Lauren sat in her husband's lap, kissed him a little,

but that was it. At that point, I already was, OK, there's a lot of people here and that's inappropriate let's just kiss like normal people. Okay so hypnosis probably won't make us undress in front of strangers or maul our husband on stage if we actually don't want to do that. But what about the smaller things? Things we might actually want to do, like quit smoking, lose weight, sleep better, or maybe even stop pain, say during childbirth. There are lots of claims out there that hypnosis can do the trick for all of these things. But the problem is there just isn't enough good evidence to show whether or not hypnosis works for any of these. Yes, there have been clinical trials,

but sometimes they aren't particularly good quality. They typically don't have a lot of people within them, and scientists use different ways to hypnotise their subjects in different studies, which makes it really difficult to compare results and come up with solid findings. It also makes it really difficult to say the likelihood that hypnosis can help you. Conclusion. Even highly hypnotisable people probably won't do everything they're told to by a hypnotist. Best we can tell, there are limits. Even when you go into a trance, you can probably snap yourself out of it. Which takes us back to my greatest fear,

being forced to make animal noises while I'm under hypnosis. Straight after Philip Muskin hypnotised me in his office, I asked him... With more work, could you make me quack like a duck? If you wanted to. That is, if you wanted, during the the experience to be disinhibited in that way. For me, I guess whether, say, to bark like a duck or bark like a dog or quack like a duck, that would be evidence for me about the power of hypnosis, I guess.

The power of hypnosis is internal. What you're saying is that would be evidence of my power over you. That is not how hypnosis works. So when it comes to science versus hypnosis, does it stack up? First, does hypnosis really work? Well, on stage there's peer pressure and wanting to get a laugh, so it's hard to know how many of those people are faking it. And in fact, even in the lab, picking out a faker can be a problem.

But based on the research we have found, hypnosis does seem to be a real thing. Next, can everyone be hypnotised? No, but most of us probably can. People fall along a spectrum of hypnotisability and about 10 to 15% of people are highly hypnotisable. Okay, now, what is happening in your brain when you are under? Well, that is something that scientists are very much still trying to figure out. For people who do seem to be highly hypnotisable, there is a chance that what we're seeing isn't them under hypnosis, but rather the placebo effect in action. But placebo doesn't explain all experiences of hypnosis.

Still, according to the science, you're not under a spell or someone else's control. And for now, there is no evidence that you entirely lose control of yourself. So if hypnosis isn't all faking, and it's not all placebo, and it's not mind control. What is it? Here's the best answer we got. When your mind is truly focused and all you can hear is the hypnotist's voice, you're just more likely to follow suggestions. Hearing this just baffled me a lot.

So I asked Philip Muskin about it. The trance and the being very, very focused, I can completely understand. But the fact that then your mind is more malleable, is more likely to be suggestible when you're concentrating, how does that happen? How does that happen? So how does it work?

We don't know. And, of course, whenever we don't know how something works, it either makes us think it's false, BS of some sort. But you don't. I don't. I don't from my personal experience. I don't from my experience with patients. Does it frustrate you that there's not a mechanism at play that we know about? We don't know about so much that, you know, truly if you get yourself caught up in all the things we don't know, the world seems hopeless. I'll give you a common example. Falling in love. Most everybody falls in love. You see somebody and you say hello and you're pretty much in love at that moment.

Boom. What is that? We could come up with stuff, but we're making it up. So while a lot of hypnosis remains a mystery, it does seem that there is something about being so completely focused on the words that someone tells you. So completely focused on the words that someone tells you. That everything else just fades away. Just fades away.

And you are so focused on the words that you hear. So focused on the words that you hear, so focused on the words that you hear, that you just nod your heads and you start to... ..like a chicken. That's science versus hypnosis. This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Caitlin Kenney, Austin Mitchell, Dr Diane Wu and Truti Ravindran.

Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. Edited by Annie Rose Strasser and fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta. Music written by Martin Peralta and Bobby Lord. Thanks to Alex Bloomberg for being the man that spoke pretty often in the end. It was worth hearing what he had to say.

And Jonathan Goldstein for being our CIA agent. And if you like the sound of that CIA agent that really surprised me, then you will love Jonathan's new show. It's called Heavyweight. You can subscribe now. Heavyweight. And hang around for a preview of it in just a moment.

Science Versus is a production of Gimlet Media. Next week, we're looking at Zika. Should you be worried? And why is it becoming a big deal now? I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.