Science Vs - Hypnosis: Does It Really Work?

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

What is hypnosis? Is it mind control? Are some people just faking? We’re revisiting this episode in which 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.  Find our transcript here: bit.ly/sciencevshypnosis  This episode was produced by Heather Rogers, Michelle Dang and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Kaitlyn Sawrey, Austin Mitchell, Diane Wu, and Shruti Ravindran. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser, Caitlin Kenney and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll, mixed by Martin Peralta and Peter Leonard. Music written by Martin Peralta, Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard and Emma Munger. Thanks to Alex Blumberg for being the man that spoke pretty often in the end … and Jonathan Goldstein from the very amazing podcast Heavyweight for being our CIA agent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. OK, so we're about to see a hypnosis show on stage at the Mohegan Sun Casino, which is this 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, which is perched on a fake cliff.

Look at that! That's a wolf. That's a wolf. The wolf just moved. We're in for a great Sunday night. Ladies and gentlemen, 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. That was 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's about to make a bunch of people do some of those very same crazy things. 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. Oh, yeah, keep coming. We need a punch, need a punch. 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, separated please. Yep.

Close your eyes, volunteers. Just sit back and close your eyes. And just listen, just listen to the music of my voice. It's 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 melts away. My head rolled down, and I started to lean forward. And I actually thought my head was resting on my chest, but producers Caitlin Sori and Heather Rogers, who were in the audience, told me later that my head was practically in my lap. Zero. Close your eyes, everybody.

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. And 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. But 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. So 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 immediately snapped out of it 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 him like a regular person would. She buried her head deep into her crutch, and the crowd went nuts for this. Now, that was the moment I realised I needed 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 Lauren, who's normally a real estate agent, was sent roaming around the club looking for a lost poodle called Twat. Twat! Twat!

So what in the world was happening in the minds of those people on stage? Were they really putty in Jim Spenado's hands? Or were they just hamming it up for the crowd? Well, the thing is, entertainers aren't the only ones who use hypnosis. For thousands of years, across many cultures, healers and doctors have been using something

that looks a lot like hypnosis to help their patients feel better. And while we first covered hypnosis in an episode a few years ago, we're updating it now because scientists just keep researching its potential to help with all kinds of things from anxiety to pain to weight loss. And if this works, if you could harness the power of hypnosis to help people, like if you look into my eyes and you'll no longer feel crappy, that would be amazing. But what does the science say? When it comes to hypnosis, there's a lot of... I was like, whoa.

But then, there's science. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Today on Science Versus, we are pitting facts against focus as we dive into the weird world of hypnosis. It's all coming up. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches.

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So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan Eleven. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st.

What does the AI revolution mean for jobs? For getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI.

Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. Today, we're pushing science verses to the edge of consciousness as we look at the power of hypnosis. And it seems like there is something truly bizarre about hypnosis. And the scientists who study it say that this isn't just about faking it. I mean, surely when people are on a stage, they might ham it up for the crowd.

But when researchers study this, they do think there is something weird going on. So let's find out what it is. By starting with the basics. When you take hypnosis off stage and into, say, the doctor's office, what exactly happens? Professor Philip Musken 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's been treating patients with hypnosis. And he says that even after all these years, he can still remember

one of the first times that he saw someone get hypnotized. It was a doctor who was being hypnotized 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. 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. 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 he showed us how to hypnotize someone. Look into my eyes. Nah, that was just his Dracula impersonation. Okay, so here it is. This is how you actually hypnotize someone.

And you'll notice that the words that Professor Philip Muskin uses are actually 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, as if you're trying to stare at the top of your own forehead, all right?

Philip says you can use lots of things to hypnotize someone. You don't have to roll your eyes up or take a deep breath. You can use 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. 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. Yeah, that is seriously what Philip and other academics call it. A trance. Now, there's a few components needed for someone to be considered hypnotized,

including what scientists call absorption and suggestibility. Absorption really means that you narrow your focus. You're absorbed. And suggestibility means that social cues that you might ignore, you're more open to them. In a clinical setting, a person who's hypnotized might be sitting very still and quiet, waiting for instructions from the doctor. And once that suggestibility kicks in, that's when they can start to make suggestions to you. Like if perhaps they're trying to help you quit smoking, they might say, smoking is poison.

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'd taken a short nap.

So, as a recap, to put someone under, you first focus them, get them absorbed, then give them suggestions. And finally, you wake them up. But knowing this left me with one big question. How does this work? What is it about that focus state? That is what I can't wrap my head around. The trans and the being very, very focused, I can completely understand.

But the fact that then your mind is more malleable, more likely to be suggestible when you're concentrating, how does that happen? So we can look at the brain and we can, to some extent, look at the brain functioning. Yeah. Brain studies have looked at people who seem to be under hypnosis and they found some strange stuff going on.

So, for example, when people are hypnotised and told they're in pain, even though nothing's hurting them, parts of their brain look like they are actually feeling pain. And then, let me tell you about this weird study, where scientists wanted to know if they could hypnotise the brain into thinking it was hearing something that wasn't there. OK, so here's what they did. Researchers scanned the brains of eight people

while they played them a recording of a sentence that didn't mean anything. This is what it was. The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say. The researchers played that sentence 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. The people were then hypnotized and told that they were hearing the recording again. The man did not speak.

But they weren't. They were just hypnotized, so they thought they were hearing it. The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say. Here's what the researchers found. When the people actually heard the recording, a particular area of their brain lit up. And when they were hypnotized and told they were hearing it, that area also lit up, as it did when they actually heard the sentence. And what made this even more convincing was that when people were told to just imagine that they were hearing the

recording at a time when they weren't hypnotised at all, that part of their brain stayed dark. And so this suggested to the researchers that there was something curious going on with hypnosis, like perhaps it was tricking the brain somehow. But still, these brain scans with people under hypnosis, they're often really small. And brain scans at the best of times are notoriously difficult to analyse. Still though, from what we're seeing, there does seem to be something special about getting someone to be really, really focused. It seems to make them more open to following suggestions. But there's a lot that goes on we don't have a clue about. 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. Here's what we do know, though. While we like to think that everyone can fall in love, it doesn't look like everyone can be hypnotized. And Philip says it can be really hard to know who's going to go under just by looking at them.

There are people who are very hypnotizable, but they wear three-piece suits. You can be weak-willed and not be hypnotizable at all, and extremely strong-willed and be very hypnotizable. Studies with identical twins suggest there's actually a genetic link between people who are hypnotizable. But researchers say the only way that we can know for sure if, say, you can be hypnotised, is to actually try to hypnotise you. Ask you to do a

series of increasingly complicated tasks and see if you do it. A test. And there's a few of these kinds of tests. Two of the most common come from Harvard and Stanford. And when scientists use these tests, 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 hypnotisable, and then there are very, 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 professional. Look into my eyes. Philip gave me a short hypnotizability test, and he used this simple scoring system of zero to five. Zero, not hypnotizable at all. Five, very hypnotizable. He put me under, then told me my arm felt tingly. And it did kind of start to feel 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, um, a little bit drugged out. Drugged out. The most similar to when I've 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. Okay. As you can hear, I do sound pretty groggy. And that actually really surprised me for just five minutes of focusing my attention,

for my head to feel all woozy. That was odd. And it led Philip Muskin to tell me. You're actually hypnotizable. Sorry to disappoint you. What number? What number am I? You're at least a three. At least a three? I don't want people messing with my head to be like a puppet on a string for some hypnotist or even some researcher like Amanda Barnier. I'm a professor

of cognitive science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Amanda 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 Amanda told me about one case of a man called Blake. It's not his real name. But she put him under hypnosis and then 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, OK, 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, no. Amanda pushed Blake and he kept saying that 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. Amanda tried this out on 22 highly hypnotisable people, and over half of them said that they saw a stranger when they looked in the mirror. She also tried this out on people with low hypnotisability, and it didn't work.

So from all this, Amanda knows that you can push some people pretty far when they're under. But how far can you take it? I don't know how far, and I don't know that it's not ethical to test how far can you take it? 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. Academics and their pesky ethics.

Well, there's one organisation that doesn't have to worry about that. The CIA. And that's coming up just after the break. Plus, could hypnosis help you with your anxiety. Welcome back. Today, we are diving into the science of hypnosis. And now we're going to see how far we can push someone while they're under. Like if you are highly hypnotizable, what could a hypnotist make you do? And luckily for us, back in the 1950s, the CIA was working on this very problem, looking at how far you could push hypnosis. And they were doing it using covert programs with adorable names, like Project Bluebird,

Project Artichoke, and the less adorable MKUltra. A partially redacted CIA memo summarized their thoughts on the potential of hypnosis. 5th of May, 1955. Subject, hypnotism and covert operations. If you recognize the voice, our CIA agent is played by fellow Gimleter, Jonathan Goldstein. 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 what, like, our, is this what 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. OK, cos 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 of hypnotizing people was unlikely because of studies that they cited in their declassified documents, like this one, where researchers told a hypnotized woman to stab and poison several people. She did it without hesitating. But when they told her to undress, she snapped out of her hypnotized state and refused. What was going on? Well, the thing is, she knew the murders weren't real.

And they weren't. The researchers had used rubber daggers and sugar pills for poison. But the undressing, that was real. And she could tell the difference, even when she was under. It was studies like these that led the CIA in 1960 to ultimately conclude that it, quote, appears extremely doubtful, end quote, that you could hypnotise someone into doing something they don't really want.

So that's the CIA. And 50 years later, Jim Spenato and his R-rated hypnosis show ran up against those limits too. He got those women on stage to do some pretty wild stuff when they were under. Like 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 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. We talked to Lauren about what was going on. 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. Amanda Barnier has published work on the limits of hypnosis too.

Like in one study, she asked hypnotized people to send her a postcard in the mail every day. But pretty quickly they stopped. Which brings us to our last question. Could we use hypnosis to push people into doing things that they want for themselves but just can't? Like, could you use it to stop us eating junk food, feeling anxious, or even feeling pain?

Well, this is something that Professor Philip Musken uses hypnosis for these days. He tries to help his patients with it, like for pain. Sometimes he'll be sent patients that have tried other stuff like pills and it didn't work. So their doctor might say, What about other ways of controlling your pain? Physical therapy, massage. And someone might say, have you considered hypnosis?

And here's how it would work. The idea would be that, say, you had a pain in your arm. Philip would put you in a trance and then make suggestions like... You can't feel your right arm. Or in studies on this, sometimes they say, imagine the arm being completely filled with a sensation of relief. At other times, a doctor would ask patients to wear a glove and then say, you cannot feel pain

because the glove you are wearing prevents you from feeling it. And this seems kind of wild, but studies on highly hypnotisable people show that sometimes it actually can help. That's what a recent meta-analysis of over 40 studies on pain found. And they were looking at all kinds of pain, like pain in cancer patients, chronic pain, and things like pain from burns or surgery.

They said it was about as helpful as stuff like CBT and mindfulness. In fact, the National Institutes of Health in the US says that, quote, a growing body of evidence suggests that hypnosis may help to manage some painful conditions, end quote. And so far, the strongest evidence that we have for this is in pain. Scientists have also looked at whether highly hypnotisable people can be hypnotised into quitting smoking or losing weight. And that research is more mixed. We're also seeing some studies on certain kinds of anxiety,

like getting anxious before medical treatments. And sometimes here, hypnosis can help. Philip and others have seen it work in very specific instances. Like, he told us about this one patient who was in hospital, really sick with a bad lung disease. And she was spiraling, anxious, thinking... What if I die? She had the cutest little three-year-old twins.

They'll never have a mother. Just incredible, intense emotion. And I'm saying to her, I want you to take deep breath, which is not so easy for her. And I want you to imagine yourself floating. It took about 20 minutes to calm her down until this torrent of emotion had run its course. And then I had her come out of the trance. And she opens her eyes and with a big smile says, wow, that was intense. She remembered everything and said, wow, I said, all this stuff was pent up in me. And just when I sort of hit this state, it all came out.

But while chatting to Philip, as well as reading the reports on hypnosis that happen in a clinical setting. In lots of cases, it really didn't feel like what was happening was some kind of mind control, but rather that if hypnosis was helping, it could have been due to something else, like maybe our old friend, the placebo effect. And that having a nice doctor like Philip tell you, we're going to do this thing and it might help, well, that just does it. It could also be something as simple as just helping you relax. In fact, one review looked at heart rates, breathing and sweating when people were under hypnosis.

And it found that it can physically relax you. It's actually something I noticed as well. And then there's this final idea that there is something about the intense focus of being hypnotized that can help you change the way you think about your pain or your anxiety. And that's kind of how Philip sees it. Which takes us back to my greatest fear, being forced to make animal noises while I'm under hypnosis.

With more work, could you make me quack like a duck? If you wanted to. That is, if you wanted during the experience to be disinhibited in that way. For me, I guess whether, say, to 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 what Philip is kind of saying here is that if you really wanted to be hypnotized into walking like a chicken, the power of hypnosis could help you because there is something about the power of

the mind, the power of your mind, that when you tune in and focus and you're just completely focused on the words that someone tells you, you're completely focused on the words that someone tells you, that everything else just fades away. And you are so focused on the words that someone tells you, so focused on the words that someone tells you, that you just nod your head and you start to... Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, like a chicken. That's Science Versus. Hello. Hey, Michelle Dang, producer at Science Versus.

Hi, Wendy. How's it going? It's good. Look into my eyes and tell me how many citations there are. Ooh, today, okay, there are 48 citations in this episode. 48. So my hypnosis worked on you. Yeah, I guess so. If people want to see these citations, where should they go? They should go check out our show notes. They should go check out the link.

They should go to... Look, I made you all woozy. Yes. I'm feeling a bit out of it. They should go check out the transcript, which is in our show notes. Great. Thanks, Michelle. Thanks, Wendy.

Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Heather Rogers, Michelle Dang, and me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Caitlin Sori, Austin Mitchell, Diane Dang, and me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Caitlin Sori, Austin Mitchell, Diane Wu, and Truti Ravindran. Edited by Annie Rose Strasser, Caitlin Kenney, and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Akedi Foster-Keys. Sound design and music production by Matthew Boll,

mixed by Martin Peralta and Peter Leonard. Music written by Martin Peralta, Bobby Lord, Peter Leonard, and Emma Munger. Thanks to Alex Bloomberg for being the man who, well, ended up speaking pretty often. And Jonathan Goldstein from the very amazing podcast that I know you know called Heavyweight. He was our CIA agent.

Thanks again. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.