Fringe Hypnosis

First off, thank you to Joshua Houghton for inviting me to post a guest post on his Hypnosis blog. I greatly appreciate the opportunity.

I was going to write about how hypnosis can relieve stress and get rid of worry, especially for financial concerns. However, that topic has been covered by Adam Eason, among others, and his advice is excellent. Also, I’m watching Fringe right now, which brought another topic idea to mind. Yes, I’m writing this very much on the fly.

If you haven’t been watching Fringe, I’d recommend it. It’s a very cool show, though a little bit on the gross side at times, as well as disturbing in general. The past couple episodes have dealt with hypnosis in one form or another, casting it in both a negative light and a positive one.

If you’re watching the show and haven’t seen either episode, I apologize for any spoiler you may encounter. A couple episodes ago, flashing colored lights were used to produce a hypnotic state in order to control someone and force them to solve a complex equation. They were made to hallucinate disturbing and painful images as negative motivation and punishment for not solving the equation quickly.

Tonight’s episode involved a form of hypnosis using a sensory deprivation tank, in order to recover memories from someone else (if you haven’t watched the show, that won’t make much sense; if you have, you know what I’m talking about). In addition, it mentioned hypnosis being used to harm.

This show, among others, raises questions about hypnosis and what’s possible and not possible with it. In the long run, I believe this is a good thing, just like stage hypnosis works overall as good advertisement for hypnosis. In the short run, however, it could spark some negative reaction and beliefs. So let’s explore this.

We’ll start with the lights. Can a pattern of flashing lights so enthrall a person as to leave them in a completely open and susceptible state, where they will immediately follow any and all suggestions? We’ve all heard about how strobe lights can cause epileptic fits in people, so it would seem to be plausible that it could cause hypnosis, as well.

Certainly if you Google the term “strobe light hypnosis,” you get a lot of hits selling “light and sound machines” and similar products (heck, even some do-it-yourself projects).

How this works, if and when it does, is through a process called “brain entrainment.” Basically that means that your brainwaves tend to follow the lead of a strong rhythm. So if you have flashing lights that flash at 60 Hz, your brain will tend to slow down till it’s in an alpha state. The problem is that this takes a long while; it doesn’t happen instantly upon viewing of the flashing lights.

And even when you get down into that alpha state, which is a hypnotic state, the basic tenets of hypnosis apply. That is, you can’t be forced into doing something you don’t want to do or that goes strongly against your morals. That statement, btw, does need some clarification. Some of you may be hypnotists, or may have run across ads for programs that teach covert hypnosis and “mind control secrets,” etc. And you’re now wondering about that.

You can be hypnotized into doing things you don’t want to do, but it takes a lot of work and effort and goes right up to (if not crossing) the border between hypnosis and brainwashing. And it involves trickery: if I hypnotized someone and told them to go punch someone in the face, they’d—rightly—refuse and possibly come out of trance and storm out.

However, if I convinced them the other person was a punching bag, or was holding a training punching glove in front of their face, or … then they just might punch the person in the face. Because now they don’t see anything wrong with throwing a punch at the person’s face. Either that or they don’t even register it as a face. For all intents and purposes, however, you can’t be made to do something against your morals in hypnosis. And certainly not from a brief exposure to flashing lights.

Now, in that episode, the little kid being hypnotized wasn’t being forced to do anything against his morals, but he was essentially being tortured mentally. Is that possible? I’d have to say it just might be. A common technique used in hypnosis is to “see” someone from your past and interact with them, with an intent toward healing and integration. And that can definitely be painful at times.

This is one of the reasons one should be well trained in hypnosis and hypnotherapy before attempting a regression, by the way. It can bring up powerful emotions and memories, and if you’re not careful, it can cause a session to be cut short because of the crying and/or screaming. That is different from what happened here, however; in this episode, the little kid’s dead mother was revivified in his mind, and used first as motivation for completing the equation, then used as punishment when the kid wasn’t able to solve it fast enough. The kid saw his mom falling apart from injuries before his eyes.

In real life, most, if not all, clients would snap out of hypnosis if something like this was tried, and walk out. If you watched the Myth Busters’ episode on hypnosis with Seth-Deborah Roth, you saw the attempt to hypnotize someone to hit a coworker fail miserably. She woke up almost immediately and went “Don’t ever do that again,” or words to that effect (going purely by memory here).

The kid didn’t know he was being hypnotized, however. And he certainly had not given conscious consent beforehand. So assuming that the flashing lights worked as they did in the show (which is not the case in reality, unless you’re really sensitive to flashing lights or have been hypnotized before, with the lights used as a trigger for going back into hypnosis), the rest could, conceivably be possible. Very highly unlikely, however, and it would take a great deal of skill on the part of the hypnotist to keep the kid in hypnosis and following instructions. Much easier and simpler to use traditional coercive techniques.

A grain of truth in the tale. Just enough to make it sound convincing, even to those in the know. Now. The most recent episode. Hypnosis itself was used in a demonstration of causing someone physical harm. An ice cube was presented to a hypnotized subject as a red hot coal, and pressed into their arm. When it was removed, blisters formed on the subject’s arm, just as though they’d actually been burned. Hypnotic suggestion was used later in the episode in conjunction with psychoactive drugs, for use in memory recovery.

The ice cube thing is true. No ifs ands or buts there; it is true. Actual experiments have been done in the past on just that effect. Ice cubes used to cause burns.

Here’s why it works:

1) the body has a hard time distinguishing extreme cold from extreme heat in the first place, so in the absence of seeing whether it’s an ice cube or a coal, the suggestion determines which it’s perceived as; and

2) the body rushes its healing agents to the site of the injury and raises a blister to protect and heal the skin because it believes the injury is real.

Please note that this doesn’t work on everyone. If I remember right from the original experiments, not everyone responded with a blister; some responded with just pain.

Also, please don’t try this at home. That would just be wrong and irresponsible of you. The ice cube thing was brought up as a framework for how the administration of a powerful hallucinogenic drug caused real physical injuries in people. There’s just one thing wrong with that. The blisters raised by the ice cube don’t behave entirely like burn blisters.

They die down much faster, as there is no real physical injury, plus there’s no accompanying tissue damage, like there is with a real burn. Also, the skin is very responsive to suggestion and emotion. Perhaps more so than most other parts of the body.

That said, belief is a powerful thing and stress does make illnesses and injuries worse, so please don’t go suggesting serious problems to people and expect them to be completely okay afterward. Be responsible.
Now for the memory recovery part of the show. Aside from the drugs and sensory deprivation tank, this, too, is possible.

Hypnosis can be used to recover buried memories, though the use of what’s called “clean language” is a must. Without clean language being used, a false memory could easily be created, without either the client or the therapist being aware of it.

Hypnosis is even used to recover memories from past lives, which, depending on your viewpoint, would count as alien memories. That is, memories from someone other than you. Because of the clean language requirement, and the ease with which false memories and false certainty can be created, many courts do not allow hypnotically-discovered evidence. Hypnosis in real life, when it pertains to a legal matter, is largely used to enhance the ability to recall, but not to directly relive/discover memories.

On that note, Walter, the doctor who performed the regression in tonight’s Fringe, was irresponsible in some of what he did. At the very outset, while Olivia was going into hypnosis and the hyper-suggestible state, he made some negative suggestions about the danger and possibility of severe negative consequences to the procedure.

That’s akin to going into a surgery and hearing the doctor say “There’s a strong possibility you’ll die on the table today … Well, let’s get started!” That’s going to raise the chances of something bad happening.

All in all, in these two episodes, at least, Fringe seems to be dealing with hypnosis fairly realistically, though dramatically. As long as you keep in mind those dramatic turns of artistic license, Fringe is both enjoyable and educational. Kind of. And it’s quite possibly raising more interest in hypnosis and what it can do, which, speaking as a hypnotist, is not a bad thing.

Joshua Johnston

Joshua Johnston, like Adam Eason, doesn’t talk about himself in the third person. Very often. I’m a hypnotist originally from Washington State and now in Michigan. I’ve trained with Wendi Friesen, Roy Hunter, and Brian David Phillips, among others. Currently I maintain my own practice’s website, http://firegoldhypnosis.com, and am managing Wendi Friesen’s 7 Super Simple Steps ebook site, http://7supersimplesteps.com, and the accompanying blog, http://supersimplesteps.wordpress.com.

I like computers, mind studies, reading, writing, bowling, martial arts, my girlfriend, learning and sharing knowledge with others. If you’re in the Detroit Metro area and need hypnosis services or even just have any questions, feel free to contact me through my site.