Free Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis by Robin Waterfield Page A

on the right side of the brain, and a university professor on the left. For most of us, the left side is dominant. Some recent experiments on people who are good hypnotic subjects have indicated that they are significantly better at right-brain tasks than non-hypnotized people.
    However, more is going on in the brain during hypnosis apart from the shift to the non-dominant hemisphere. This shift does not seem to occur in all cases, but more in those who are highly hypnotizable. Moreover, the dominant hemisphere is also activated during hypnosis: which hemisphere is activated depends probably on the kind of task the hypnotized person is being set. This suggests that hemisphere-shifting may not be an explanation in itself, but part of the general capacity of highly hypnotizable people to shift from one state to another – to dissociate. Work is still in progress on the relations between brain activity and hypnosis. For instance, early research seemed to suggest that hypnotizable subjects were thosewho could easily enter the alpha state. Brainwaves in the alpha spectrum (8–13Hz) are ‘the noise the brain makes when it is alert but doing little’ – for instance, when someone is awake but has her eyes closed. But now it seems that the slower theta rhythm (4–7Hz), associated with a deeper level of drowsiness, is more typical of hypnotizable subjects and perhaps of hypnosis in general.
    Experimental findings have suggested that people can get better at being hypnotized, as if it were a skill that could be learnt. But in the experience of working hypnotherapists this is due to the overcoming of initial resistance. It is not so much that their patients learn a task as that they become less fearful and suspicious of the therapist and his practice. Another view – a powerful and interesting theory – suggests that we are all easier to hypnotize when our natural bodily rhythms are in relaxing mode.
    Is it possible to resist hypnotism, perhaps as Kim did in Rudyard Kipling's novel, published in 1901, by reciting multiplication tables to himself to keep his mind off the hallucination he was being asked to see? Of course it is. You have to want to be hypnotized, otherwise it just isn't going to work. There are ways of overcoming resistance; as I said, Milton Erickson was a master at this. But in order for him to have successfully overcome resistance, the client must have unconsciously wanted to be hypnotized, however much his conscious mind was protesting.
    Sometimes resistance to hypnotism can take quite extreme forms. On a famous occasion in 1978, during the World Chess Championship, defector Victor Korchnoi claimed that Russians from the camp of his opponent, Anatoly Karpov, were trying to hypnotize him from a distance, to put him off his game. But this was probably paranoia – a probability that is increased by the consideration that Korchnoi took to wearing one-way reflecting spectacles, to deflect any rays that they might be beaming at him, and to carrying a Geiger counter to detect such rays! Karpov won anyway.
The Phenomena of Hypnotism
    Hypnotic phenomena can be divided into various categories. First, there are alterations in involuntary muscles: your breathing may deepen, your stomach gurgle, your eyes water, a few muscles twitch, your heart and pulse rate increase or decrease. You will feel listless, and your arms and legs may feel heavy. These phenomena are easy to understand. They are features of the light trance, or simply of relaxation. But as the trance deepens, more extraordinary phenomena begin to manifest: alterations in voluntary muscles, alterations to the senses, delusions of the senses and certain psychological phenomena. These phenomena are not unique to hypnosis by any stretch of the imagination: they can all occur spontaneously, or may be produced by drugs, for instance. But they do all occur through hypnosis, and have played an important part in the story of hypnosis through