Modern skeptics have a sound and convincing explanation of this unusual state. Hypnotic subjects aren’t actually in a trance state, they argue, they only think they are. Social pressure and the influence of the hypnotist are often enough to convince people that they should act a certain way. When they find themselves heeding the suggestions, they think they must be in a hypnotic trance. Proponents of this theory contend that this belief alone may be powerful enough to bring about remarkable changes in a person. If you think someone is compelling you to act a certain way, you will act that way. If you think hypnotic suggestion will ease your pain, your mind will bring about this feeling.
I have heard this argument so many times, and it always makes me laugh. “Hypnosis doesn’t exist, it’s just a placebo that works on gullible people’s minds.”
What’s funny is that these people even know of and acknowledge the fact that hypnosis has been used to anesthesize people during open heart surgery and during dentistry – in situations where there are excruciating pain levels and where no person in his normal waking state would be able to remain calm and relaxed.
They also acknowledge that hypnosis has been used in many cases to cure people from different medical conditions.
Yet, they claim it’s not really hypnosis what works.
I don’t even know what the argument is about – basically what they say is that “the hypnotist does something that causes changes in their mind so that they experience all these things or get healed”.
Well, yeah. That’s pretty much the definition of hypnosis. It pretty much seems that these people are hypnotized into believing that there must be something evil about hypnosis, that makes them insist so much on their quiet laughable line of reasoning. That’s quiet a medieval attitude towards the power of our minds, and it shows a deep lack of understand about what hypnosis really is.
