History, Mystery & Myth of Hypnosis
Members of the Horndean & District U3A met for their regular monthly meeting on Friday 1st February at Merchistoun Hall. They listened to an interesting and amusing talk by Alan Jones about the "History, Mystery & Myth of Hypnosis".
Alan started his career as a state registered nurse on a busy men's surgical ward where men didn't show emotions of fear or anxiety. He was concerned about this and wanted them to overcome it to enable them recover and leave hospital quicker and it was that that inspired him to study and become a hypnotist. He has a practice in Romsey and also in London.
Alan assured everyone that is was not his intention to hypnotise anyone today. He told us that we are all hypnotised every day of our lives since the ages of 3 to 4 years. He gave an instance of driving down a road and not remembering familiar landmarks - that shows that one has been hypnotised! If you have jumped or cried in a movie again shows you have been hypnotised. He explained that when you give your sole focus of attention to one thing to the extent that you are prepared to exclude everything - like a phone ringing, someone speaking to you - that is hypnosis.
Hypnosis needs intelligence and imagination of that of a 3 to 4 year old and the most important part is willingness to engage with it. What is special about us humans is we have a unique ability to remember the past, we live in the present and we are able to imagine the future.
Hypnosis is a very modern term however the history of hypnosis dates back to the dawn of civilisation. Going back in history Alan explained how the Aborigines communicated with their past ancestors by going into a dream time - a type of hypnosis. The Native Americans communicated with their Gods by lighting a fire, having a regular beat of a drum with the warriors dancing around the flickering flames to put them into a trance - hypnosis.
In the 1700's a Jesuit priest in Vienna who was also a scientist had an unusual name of Maximilian Hell. He came up with an idea that inside all of us is an animal magnetism - a magnetic tide that ebbed and flowed. When it was flowing we felt great; when it was ebbing we didn't feel so good. About 50 years later a well respected doctor in Vienna studied his work and thought he could do something with it. He set up a special clinic in Paris with a circular room with a false floor. In the void in the middle of the floor he put barrels of magnetised water and around the room he arranged chairs in a tight circle with the people holding little metal rods and with other magnets around the room. It had a reaction on some of his patients and he became famous, even to the King of France. His name was Franz Messier hence the word mesmerism.
A psychiatrist in Vienna called Freud came up with a simple concept of the subconscious and conscious mind which takes in seven bites of information (sitting on chair, lighting, comfort of heating, someone's voice etc) whilst the subconscious mind deals with 90% of what we do (breathing, blinking, digesting food etc) which we do without thinking about it and works at a much faster pace. The seven parts of information pass through the perceptual filters in one fifteenth of a second, then go into short term memory for 20 seconds, then go into the hippocampus at the back of the brain and scatters across all parts of the brain to store as a memory.
Our reactions to events come from stored memory based on experiences and to keep us safe. In hypnosis there is a thing called reframing. The hypnotist will reframe the experience so that his patient sees it in a different way to get a different reaction. This is also done by regression. Alan talked about many instances of treating his patients and how these processes worked. Several questions were asked and he was thanked for his interesting and amusing talk.