November 29, 2023 • 67 mins
Most people are familiar with some version of "hypnosis" -- at least as it's portrayed in fiction. But what is hypnosis, exactly? Why did this fancy name for a trance state become such an infamous term, and why have so many people made extravagant claims about the concept? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the fact and fiction surrounding 'hypnosis' -- spoiler: the trance state is real, and a lot of people conspire to make money off it.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super
producer Max Max, the mesmerist Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know, Fellow conspiracy realists. Is a
bit of a trick question. Have you ever hypnotized someone?
Or have you yourself been hypnotized? What do you think
(00:48):
about the idea of hypnosis in general? We didn't really
talk about this one too much before we went on
air with it, so I had to ask, guys, I
feel like I see it in film and fiction all
the time, but I I've never actually seen the kitchy
trope of a stage hypnotist for entertainment. Have you, guys
ever seen that?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yes, College did some college touring back in the day,
and one of the one of the big acts that
gets on college tours along with comedians musicians, is a
hypnotist who will do a stage show. It's like an
icebreaker basically for like orientation kind of stuff or early
get togethers with like a new class coming in.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Right right on. What was the experience like, as you can.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Remember, people raise their hands, people go on stage, a
hypnotist tells everybody what to do basically, and everybody for
the most part kind of does it and plays along.
And you know, we're going to get into a lot
of the details here. From my perspective, it was people
(01:53):
having an excuse to be a little more open and
do things that they'd be nervous and anxious about doing
if they didn't have a reason to do it.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I see, because then there's a bit of a gosh,
a bit of a scrimmage line between one's own agency.
Right yeah, I wouldn't cluck like a chicken, for example.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Well, even just like to be in a public place
in front of a bunch of other people, that makes
some people nervous to one level. Right now, imagine like
dancing and putting yourself out there on that stage. It's
kind of like showing yourself off a little bit. There's
another level of anxiety associated with that stuff. So I
think this just strips that away at least to some extent.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But you have to imagine that no one with a
crippling anxiety for being up on stage or being called
out in public would ever raise their hand in a
million years.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Good point.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
So selection it's a big thing that our pal mentalist
Darren Brown talks about at length when when you hear
him speak about parts of his method. And it's weird
because we're also going to find out why hypnosis has
such a bad reputation. There two or three really big reasons,
and as a result, even now in twenty twenty three,
(03:06):
the public often derides this as pseudoscience or quirky quackery,
but it turns out there's still Weirdly enough, there's a
lot of science supporting this bizarre phenomenon and people still
don't fully understand it. Hypnosis, you could say, is itself
a bit of a conspiracy with a lot of fact
(03:26):
and a lot of fiction around the whole concept. And disclaimer, folks,
we might play around with examples of hypnotism or trance
states in tonight's episode, so seriously, if you are vulnerable
to experiencing trance states, please please make sure you're in
a safe environment, not driving operating heavy machinery, et cetera.
(03:48):
Here are the facts. Way to prime the pump.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
There, Man, You're not going to hypnotize you. You cannot
get hypnotized.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
You are so unsuggestible right now, bro Us.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I'm gonna look, we'll get there. But I am coming
into this episode fully feeling like hypnosis is complete bs.
And it's only because I watched that Penn and Teller
BS episode from season two, like right before we're recording,
and so I feel like this whole thing is kakamamine
bum bumps.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
And yet it is used in some forms of therapy. Still,
I know this day and sort of there's some stock
put into it. Sorry, let's get those facts out, guys.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yes, here are the facts. Let's start with a brief
history of hypnosis without making anyone sleepy. The term itself
is pretty recent. It was coined back in the eighteen
hundreds and popularized by a guy named James Braid that
you'll never hear about again in the rest of this episode.
The actual thing, the experience of this state, it dates
(04:48):
back into antiquity. Some experts who we'll get to later
this evening have referred to it as the oldest Western
form of psychotherapy. Trances, as we've discussed in the past,
have been considered part of magic religion, soothsaying. I mean,
if we look at the scientific history of hypnosis, we
also see why those scientific origins caused it so much
(05:12):
trouble down the road, we got to talk about our
main man friends, friends, not Ferdinand Sadly Mesmer.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
This is cool to me. I mentioned this maybe recently
when we were sort of hinting that this episode was coming.
I recently watched a Japanese film from the nineties called
Cure by Cursawa, but not that Curasawa and hypnosis and
hypnotism is a huge plot point, and I'm not gonna
give anything away, but Franz Mesmer ends up being this
sort of specter hovering over the whole movie and the
(05:42):
study of his work, and was he onto something? One
of those kind of deals, right, Was he totally full
of it? Was he an absolute quack? Or did he
really have the truth? It was one of those types
of movies, and I think everyone would really dig It's
a little slow, a little odd, but very cool, very
cool movie.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I like that we're like Curasawa, but not that when
the same way we had to say friends, but not Franz.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
That's true, that's true. Well, yeah, so I didn't know
much about Mesmer before I saw this film, and some
of this stuff is new to me as well. Well.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I wanted to ask just quickly before we get into this,
did you guys find in your research that a lot
of the early hypnosis stuff went back to and refers
to patients as we're talking about here with Mesmer, that
were experiencing things that were quote hysteria or you know,
someone who was maybe going through some kind of mental
(06:34):
state that was not understood at all, but there were
like attempts to make almost make contact with someone who
was operating on a different level.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm glad you pointed that out, because
I would say a big differentiation between hypnosis and its
precursors versus something like faith healing is that faith healing
would purport often to leave a physical condition, whereas a
lot of Mesmerism and things that were hypnosis by other names,
(07:07):
they sought to elite alleviate what they would call maybe
demons of the mind or some sort of spiritual cognitive blockage.
And you know, as we always have to say when
we point out hysteria in general. Maybe the problem was
that women lived in a really crappy society toward women,
you know what I mean, that's oh god, the etymology
(07:29):
of hysteria and hysterics alone is pretty problematic.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The wandering womb. Well, but they don't even get me started.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
No really, but there were even people who were like
having some form of seizures, right that had It didn't
have anything to do with that stuff necessarily, right, It
has more to do with just again a malady that
isn't misunderstood or not understood at all, but then attempting
to use things like tuning forks and like all of
these just so many different interesting ways to try and
(07:58):
get someone in this trans It's like state.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yep, could be visual, could be auditory, could be pulses
or like vibrations, like anything that's sort of a repetitive
pattern that the mind can lock into and get sort
of tricked into a fugue state kind of right.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's apt. I mean you can even see
it today on social media, the concept of a sound bath.
That's that's so.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Social media is hypnotism of it. Other find yeah, with
the patterns like yeah, you look up and it's been
three hours. You know, you know it's great.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Truly, casinos are also built gender that hypnotic state, a
flow state you could call it, which it is, but
it's also a flow state. That's the flowing helping your
bank account too.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And well, I want to talk about it more later,
but because I want to get through this stuff, because
it's really important to set this up. But just pop
music and in the vibrations that comes through your speakers,
and then when you combine it with the words, it
gets into like we've talked about some of that in
the past, but like.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Oh Max Martin and the Swedish hit making machines, they're
using a formula to keep you exactly as invested as
they want you to be at the exact moment and
then share you over and make that three minutes feel
like it's an eternity in a good way.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Sup. We're indie music, but you can again, you could
be an indie musician and make that most him not stuff. Ever,
it just maybe then becomes a crazy pop phenomenon like
some of the artists we've seen over the past couple
of years that start on a YouTube and then all
of a sudden they're on the Grammys and you're like, whoa.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What shout out ye but there yeah, And I love
that you're saying that because it is technology and there
is a democratization of it. You know, anyone can learn
that math and you can apply that stuff. Mesmer Franz
Mesmer is not worried about being a pop star, but
he is worried about being a reality star, maybe more
(09:55):
so than he's worried about being a physician. This guy
was diplomatically put eccentric, and like a lot of other showmen,
he stood on the shoulders of giants. He got a
lot of his basic ideas from two people. One was
a British physician named Richard Meade. And Richard's whole thing
(10:16):
is that there are gravitational interactions of the planets. Then
as now, people didn't fully understand gravity. And he said,
the effect this kind of invisible substance or fluid. It's
in all their bodies. Baby, you just got to feel
the vibration and I can manipulate this according to the
laws of what I call animal magnetism.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Ooh yeah. Animal magnetism was the big thing, and care
that's the most important central part of Mesmer's philosophy. You
guys gotta watch Karen tell me what you think I'm fascinating.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah, actually sure, but you get that that is another
thing that has continued down the timeline into modern day. Right,
It's just different terms, not the idea that there's some
invisible fluid that's being affected by things. But if you
think about how important astrology is to so many people,
like in their personal lives right now, and how popular
(11:10):
that is on social media, Like it's something within us
that is affected by these heavenly other bodies, right.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
That reminds me. I think maybe we talked about this
on air Fusebacker. Maybe was I had this mission a
long time ago where I was like, maybe there is.
Let me not be a jerk, let me not be dismissive.
Let me see if in my own mind I can
figure out some kind of theory for astronomy, right, so
our astrology Excuse me how this would work? And the
(11:39):
closest I got was a we don't really understand gravity
as a civilization, right, as a scientific body of thought.
Be we know that it affects things, and see, we
don't know everything about the development of the human mind
in gestation so, with those three things being true, could
we argue that the passage of heavenly bodies in some
(12:02):
infinitesimal way affects brain chemistry. And if so, does that
mean that you know, a taurus is likely to taurus
or in our case, Leo's are likely to roar. I
don't know. I never got past that part.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, I was also gonna add, you know, to me,
the concept of animal magnetism is like what a cult
leader has, like it describes a quality in somebody, like
you got that raw animal magnetism. That means that you
can like influence people, you can hold sway over people
with your just sex, panther energy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I got that dog in me join my cult.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Well, but it's not just it's it is influence and
that's a major part of it.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Right, I'm saying that's what I associated with. This is
all other nuances, and I think it's maybe been co
opted a little bit, but like this is fabulous.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Please, But this thing of animal magnetism, for me, one
of the most important parts is that the belief was
this stuff this chi, right, you can think about it
like chi, this energy, this whatever this for is that's
inside you can be manipulated by your mind, and basically
someone else can take your mind to a place where
your body can do things like heal itself, right like Wolverine. Yes,
(13:14):
in a potentially very dangerous manner. Right, the belief could
be potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yes, Yes, because we enter into oh gosh, we're all
excited to get to this. We enter into a world
where the concept of truth experienced truth changes and it
is a very real thing. And that's why we call
it a conspiracy. At the top, I want to shout
out the second guy who really informed a lot of
(13:41):
Mesmer's work toward what he called in about of Humility Mesmerism.
He had a teacher in Vienna, a Jesuit whose name
was I kid you not father Hell, and father Maximilian
Hell spelled the way it sounds. His whole deal was,
I mean, on being a Jesuit to being a teacher.
(14:01):
His third whole deal was this idea that he could
heal patients of all sorts of stuff with the use
of magnetized metal platest man magnets.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Right, how unclear?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
How are these eighteen hundreds ideas just like popping back
up like this is the big thing.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, asach what and this guy. Okay, so Mesmer has
these two guys bumping around his head. They're huge influences
on him. And so he takes it a little step
further and he says, okay, animal magnetism, love it, magnets,
I'm in invisible fluid chi if you will, you know
(14:40):
it has to your point. Man, it has a thousand
names throughout history. He says, Okay, a lot of diseases,
a lot of infections of the mind are just all
coming down to obstacles in the flow of this cosmic force.
So all I have to do to fix it is
induce what he called prices, trance states that culminate in
(15:04):
an explosion of delirium or even physical convulsions revelatory moments.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Which makes you think about the old hysteria treatments with
with like hand created vibrating machines.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah, like that woman in the symphony that had a
little too good at time.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Well sure, but in this case, like the actual machinery
that was developed by doctors who are like, I'm going
to treat these patients.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
I would physically manipulate you into a sense of sedate
well being and invulsions and it's all above board, your
husband cannot be in the room.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Well, I don't want to get on any kind of
like feminist soap ex here, but it did occur to me.
Maybe this is like stating the most obvious thing. I
think women have been sort of subjugated over time because
they are just the most powerful force that we know.
They're the only ones that can actually create men, create
more men who could potentially subjugate other men. Again, probably
(16:07):
stating the obvious, but it's pretty wild when you think
about to what degree that was realized and then just
driven home by men.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Oh one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Well there's we're I don't know if we're going to
get into it. But there was a whole hypnosis panic
akin to the Satanic panic.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yes for a while, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Cool, Yeah, and that's the dangerous thing. Okay. So so
Mesmer had a lot of ideas about how to get
these crises going, and a lot of his ideas, now
this is an unintentional pun, rubbed people the wrong way.
There were numerous allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with
female patients. That was kind of true. I find it
(16:47):
also incredibly interesting that his big, his big fall from
Grace comes about when King Louis the sixteenth hears about this,
and you know, Louise is balling out at this point.
So he convenes a panel of experts, just like people
that he can reach who he thinks are smart, and
(17:09):
he says, investigate this mesmer guy's claims. See if there's
real science to what he's saying. One of those guys
was the famous Libertine ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who also had
some inappropriate relationships throughout his life. And they said, according
to our report, and you can read this online, he said,
(17:30):
mesmerism is utterly fallacious and without merit, a little bit hypocritical,
ben But.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And he added, don't check my house for body.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
It is to check my London basement. And they're like,
why did you put that at the top of every pitch.
Just don't do it, please, don't do it, so right now,
So like that's that's the past. But because of the
controversy surrounding this just this guy Mesmer, then it gave
birth to a cavalcade of accusations against hypnotism. And similar
(18:06):
to the way that the US government's war against hallucinogens
stymied a lot of research into addiction and into you know,
the power of the mind and body relationship. Mesmer's terrible reputation,
I would argue, also hamstrung the efforts of scientists who
(18:27):
had come later. For a long time, the controversy surrounding
this guy transferred into a controversy around hypnosis in general,
and that's why a lot of times now people think
of it as like a novelty. Did you guys ever
play that game? Light as a feather, stiff as a
board is getting?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I played it. I just remember it from the craft
very vividly. But that's the one where you're supposed to
be able to put your fingers underneath the edges of
a person's body and levitate them, you know, with the
combined power of your mind. Right, yes, sir, Yeah, I
was too happy. I was too stiff.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Oh my gosh. Well this this is a that's a
form of hypnosis too, because really hypnosis is a series
of tactics that create another create a state and the feeling. Yeah,
it's kind of like it's kind of like driving toward
the center of your whatever country you're hearing this in.
(19:24):
There are multiple roads that lead there, but your destination
is the same.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
There was this group of kind of weirdo performance artists,
sort of hippies in the late sixties called the Yippies.
I believe Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and an artist, was
a part of it. And they supposedly did light as
a featherstiff as a board on the Pentagon and the
White House, and they claim to have levitated it a
centimeter or so into the air, which it was all
(19:52):
kind of like for you know, lulls and kind of
like satire. But that's the whole thing, is Hey, if
it's a shared belief, if we all believe it happened
and felt that it happened, then it happened.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
You know, except for all the places where it's connected
to the load bearing you know, rods, they can't well, first.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Off, we need to look at buildings that are situated
on lay lines. Right shout out to that episode. So
all right, right now, skeptics and scientists don't buy a
lot of stuff about hypnosis. They're not saying it's both.
What they're saying is they don't buy a lot of
the more extravagant claims about the effects or potential of
(20:33):
these processes. And then law enforcement has their own special
traumatic story, a story about trauma. In fact, they are
pretty gun shy about types of hypnosis, such as memory
recovery or memory regression therapy. And there's a good reason
for that. We don't understand hypnosis fully. Humans don't and
(20:54):
probably never will because it's a smaller question about a
bigger problem, which is that humans still do not understand
the human mind and may not for the foreseeable future.
But despite all the controversy, there is one thing for certain.
You can bet your bottom dollar on it. Hypnosis is real.
(21:15):
Sorry to the guy reached out on Twitter, hypnosis is
real asterisk depending on how you define it.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
See's speaking of mess Somebody just went through time and said,
bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, and it just happened
as soon as you said it, and complained in my mind,
I don't know. I'm in a weird state, guys.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Let's get in a state of sponsored add Hey, how
about that. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, Real hypnosis
triggers anchors, post hypnotic suggestions, Manchurian candidates. We'll get to
(21:59):
all of that first. I think we got a bust
some myths. Did you guys ever see that film The
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
In film school but a minute because of all the
canton angles and the crazy like it evokes a sense
and this is a technique that's been used in film.
Fincher uses it a lot where at the angle of
the camera sort of tilted, it puts you in a
different mindset, a mindset of maybe insanity or approaching madness,
things like that. And that's the movie that really kind
(22:28):
of created that language, which is really really cool and
it's it looks very modern. Actually, it's a real cool movie.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, and we're gonna spoil it, so this is your
spoiler warning three to one spoilers. The ostensible bad guy
for a lot of the film most of the film
is a dude named Caesar and it's spelled ceesa r.
He is a hulking murderer. He's an evil somnambulist, a sleepwalker,
(22:58):
and he's compelled to commit these homicides left and right.
He's a real nasty customer. This depiction of hypnosis is
not true it later it turns out in the film
that the real bad guy is doctor Caligari, or is it.
Because there's a twist at the end. But the reason
(23:19):
this doesn't work, the reason it's what Joe Biden would
call malarkey, is that real hypnosis does not remove free will.
To your earlier example, Matt, about the icebreakers at a
college or at college tours, that stage hypnotist cannot compel
someone to murder someone or to act against their own
(23:42):
kind of like moral compass, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
There's a great example of that exact thing been in
that Pentin Teller BS episode where the stage hypnotist says, oh, now,
everybody look down at your shoes. Oh, it's the most
adorable puppy dog you've ever seen in your life. And
everybody picks up their shoes and they pretend that they've
got their cute dogs, and he's asking questions about their
individual dogs. And in the post interview for Penn Teller's
(24:08):
BS with all of the people who got hypnotized, they
were all reporting, well, no, it was just I mean,
it was fun to pretend, and I felt like I could,
and it was just it was, you know, basically, that's
what they're reporting.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
To Ben's earlier part or maybe years as well, Matt
about crossing over into this like you know place where
you can be more permissive with yourself and perhaps have
a good time and play a little bit and be
part of the show. And again to the point where
anyone that wasn't down with that would keep their hand
perfect firmly planted under their behinds.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Social pressure, peer pressure and social dynamics, they're a huge
part of that when you're working with groups as well.
I mean, look, if you put someone into trance, what
we're saying is they don't all of a sudden become
an autumaton of some sort, even if they're very, very suggestible.
Instead instead of dozing, really they're hyper attentive. They're just
(25:02):
hyper attentive on different things than they would ordinarily be
attending to. And there are different kinds of hypnosis. The
two biggest self hypnosis and hypnosis brought on by an
external source. In the modern day, that's a psychiatrist. In
the past, it might have been a magician, the local
holy figure, you name it. The weird thing is, and
(25:23):
we'll see how this is true. But the weird thing is, folks,
you likely hypnotize yourself. You are your number one hypnotist.
We talked about that a little bit with our pal
Joe McCormick about the kind of flow, absent minded state
you might get in when you're taking the same route
to or from work every day. You might hypnotize yourself
(25:47):
during repetitive task and who doesn't have a moment of
reverie when you're falling asleep or when you're kind of
waking up and you're still sort of dreaming. That's self hypnosis.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
There's another popular thing that you can find on TikTok
or Instagram wherever you look YouTube, something that would be
titled probably guided meditation, and it's very similar to a
hypnosis session. And they are separate things, right, but that
there's there's so many similarities here, this concept of just
(26:22):
maybe this is why I'm confused, because I think in
that state you can be hyper attentive to the words
that are coming out, but also you can These are
often used to relax and to get people to fall asleep.
So I wonder where that line is between a state
of hypnosis that is hyper attentive that is also just
lulling you into relaxation. So like, I think there's there's
(26:45):
something there, right, there's a space, oh eliminal space in
between those two states that is that is fascinating.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
I don't know. You know what's funny too, is you
got me thinking about film noir. It's it's a trope
you see come up in film noir a lot, like
in terms of like the shadow self and like the
idea of what could make someone capable of murder, you know,
or even like perhaps someone was committing murder while under
the influence of hypnosis from an external party who is
(27:15):
trying to control their actions and stuff like that. So
I'm looking at this list of amazing film noir from
the forties and fifties, and I've got some homework to do.
But really really interesting how that this idea, especially with like,
you know, things like Freud and just you know, psychoanalysis,
they sort of went hand in hand and really invaded
the popular kind of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I'm glad you said that, right, The shadow of Freud
leans long into the modern day and actually leads to
some of the problems we're going to explore here, some
of the moral panics and conspiracies. That's your question, Like
what is the difference between say a sleep aid and
auditory sleep aid and this kind of guided hip. I
(28:01):
would say that it's still again, it's that example of
different roads to the same city, because those things still
get you hyper attentive, but you're hyper attentive upon the
inner workings of your mind right your your environment. The
guided imagery is sometimes a big thing in those meditation videos,
like we're going to the waterfall, you know, picture relaxing
(28:25):
by the beach, a.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Lot of thing in your cave.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
But it's a hypnosis technique to do that very exact,
same exact thing.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, So I think as it gets
weird to me because it is we're talking about self
hypnosis now at this point guided meditation. To me, it
rides the line of self hypnosis and somebody hypnotizing you,
which is really weird because it's so often just experience
with headphones right when you're in bed getting ready.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Well, okay, this is just me showing you.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I've done that many a time, a self guided meditation
while I'm trying to go to sleep or something. And
I just wonder if you could convey messages to someone
that is being hyper attentive, just not on the conscious level.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, right, like the hypnotize yourself into quitting smoking kind
of things. Or into changing some habit or some diet. Yeah,
and there was. That's still a really big industry. There's
a guy that I think we all got pretty into
named doctor David Spiegel, who's a Stanford University psychiatrist, one
(29:33):
of the top minds in the world of hypnosis. And
he puts it this way. He says, if you look
at the science during hypnosis and actually during flow state
in sports and feats of creativity, activity in brain regions
that helps you switch between task that's what starts to
shut down, and the same region seems to disconnect from
(29:58):
another part of your brain that helps you notice when
you are being self reflective or notice when you're day dreaming.
So the part of you that questions your stream of
thought why it's down, that's that's the giant who is
being put to sleep. Weird, it's a weird one. And
(30:20):
also I've never done this now, I don't know anybody
who has to be fair, but it seems that hypnosis
can also be used to help you slowly gain control
over autonomic functions that people usually can't control voluntarily, stuff
like your heart rate, your blood flow, things like that.
(30:41):
Like that's why people in these states their breathing tends
to calm down, right, it slows their bpms go down.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's doctor Spiegels found like that that actually works.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
You can in gender that state when you are hypnotizing
someone and putting them in a tranced state. But and
Spiegel didn't say this, But what I have heard is
that people have been able to be trained or to
train themselves to have control over that sensory stimulus. It's
kind of like remember whim Hoff. Sure, the guy.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Who's towering his body temperature and all that.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
But he uses physical breathing techniques. That's at it pumps
his core right, and like he's literally over exercising his
core to send into this state of like heating it
heating itself through kinetic movements. So I just wonder the
difference between like, because look, it's for me, it's still
(31:46):
feeling as though I cannot believe that there's some unseen
force that's being actually manipulated, right, the animal magnetism stuff.
I have trouble believing that that could possibly be true.
And I maybe it's because I'm still connecting it to
those concepts rather than just that the mind itself which
(32:06):
controls all of those functions. That you don't consciously think about,
like heart rate, right, or temperature or things like that.
Maybe you could harness control over that somehow by changing
the way you think. I don't know, it's just sorry,
I'm just having problems with it. Still, Hey, you.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Me and Noel in the rest of humanity, because again
this is still not fully understood, and I do have
to give credit where it's due. Wim Hoff probably not
the best example. I could have went off the dome
with our pals Robert and Sophie over it. Behind the Bastards.
I think they just recently released a pretty great series
(32:47):
on wim Hoff. Tune into that, as we always you
don't get.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Featured on that show unless you're kind of a pill.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Oh wait really, Oh no, I don't want to listen
to that.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I do think it's interesting because that also is like,
you know, I know that he's been tested, you know,
science or whatever, and then it is determined that he
can do feats of extreme extremity or whatever, and that
he claims to be able to do a lot of
the stuff with by focusing his mind. That is connected
to a type of self hypnosis. It's sort of like
psychosomatic where it's like, if you believe something enough, you
(33:22):
can make your body do what your mind tells you
to do, sort of like lucid dreaming or being able
to gain self hypnotize in a way. But it's useful
to you.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
M oh and yes, yeah, you're absolutely right, nol. And
that's also it was correct Behind the Bastards multi part
series on wim Hoff wim Hoff's surprisingly Deadly story, and
that is from September of this year, so pretty current.
We do know that regardless of the different variables we're
going into hypnosis, guided or self almost said, inflicted, self inspired, whatever,
(33:58):
it generates that famous sense of physical relaxation. Hypnosis brings
us ultimately to the same state. All roads lead to
the same rome. Figuratively, the outer world falls away and
all of a sudden you're like a deep sea diver
in the mind. You know what, dreams may come, et cetera.
You plunge into your own mental ocean and you're entranced
(34:20):
by your own inner world. Any hypnotic state can be
described as a trance state characterized by well, they'll say extreme,
but let's say higher than normal suggestibility, relaxation and a
heightened imagination, very reading, rainbow. These all sound like good things.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
They do.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Sorry, I just sound is great.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Butterfly in the Sky am I right? Stop? Yeah it's
too late, man.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
I'm glad we made I'm glad we made it through psychosomata,
even though I know we were all figuring a round it. Yeah.
So it's but the state is not like sleep, very
very important. It is not like sleep because the subject
in the trance is alert the entire time on some level.
(35:13):
That's why the Manchurian candidate stuff doesn't really work. We'll
get into that. We got a scary story there. Most
people can compare this to daydreaming, or the feeling that
you get when you when you mentally exist in another world,
like you watch an incredibly enrapturing or moving film, or
(35:34):
you read an amazing book and you kind of forget
where you are, or music can transport you as well.
That's that's what people compare it to, more so than
just like take a melatonin and conking out for you know,
four to eight hours or whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I just remember one of the best examples of this
thing from a recent, well somewhat recent movie, Get Out
with the Yea.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
The spoon, spoon trigger, yeah, and and cure. It's a lighter,
a flickering flame, it can be anything. Those are both
the that's visual and sonic at the same time, and
they're in sync with what another.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
No, no, you're right. I'm like, I love that you bring
up the flame because the flame is one of the
oldest induction methods. And we'll learn about induction in like
a second. But the thing is whether whatever you call
these states, when people are in them, you are tuning
out the majority of the stuff happening in the physical
(36:33):
world around you so that you can hyper focus on
the subject at hand, the truth occurring in your mind,
whatever that could be. You're really paying a sort of
super attention. You're just taking all of the all of
the attention you would have paid to the outside world,
and you're putting it into your inner world. I mean, like,
(36:55):
that's so cool. It It means that the emotions you feel,
because they're the like non physical sensations, right, they're paying
more attention to those emotions are very real, and those
feelings then become for a time, your reality. It's pretty weird.
That's why, like the that's why hypnotists have to be
(37:18):
very careful with their leading questions.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It makes me think of hypnotic regression again. And when
you guys remember we talked to Toby Ball, who's made
a show Strange Arrivals. The first season was about the
Hill family, right, Benny and Barney Hill. And one of
the major pieces of that whole close encounter of the
(37:41):
third and or maybe fourth kind was that they were
they were hypnotically regressed and remembered things that they had
not remembered before. And the big question was could any
of that have been implanted or like, could they have
been led down the pathway by the person leading the set?
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Yes, it's dangerous, dude, That's one of the most dangerous parts.
I mean, I don't do we want to Should we
talk about the basic process of hypnotism?
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Oh yeah, I think people get the gist in general,
but I'd love to maybe even review some of the
terms you mentioned induction, you know, so, I think it's
definitely a smart movement.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Excellent idea. We're going to tell you the first and
most important thing about hypnotizing people right after this word
from our sponsors, and we have returned the first and
most important thing about any guided meditation any hypnotic activity
(38:46):
is to make sure the subject consens I know that
sounds like all goodie goodie, but it's very important. There
are ways to know. You asked about induction. There are
ways to get people to enter a hypnotic state without
their consent, but they're very unethical. They're also pretty difficult,
and it's best to avoid them. Once you have consent,
(39:08):
make sure the person's comfortable. Once you have them comfortable
with no interruptions, you can begin the process of induction.
Induction is just the fancy word for kind of ushering
someone in to this trance state. And there are a
million ways to do it. I'm using hyperbole. They're like
(39:28):
several dozen good ways to do it, and they really
depend on the subject more than they depend on the
hypnotists themselves. Like mentioned fire right, star into the fire.
They used to do that to us in boy Scouts.
Or they would say, or you know what's the other one?
The one we always hear.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
The clock watch ependulum swinging thing, and it's to you know, focus,
make the eyes move in a hypnotic pat I'm also
like perhaps a crystal looking into a crystal ball, you
know what I mean? That can be just as much
for the person on the other side as it is
for the quote unquote hypnotists or soothsayer. You know, it's
a shared experience.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
A black mirror, yes, yes, like the like the minds
did once.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Upsprying mirror or something like that.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And also like an Apple iPhone fifteen promax just.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
So just so brought to you by Apple quotes. So
there's yes, again, this very ancient stuff. And that's after that,
Assuming that works, you get to progressive relaxation. Progressive relaxation
is Matt kind of like what it's exactly what you
were describing with some of those things we've listened to
about going to sleep or meant to help you go
(40:41):
to sleep. Progressive relaxation just sort of makes you more
conscious of your body, makes you more conscious of your
breathing and slowing that down. And this requires a certain
amount of willingness or trust on the subject's part. It
is again extremely difficult to hypnotize as someone who doesn't
want to be hypnotized. You also should not do it
(41:04):
because can sent is key. You can. You know, once
you get people relaxed and they're breathing and they're kind
of entering that trans state they're going to naturally start
to close their eyes. You can prompt them to do so.
The way a lot of folks will get into it
is counting. We've all seen this or heard this in
film as well. You may hear this in some meditation,
(41:25):
things like we're going to count from one to and
you know, pause at certain points to say, like feel
your body begin to float, the lightness, a warmness.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
I do that with my therapist every time we start
and he does a mindfulness meditation, and I actually have
asked him of late, can we actually do that at
the end, because we do at the beginning. It's cool,
but sometimes I'm it's like I only see him every
couple of weeks. Sometimes I'm ready to jump right in
and talk. But if you do it at the end,
it transitions me and allows me to think about sort
(42:00):
of what we've talked about, like me, but also kind
of just transition into the state of calm. So I've
really been enjoying doing it at the end, and then
it sort of feels like I'm getting the most value
out of the exercise.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
And that's a that's a good point because that's we
see the bookend of this in hypnotic sessions. Like at
the end of a hypnosis session, there's the counting back
to the waking world, right, But once you have someone entranced,
then that's that's when the work begins. That's where you
have the repetition of phrases. That's where you have this
(42:34):
stuff where you set up like anchors, suggestions, triggers. Right,
you see a red light, you will always feel warm,
which is a very easy one because people already do
that if they can see red and green.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
But again, we're not saying that you can actually make
someone respond to these things, right, because there's no scientific
proof that you do in all of this stuff we're
talking about, actually make someone see a chicken when they
look at, you know, a shoe.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
No, that's an extreme version, and that would be for
that to happen, you would need a lot more work
put in and it would not be ethical.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
But we're saying we could. You could potentially pair the
color red with making someone think something.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
You could, Yeah, you could make them more likely to
have that association as long as it was as long
as it was emotively anchored, as long as it's anchored
in an emotion.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
You're talking about implanting as well. Right, that's sort of
what mentalists do, where they'll they'll implant an idea subconsciously
and then there's a trigger like the color red or
a word or whatever it might be. And again, this
is a Manatorian candidate's screen to action and killing somebody,
but it could make them say a thing or think
a thing. We can do that to ourselves all day long.
Be triggered by a thing that Matt joked earlier about,
(43:55):
what was it? Something that yeah, Annie, like I mean,
and that wasn't really a magical moment, but it was
something that triggered that thing in you that already existed.
And if a mentalist or practitioner of this kind of
stuff had put it there, then he could have easily
recalled that. I do believe that's true. I think the
stuff that Darren Brown does is absolutely real. But it's
also not magic. It's just weaponized psychology. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yes. And at one point, at some point, we have
to ask, what's the difference. So you do this stuff,
and you know, you say, like you'll have a more
hardcore thing would be implanting a suggestion or attempting to
implant an association of disgust with like cigarettes, right, every
time you pick up a cigarette, you will you'll be
repulsed by the smell or the taste of it in
(44:43):
your mouth or something like that. And people have sworn
by that. But again, it's not one hundred percent solution
because at the every step of the way, there are
myriad there's a myriad of options and variables. There's no
real silver bullet. That's all malarchy. There's no one side
fits all.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
What I love about your conversation with your therapist, Noal
is when people count out of a hypnotic session, they
are often the hypnotist is often going to encourage the
subject to continue carrying that warm, relaxed feeling when they exit,
(45:22):
and that's a cool, powerful.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Thing, Plasmo effect or no. I do find that it
makes me feel a little more grounded, a little more chill,
and a little more able to shake off some of
the stresses of my week and or day, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
And here's here's the other thing. Okay, we're going into
the deep water now. Sorry. I recently rewatched What Dreams
May Come, and it's messing with me. I loved it,
so we know.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
It's a bummer it's it's heavy, it's it's good, it's amazing,
it's just God. Not to mention, I haven't rewatched it
since we've lost dear Robin Williams, so that may even
make it hard to watch.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
He's really good in serious roles. Not. Yes, we know
to the earlier point that we've all made in the
course of tonight's show, we all know that you cannot,
through hypnosis alone, create something that create a Manchurian candidate.
One cannot compel a person to do things that they
(46:23):
would not ordinarily do or that they have a strong
moral moral barrier against. However, you can get closer to
that kind of thing if you use other compliance techniques,
brainwashing drugs. Check out the story of Buckley when he
got abducted by the CIA. Evil evil, infernal stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
But I guess what I'm saying is if you can,
if you can convince someone to feel disgusted when they
look at a physical object like a cigarette, then you could.
Then it would you would have to be able to
convince someone to feel a certain way when they, let's say,
look at a picture of a certain political leader, right, yes, yeah,
(47:08):
I mean you.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Could do that, because that is an emotive feeling, but
that feeling does not have a one to one translation
to an action, which is why people can go through
these self hypnosis things and then they'll still smoke or something,
you know what I mean. Yeah, so there is an
air gap there, and it's a very important one I think.
(47:31):
But yeah, you're absolutely right. The most dangerous thing we
teased it. We had to do it at the beginning.
This is probably an episode we want to revisit in full,
in more detail, but for now you need to know.
The most dangerous thing about hypnosis, outside of mass hypnosis,
outside of propaganda, the most dangerous thing in the West
is the widespread panic of memory regression. The recovered memory
(47:57):
movement of the eighties and nineties is the idea that
you could have experienced childhood sexual abuse, or you know,
just very very unspeakably horrific things in your past, and
they would be so horrible and so scarring that you
would bury them and you would never think about them
(48:18):
until a skilled therapist who happens to have a book
that they can sell you once.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
Along brought it out of you. Right. Yeah, that's where
we start getting into the kind of implantation that's a
little more deadly in life ruining than just like a
reality show with Darren Brown.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, this is the stuff where, this is the stuff
where the danger of leading questions and soft suggestions comes
into play, because when people are in a very suggestible state,
these therapists are, they're portraying themselves in the eighties and
nineties as kind of a I would call a cognitive spelunker. Right,
(48:57):
we're going back through the layers and we're finding we're
finding that grain, you know, that led to the actions
and the feelings you can't explain in the modern day
as the modern you. This seemed like a revelation at first,
patients all across the Western world where claiming they had
recovered memories of abuse that began maybe in infancy, lasted
(49:21):
for decades they had completely forgotten about them. And this
also saw the rise or the popularization of the idea
that trauma would be so bad that your mind had
fractured into multiple personalities, which is where we see things
like is the pop culture phenomenon sibyl that's the right one, right,
(49:42):
So that's correct?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Yeah, that's sure.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
So in how dangerous did this get? Well, people got
wrongfully convicted shout out Jason Flum based off of these
memories that appear to have been repressed. And again, no
one's a villain here. Everybody who was working in good
faith turned out those memories might have been manufactured. And
this leads a guy, uh, well, he was already a
(50:07):
Harvard psychology professor. But in two thousand and five, Richard McNally,
I don't know if he's related to the MAP Empire.
He calls the recovery recovered memory movement quote the worst
catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.
Those are strong words, right, they are strong words.
Speaker 3 (50:25):
And you know, obviously things that were invasively a trepanation,
you know, drilling holes and the skulls to release demons
and stuff, lobotomies, things like that, horrific abuses of science
quote unquote of power. And so I could see how
you might could potentially categorize this kind of stuff as
soft sciences. They couldn't possibly do as much damage as
(50:48):
drilling into someone's brain or attaching electrodes to them, but
left unchecked, it can do just that. It can do
horrible things.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Shout out fantastic New York Times piece by a guy
named Ethan Waters, who is the co author of a
book called Making Monsters, which came out in nineteen ninety four.
It is about this phenomenon, the recovered memory movement, and
he points out that all of the techniques these therapists
were using, they have been proven to be much more
(51:22):
likely to distort memory rather than to help enhance accurate recalls. So, yeah,
the science was out and the backlash was pretty quick,
but it was overwhelmed by the deluge of pop culture
and self help books, all of which shed the deluge
(51:42):
of delusions, yes perfect, all of which seemed to paint
these therapists as these great fonts of knowledge, these gurus
who could solve any problem you had by finding a
memory that you did not know existed, or a.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Crime I am perhaps that you may or may not
have witnessed. We already know that eyewitness accounts are so fallible,
even though they seem like they wouldn't be. The mind
does crazy things to convince you that you're correct and
that you're remembering, and oftentimes there can be a confirmation
bias at play, and if someone's really pushing you to
(52:20):
remember the thing, you can very easily manufacture that memory
inside your head well thinking.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
I mean, it's almost a hypnotic state when you're sitting
there and being interrogated for hours on end being told
you're not telling us the truth. Come on, Jimmy, you're
not telling us the truth. But no, I am telling
you the truth. You're not telling us the truth. We're
gonna be here till you tell us the truth.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
And then I got a thing. I gotta go fin
nights at Freddy's.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
You do the befriending thing. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole
there's a whole pattern twisted.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
But really quickly, just what this is the last time
I'm going to reference that Pen and Teller episode. There
is someone named Wendy Freesen f r I E s
e N and it's spelled w E N d I.
This is a person who in nineteen ninety four, and
this is coming back because of the time that this
New York piece was written in nineteen ninety four. She
(53:11):
on that pent and Teller episode takes a woman back
through hypnotic regression to the moment of birth right, and
it's to help her get over some anxieties that she's having.
They just, you know, scientifically, they talk about well, actually,
the way the eyes develop, there's no way you could
have the clear picture of all the things that were
just described throughout. You know, this person who has just
supposedly went through this birth process right through hypnotic regression.
(53:35):
This same person, Wendy has been making audio and video
products for sale for years and years and years since
nineteen ninety four. She I'm just gonna run quickly run
down the types of hypnosis that she or like sessions
that she will sell to you on through her website
wendyweandi dot com, which you can still go to. You
(53:56):
can take a financial abundance course for one hundred and
fifty bucks. You can take a back pain relief hypnosis
session for fifty bucks, a stroke recovery session for thirty bucks.
You can remotely influence somebody for forty five dollars.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
Why only thirty for the stroke recovery.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
I don't know then, I think I think it's multiple
videos in a course or something. You can end your
pornography addiction for fifty bucks. You can enlarge your breasts
through her hypnosis sessions for forty dollars, or you can
get a penis enlargement for seventy dollars.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Oh wow, she knows people pay more for that.
Speaker 2 (54:37):
Huh. Well, But it's all going back to this concept
that through your you can trick your mind into doing
things like growing more cells in your penis or you know, no,
I'm serious.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
I know that's the belief. I'll still giggle when people
say penis because I'm a child.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
But but it all goes back to this same thing
of like you're in a way, you were tricking yourself
into believing something to the point where in this case,
like this New York Times article that we're referencing here,
you are tricking someone into believing they maybe even did
something that they didn't do exactly.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, And if it's a past occurrence, then you don't
need physical evidence the way you would need with like
enlargement of body parts, right, or improvement of vision. And
this goes into Okay, so this moral panic the reason
hypnosis can be so dangerous.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
First, it Israel.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
It does do some things, it doesn't do what Charlatan's claim,
and it certainly has a at least the way it
was applied during the recovery movement, the recovered memory movement,
it was certainly more likely to invent implant or distort
memories than it was to help you accurately recall things,
and people went so nuts for this. These folks were
(55:56):
celebrities on name your favorite talk show here all the hits, Oprah,
Ricky Lake, Donahue, I think it was Donahue, a million,
Fox and Friends, Fox and Friends, like this before Fox
and Friends. But they would have loved it. They probably
did do this right they were and this is the
most dangerous part. Though states changed their statute of limitation
(56:19):
laws to allow for criminal prosecutions based entirely on repressed memories.
That is thankfully no longer the case, because it turns
out that was very dangerous and innocent people got locked up.
Speaker 3 (56:33):
Well, but to your point, both of y'all's points about
like convincing yourself that something has happened, and maybe that
even convinces the practitioner that they've actually done something. It's
it's almost like self fulfilling prophecy, or that's sort of
like cope, what's the word almost like parasitic slash kind
of not what's the word where you're actually kind of
(56:54):
helping symbiotic kind of Exactly do you think that? I mean,
I don't I personally. Don't think that everyone who believes
the stuff. You know, that everyone who purports to be
able to do this are Charlatans. No, I think some
people really believe in it, and they think that what
they're doing is actually helping people, and maybe it is.
Maybe there are some instances where this is helping.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
If you feel better again, if you're in a state
where an emotional experience is your core focused reality, then
that does have measurable effects on the body over time.
It's just I think it's really important that you pointed
that out. The vast majority of these practitioners were acting
in good faith. They were probably inadvertently doing dangerous things,
(57:39):
but they weren't all out for a cash grab. And
there's a thing that happens, right, because the practitioners are
themselves human, right, there's a fundamental design flaw they can't
get around. And how many people have to tell you
that you have magic powers before you start to believe
there might be something to these claims. It's social dynamics
and another form of pure pressure yet a gut.
Speaker 3 (58:01):
And there's no FDA process for checking out and overseeing
you know, hypnosis, and you don't need any equipment you've
already got it all, you know, So there's really it's
very difficult to oversee this kind of stuff unless something
absolutely catastrophic happens.
Speaker 2 (58:18):
Yeah, I yeah, I think it just points to maybe
the dangers of feedback loops in general, because I'm again like,
in defense of that person I called out Wendy, it
looks like in all the video I've seen of her,
in all the writing I've seen in her website, that
she truly believes she's helping people and is capable of
(58:38):
providing those services. I can't, you know, subjectively whether I
believe her or not, that's one thing, But she appears
to truly believe it, and I do wonder if that's
exactly what it is. Been just she's been told enough
times that it works, right. She in the Pentaitellar episode,
she says she got a call from a guy who said, yeah,
it grew an.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Inch his rest his self confidence. Let's go with that euphemism. So, yeah,
it is a good point. And you know, we also
we're also aware that, look, if you are a patient
of any sort, you will tend to adopt your healers
(59:19):
patterns of behavior and belief, and you might not know
you're doing that. Even little stuff like mirroring behaviors. You'll
pick up cues and clues from social settings and you
might not be aware that this is happening. And the doctors,
the therapist, the psychiatrists, there's a ton of literature on this.
(59:41):
They have to be very careful to not unintentionally cause
you to pick up things, pick up cues that you
don't know you're throwing. And that's why all this leads
us to, of course, the Satanic panic. This also leads
us to the reason the American Psychological Association has said
conclusively it is not possible to distinguish repressed memories from
(01:00:04):
false memories without corroborating evidence. We need something physical there.
And this tells us the following hypnosis is real. You
hypnotize yourself more than likely on a regular, if limited basis. Yes,
hypnosis can be used for dangerous purposes, even with the
best of intentions. But you know, there's so much we
(01:00:27):
didn't get to. The susceptibility scale, like the reason about
two thirds of human beings are considered to be pretty
susceptible to suggestion. I should say pretty suggestible. I don't
want to make it look like a weakness because it is.
It kind of does have a correlation with the power
of your imagination, which is a beautiful thing. We didn't
(01:00:48):
really go into this a ton, but like, there are
people that are more quote unquote suggestible than others.
Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
Yes, that's real. Like, and I was gonna mention earlier,
like the one time I've seen a hypnosis show was
at the Renaissance Fair here in Atlanta, and I was
pretty impressed because, like I just I don't think these
people were plants, and I don't remember exactly what they did,
but it was some stuff that was really interesting and
pretty compelling. And I remember, I'm pretty you know, I'm
(01:01:14):
skeptical as the next person on this kind of stuff,
and I just remember seeing some of these people just
walking around. They weren't stooges, as Darren Brown calls them.
They were just there having a good time with their families,
and they definitely did some weird stuff. So I do
love that we've pointed out the whole idea of the
performative aspect of it and how it's fun to just
participate and have a good time, and maybe that's more
of it than anything. Maybe that is it, but I
(01:01:37):
do remember being taken by it and being like, oh man,
how does he pick out the ones that are the
most suggestible? Because he picks and chooses, a lot of
people raise their hands and the person on stage decides,
you know, who to take up there.
Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Wouldn't it be crazy if you heard a fingersnap and
noll you open your eyes and you were on stage
at the Renaissance Fair so for years right.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Now it had been for a year. Dude, Oh my god,
that's terrified. That's good story material right there. I like that.
Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Are you guys cool with me? I don't believe hypnosis
is real at all? Oh please, I don't think you
can do any like. I don't think it's real. I
think I think we're the thing that is like hypnosis
and meditation and some of those things that you can
like access is not the same thing as hypnosis. But
because I understand meditation and guided things like implanting ideas
(01:02:24):
when you're in a susceptible state is one thing. But
like hypnosis, hypnosis, I don't think it's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
That's why I say it's like, it's the definition what
is hypnosis? Hypnosis? Then how do we define the thing
that is not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Real, someone putting you under, getting you calm, and then
making you think things that you're unaware of.
Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Okay, but then that would be How is that different
from implanting a memory.
Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I don't think you. It's weird because I don't think you.
I don't think you can do that either. I think
you can take someone into a place where you like
create a story in your head. But to me, that's
not implant a memory. That is literally using your imagination
to come up with a scenario.
Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
But what if we took it to an even a
more extreme, like borderline techno torture kind of situation where
you literally had like like clockwork Orange, you know, where
you've got someone being forced to watch stuff on a
loop for an incredible long periods of time, and pair
that with drug injections that make you open up to
this kind of suggestion, Like do you think that's possible?
Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
But that's like torture? And I think it's just the
terminology maybe, is what I've like, am having a problem with.
Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
I understand. I think we're all on the same page. Frankly,
That's why I really do MM.
Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Well, but it's weird because you can do things like,
I got a feeling.
Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
I don't remember the next lines.
Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
It's gonna be something which just to how many people
in their target, Because you can do weird stuff like
that right with the mind. You can play tricks with
somebody's mind if you have bad intentions through repetition.
Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
It's about repetition. I wouldn't have been able to finish
that line for you if I hadn't heard that song
of a gazillion.
Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
That's one of the tools. Repetition is one of the tools.
But definitely, yeah, I see you, Matt, and I do
like to your point, noll, I do think we're all
on once we get past the nomenclature. I think we're
on the same page about the phenomenon and the limits
importantly of that of that phenomenon, right, because you know,
(01:04:25):
there's no way someone's going to be hypnotized into flying
because humans don't do that without a specific set of tools.
Oh yeah, and changing your mind about it is not
going to help you beat gravity or other kind of
physical limitations.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Yeah, because I'm thinking about just watching the news or something,
depending on how you feel about like a political issue
or a global news issue. I feel like that's more
conditioning based on what you've encountered in the past.
Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
There, how is conditioning different than hypnosis? That's what how
now we're getting somewhere? I think what I was describing
too earlier, the clockwork orange example, that's conditioning to an
aggressive degree. Hypnosis is almost meant to be a shortcut
to long term conditioning.
Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
I mean, maybe it's just the H word and the
way it's been associated with such Kakamami's stuff since the
days of Mesmer and well before. But the idea of
a flow state or trance or suggestibility is that part
is real and that does have you know, it's a
kissing cousin to conditioning. It can be used as a
(01:05:30):
kind of conditioning. But folks, we we're obviously, we're obviously
having a lot of fun with this. We've all consented
to be here. We are not in a current trance state.
We hope you enjoyed tonight's show. We would love to
hear your opinions.
Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Harmonica or not.
Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
What this is?
Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
I have this thing.
Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
It says music on it. It looks like somebod's supposed
to blow into but I don't know what it does.
It doesn't really do anything. I've been holding off on
throwing it away because I was like, maybe it's useful,
but I don't think it is. Sorry, guys, I.
Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
Was listening to Ben and I felt like I was
being pulled back from a hypnosis session or something.
Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
I don't know if you are, You're being pulled back
from our hypnosis session, and then that it's our episode
on hypnosis and it's coming to an end to Ben's boy.
You can find us all over the internet if you wish.
We are conspiracy stuff on YouTube, x nay, Twitter. I'm
stop saying that eventually, I just say hate X so
much and also Facebook and we are a conspiracy stuff
(01:06:32):
show on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
Hey, do you want to call us? Our number is
one eight three three std WYTK. Go ahead and take
a second. Put that as a contact in your phone
just in case it calls you back. If you call it,
you're gonna get three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname,
and say whatever you'd like. Just please let us know
if you give us permission to use your voice end
message on the air. If you don't want to do that,
(01:06:56):
why not send us an email?
Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
We read everyone we get. Send us your pictures, send
us your links, take us deep into the rabbit hole.
We'll do the rest. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
They called me Ben. We're joined with our guest super
producer Max Max, the mesmerist Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
don't want you to know, Fellow conspiracy realists. Is a
bit of a trick question. Have you ever hypnotized someone?
Or have you yourself been hypnotized? What do you think
(00:48):
about the idea of hypnosis in general? We didn't really
talk about this one too much before we went on
air with it, so I had to ask, guys, I
feel like I see it in film and fiction all
the time, but I I've never actually seen the kitchy
trope of a stage hypnotist for entertainment. Have you, guys
ever seen that?
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yes, College did some college touring back in the day,
and one of the one of the big acts that
gets on college tours along with comedians musicians, is a
hypnotist who will do a stage show. It's like an
icebreaker basically for like orientation kind of stuff or early
get togethers with like a new class coming in.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Right right on. What was the experience like, as you can.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Remember, people raise their hands, people go on stage, a
hypnotist tells everybody what to do basically, and everybody for
the most part kind of does it and plays along.
And you know, we're going to get into a lot
of the details here. From my perspective, it was people
(01:53):
having an excuse to be a little more open and
do things that they'd be nervous and anxious about doing
if they didn't have a reason to do it.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
I see, because then there's a bit of a gosh,
a bit of a scrimmage line between one's own agency.
Right yeah, I wouldn't cluck like a chicken, for example.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
Well, even just like to be in a public place
in front of a bunch of other people, that makes
some people nervous to one level. Right now, imagine like
dancing and putting yourself out there on that stage. It's
kind of like showing yourself off a little bit. There's
another level of anxiety associated with that stuff. So I
think this just strips that away at least to some extent.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
But you have to imagine that no one with a
crippling anxiety for being up on stage or being called
out in public would ever raise their hand in a
million years.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Good point.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
So selection it's a big thing that our pal mentalist
Darren Brown talks about at length when when you hear
him speak about parts of his method. And it's weird
because we're also going to find out why hypnosis has
such a bad reputation. There two or three really big reasons,
and as a result, even now in twenty twenty three,
(03:06):
the public often derides this as pseudoscience or quirky quackery,
but it turns out there's still Weirdly enough, there's a
lot of science supporting this bizarre phenomenon and people still
don't fully understand it. Hypnosis, you could say, is itself
a bit of a conspiracy with a lot of fact
(03:26):
and a lot of fiction around the whole concept. And disclaimer, folks,
we might play around with examples of hypnotism or trance
states in tonight's episode, so seriously, if you are vulnerable
to experiencing trance states, please please make sure you're in
a safe environment, not driving operating heavy machinery, et cetera.
(03:48):
Here are the facts. Way to prime the pump.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
There, Man, You're not going to hypnotize you. You cannot
get hypnotized.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
You are so unsuggestible right now, bro Us.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I'm gonna look, we'll get there. But I am coming
into this episode fully feeling like hypnosis is complete bs.
And it's only because I watched that Penn and Teller
BS episode from season two, like right before we're recording,
and so I feel like this whole thing is kakamamine
bum bumps.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
And yet it is used in some forms of therapy. Still,
I know this day and sort of there's some stock
put into it. Sorry, let's get those facts out, guys.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yes, here are the facts. Let's start with a brief
history of hypnosis without making anyone sleepy. The term itself
is pretty recent. It was coined back in the eighteen
hundreds and popularized by a guy named James Braid that
you'll never hear about again in the rest of this episode.
The actual thing, the experience of this state, it dates
(04:48):
back into antiquity. Some experts who we'll get to later
this evening have referred to it as the oldest Western
form of psychotherapy. Trances, as we've discussed in the past,
have been considered part of magic religion, soothsaying. I mean,
if we look at the scientific history of hypnosis, we
also see why those scientific origins caused it so much
(05:12):
trouble down the road, we got to talk about our
main man friends, friends, not Ferdinand Sadly Mesmer.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
This is cool to me. I mentioned this maybe recently
when we were sort of hinting that this episode was coming.
I recently watched a Japanese film from the nineties called
Cure by Cursawa, but not that Curasawa and hypnosis and
hypnotism is a huge plot point, and I'm not gonna
give anything away, but Franz Mesmer ends up being this
sort of specter hovering over the whole movie and the
(05:42):
study of his work, and was he onto something? One
of those kind of deals, right, Was he totally full
of it? Was he an absolute quack? Or did he
really have the truth? It was one of those types
of movies, and I think everyone would really dig It's
a little slow, a little odd, but very cool, very
cool movie.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
I like that we're like Curasawa, but not that when
the same way we had to say friends, but not Franz.
Speaker 3 (06:03):
That's true, that's true. Well, yeah, so I didn't know
much about Mesmer before I saw this film, and some
of this stuff is new to me as well. Well.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
I wanted to ask just quickly before we get into this,
did you guys find in your research that a lot
of the early hypnosis stuff went back to and refers
to patients as we're talking about here with Mesmer, that
were experiencing things that were quote hysteria or you know,
someone who was maybe going through some kind of mental
(06:34):
state that was not understood at all, but there were
like attempts to make almost make contact with someone who
was operating on a different level.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Absolutely. Yeah, and I'm glad you pointed that out, because
I would say a big differentiation between hypnosis and its
precursors versus something like faith healing is that faith healing
would purport often to leave a physical condition, whereas a
lot of Mesmerism and things that were hypnosis by other names,
(07:07):
they sought to elite alleviate what they would call maybe
demons of the mind or some sort of spiritual cognitive blockage.
And you know, as we always have to say when
we point out hysteria in general. Maybe the problem was
that women lived in a really crappy society toward women,
you know what I mean, that's oh god, the etymology
(07:29):
of hysteria and hysterics alone is pretty problematic.
Speaker 3 (07:33):
The wandering womb. Well, but they don't even get me started.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
No really, but there were even people who were like
having some form of seizures, right that had It didn't
have anything to do with that stuff necessarily, right, It
has more to do with just again a malady that
isn't misunderstood or not understood at all, but then attempting
to use things like tuning forks and like all of
these just so many different interesting ways to try and
(07:58):
get someone in this trans It's like state.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Yep, could be visual, could be auditory, could be pulses
or like vibrations, like anything that's sort of a repetitive
pattern that the mind can lock into and get sort
of tricked into a fugue state kind of right.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, yeah, that's apt. I mean you can even see
it today on social media, the concept of a sound bath.
That's that's so.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
Social media is hypnotism of it. Other find yeah, with
the patterns like yeah, you look up and it's been
three hours. You know, you know it's great.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Truly, casinos are also built gender that hypnotic state, a
flow state you could call it, which it is, but
it's also a flow state. That's the flowing helping your
bank account too.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
And well, I want to talk about it more later,
but because I want to get through this stuff, because
it's really important to set this up. But just pop
music and in the vibrations that comes through your speakers,
and then when you combine it with the words, it
gets into like we've talked about some of that in
the past, but like.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Oh Max Martin and the Swedish hit making machines, they're
using a formula to keep you exactly as invested as
they want you to be at the exact moment and
then share you over and make that three minutes feel
like it's an eternity in a good way.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Sup. We're indie music, but you can again, you could
be an indie musician and make that most him not stuff. Ever,
it just maybe then becomes a crazy pop phenomenon like
some of the artists we've seen over the past couple
of years that start on a YouTube and then all
of a sudden they're on the Grammys and you're like, whoa.
Speaker 1 (09:33):
What shout out ye but there yeah, And I love
that you're saying that because it is technology and there
is a democratization of it. You know, anyone can learn
that math and you can apply that stuff. Mesmer Franz
Mesmer is not worried about being a pop star, but
he is worried about being a reality star, maybe more
(09:55):
so than he's worried about being a physician. This guy
was diplomatically put eccentric, and like a lot of other showmen,
he stood on the shoulders of giants. He got a
lot of his basic ideas from two people. One was
a British physician named Richard Meade. And Richard's whole thing
(10:16):
is that there are gravitational interactions of the planets. Then
as now, people didn't fully understand gravity. And he said,
the effect this kind of invisible substance or fluid. It's
in all their bodies. Baby, you just got to feel
the vibration and I can manipulate this according to the
laws of what I call animal magnetism.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
Ooh yeah. Animal magnetism was the big thing, and care
that's the most important central part of Mesmer's philosophy. You
guys gotta watch Karen tell me what you think I'm fascinating.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah, actually sure, but you get that that is another
thing that has continued down the timeline into modern day. Right,
It's just different terms, not the idea that there's some
invisible fluid that's being affected by things. But if you
think about how important astrology is to so many people,
like in their personal lives right now, and how popular
(11:10):
that is on social media, Like it's something within us
that is affected by these heavenly other bodies, right.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
That reminds me. I think maybe we talked about this
on air Fusebacker. Maybe was I had this mission a
long time ago where I was like, maybe there is.
Let me not be a jerk, let me not be dismissive.
Let me see if in my own mind I can
figure out some kind of theory for astronomy, right, so
our astrology Excuse me how this would work? And the
(11:39):
closest I got was a we don't really understand gravity
as a civilization, right, as a scientific body of thought.
Be we know that it affects things, and see, we
don't know everything about the development of the human mind
in gestation so, with those three things being true, could
we argue that the passage of heavenly bodies in some
(12:02):
infinitesimal way affects brain chemistry. And if so, does that
mean that you know, a taurus is likely to taurus
or in our case, Leo's are likely to roar. I
don't know. I never got past that part.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
Well, I was also gonna add, you know, to me,
the concept of animal magnetism is like what a cult
leader has, like it describes a quality in somebody, like
you got that raw animal magnetism. That means that you
can like influence people, you can hold sway over people
with your just sex, panther energy.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
I got that dog in me join my cult.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Well, but it's not just it's it is influence and
that's a major part of it.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
Right, I'm saying that's what I associated with. This is
all other nuances, and I think it's maybe been co
opted a little bit, but like this is fabulous.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
Please, But this thing of animal magnetism, for me, one
of the most important parts is that the belief was
this stuff this chi, right, you can think about it
like chi, this energy, this whatever this for is that's
inside you can be manipulated by your mind, and basically
someone else can take your mind to a place where
your body can do things like heal itself, right like Wolverine. Yes,
(13:14):
in a potentially very dangerous manner. Right, the belief could
be potentially dangerous.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yes, Yes, because we enter into oh gosh, we're all
excited to get to this. We enter into a world
where the concept of truth experienced truth changes and it
is a very real thing. And that's why we call
it a conspiracy. At the top, I want to shout
out the second guy who really informed a lot of
(13:41):
Mesmer's work toward what he called in about of Humility Mesmerism.
He had a teacher in Vienna, a Jesuit whose name
was I kid you not father Hell, and father Maximilian
Hell spelled the way it sounds. His whole deal was,
I mean, on being a Jesuit to being a teacher.
(14:01):
His third whole deal was this idea that he could
heal patients of all sorts of stuff with the use
of magnetized metal platest man magnets.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Right, how unclear?
Speaker 2 (14:14):
How are these eighteen hundreds ideas just like popping back
up like this is the big thing.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Yeah, asach what and this guy. Okay, so Mesmer has
these two guys bumping around his head. They're huge influences
on him. And so he takes it a little step
further and he says, okay, animal magnetism, love it, magnets,
I'm in invisible fluid chi if you will, you know
(14:40):
it has to your point. Man, it has a thousand
names throughout history. He says, Okay, a lot of diseases,
a lot of infections of the mind are just all
coming down to obstacles in the flow of this cosmic force.
So all I have to do to fix it is
induce what he called prices, trance states that culminate in
(15:04):
an explosion of delirium or even physical convulsions revelatory moments.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
Which makes you think about the old hysteria treatments with
with like hand created vibrating machines.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah, like that woman in the symphony that had a
little too good at time.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Well sure, but in this case, like the actual machinery
that was developed by doctors who are like, I'm going
to treat these patients.
Speaker 4 (15:33):
I would physically manipulate you into a sense of sedate
well being and invulsions and it's all above board, your
husband cannot be in the room.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Well, I don't want to get on any kind of
like feminist soap ex here, but it did occur to me.
Maybe this is like stating the most obvious thing. I
think women have been sort of subjugated over time because
they are just the most powerful force that we know.
They're the only ones that can actually create men, create
more men who could potentially subjugate other men. Again, probably
(16:07):
stating the obvious, but it's pretty wild when you think
about to what degree that was realized and then just
driven home by men.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Oh one hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
Well there's we're I don't know if we're going to
get into it. But there was a whole hypnosis panic
akin to the Satanic panic.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
Yes for a while, Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Cool, Yeah, and that's the dangerous thing. Okay. So so
Mesmer had a lot of ideas about how to get
these crises going, and a lot of his ideas, now
this is an unintentional pun, rubbed people the wrong way.
There were numerous allegations that he had inappropriate relationships with
female patients. That was kind of true. I find it
(16:47):
also incredibly interesting that his big, his big fall from
Grace comes about when King Louis the sixteenth hears about this,
and you know, Louise is balling out at this point.
So he convenes a panel of experts, just like people
that he can reach who he thinks are smart, and
(17:09):
he says, investigate this mesmer guy's claims. See if there's
real science to what he's saying. One of those guys
was the famous Libertine ambassador Benjamin Franklin, who also had
some inappropriate relationships throughout his life. And they said, according
to our report, and you can read this online, he said,
(17:30):
mesmerism is utterly fallacious and without merit, a little bit hypocritical,
ben But.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
And he added, don't check my house for body.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
It is to check my London basement. And they're like,
why did you put that at the top of every pitch.
Just don't do it, please, don't do it, so right now,
So like that's that's the past. But because of the
controversy surrounding this just this guy Mesmer, then it gave
birth to a cavalcade of accusations against hypnotism. And similar
(18:06):
to the way that the US government's war against hallucinogens
stymied a lot of research into addiction and into you know,
the power of the mind and body relationship. Mesmer's terrible reputation,
I would argue, also hamstrung the efforts of scientists who
(18:27):
had come later. For a long time, the controversy surrounding
this guy transferred into a controversy around hypnosis in general,
and that's why a lot of times now people think
of it as like a novelty. Did you guys ever
play that game? Light as a feather, stiff as a
board is getting?
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I played it. I just remember it from the craft
very vividly. But that's the one where you're supposed to
be able to put your fingers underneath the edges of
a person's body and levitate them, you know, with the
combined power of your mind. Right, yes, sir, Yeah, I
was too happy. I was too stiff.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Oh my gosh. Well this this is a that's a
form of hypnosis too, because really hypnosis is a series
of tactics that create another create a state and the feeling. Yeah,
it's kind of like it's kind of like driving toward
the center of your whatever country you're hearing this in.
(19:24):
There are multiple roads that lead there, but your destination
is the same.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
There was this group of kind of weirdo performance artists,
sort of hippies in the late sixties called the Yippies.
I believe Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and an artist, was
a part of it. And they supposedly did light as
a featherstiff as a board on the Pentagon and the
White House, and they claim to have levitated it a
centimeter or so into the air, which it was all
(19:52):
kind of like for you know, lulls and kind of
like satire. But that's the whole thing, is Hey, if
it's a shared belief, if we all believe it happened
and felt that it happened, then it happened.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
You know, except for all the places where it's connected
to the load bearing you know, rods, they can't well, first.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Off, we need to look at buildings that are situated
on lay lines. Right shout out to that episode. So
all right, right now, skeptics and scientists don't buy a
lot of stuff about hypnosis. They're not saying it's both.
What they're saying is they don't buy a lot of
the more extravagant claims about the effects or potential of
(20:33):
these processes. And then law enforcement has their own special
traumatic story, a story about trauma. In fact, they are
pretty gun shy about types of hypnosis, such as memory
recovery or memory regression therapy. And there's a good reason
for that. We don't understand hypnosis fully. Humans don't and
(20:54):
probably never will because it's a smaller question about a
bigger problem, which is that humans still do not understand
the human mind and may not for the foreseeable future.
But despite all the controversy, there is one thing for certain.
You can bet your bottom dollar on it. Hypnosis is real.
(21:15):
Sorry to the guy reached out on Twitter, hypnosis is
real asterisk depending on how you define it.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
See's speaking of mess Somebody just went through time and said,
bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, and it just happened
as soon as you said it, and complained in my mind,
I don't know. I'm in a weird state, guys.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Let's get in a state of sponsored add Hey, how
about that. Here's where it gets crazy. Okay, Real hypnosis
triggers anchors, post hypnotic suggestions, Manchurian candidates. We'll get to
(21:59):
all of that first. I think we got a bust
some myths. Did you guys ever see that film The
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.
Speaker 3 (22:06):
In film school but a minute because of all the
canton angles and the crazy like it evokes a sense
and this is a technique that's been used in film.
Fincher uses it a lot where at the angle of
the camera sort of tilted, it puts you in a
different mindset, a mindset of maybe insanity or approaching madness,
things like that. And that's the movie that really kind
(22:28):
of created that language, which is really really cool and
it's it looks very modern. Actually, it's a real cool movie.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Yeah, and we're gonna spoil it, so this is your
spoiler warning three to one spoilers. The ostensible bad guy
for a lot of the film most of the film
is a dude named Caesar and it's spelled ceesa r.
He is a hulking murderer. He's an evil somnambulist, a sleepwalker,
(22:58):
and he's compelled to commit these homicides left and right.
He's a real nasty customer. This depiction of hypnosis is
not true it later it turns out in the film
that the real bad guy is doctor Caligari, or is it.
Because there's a twist at the end. But the reason
(23:19):
this doesn't work, the reason it's what Joe Biden would
call malarkey, is that real hypnosis does not remove free will.
To your earlier example, Matt, about the icebreakers at a
college or at college tours, that stage hypnotist cannot compel
someone to murder someone or to act against their own
(23:42):
kind of like moral compass, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
There's a great example of that exact thing been in
that Pentin Teller BS episode where the stage hypnotist says, oh, now,
everybody look down at your shoes. Oh, it's the most
adorable puppy dog you've ever seen in your life. And
everybody picks up their shoes and they pretend that they've
got their cute dogs, and he's asking questions about their
individual dogs. And in the post interview for Penn Teller's
(24:08):
BS with all of the people who got hypnotized, they
were all reporting, well, no, it was just I mean,
it was fun to pretend, and I felt like I could,
and it was just it was, you know, basically, that's
what they're reporting.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
To Ben's earlier part or maybe years as well, Matt
about crossing over into this like you know place where
you can be more permissive with yourself and perhaps have
a good time and play a little bit and be
part of the show. And again to the point where
anyone that wasn't down with that would keep their hand
perfect firmly planted under their behinds.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Social pressure, peer pressure and social dynamics, they're a huge
part of that when you're working with groups as well.
I mean, look, if you put someone into trance, what
we're saying is they don't all of a sudden become
an autumaton of some sort, even if they're very, very suggestible.
Instead instead of dozing, really they're hyper attentive. They're just
(25:02):
hyper attentive on different things than they would ordinarily be
attending to. And there are different kinds of hypnosis. The
two biggest self hypnosis and hypnosis brought on by an
external source. In the modern day, that's a psychiatrist. In
the past, it might have been a magician, the local
holy figure, you name it. The weird thing is, and
(25:23):
we'll see how this is true. But the weird thing is, folks,
you likely hypnotize yourself. You are your number one hypnotist.
We talked about that a little bit with our pal
Joe McCormick about the kind of flow, absent minded state
you might get in when you're taking the same route
to or from work every day. You might hypnotize yourself
(25:47):
during repetitive task and who doesn't have a moment of
reverie when you're falling asleep or when you're kind of
waking up and you're still sort of dreaming. That's self hypnosis.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
There's another popular thing that you can find on TikTok
or Instagram wherever you look YouTube, something that would be
titled probably guided meditation, and it's very similar to a
hypnosis session. And they are separate things, right, but that
there's there's so many similarities here, this concept of just
(26:22):
maybe this is why I'm confused, because I think in
that state you can be hyper attentive to the words
that are coming out, but also you can These are
often used to relax and to get people to fall asleep.
So I wonder where that line is between a state
of hypnosis that is hyper attentive that is also just
lulling you into relaxation. So like, I think there's there's
(26:45):
something there, right, there's a space, oh eliminal space in
between those two states that is that is fascinating.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
I don't know. You know what's funny too, is you
got me thinking about film noir. It's it's a trope
you see come up in film noir a lot, like
in terms of like the shadow self and like the
idea of what could make someone capable of murder, you know,
or even like perhaps someone was committing murder while under
the influence of hypnosis from an external party who is
(27:15):
trying to control their actions and stuff like that. So
I'm looking at this list of amazing film noir from
the forties and fifties, and I've got some homework to do.
But really really interesting how that this idea, especially with like,
you know, things like Freud and just you know, psychoanalysis,
they sort of went hand in hand and really invaded
the popular kind of consciousness.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
I'm glad you said that, right, The shadow of Freud
leans long into the modern day and actually leads to
some of the problems we're going to explore here, some
of the moral panics and conspiracies. That's your question, Like
what is the difference between say a sleep aid and
auditory sleep aid and this kind of guided hip. I
(28:01):
would say that it's still again, it's that example of
different roads to the same city, because those things still
get you hyper attentive, but you're hyper attentive upon the
inner workings of your mind right your your environment. The
guided imagery is sometimes a big thing in those meditation videos,
like we're going to the waterfall, you know, picture relaxing
(28:25):
by the beach, a.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
Lot of thing in your cave.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
But it's a hypnosis technique to do that very exact,
same exact thing.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, okay, okay, yeah, So I think as it gets
weird to me because it is we're talking about self
hypnosis now at this point guided meditation. To me, it
rides the line of self hypnosis and somebody hypnotizing you,
which is really weird because it's so often just experience
with headphones right when you're in bed getting ready.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
Well, okay, this is just me showing you.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I've done that many a time, a self guided meditation
while I'm trying to go to sleep or something. And
I just wonder if you could convey messages to someone
that is being hyper attentive, just not on the conscious level.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yeah, right, like the hypnotize yourself into quitting smoking kind
of things. Or into changing some habit or some diet. Yeah,
and there was. That's still a really big industry. There's
a guy that I think we all got pretty into
named doctor David Spiegel, who's a Stanford University psychiatrist, one
(29:33):
of the top minds in the world of hypnosis. And
he puts it this way. He says, if you look
at the science during hypnosis and actually during flow state
in sports and feats of creativity, activity in brain regions
that helps you switch between task that's what starts to
shut down, and the same region seems to disconnect from
(29:58):
another part of your brain that helps you notice when
you are being self reflective or notice when you're day dreaming.
So the part of you that questions your stream of
thought why it's down, that's that's the giant who is
being put to sleep. Weird, it's a weird one. And
(30:20):
also I've never done this now, I don't know anybody
who has to be fair, but it seems that hypnosis
can also be used to help you slowly gain control
over autonomic functions that people usually can't control voluntarily, stuff
like your heart rate, your blood flow, things like that.
(30:41):
Like that's why people in these states their breathing tends
to calm down, right, it slows their bpms go down.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's doctor Spiegels found like that that actually works.
Speaker 1 (30:57):
You can in gender that state when you are hypnotizing
someone and putting them in a tranced state. But and
Spiegel didn't say this, But what I have heard is
that people have been able to be trained or to
train themselves to have control over that sensory stimulus. It's
kind of like remember whim Hoff. Sure, the guy.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Who's towering his body temperature and all that.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
But he uses physical breathing techniques. That's at it pumps
his core right, and like he's literally over exercising his
core to send into this state of like heating it
heating itself through kinetic movements. So I just wonder the
difference between like, because look, it's for me, it's still
(31:46):
feeling as though I cannot believe that there's some unseen
force that's being actually manipulated, right, the animal magnetism stuff.
I have trouble believing that that could possibly be true.
And I maybe it's because I'm still connecting it to
those concepts rather than just that the mind itself which
(32:06):
controls all of those functions. That you don't consciously think about,
like heart rate, right, or temperature or things like that.
Maybe you could harness control over that somehow by changing
the way you think. I don't know, it's just sorry,
I'm just having problems with it. Still, Hey, you.
Speaker 1 (32:26):
Me and Noel in the rest of humanity, because again
this is still not fully understood, and I do have
to give credit where it's due. Wim Hoff probably not
the best example. I could have went off the dome
with our pals Robert and Sophie over it. Behind the Bastards.
I think they just recently released a pretty great series
(32:47):
on wim Hoff. Tune into that, as we always you
don't get.
Speaker 3 (32:52):
Featured on that show unless you're kind of a pill.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Oh wait really, Oh no, I don't want to listen
to that.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Yeah, so that's it.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
I do think it's interesting because that also is like,
you know, I know that he's been tested, you know,
science or whatever, and then it is determined that he
can do feats of extreme extremity or whatever, and that
he claims to be able to do a lot of
the stuff with by focusing his mind. That is connected
to a type of self hypnosis. It's sort of like
psychosomatic where it's like, if you believe something enough, you
(33:22):
can make your body do what your mind tells you
to do, sort of like lucid dreaming or being able
to gain self hypnotize in a way. But it's useful
to you.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
M oh and yes, yeah, you're absolutely right, nol. And
that's also it was correct Behind the Bastards multi part
series on wim Hoff wim Hoff's surprisingly Deadly story, and
that is from September of this year, so pretty current.
We do know that regardless of the different variables we're
going into hypnosis, guided or self almost said, inflicted, self inspired, whatever,
(33:58):
it generates that famous sense of physical relaxation. Hypnosis brings
us ultimately to the same state. All roads lead to
the same rome. Figuratively, the outer world falls away and
all of a sudden you're like a deep sea diver
in the mind. You know what, dreams may come, et cetera.
You plunge into your own mental ocean and you're entranced
(34:20):
by your own inner world. Any hypnotic state can be
described as a trance state characterized by well, they'll say extreme,
but let's say higher than normal suggestibility, relaxation and a
heightened imagination, very reading, rainbow. These all sound like good things.
Speaker 3 (34:40):
They do.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Sorry, I just sound is great.
Speaker 3 (34:46):
Butterfly in the Sky am I right? Stop? Yeah it's
too late, man.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
I'm glad we made I'm glad we made it through psychosomata,
even though I know we were all figuring a round it. Yeah.
So it's but the state is not like sleep, very
very important. It is not like sleep because the subject
in the trance is alert the entire time on some level.
(35:13):
That's why the Manchurian candidate stuff doesn't really work. We'll
get into that. We got a scary story there. Most
people can compare this to daydreaming, or the feeling that
you get when you when you mentally exist in another world,
like you watch an incredibly enrapturing or moving film, or
(35:34):
you read an amazing book and you kind of forget
where you are, or music can transport you as well.
That's that's what people compare it to, more so than
just like take a melatonin and conking out for you know,
four to eight hours or whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
I just remember one of the best examples of this
thing from a recent, well somewhat recent movie, Get Out
with the Yea.
Speaker 3 (35:57):
The spoon, spoon trigger, yeah, and and cure. It's a lighter,
a flickering flame, it can be anything. Those are both
the that's visual and sonic at the same time, and
they're in sync with what another.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
No, no, you're right. I'm like, I love that you bring
up the flame because the flame is one of the
oldest induction methods. And we'll learn about induction in like
a second. But the thing is whether whatever you call
these states, when people are in them, you are tuning
out the majority of the stuff happening in the physical
(36:33):
world around you so that you can hyper focus on
the subject at hand, the truth occurring in your mind,
whatever that could be. You're really paying a sort of
super attention. You're just taking all of the all of
the attention you would have paid to the outside world,
and you're putting it into your inner world. I mean, like,
(36:55):
that's so cool. It It means that the emotions you feel,
because they're the like non physical sensations, right, they're paying
more attention to those emotions are very real, and those
feelings then become for a time, your reality. It's pretty weird.
That's why, like the that's why hypnotists have to be
(37:18):
very careful with their leading questions.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
It makes me think of hypnotic regression again. And when
you guys remember we talked to Toby Ball, who's made
a show Strange Arrivals. The first season was about the
Hill family, right, Benny and Barney Hill. And one of
the major pieces of that whole close encounter of the
(37:41):
third and or maybe fourth kind was that they were
they were hypnotically regressed and remembered things that they had
not remembered before. And the big question was could any
of that have been implanted or like, could they have
been led down the pathway by the person leading the set?
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:01):
Yes, it's dangerous, dude, That's one of the most dangerous parts.
I mean, I don't do we want to Should we
talk about the basic process of hypnotism?
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Oh yeah, I think people get the gist in general,
but I'd love to maybe even review some of the
terms you mentioned induction, you know, so, I think it's
definitely a smart movement.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Excellent idea. We're going to tell you the first and
most important thing about hypnotizing people right after this word
from our sponsors, and we have returned the first and
most important thing about any guided meditation any hypnotic activity
(38:46):
is to make sure the subject consens I know that
sounds like all goodie goodie, but it's very important. There
are ways to know. You asked about induction. There are
ways to get people to enter a hypnotic state without
their consent, but they're very unethical. They're also pretty difficult,
and it's best to avoid them. Once you have consent,
(39:08):
make sure the person's comfortable. Once you have them comfortable
with no interruptions, you can begin the process of induction.
Induction is just the fancy word for kind of ushering
someone in to this trance state. And there are a
million ways to do it. I'm using hyperbole. They're like
(39:28):
several dozen good ways to do it, and they really
depend on the subject more than they depend on the
hypnotists themselves. Like mentioned fire right, star into the fire.
They used to do that to us in boy Scouts.
Or they would say, or you know what's the other one?
The one we always hear.
Speaker 3 (39:45):
The clock watch ependulum swinging thing, and it's to you know, focus,
make the eyes move in a hypnotic pat I'm also
like perhaps a crystal looking into a crystal ball, you
know what I mean? That can be just as much
for the person on the other side as it is
for the quote unquote hypnotists or soothsayer. You know, it's
a shared experience.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
A black mirror, yes, yes, like the like the minds
did once.
Speaker 3 (40:12):
Upsprying mirror or something like that.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
And also like an Apple iPhone fifteen promax just.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
So just so brought to you by Apple quotes. So
there's yes, again, this very ancient stuff. And that's after that,
Assuming that works, you get to progressive relaxation. Progressive relaxation
is Matt kind of like what it's exactly what you
were describing with some of those things we've listened to
about going to sleep or meant to help you go
(40:41):
to sleep. Progressive relaxation just sort of makes you more
conscious of your body, makes you more conscious of your
breathing and slowing that down. And this requires a certain
amount of willingness or trust on the subject's part. It
is again extremely difficult to hypnotize as someone who doesn't
want to be hypnotized. You also should not do it
(41:04):
because can sent is key. You can. You know, once
you get people relaxed and they're breathing and they're kind
of entering that trans state they're going to naturally start
to close their eyes. You can prompt them to do so.
The way a lot of folks will get into it
is counting. We've all seen this or heard this in
film as well. You may hear this in some meditation,
(41:25):
things like we're going to count from one to and
you know, pause at certain points to say, like feel
your body begin to float, the lightness, a warmness.
Speaker 3 (41:37):
I do that with my therapist every time we start
and he does a mindfulness meditation, and I actually have
asked him of late, can we actually do that at
the end, because we do at the beginning. It's cool,
but sometimes I'm it's like I only see him every
couple of weeks. Sometimes I'm ready to jump right in
and talk. But if you do it at the end,
it transitions me and allows me to think about sort
(42:00):
of what we've talked about, like me, but also kind
of just transition into the state of calm. So I've
really been enjoying doing it at the end, and then
it sort of feels like I'm getting the most value
out of the exercise.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
And that's a that's a good point because that's we
see the bookend of this in hypnotic sessions. Like at
the end of a hypnosis session, there's the counting back
to the waking world, right, But once you have someone entranced,
then that's that's when the work begins. That's where you
have the repetition of phrases. That's where you have this
(42:34):
stuff where you set up like anchors, suggestions, triggers. Right,
you see a red light, you will always feel warm,
which is a very easy one because people already do
that if they can see red and green.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
But again, we're not saying that you can actually make
someone respond to these things, right, because there's no scientific
proof that you do in all of this stuff we're
talking about, actually make someone see a chicken when they
look at, you know, a shoe.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
No, that's an extreme version, and that would be for
that to happen, you would need a lot more work
put in and it would not be ethical.
Speaker 2 (43:15):
But we're saying we could. You could potentially pair the
color red with making someone think something.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
You could, Yeah, you could make them more likely to
have that association as long as it was as long
as it was emotively anchored, as long as it's anchored
in an emotion.
Speaker 3 (43:32):
You're talking about implanting as well. Right, that's sort of
what mentalists do, where they'll they'll implant an idea subconsciously
and then there's a trigger like the color red or
a word or whatever it might be. And again, this
is a Manatorian candidate's screen to action and killing somebody,
but it could make them say a thing or think
a thing. We can do that to ourselves all day long.
Be triggered by a thing that Matt joked earlier about,
(43:55):
what was it? Something that yeah, Annie, like I mean,
and that wasn't really a magical moment, but it was
something that triggered that thing in you that already existed.
And if a mentalist or practitioner of this kind of
stuff had put it there, then he could have easily
recalled that. I do believe that's true. I think the
stuff that Darren Brown does is absolutely real. But it's
also not magic. It's just weaponized psychology. Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Yes. And at one point, at some point, we have
to ask, what's the difference. So you do this stuff,
and you know, you say, like you'll have a more
hardcore thing would be implanting a suggestion or attempting to
implant an association of disgust with like cigarettes, right, every
time you pick up a cigarette, you will you'll be
repulsed by the smell or the taste of it in
(44:43):
your mouth or something like that. And people have sworn
by that. But again, it's not one hundred percent solution
because at the every step of the way, there are
myriad there's a myriad of options and variables. There's no
real silver bullet. That's all malarchy. There's no one side
fits all.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:01):
What I love about your conversation with your therapist, Noal
is when people count out of a hypnotic session, they
are often the hypnotist is often going to encourage the
subject to continue carrying that warm, relaxed feeling when they exit,
(45:22):
and that's a cool, powerful.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Thing, Plasmo effect or no. I do find that it
makes me feel a little more grounded, a little more chill,
and a little more able to shake off some of
the stresses of my week and or day, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
And here's here's the other thing. Okay, we're going into
the deep water now. Sorry. I recently rewatched What Dreams
May Come, and it's messing with me. I loved it,
so we know.
Speaker 3 (45:50):
It's a bummer it's it's heavy, it's it's good, it's amazing,
it's just God. Not to mention, I haven't rewatched it
since we've lost dear Robin Williams, so that may even
make it hard to watch.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
He's really good in serious roles. Not. Yes, we know
to the earlier point that we've all made in the
course of tonight's show, we all know that you cannot,
through hypnosis alone, create something that create a Manchurian candidate.
One cannot compel a person to do things that they
(46:23):
would not ordinarily do or that they have a strong
moral moral barrier against. However, you can get closer to
that kind of thing if you use other compliance techniques,
brainwashing drugs. Check out the story of Buckley when he
got abducted by the CIA. Evil evil, infernal stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:48):
But I guess what I'm saying is if you can,
if you can convince someone to feel disgusted when they
look at a physical object like a cigarette, then you could.
Then it would you would have to be able to
convince someone to feel a certain way when they, let's say,
look at a picture of a certain political leader, right, yes, yeah,
(47:08):
I mean you.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
Could do that, because that is an emotive feeling, but
that feeling does not have a one to one translation
to an action, which is why people can go through
these self hypnosis things and then they'll still smoke or something,
you know what I mean. Yeah, so there is an
air gap there, and it's a very important one I think.
(47:31):
But yeah, you're absolutely right. The most dangerous thing we
teased it. We had to do it at the beginning.
This is probably an episode we want to revisit in full,
in more detail, but for now you need to know.
The most dangerous thing about hypnosis, outside of mass hypnosis,
outside of propaganda, the most dangerous thing in the West
is the widespread panic of memory regression. The recovered memory
(47:57):
movement of the eighties and nineties is the idea that
you could have experienced childhood sexual abuse, or you know,
just very very unspeakably horrific things in your past, and
they would be so horrible and so scarring that you
would bury them and you would never think about them
(48:18):
until a skilled therapist who happens to have a book
that they can sell you once.
Speaker 3 (48:23):
Along brought it out of you. Right. Yeah, that's where
we start getting into the kind of implantation that's a
little more deadly in life ruining than just like a
reality show with Darren Brown.
Speaker 1 (48:36):
Yeah, this is the stuff where, this is the stuff
where the danger of leading questions and soft suggestions comes
into play, because when people are in a very suggestible state,
these therapists are, they're portraying themselves in the eighties and
nineties as kind of a I would call a cognitive spelunker. Right,
(48:57):
we're going back through the layers and we're finding we're
finding that grain, you know, that led to the actions
and the feelings you can't explain in the modern day
as the modern you. This seemed like a revelation at first,
patients all across the Western world where claiming they had
recovered memories of abuse that began maybe in infancy, lasted
(49:21):
for decades they had completely forgotten about them. And this
also saw the rise or the popularization of the idea
that trauma would be so bad that your mind had
fractured into multiple personalities, which is where we see things
like is the pop culture phenomenon sibyl that's the right one, right,
(49:42):
So that's correct?
Speaker 3 (49:43):
Yeah, that's sure.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
So in how dangerous did this get? Well, people got
wrongfully convicted shout out Jason Flum based off of these
memories that appear to have been repressed. And again, no
one's a villain here. Everybody who was working in good
faith turned out those memories might have been manufactured. And
this leads a guy, uh, well, he was already a
(50:07):
Harvard psychology professor. But in two thousand and five, Richard McNally,
I don't know if he's related to the MAP Empire.
He calls the recovery recovered memory movement quote the worst
catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.
Those are strong words, right, they are strong words.
Speaker 3 (50:25):
And you know, obviously things that were invasively a trepanation,
you know, drilling holes and the skulls to release demons
and stuff, lobotomies, things like that, horrific abuses of science
quote unquote of power. And so I could see how
you might could potentially categorize this kind of stuff as
soft sciences. They couldn't possibly do as much damage as
(50:48):
drilling into someone's brain or attaching electrodes to them, but
left unchecked, it can do just that. It can do
horrible things.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Shout out fantastic New York Times piece by a guy
named Ethan Waters, who is the co author of a
book called Making Monsters, which came out in nineteen ninety four.
It is about this phenomenon, the recovered memory movement, and
he points out that all of the techniques these therapists
were using, they have been proven to be much more
(51:22):
likely to distort memory rather than to help enhance accurate recalls. So, yeah,
the science was out and the backlash was pretty quick,
but it was overwhelmed by the deluge of pop culture
and self help books, all of which shed the deluge
(51:42):
of delusions, yes perfect, all of which seemed to paint
these therapists as these great fonts of knowledge, these gurus
who could solve any problem you had by finding a
memory that you did not know existed, or a.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Crime I am perhaps that you may or may not
have witnessed. We already know that eyewitness accounts are so fallible,
even though they seem like they wouldn't be. The mind
does crazy things to convince you that you're correct and
that you're remembering, and oftentimes there can be a confirmation
bias at play, and if someone's really pushing you to
(52:20):
remember the thing, you can very easily manufacture that memory
inside your head well thinking.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
I mean, it's almost a hypnotic state when you're sitting
there and being interrogated for hours on end being told
you're not telling us the truth. Come on, Jimmy, you're
not telling us the truth. But no, I am telling
you the truth. You're not telling us the truth. We're
gonna be here till you tell us the truth.
Speaker 3 (52:40):
And then I got a thing. I gotta go fin
nights at Freddy's.
Speaker 1 (52:44):
You do the befriending thing. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole
there's a whole pattern twisted.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
But really quickly, just what this is the last time
I'm going to reference that Pen and Teller episode. There
is someone named Wendy Freesen f r I E s
e N and it's spelled w E N d I.
This is a person who in nineteen ninety four, and
this is coming back because of the time that this
New York piece was written in nineteen ninety four. She
(53:11):
on that pent and Teller episode takes a woman back
through hypnotic regression to the moment of birth right, and
it's to help her get over some anxieties that she's having.
They just, you know, scientifically, they talk about well, actually,
the way the eyes develop, there's no way you could
have the clear picture of all the things that were
just described throughout. You know, this person who has just
supposedly went through this birth process right through hypnotic regression.
(53:35):
This same person, Wendy has been making audio and video
products for sale for years and years and years since
nineteen ninety four. She I'm just gonna run quickly run
down the types of hypnosis that she or like sessions
that she will sell to you on through her website
wendyweandi dot com, which you can still go to. You
(53:56):
can take a financial abundance course for one hundred and
fifty bucks. You can take a back pain relief hypnosis
session for fifty bucks, a stroke recovery session for thirty bucks.
You can remotely influence somebody for forty five dollars.
Speaker 3 (54:13):
Why only thirty for the stroke recovery.
Speaker 2 (54:15):
I don't know then, I think I think it's multiple
videos in a course or something. You can end your
pornography addiction for fifty bucks. You can enlarge your breasts
through her hypnosis sessions for forty dollars, or you can
get a penis enlargement for seventy dollars.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Oh wow, she knows people pay more for that.
Speaker 2 (54:37):
Huh. Well, But it's all going back to this concept
that through your you can trick your mind into doing
things like growing more cells in your penis or you know, no,
I'm serious.
Speaker 3 (54:49):
I know that's the belief. I'll still giggle when people
say penis because I'm a child.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
But but it all goes back to this same thing
of like you're in a way, you were tricking yourself
into believing something to the point where in this case,
like this New York Times article that we're referencing here,
you are tricking someone into believing they maybe even did
something that they didn't do exactly.
Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, And if it's a past occurrence, then you don't
need physical evidence the way you would need with like
enlargement of body parts, right, or improvement of vision. And
this goes into Okay, so this moral panic the reason
hypnosis can be so dangerous.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
First, it Israel.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
It does do some things, it doesn't do what Charlatan's claim,
and it certainly has a at least the way it
was applied during the recovery movement, the recovered memory movement,
it was certainly more likely to invent implant or distort
memories than it was to help you accurately recall things,
and people went so nuts for this. These folks were
(55:56):
celebrities on name your favorite talk show here all the hits, Oprah,
Ricky Lake, Donahue, I think it was Donahue, a million,
Fox and Friends, Fox and Friends, like this before Fox
and Friends. But they would have loved it. They probably
did do this right they were and this is the
most dangerous part. Though states changed their statute of limitation
(56:19):
laws to allow for criminal prosecutions based entirely on repressed memories.
That is thankfully no longer the case, because it turns
out that was very dangerous and innocent people got locked up.
Speaker 3 (56:33):
Well, but to your point, both of y'all's points about
like convincing yourself that something has happened, and maybe that
even convinces the practitioner that they've actually done something. It's
it's almost like self fulfilling prophecy, or that's sort of
like cope, what's the word almost like parasitic slash kind
of not what's the word where you're actually kind of
(56:54):
helping symbiotic kind of Exactly do you think that? I mean,
I don't I personally. Don't think that everyone who believes
the stuff. You know, that everyone who purports to be
able to do this are Charlatans. No, I think some
people really believe in it, and they think that what
they're doing is actually helping people, and maybe it is.
Maybe there are some instances where this is helping.
Speaker 1 (57:16):
If you feel better again, if you're in a state
where an emotional experience is your core focused reality, then
that does have measurable effects on the body over time.
It's just I think it's really important that you pointed
that out. The vast majority of these practitioners were acting
in good faith. They were probably inadvertently doing dangerous things,
(57:39):
but they weren't all out for a cash grab. And
there's a thing that happens, right, because the practitioners are
themselves human, right, there's a fundamental design flaw they can't
get around. And how many people have to tell you
that you have magic powers before you start to believe
there might be something to these claims. It's social dynamics
and another form of pure pressure yet a gut.
Speaker 3 (58:01):
And there's no FDA process for checking out and overseeing
you know, hypnosis, and you don't need any equipment you've
already got it all, you know, So there's really it's
very difficult to oversee this kind of stuff unless something
absolutely catastrophic happens.
Speaker 2 (58:18):
Yeah, I yeah, I think it just points to maybe
the dangers of feedback loops in general, because I'm again like,
in defense of that person I called out Wendy, it
looks like in all the video I've seen of her,
in all the writing I've seen in her website, that
she truly believes she's helping people and is capable of
(58:38):
providing those services. I can't, you know, subjectively whether I
believe her or not, that's one thing, But she appears
to truly believe it, and I do wonder if that's
exactly what it is. Been just she's been told enough
times that it works, right. She in the Pentaitellar episode,
she says she got a call from a guy who said, yeah,
it grew an.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
Inch his rest his self confidence. Let's go with that euphemism. So, yeah,
it is a good point. And you know, we also
we're also aware that, look, if you are a patient
of any sort, you will tend to adopt your healers
(59:19):
patterns of behavior and belief, and you might not know
you're doing that. Even little stuff like mirroring behaviors. You'll
pick up cues and clues from social settings and you
might not be aware that this is happening. And the doctors,
the therapist, the psychiatrists, there's a ton of literature on this.
(59:41):
They have to be very careful to not unintentionally cause
you to pick up things, pick up cues that you
don't know you're throwing. And that's why all this leads
us to, of course, the Satanic panic. This also leads
us to the reason the American Psychological Association has said
conclusively it is not possible to distinguish repressed memories from
(01:00:04):
false memories without corroborating evidence. We need something physical there.
And this tells us the following hypnosis is real. You
hypnotize yourself more than likely on a regular, if limited basis. Yes,
hypnosis can be used for dangerous purposes, even with the
best of intentions. But you know, there's so much we
(01:00:27):
didn't get to. The susceptibility scale, like the reason about
two thirds of human beings are considered to be pretty
susceptible to suggestion. I should say pretty suggestible. I don't
want to make it look like a weakness because it is.
It kind of does have a correlation with the power
of your imagination, which is a beautiful thing. We didn't
(01:00:48):
really go into this a ton, but like, there are
people that are more quote unquote suggestible than others.
Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
Yes, that's real. Like, and I was gonna mention earlier,
like the one time I've seen a hypnosis show was
at the Renaissance Fair here in Atlanta, and I was
pretty impressed because, like I just I don't think these
people were plants, and I don't remember exactly what they did,
but it was some stuff that was really interesting and
pretty compelling. And I remember, I'm pretty you know, I'm
(01:01:14):
skeptical as the next person on this kind of stuff,
and I just remember seeing some of these people just
walking around. They weren't stooges, as Darren Brown calls them.
They were just there having a good time with their families,
and they definitely did some weird stuff. So I do
love that we've pointed out the whole idea of the
performative aspect of it and how it's fun to just
participate and have a good time, and maybe that's more
of it than anything. Maybe that is it, but I
(01:01:37):
do remember being taken by it and being like, oh man,
how does he pick out the ones that are the
most suggestible? Because he picks and chooses, a lot of
people raise their hands and the person on stage decides,
you know, who to take up there.
Speaker 1 (01:01:48):
Wouldn't it be crazy if you heard a fingersnap and
noll you open your eyes and you were on stage
at the Renaissance Fair so for years right.
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Now it had been for a year. Dude, Oh my god,
that's terrified. That's good story material right there. I like that.
Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Are you guys cool with me? I don't believe hypnosis
is real at all? Oh please, I don't think you
can do any like. I don't think it's real. I
think I think we're the thing that is like hypnosis
and meditation and some of those things that you can
like access is not the same thing as hypnosis. But
because I understand meditation and guided things like implanting ideas
(01:02:24):
when you're in a susceptible state is one thing. But
like hypnosis, hypnosis, I don't think it's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
That's why I say it's like, it's the definition what
is hypnosis? Hypnosis? Then how do we define the thing
that is not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
Real, someone putting you under, getting you calm, and then
making you think things that you're unaware of.
Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Okay, but then that would be How is that different
from implanting a memory.
Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
I don't think you. It's weird because I don't think you.
I don't think you can do that either. I think
you can take someone into a place where you like
create a story in your head. But to me, that's
not implant a memory. That is literally using your imagination
to come up with a scenario.
Speaker 3 (01:03:04):
But what if we took it to an even a
more extreme, like borderline techno torture kind of situation where
you literally had like like clockwork Orange, you know, where
you've got someone being forced to watch stuff on a
loop for an incredible long periods of time, and pair
that with drug injections that make you open up to
this kind of suggestion, Like do you think that's possible?
Speaker 2 (01:03:26):
But that's like torture? And I think it's just the
terminology maybe, is what I've like, am having a problem with.
Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
I understand. I think we're all on the same page. Frankly,
That's why I really do MM.
Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
Well, but it's weird because you can do things like,
I got a feeling.
Speaker 3 (01:03:44):
I don't remember the next lines.
Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
It's gonna be something which just to how many people
in their target, Because you can do weird stuff like
that right with the mind. You can play tricks with
somebody's mind if you have bad intentions through repetition.
Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
It's about repetition. I wouldn't have been able to finish
that line for you if I hadn't heard that song
of a gazillion.
Speaker 1 (01:04:05):
That's one of the tools. Repetition is one of the tools.
But definitely, yeah, I see you, Matt, and I do
like to your point, noll, I do think we're all
on once we get past the nomenclature. I think we're
on the same page about the phenomenon and the limits
importantly of that of that phenomenon, right, because you know,
(01:04:25):
there's no way someone's going to be hypnotized into flying
because humans don't do that without a specific set of tools.
Oh yeah, and changing your mind about it is not
going to help you beat gravity or other kind of
physical limitations.
Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Yeah, because I'm thinking about just watching the news or something,
depending on how you feel about like a political issue
or a global news issue. I feel like that's more
conditioning based on what you've encountered in the past.
Speaker 3 (01:04:55):
There, how is conditioning different than hypnosis? That's what how
now we're getting somewhere? I think what I was describing
too earlier, the clockwork orange example, that's conditioning to an
aggressive degree. Hypnosis is almost meant to be a shortcut
to long term conditioning.
Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
I mean, maybe it's just the H word and the
way it's been associated with such Kakamami's stuff since the
days of Mesmer and well before. But the idea of
a flow state or trance or suggestibility is that part
is real and that does have you know, it's a
kissing cousin to conditioning. It can be used as a
(01:05:30):
kind of conditioning. But folks, we we're obviously, we're obviously
having a lot of fun with this. We've all consented
to be here. We are not in a current trance state.
We hope you enjoyed tonight's show. We would love to
hear your opinions.
Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Harmonica or not.
Speaker 1 (01:05:50):
What this is?
Speaker 2 (01:05:51):
I have this thing.
Speaker 3 (01:05:53):
It says music on it. It looks like somebod's supposed
to blow into but I don't know what it does.
It doesn't really do anything. I've been holding off on
throwing it away because I was like, maybe it's useful,
but I don't think it is. Sorry, guys, I.
Speaker 2 (01:06:06):
Was listening to Ben and I felt like I was
being pulled back from a hypnosis session or something.
Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
I don't know if you are, You're being pulled back
from our hypnosis session, and then that it's our episode
on hypnosis and it's coming to an end to Ben's boy.
You can find us all over the internet if you wish.
We are conspiracy stuff on YouTube, x nay, Twitter. I'm
stop saying that eventually, I just say hate X so
much and also Facebook and we are a conspiracy stuff
(01:06:32):
show on Instagram and TikTok.
Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
Hey, do you want to call us? Our number is
one eight three three std WYTK. Go ahead and take
a second. Put that as a contact in your phone
just in case it calls you back. If you call it,
you're gonna get three minutes. Give yourself a cool nickname,
and say whatever you'd like. Just please let us know
if you give us permission to use your voice end
message on the air. If you don't want to do that,
(01:06:56):
why not send us an email?
Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
We read everyone we get. Send us your pictures, send
us your links, take us deep into the rabbit hole.
We'll do the rest. Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Stuff they Don't want you to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Show Links
RSSStoreAboutLive ShowsPopular Podcasts
1. The Podium
The Podium: An NBC Olympic and Paralympic podcast. Join us for insider coverage during the intense competition at the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. In the run-up to the Opening Ceremony, we’ll bring you deep into the stories and events that have you know and those you'll be hard-pressed to forget.
2. In The Village
In The Village will take you into the most exclusive areas of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games to explore the daily life of athletes, complete with all the funny, mundane and unexpected things you learn off the field of play. Join Elizabeth Beisel as she sits down with Olympians each day in Paris.
3. iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2024 Olympics.