- Hypnosis can make people see what they believe, producing
changes in the brain that suggest the effects are real, according to a
study presented to the world's largest general science meeting yesterday.
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- About two thirds of the population can be hypnotised
and 10 per cent, mostly children, are easily hypnotised. Common medical
applications of hypnosis include the treatment of pain, anxiety and phobias.
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- In a study of eight subjects who were hypnotised, the
changes to the part of the brain that processes colour were studied as
the individuals were shown black and white or colour pictures.
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- When subjects who were looking at a black and white image
said they were seeing colour there were increases in blood flow to the
area of the brain that processes colour vision. When they saw black and
white, though they were looking at a colour image, there was a decrease.
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- "Believing was seeing," said Prof David Spiegel
of Stanford University School of Medicine. "When they believe that
they were looking at colour, the part of the brain that processes colour
showed increases in blood flow.
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- "This is scientific evidence that something unusual
is happening in the brain, that does not happen ordinarily, when people
are hypnotised.
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- "There has been a whole school of argument that
hypnosis is nothing more than an exaggerated form of social compliance.
This is evidence that they are not just telling you what they think you
want to hear. They are actually perceiving things differently. That is
a very important lesson."
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- Prof Spiegel studied the effects of hypnosis on colour
vision with Prof Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University. Now they plan a
new study to follow up work by Prof Spiegel, published in The Lancet, which
showed that subjects who were hypnotised during painful procedures could
reduce the dose of pain relief required.
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- Another trial on the use of hypnotism to prevent pain
involves children aged six to 12 with a suspected kidney disorder which
can only be investigated by inserting a catheter into the bladder without
anaesthetic.
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- Under hypnosis, the children imagine they are inside
Disney Land.
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- "There is less crying, less pain as they are inserting
the catheter, and the procedure takes 20 minutes less, which for a kid
is a big difference," said Prof Spiegel.
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- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/
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- Comment
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- From Alfred Lehmberg
Lehmberg@snowhill.com
www.alienview.net
2-22-2
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- Hypnosis has a strange history shrouded in chicanery,
humbuggery, and a little something extra one can't put a finger on. That
little something extra is what keeps it around, makes it useful, and justifies
a harder look by science...
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- ...Sometimes it works.
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- One hears the word "hypnosis" and is overcome
by images of slick stage personalities suggesting to people the they can
be transformed into barnyard animals, dance a grand fandango, or be compelled
to quit smoking... but the program can be more insidious than that...
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- If two thirds of the population can be effected by a
phenomena that science can quantify (if not qualify) this seems to be
a ready mechanism for control by manipulative forces and their "suggestions"
delivered via a daily sensory bombardment from a very tightly controlled
cultural media -- news print, radio, and television.
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- An individual buying in to the unceasing manipulations
of the contrived, distorted, and corrupted mainstream might even take the
next step in their own "control" by hypnotizing themselves!
In effect, rendering themselves incapable of perceiving what is there,
plainly, to be perceived, and NOT, conversely, seeing what is not there
to be seen...
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- While on active duty years ago, and before I developed
an interest in the ufological, I had a barbeque at my home with five or
six couples in attendance. I was standing away from the group with two
other men -- one an AH-64 (Apache) instructor pilot, and the other a fixed-wing
driver who was an Army candidate for the astronaut program. The sun had
just gone down and dusk was washing out to the blackness of night.
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- There was a lull in the conversation, and one of the
men looked up and said, "That's odd..." Pointing at the sky with
his beer hand, we all looked up at a black strip about as wide as a little
fingernail held at arm's length and flying -diagonally- through the air!
As it flew, one of the men remarked that the craft had very peculiar position
lights. These lights were white strobes that ran from wing-tip to wing-tip,
and then back again... there was no evidence of the required red and green,
and no flashing anti-collision light...
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- "Well -- it's got to be something..." someone
said, and with that the object was forgotten, and all three of us returned
to the party. More beer was had by all, and the bash continued into the
usual drunken mini-brawl that Army aviators USED to be famous for...
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- I didn't remember this occurrence again for almost a
decade, and was reminded of it only by seeing a similar object in California
after I had developed an interest in UFOs. I would suggest that my two
fellow aviators and I followed the programming hypnosis of "polite"
society and (through a kind of 'self' hypnosis) ignored a sighting that
should have been VERY interesting to two professional instructor pilots
and a candidate astronaut!
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- But we were less than interested, and we ignored a genuine
UFO as a non event -- behavior on this end that now seems inexplicable
to me. We hypnotized ourselves (followed our social programming) and rejected
the unsettling enigmatic for the comforting mundane. We ignored what our
eyes were reporting to us and replaced it with an "accepted"
routine. We turned our back on the unexplained, likely occurring around
us all the time (unseen), and made it fit into what we are trained to find
culturally tolerable...
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- I've watched this process of denial (through self hypnosis?)
at work twice now. At a rubber model airplane meet in Northern California,
dozens of us watched a UFO fly by -five- times with fewer and fewer people
looking up to watch it fly with each succeeding pass that it made! ...Tell
yourself passionately enough that something's not there -- and it's not
there.
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- The article that I comment on, above, gives every indication
that science believes the human brain can convince itself to perceive what
is -not- there to be perceived. I would suggest that it can also do the
inverse of that. It can also mask what is there, as plain as shining day.
We won't pay enough attention to that -- given that we have to overcome
so much programming from our myopically conflicted culture.
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- But we must, ultimately, if we (individually) ever expect
to see anything really there, at all.
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