Hypnosis and coercion: What people believe vs. What we know

ICSA CONFERENCE 2026

Date: July 1-4, 2026

Hilton Bayfront, San Diego

Perhaps more than any other single method of influence, there is mystery, myth, misunderstanding, and outright falsehoods about hypnosis, even among mental health professionals. Some cite research that essentially claims hypnosis does not exist beyond a not-particularly useful and confusing construct; others—especially among but hardly limited to some cult-critics—describe hypnosis in a manner that greatly exaggerates its power. This presentation, by a cult-aware psychologist with advanced training in scientific/experimental as well as clinical hypnosis, will cover and debunk a range of misunderstandings and misinformation about the use of hypnosis and hypnotic-like interpersonal dynamics in coercive and cultic environments and processes. The very real impact of hypnosis on certain people in certain situations will be carefully explored, using the most current research available rather than relying solely on anecdotal evidence.

Steve K.D. Eichel, Ph.D., ABPP, CST received his B.A. from Columbia University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a licensed psychologist since 1982. His career has included roles as a child and family psychologist, director of child and family services, and consulting forensic psychologist. He has also held academic positions, including Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Delaware. His professional affiliations include the American Academy of Psychotherapists and the International Cultic Studies Association, where he formerly served as president of the board.

https://internationalculticstudies.org/events/hypnosis-and-coercion/

Greater self-consciousness linked to decreased hypnotizability, study finds

Emily Manis

PsyPost

December 8, 2022

Have you ever wondered what makes someone vulnerable to hypnosis? A study published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis suggests that being self-conscious can make individual’s less susceptible to being hypnotized. 

Hypnotism is frequently thought of as a gimmick done by magicians, but it can also be a utilized as a psychological intervention. Theories about how hypnosis functions indicate that there is a decrease in self-awareness and/or attention that is necessary for that influence. There may be an aspect of hypnosis requiring less competition with other aspects of cognitive functioning. 

Hypnotizability has been found to be linked to many individual traits, but there has been limited research exploring how different aspects of self-consciousness relate to hypnotizability. This study seeks to bridge that gap in literature. 

correlations showed small effect sizes. Additionally, utilizing only an undergraduate sample from California limits generalizability. Future research could utilize a more diverse participant pool. 

“Besides taking into consideration these limitations, future studies should consider making more focused analyses looking at the potential relations between self-consciousness, gender, trait dissociation, and hypnotic experiential automaticity, discontinuity, and absorption,” the researchers concluded. “Only the latter has received much research attention. In addition, aspects of self-consciousness could be manipulated experimentally to evaluate any impact on hypnotic responsiveness. In sum, there are multiple reasons to continue investigating how different aspects of self-consciousness may relate to hypnotic experience and hypnotizability.” 

The study, “Dispositional Self-Consciousness and Hypnotizability“, was authored by Etzel Cardeña, Lena Lindström, Ann Åström, and Philip G. Zimbardo.

https://www.psypost.org/2022/12/greater-self-consciousness-linked-to-decreased-hypnotizability-study-finds-64467

Mind games: Inside the mysterious world of the mentalists

Karan Singh, a mentalist.

Meet the ‘mystic men’ who are popularising mentalism as a performing art in India

Manoj Sharma
Hindustan Times
March 3, 2018

A one-on-one conversation with Karan Singh can be quite an unsettling experience. As you speak, sitting before him, he looks intently at you -- too intently, in fact, for your comfort. Singh, a mentalist, is trying to read your expressions and body language to play tricks of the mind on you.

Dressed in jeans and a casual navy blue shirt, sporting a stubble beard and a ponytail, Singh looks every bit like a modern mystic. He asks you to think about things happening in your life, say some numbers and letters aloud in your mind. And, in no time, as if he has peeped into your mind, he tells you your birthday, your ATM pin, your favourite city, even the exact thought that crossed your mind at that instant. In fact, revealing phone password and ATM pin is his signature trick. He says he recently stunned Shah Rukh Khan by disclosing his ATM pin at a New-Year party at Aamir Khan’s house.

“What goes on in your mind comes out in your body language. I don’t have any psychic powers. Mentalism is an acquired skill,” says Singh, 26, one of India’s most famous mentalists. “How you sit, how you rest your feet, how you breathe, how you purse your lips, all give away several intimate facts of your life – including whether you are happy in your marriage, relationship, or job.”

Singh’s house in Faridabad is like a little museum of mentalism: there are posters of Sherlock Holmes, of magician Harry Houdini, mentalist Derren Brown, and one from The Prestige, a mystery movie in which two friends and fellow magicians become bitter enemies. Then there is an assortment of dices, Harry Potter replica wands and dozens of books on psychology and mentalism.

While mentalism as a performing art-- where the mentalist demonstrates highly evolved mental abilities or paranormal effects-- has been quite popular in the West, it is fast picking up in India, all because of a new breed of young, suave mentalists.

They specialise in what they call ‘psychological illusion’, and claim to a blend psychology, hypnosis, suggestion, cold reading, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), misdirection, and other subtle skills of observation to create the illusion of a sixth sense. “A combination of this enables me to accomplish mind reading, psychokinesis and telepathy,” says Singh, who dropped out of college to pursue his passion for mentalism.

And unlike magicians, who use props and sleight of hand, mentalists use their audience as their props and perform tricks of the mind such as reading your thought, planting a thought in your mind, even making you forget your name.“When we talk to someone, 60 per cent communication happens through body language, 30 per cent through the tone of what we are saying, and only 10 per cent through the actual words being spoken,” says Mohit Rao, 39, who was a marketer before he became a mentalist. “What I do is undertake a journey into your mind using my inherent skills and a range of different sciences as tools.”

Rao performs a show called ‘The Wolf of Dalal Street’ for his corporate clients, which involves mind reading, telepathy, hypnosis, walking on broken glass and predicting the exact closing of Sensex on the day of the event, his signature trick. “Mentalism as an art form is all about mystery, amazement, and unforgettable entertainment. Hypnosis can also be a great tool of meditation and relaxation,” he says.

Rao got interested in mentalism after an interaction with a psychologist in 2010. “He said think of an elephant; then he said don’t think of two elephants, and then he said don’t think of two elephants that are pink in colour. I was stunned by how he was trying to manipulate my thoughts. I was exactly thinking what he was asking me not to think,” says Rao, who did four years of intense research before he performed his first show. “I even took a month’s off from my job to study the sciences behind this art. That one month changed the course of my life,” says Rao. “When I quit my job seven years back to become a mentalist, everyone thought I had lost my mind.”

Nakul Shenoy, 40, another well-known mentalist, says that as a child he was inspired by the comic series, Mandrake The Magician, who hypnotically could make people see what he wanted them to see. “ I consider myself a mystery entertainer,” says Shenoy, who is a member of the Psychic Entertainers Association (USA) and the British Society of Psychic Entertainers (UK).

Mentalism, he says, falls in the larger realm of magic. While magic makes the impossible possible, mentalism makes the improbable happen. “A magician’s skills lie in producing something out of nothing, performing vanishes, transformations, transpositions, or levitations, while a mentalist can read people’s mind through verbal manipulation, demonstrate telepathy or clairvoyance,” says Shenoy, who was a ‘user experience’ (UX) professional before

he became a mentalist. “It is not about rare powers, it is about acquiring and honing skills. During my shows, I keep telling people to be wary of godmen, who use nothing but mentalism and magic to fool people.”

Shenoy’s signature tricks include reading people’s minds, demonstrating ‘superhuman memory’ and predicting people’s choices and actions on stage. “My most favourite effects are those where I am performing direct mind reading of my volunteers on stage,” he says.

Singh, who also studied theatre in London, does both theatre and corporate shows. In 2016, he performed Merchant of Menace, a theatre show in eight cities across the country. “In the entire 90-minute show, the audience are the actors—they come on stage, become part of the story of my childhood. I play tricks of memory and hypnosis on them.”

Most of these mentalists are psychology buffs, master communicators and performers, have delivered several Tedx talks, and derive their inspiration from the likes of Derren Brown and Robert Beno Cialdini, a social psychologist. Interestingly, all of them are avid fans of The Mentalist, an American TV series in which Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker), an independent consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI), uses his skills from his former career as a successful, yet admittedly fraudulent, psychic to help a team of CBI agents to solve murders.

“I have watched the series many times over, and I love it. In fact, I get some good ideas from it for my shows,” says Singh, laughing. But given the opportunity, would he want to play Patrick Jane in real life? “When I watched it the first time in my teens, I was fascinated and wondered if I too could do it for a living. But mentalism is not an exact science and I can be wrong. So, I would not want to venture into crime investigation,” he says.

Mentalists are much sought after by corporate house these days not just as entertainers, but also as a friend, philosopher and guide for their employees. Their shows, mentalists say, combine knowledge sharing while delivering shock and awe. In Shenoy’s words, “It is cerebral entertainment”. To tell you why, he cites the books of Robert Cialdini, who has written many bestselling books such as Influence: ‘Psychology of Persuasion’, and more recently, ‘Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade’.

“His work brings out how we are persuaded and can persuade others through words and actions. I also deliver lessons in the art of persuasion in a way which is interactive, amazing and entertaining,” he says. “Companies expect us to both enthral and motivate their employees. My shows are structured to have a story with a message. The idea is to help them understand and unleash the power of the mind.”

A mentalist, Shenoy says, has to worry about both the mechanics and performance part of his show. “Performance is very important. When I do a show, I have to be very careful about who I invite on the stage. It is not a random selection, despite it appearing to be. These people are carefully chosen”.

So do mentalists have to practice their craft? “Yes. They have to keep innovating and coming up with new tricks, otherwise they run the risk of being irrelevant,” Singh says. “I make videos of my families and friends to study similarities and differences in their expressions. Body language, as I said, is the key to figuring out what is going on in someone’s mind.”

https://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/mind-games-inside-the-mysterious-world-of-the-mentalists/story-6cF32o8WGvlM2Ad5PLdfRL.html

The Cult Next Door

Small, NJ, New Age cult memoir. A True Story of Deception, Despair, and Redemption. Sociopathic guru and his devotees locked in shared delusion. The high price paid for situational and personal vulnerability and finding yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time. However, a message of hope.

By Elizabeth Burchard

"True Story: At 17, Elizabeth, plagued with migraines, attended an initial biofeedback session at the office of an Upper East Side psychologist. Certain of her naivete, the therapist regaled the idealistic Swarthmore College pre-med with prophetic visions of a glorious future, hers to claim alongside him. In the decades that followed, this master at manipulating metaphysical concepts organized a small dedicated band of 'Spiritual Navy Seals.'" 

"Among brainwashed and deluded minds fused with New Age doctrine, Elizabeth prepared for Armageddon. From the gullibility that led her astray, to the enlightenment that freed her, you will travel an incredible journey. For anyone who has ever been trapped by a person who would not let them go, here lies a message of hope and redemption."

http://www.thecultnextdoor.com

Investigation into satanic child sex abuse involving dead U.K. prime minister began in Edmonton with hypnosis

Edmonton Journal
JOSEPH BREAN

January 13, 2017

Edward Heath in 1971

A controversial police investigation into suspected sex abuse of children by the late British prime minister Edward Heath, with related claims of Satanic rituals and murders, originated in Edmonton in 1989, when a Canadian psychologist hypnotized a woman and helped her “recover” suppressed memories, according to a confidential police consultant report obtained by the National Post.

Cheryl Malmo, an Edmonton psychologist who retired in 2016, hypnotized a woman to treat her for depression, which she suspected was related to abuse from her childhood in Wiltshire, England, according to the report. What followed was a litany of horrific tales, seeping slowly from the woman’s memory, growing in lurid detail over time, “guided and influenced” by Malmo’s hypnotherapy, according to the consultant criminologist.

They include stories of helping her mother kidnap a boy, who was raped by her father on a church altar, then suspended from a rope, as the woman’s mother cut his penis with a knife and drained his blood into a gleaming metal bucket. After apparently suppressing these memories all her adult life, the woman, then in her late 40s, told stories of rape, candlelit black magic rituals, cannibalism, child murder and bestiality — stories that were initially about her parents, but in time grew to include one of the most powerful men in the world.

“It is quite possible that childhood sexual abuse did indeed take place,” the expert report concludes. “However, many of the so-called retrieved memories seem to me most likely to fit False Memory Recall of the type associated with the Satanic Ritual Abuse scandal of the 1980s. Some of the extreme ritual abuse and ritual murder scenes, in particular, strike me as crossing the boundary into flights of fancy.”

The report recommends “no charges are brought in cases where evidence relies solely or mainly on the recovery of alleged memories under psychotherapy, especially where hypnosis is employed.” It is also skeptical of evidence from the woman’s sisters, three of whom eventually made similar claims of serial rape by their parents and others, including Heath, which the report says are clearly influenced by each other. Another of those sisters had also moved to Canada.

“I think there’s definite cross-contamination,” said the report’s author, Rachel Hoskins, in an interview. Whether this was honest confabulation, or dishonest fabrication, the memories are not backed up by corresponding official records, such as police investigations or missing person reports, Hoskins said.

Her report has thrown a wrench into a sprawling police investigation that so far, 28 years after it started, has not resulted in any criminal charges.

The Edmonton woman’s allegations were first brought to police back when they were recovered in 1989, but they were focused on the sisters’ parents, not Heath, and no charges resulted. One sister returned to police a few months later, to say more memories had arisen. “I now believe that both of my parents were practising members of the Occult,” she reported.

The case was resurrected only in the last year or so, with the added detail of Heath’s alleged participation in some of the abuse, but not the Satanic rituals. One sister told police she had seen his face on the news and “trusted my gut.” This crucial recollection came at a time when the police response to historical sexual abuse claims about public figures was in dramatic flux, in Britain especially.

Jimmy Savile, for example, a beloved British television performer, had been posthumously revealed as a pedophilic monster with more than 500 victims. The resulting panic led to a police investigation that took down big names — Gary Glitter, Dave Lee Travis, Max Clifford, Rolf Harris. But several widely publicized arrests of high-profile men were not followed by prosecution, such as pop star Cliff Richard. In one case, a former MP died without learning that police cleared his name months earlier. Other prominent politicians, including a former defence chief, may deserve compensation for false accusations about pedophile rings, according to the head of the Metropolitan Police.

These investigations changed the national tone in Britain, and prompted fears that the woefully belated legal response to child sex abuse was morphing into a witch hunt. Even Robert Buckland, Britain’s Solicitor-General, has privately raised concerns with Wiltshire’s police commissioner about an expensive “fishing expedition,” according to the Sunday Times.

In this context, Heath is a big fish, but he died in 2005, so any criminal charges would be against others. He served as Conservative prime minister in the early 1970s, and his term is remembered largely for economic turmoil, labour unrest, and strife in Northern Ireland. He is mentioned scornfully in the Beatles’ song Taxman, in the backing vocals “Haha, Mr. Wilson, Haha Mr. Heath.” (Harold Wilson, Heath’s Labour Party rival, was prime minister both before and after him.)

Hoskins, the author of the report, is a registered expert criminologist for the U.K. National Crime Agency, and a specialist in faith-based violence such as witchcraft, paganism and Satanism. Hired by police to explain this arcane subculture, she was given access to diaries, police statements, and interview transcripts, mainly about the sisters.

Their father worked at Wilton Barracks, an army facility that was closed in 2010. It was used by the United States Army in World War II, and became a strategic command centre for British forces afterwards. Many of the sisters’ allegations involve being forced into sexual abuse in the barracks by military men, some of whom are likely still living.

Wilton Barracks is in Wiltshire, near Stonehenge, and the image of neo-Pagan ritual plays largely in the controversy. Heath had a home nearby in Salisbury, where police held a press conference to solicit complainants.

Malmo, a psychologist focused on childhood trauma and sexual violence, has been a court-recognized expert witness in Canada on cases about, for example, post-traumatic stress disorder. She was also profiled in the documentary When The Devil Knocks, about a woman whose dissociative identity disorder seemed to stem from childhood abuse, and left her with more than 30 distinct personalities, each unknown to the other. Malmo treated each as a distinct patient.

Reached by email, Malmo said she could not discuss patient matters, nor confirm the identity of a patient. About Hoskins’ report, she wrote: “these false memory claims she seems intent on were disposed of in North America years ago by solid research and sound critique by many experts. It appears that just as the issue of child sexual abuse did not arise in Europe (except perhaps in the Netherlands) until decades after it was recognized in North America, the lack of substantiation of so-called false memories and the critiques of this position are slow to reach some professionals (this particular criminologist).”

Malmo said her own records are destroyed after 10 years.

“Whilst it is quite likely that a prolific pedophile would serially abuse all his daughters, the sequence by which the sisters retrieved their memories cannot be considered investigatively pure,” Hoskins concludes in her 150-page report.

Wiltshire Police have taken unusual steps to rebut Hoskins’ report, calling its leak “a significant breach of confidentiality and trust,” and threatening unspecified “pro-active action” in response.

Chief Constable Mike Veale said he was “duty bound” to investigate Heath, and is “very concerned and profoundly disappointed” about speculation that he is leading a witch hunt, which he fears could undermine confidence in police, or threaten any future prosecutions.

“This is not a ‘fishing trip or ‘witch hunt,'” he said. There are many allegations about a “significant number” of people, and the specific allegations about Satanism do not relate to Heath himself, he said. Rather, according to Hoskins’ report, two of the sisters report memories of Heath participating in their rapes, recalling him shirtless, with a “grotesque” face and “an element of cruelty.”

“If the force had received allegations of non-recent child abuse against a former prime minister and done nothing, what would the reaction have been?” Veale said.

• Email: jbrean@nationalpost.com |



http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/national/investigation+into+satanic+child+abuse+involving+dead/12702443/story.html

CultNEWS101 Articles: 1/20/2017

Deja vu, Satanic Ritual Abuse, Hypnosis, FLDS, Legal, Scientology, Victor Barnard, Catholic Church, Human Rights, Vietnam, Religious Freedom

​Big Think: ​

Déjà vu Is a Neurological Phenomenon Scientists Claim

The French study, published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology, measured EEG wave patterns from patients with epilepsy who experienced déjà vu through electrical stimulation. The areas of the brain they examined included the amygdala, which is responsible for emotion and the hippocampus. Researchers found that electrical patterns, emanating from rhinal cortices and the amygdala or the hippocampus, caused déjà vu to occur. These neuroscientists believe that some sort of electrical phenomenon in the medial temporal lobe activates the memory in such a way that it causes déjà vu to occur.

http://bigthink.com/philip-perry/deja-vu-is-a-neurological-phenomenon-scientists-claim

​Edmonton Journal: ​

Investigation into satanic child sex abuse involving dead U.K. prime minister began in Edmonton with hypnosis

A controversial police investigation into suspected sex abuse of children by the late British prime minister Edward Heath, with related claims of Satanic rituals and murders, originated in Edmonton in 1989, when a Canadian psychologist hypnotized a woman and helped her “recover” suppressed memories, according to a confidential police consultant report obtained by the National Post.

Cheryl Malmo, an Edmonton psychologist who retired in 2016, hypnotized a woman to treat her for depression, which she suspected was related to abuse from her childhood in Wiltshire, England, according to the report. What followed was a litany of horrific tales, seeping slowly from the woman’s memory, growing in lurid detail over time, “guided and influenced” by Malmo’s hypnotherapy, according to the consultant criminologist.

“Whilst it is quite likely that a prolific pedophile would serially abuse all his daughters, the sequence by which the sisters retrieved their memories cannot be considered investigatively pure,” Hoskins concludes in her 150-page report.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/national/investigation+into+satanic+child+abuse+involving+dead/12702443/story.html

Lake Powell News: Brower Speaks Out About FLDS

We asked Sam Brower for his reaction to the sentence. He said it was “shameful.”

“In all my decades working in the criminal justice field I have never ever seen a plea agreement handed out with absolutely no teeth in it,” he said. “It was a shameful miscarriage of justice.”

http://www.lakepowelllife.com/brower-speaks-out-about-flds/

Law360: Ex-Cult Members Sued Leader’s Attys Too Late, Judge Says

Former members of a fundamentalist Mormon sect who sued its jailed sex-offender leader Warren Jeffs and the law firm that represented the controversial church had their case dismissed Wednesday by a Utah federal judge who ruled their claims were too late or too tenuous.

https://www.law360.com/articles/879955/ex-cult-members-sued-leader-s-attys-too-late-judge-says

​Tony Ortega: ​

On the ‘Leah Remini’ Reddit special this week: A powerful Texas duo

​Wright, of course, is the Austin journalist who penned “The Apostate,” an amazing 25,000-word New Yorker magazine feature in February 2011 about director Paul Haggis and his defection from Scientology. Wright subsequently turned that article into his book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which was released in January 2013. And two years after that, Alex Gibney used Wright’s book as a basis for his documentary film version, also titled Going Clear, which HBO premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 before airing it on the network that March, becoming the most-watched HBO documentary in a decade and the winner of three Emmy awards.

http://tonyortega.org/2017/01/15/on-the-leah-remini-reddit-special-this-week-a-powerful-texas-duo/

Star Tribune: Defense attorney seeking details about Victor Barnard's reported assault in prison

The attorney for Victor Barnard, the religious cult figure serving a long sentence for sexually molesting girls who were among his followers, said Sunday that state prison officials have refused to reveal details about his client reportedly being assaulted in prison.

http://www.cultnews101.com/2017/01/defense-attorney-seeking-details-about.html

The Guardian: Abuse in Catholic church 'not being fought with enough force' claims new book

In Lussuria (Lust), which will be released in Italian by publisher Feltrinelli on Thursday, Fittipaldi methodically pores over court documents and cites interviews with priests and judicial officials to paint a damning picture of the first three years of Francis’s papacy. Fittipaldi claims that 1,200 plausible complaints of molestation against boys and girls from around the world have been brought to the Vatican’s attention in that period.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/15/catholic-church-not-done-enough-to-tackle-abuse-claims-new-book

​Human Rights Watch: ​

World Report 2017 - Our annual review of human rights around the globe

World Report 2017 summarizes key human rights issues in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide. It reflects investigative work that Human Rights Watch staff undertook in 2016, usually in close partnership with human rights activists in the country in focus.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017

​

The Diplomat: ​

Vietnam's Religious Law: Testing the Faithful

The law requires all religious groups to register with the authorities and report on their activities. Authorities have the right to approve or refuse requests.

http://thediplomat.com/2017/01/vietnams-religious-law-testing-the-faithful/

​News, Intervention, Recovery

Cults101.org resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.
Intervention101.com to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
CultRecovery101.com assists group members and their families make the sometimes difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.

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Selection of articles for CultNEWS101 does not mean that Patrick Ryan or Joseph Kelly agree with the content. We provide information from many points of view in order to promote dialogue.

Please forward articles that you think we should add to CultNEWS101.com.

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Study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances

BY STANFORD UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER ON JULY 28, 2016 COGNITION

Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you’re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.

The scientists scanned the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis sessions similar to those that might be used clinically to treat anxiety, pain or trauma. Distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotized, they report in a study that will be published online July 28 in Cerebral Cortex.

“Now that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone’s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control,” said the study’s senior author, David Spiegel, MD, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.

A serious science

For some people, hypnosis is associated with loss of control or stage tricks. But doctors like Spiegel know it to be a serious science, revealing the brain’s ability to heal medical and psychiatric conditions.

“Hypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it’s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,” said Spiegel, who holds the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professorship in Medicine. “In fact, it’s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.”

Despite a growing appreciation of the clinical potential of hypnosis, though, little is known about how it works at a physiological level. While researchers have previously scanned the brains of people undergoing hypnosis, those studies have been designed to pinpoint the effects of hypnosis on pain, vision and other forms of perception, and not the state of hypnosis itself.

“There had not been any studies in which the goal was to simply ask what’s going on in the brain when you’re hypnotized,” said Spiegel.

Finding the most susceptible

To study hypnosis itself, researchers first had to find people who could or couldn’t be hypnotized. Only about 10 percent of the population is generally categorized as “highly hypnotizable,” while others are less able to enter the trancelike state of hypnosis. Spiegel and his colleagues screened 545 healthy participants and found 36 people who consistently scored high on tests of hypnotizability, as well as 21 control subjects who scored on the extreme low end of the scales.

Then, they observed the brains of those 57 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Each person was scanned under four different conditions — while resting, while recalling a memory and during two different hypnosis sessions.

“It was important to have the people who aren’t able to be hypnotized as controls,” said Spiegel. “Otherwise, you might see things happening in the brains of those being hypnotized but you wouldn’t be sure whether it was associated with hypnosis or not.”

Brain activity and connectivity

Spiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis. Each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis.

First, they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain’s salience network. “In hypnosis, you’re so absorbed that you’re not worrying about anything else,” Spiegel explained.

Secondly, they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. He described this as a brain-body connection that helps the brain process and control what’s going on in the body.

Finally, Spiegel’s team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex. This decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone’s actions and their awareness of their actions, Spiegel said. “When you’re really engaged in something, you don’t really think about doing it — you just do it,” he said. During hypnosis, this kind of disassociation between action and reflection allows the person to engage in activities either suggested by a clinician or self-suggested without devoting mental resources to being self-conscious about the activity.

In patients who can be easily hypnotized, hypnosis sessions have been shown to be effective in lessening chronic pain, the pain of childbirth and other medical procedures; treating smoking addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; and easing anxiety or phobias. The new findings about how hypnosis affects the brain might pave the way toward developing treatments for the rest of the population — those who aren’t naturally as susceptible to hypnosis.

“We’re certainly interested in the idea that you can change people’s ability to be hypnotized by stimulating specific areas of the brain,” said Spiegel.

A treatment that combines brain stimulation with hypnosis could improve the known analgesic effects of hypnosis and potentially replace addictive and side-effect-laden painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, he said. More research, however, is needed before such a therapy could be implemented.

The study’s lead author is Heidi Jiang, a former research assistant at Stanford who is currently a graduate student in neuroscience at Northwestern University.

http://www.psypost.org/2016/07/study-identifies-brain-areas-altered-hypnotic-trances-44074

The Gargoyle: Senate appointments panelist uses discredited pseudoscience to recover 'past lives,' treat phobias

GLEN MCGREGOR

OTTAWA CITIZEN
January 19, 2016

One of the ad hoc panelists named by the Liberal government to a board that will select new senators tries to recover the past lives of people she treats using a largely debunked psychological technique.

Manitoba folk singer and hypnotherapist Heather Bishop is one of nine “eminent Canadians” who will help choose candidates to fill the 22 vacancies in the Senate, Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef announced Tuesday.

But for a government that prides itself on evidence-based policy, her addition to the Senate advisory board may raise a few eyebrows.

In addition to hypnotherapy, Bishop practises “time line therapy” and something called “neuro-linguistic programming,” or NLP, according to her personal website.

Neuro-linguistic programming came into vogue in the 1970s, along with other self-help techniques such as EST. Self-help guru Tony Robbins is its best-known practitioner.

NLP supporters claim it can treat a wide range of psychiatric illnesses, including anxiety, phobias and depression, by changing behaviour through the use of language.

“The unconscious mind does not hear the negative,” Bishop explains. “You learn tricks about never expressing anything in the negative, always express it in the positive.”

She said that she uses NLP, along with hypnotherapy and time line therapy, to help people get to the root of phobias, even delving into past lives.

“Your unconscious mind stores all of your memories on a line and we call that your time line,” she said.

To treat a client with a phobia of dogs, for example, “I would put you into a trance. I would put you on your time line and tell you ‘Go back to the time you first locked in your fear of dogs.’ ”

This fear, she says, could originate even further, requiring what Bishop calls “past-life regression.”

“It could have been in a former lifetime. It might not be from this life. Sometimes people will say, ‘It was from before I was born.’ We go back to how many lifetimes ago.”

Peer reviews studies of NLP have mostly concluded that there is no evidence to support its claims, however.

A panel of the U.S. National Research Council called NLP “an unvalidated technique” and said that studies supporting it failed “to provide an empirical base of support for NLP assumptions … or NLP effectiveness.”

NLP is based on an “outmoded view of the relationship between cognitive style and brain function (and) ultimately boils down to crude analogies,” according to another study.

Another found NLP based on theories that are “laced with numerous factual errors.” Others dismiss it as “new-age fakery” on par with astrology.

Monsef’s office provided no immediate comment in answer to the Citizen’s query about Bishop’s selection.

Bishop describes herself as “social activist, keynote speaker, visual artist, published author, teacher, and tradeswoman.” She is a member of the selection committee for the Order of Manitoba.

She said she learned she was being considered for the Senate appointments board when she received a phone call from Monsef’s office. She said she doesn’t know who put her name forward.

While she believes the science of NLP is legitimate, she says she won’t be using it to select new members of the upper chamber.

“This has nothing to do with with my appointment.”

gmcgregor@postmedia.com

http://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/the-gargoyle-senate-appointments-panelist-uses-discredited-pseudoscience-to-recover-past-lives-treat-phobias

The Hypnotic Power of ISIS Imagery in Recruiting Western Youth

ICSVE
Anne Speckhard, Ph.D.
October 20, 2015

 

Anne Speckhard, Ph.D. : is Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University in the School of Medicine and of Security Studies in the School of Foreign Service. She is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism and a nonresident Fellow of Trends. She is also the author of Talking to Terrorists and coauthor of Undercover Jihadi. Her newly released book, inspired by the true story of an American girl seduced over the Internet into ISIS is Bride of ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has interviewed over four hundred terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including Gaza, the West Bank, Chechnya, Iraq, Jordan and many countries in Europe. She was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to twenty thousand detainees and eight hundred juveniles. Website: www.AnneSpeckhard.com

A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a commonly accepted piece of wisdom—one that groups like al Qaeda and ISIS understand all too well when trying to recruit Western youth into their ranks. Images often speak directly to our right brains, activating the limbic system, and potentially bypassing rational thought. This results in statements that are subtly, or overtly embedded, alongside emotionally evocative images, highly suggestive—if not downright hypnotic.

Both al Qaeda and ISIS have built their terrorist narrative upon hijacked verses from sacred scriptures of the Quran and hadiths arguing that militant jihad is a duty incumbent on all Muslims. After declaring its Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, ISIS declared even more strongly than ever before, that hijrah—or moving to the battleground—is also incumbent on all Muslims, and for those Westerners who cannot come, one is enjoined to “stay and attack” at home. This was an argument put forward in English years earlier, prior to ISIS even being formed, by Anwar al-Awlaki (of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).[1] Although al-Awlaki was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, he continues to inspire from beyond the grave—enjoying eternal life over the Internet via his preserved sermons of hatred for the West.
Al Qaeda argued early on, and ISIS has taken up the same line of reasoning, that the worldwide Islamic jihad is a defensive one, a line of argument that is made by showing graphic images and video from conflict zones to demonstrate undisputed tragedy. The West in militant jihadi propaganda, is held responsible for propping up tyrannical dictators, states; and in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, even overtly invading Muslim lands, hurting Muslim people, and attacking Islam itself. As a result, these groups call for so-called “defensive” jihad.

In its propaganda, ISIS defends its savagery and bloodshed as a necessary evil. Its leaders and ideologues argue that building the Caliphate involves a worldwide revolution to bring in a new utopian system to rule according to Islamic ideals and that all revolutions require blood to be spilled. Abu Baker al-Baghdadi, seeming to understand that gruesome savagery was not perhaps the best marketing tool, did however, recently order that graphically violent images and videos of the group’s atrocities no longer be posted, in favor of videos that demonstrate successes of the Islamic State in building a new, peaceful, and well-running society. [2]
While one would hope that Westerners would be capable of critical thinking and not easily succumb to the visual propaganda of groups like ISIS, we know that other enterprises such as business like Coca Cola (Share a Coke) and Nike (Just Do It), and humanitarian missions like World Vision (starving child surrounded by flies) also successfully use imagery coupled with catchy slogans in much the same way—to bypass critical thinking and engage emotions to gain a sale, or in the case of humanitarian organizations, a donation.

ISIS is no different in that regard. An examination of the propaganda imagery found in Internet posters, videos, and media campaigns demonstrates the same use of images and emotional appeals as that used so successfully in Western advertising. The following is an analysis of some of their emotional and visual appeals of materials produced by al Hayat Media Center, the media arm of ISIS, and Rayat al Tawheed, a group of British foreign fighters representing ISIS.

Belonging

Fuman beings are a social species. Relatedness and belonging in youth to one’s parent, if not larger family, determines our survival and ability to thrive. In adulthood belonging to groups often greatly influences our level of psychological, economic and social wellbeing.

Read complete report (PDF)

http://www.icsve.org/the-hypnotic-power-of-isis-imagery-in-recruiting-western-youth.html

School Board to Pay $600,000 to Families of Students Who Died After Being Hypnotized by Principal

Heather Clark

Christian News NetworkOctober 8, 2015

NORTH PORT, Fla. — A school board in Florida has agreed to pay $600,000 in a settlement to a lawsuit filed by the families of three students who died after being hypnotized by their high school principal.

The board of the Sarasota County School District voted on Tuesday to pay $200,000 to each family—just days before the matter was to go to trial.
“It’s something they will never get over,” attorney Damian Mallard told reporters. “He altered the underdeveloped brains of teenagers, and they all ended up dead because of it.”

The parents of Wesley McKinley, 16, Brittany Palumbo, 17, and Marcus Freeman, 16, believe that North Port High School Principal George Kenney and the Sarasota County School District are responsible for the deaths of their children.

Kenney is believed to have hypnotized as many as 75 students and staff between 2006 and 2011. McKinley had reportedly sought to be hypnotized by Kenney in order to obtain help as he practiced for his guitar audition with New York’s Julliard music school. Palumbo had allegedly been told by Kenney that hypnotism may help improve her SAT scores as he believed she had test anxiety. Freeman, a quarterback on the school’s football team, sought hypnosis to help him concentrate on the field.

Freeman died in a car accident in March 2011 as he was driving home from a dental appointment with his girlfriend. According to reports, he was to believed to have been in a state of hypnosis when he drove off the interstate. His girlfriend survived the accident, but he did not.

McKinley was found hanging outside of his home the following month. He had been hypnotized by Kenney that same day. McKinley’s friend, Thomas Lyle, told the Herald Tribune that sometimes McKinley wouldn’t know his name or his friend’s names after being hypnotized.

“I would say that he was in a distant phase. He wasn’t all there mentally, it seemed like, after the sessions,” he stated.

Palumbo was found hanged in her closet that same year as she became discouraged that her grades were not improving following the hypnosis.
“The school board is as negligent as Dr. Kenney is, or Mr. Kenney, I should say,” her mother, Patricia Palumbo, told CBS News. “I need those other families to know that I’m trying to help their kids and their families so that they don’t end up like my daughter and my family.”

In May 2011, Kenney was placed on leave and resigned a year later, at which time he was charged with two misdemeanors for practicing hypnosis without a licence. He entered a plea of no contest and served one year probation.
Some students had rallied behind Kenney, creating a “Bring Back Dr Kenney” and “Students in Support of Dr George Kenney” page on Facebook.

“This whole thing about Dr. Kenney having any part of any death is ridiculous,” a post from November 2011 reads. “Any educated person would know that hypnosis is completely harmless and you would not do anything you normally would not do under it.”
In 2013, Kenney gave up his teaching license and was banned from obtaining another.

Some Christians warn against hypnosis as opening oneself to the occult.
“The ‘father of hypnotism,’ Franz Anton Mesmer—from whose name we get the word mesmerize—was himself a practitioner of the occult. His method of inducing a trance was very similar to the way a medium conducts a séance,” outlines the site GotQuestions.org. “Hypnotism, along with yoga and Transcendental Meditation, has always been linked to spiritual darkness. The newfound respectability of these practices has not changed their underlying nature.”

http://christiannews.net/2015/10/08/school-board-to-pay-600000-to-families-of-students-who-died-after-being-hypnotized-by-principal/

Studying how brain responds to hypnosis

Stephanie M. Lee
San Francisco Chronicle
October 23, 2012


Despite what Halloween lore might have you believe, hypnosis isn't all about swinging watches, magic spells and mind control.

It is the oldest Western conception of psychotherapy and, in mainstream medicine, it has been shown to help patients manage pain, stress and anxiety, and combat traumas and phobia. It is also associated with being used to retrieve "repressed" memories connected to mental disorders.


Now, new scientific research, bolstered by technological advances, is shedding light on the neurological nuances of the brain's response to hypnosis. For instance, a recent study from the Stanford University School of Medicine helps explain why some people easily fall into a trance while others do not.


David Spiegel, the study's senior author, defines hypnosis as a state of highly focused attention, achieved through deep breathing and muscle relaxation. When patients are fully hypnotized, they can, for instance, alter their minds to perceive pain as less painful.


"It's the equivalent in consciousness of a telephoto lens on a camera - great detail, but not a lot of context," said Spiegel, medical director of Stanford's Center for Integrative Medicine.


The ability to slip into this mentality varies among people, according to Spiegel's study. Published this month in Archives of General Psychiatry, it shows that the reason may have to do with the strength of connections between specific brain regions.


Spiegel and his team performed brain imaging scans on 12 adults considered highly hypnotizable and 12 others who were not so hypnotizable. They were divided into the two groups based on a test that assessed their behavioral responses to hypnosis.


The researchers examined activity in different networks in their brains while they were relaxed and not hypnotized. They found that the highly hypnotizable patients showed greater activity between parts of the executive-control network, which is involved in making decisions, and the salience network, which is involved in deciding what is important.


In particular, researchers saw a strong connection activated between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is part of the brain's executive-control network, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of its salience network and plays a role in focusing one's attention.


"For the high hypnotizable, it was a high level of functional connectivity," Siegel said. "If executive control is on, so is the salient network. (They) tended to work together. That's the kind of absorption you see in highly hypnotizable people. When they're in something, they're not thinking, 'Why am I doing this and not that?' "


In contrast, the activity between those regions was very low in the less hypnotizable subjects. Spiegel said his study was the first to show teamwork between the two networks in relation to hypnosis.


The 10 percent


Spiegel estimated that 10 percent of people are highly hypnotizable, one-third are not and the rest fall in between.


It is unclear why some people are more wired for hypnosis than others, but some theories posit that those who are hypnotizable especially enjoyed imaginative activities as children or learned early to focus their thoughts elsewhere in times of physical pain, Spiegel said. Another explanation holds that some people are genetically predisposed to produce certain neurotransmitters in a way that makes them more hypnotizable.


This deeper proof of people's abilities to be hypnotized helps physicians explain to patients that hypnosis "is not just some carnival trick" but a helpful medical tool, said Donald Olson, director of the pediatric epilepsy program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. He was not involved in Spiegel's study.


In a 2008 study, Olson and Richard Shaw, a child psychiatrist at the hospital, used hypnosis to properly diagnose nine children who appeared to be epileptic.




Despite what Halloween lore might have you believe, hypnosis isn't all about swinging watches, magic spells and mind control.


It is the oldest Western conception of psychotherapy and, in mainstream medicine, it has been shown to help patients manage pain, stress and anxiety, and combat traumas and phobia. It is also associated with being used to retrieve "repressed" memories connected to mental disorders.


Now, new scientific research, bolstered by technological advances, is shedding light on the neurological nuances of the brain's response to hypnosis. For instance, a recent study from the Stanford University School of Medicine helps explain why some people easily fall into a trance while others do not.


David Spiegel, the study's senior author, defines hypnosis as a state of highly focused attention, achieved through deep breathing and muscle relaxation. When patients are fully hypnotized, they can, for instance, alter their minds to perceive pain as less painful.


"It's the equivalent in consciousness of a telephoto lens on a camera - great detail, but not a lot of context," said Spiegel, medical director of Stanford's Center for Integrative Medicine.


The ability to slip into this mentality varies among people, according to Spiegel's study. Published this month in Archives of General Psychiatry, it shows that the reason may have to do with the strength of connections between specific brain regions.


Spiegel and his team performed brain imaging scans on 12 adults considered highly hypnotizable and 12 others who were not so hypnotizable. They were divided into the two groups based on a test that assessed their behavioral responses to hypnosis.


The researchers examined activity in different networks in their brains while they were relaxed and not hypnotized. They found that the highly hypnotizable patients showed greater activity between parts of the executive-control network, which is involved in making decisions, and the salience network, which is involved in deciding what is important.


In particular, researchers saw a strong connection activated between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is part of the brain's executive-control network, and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of its salience network and plays a role in focusing one's attention.


"For the high hypnotizable, it was a high level of functional connectivity," Siegel said. "If executive control is on, so is the salient network. (They) tended to work together. That's the kind of absorption you see in highly hypnotizable people. When they're in something, they're not thinking, 'Why am I doing this and not that?' "


In contrast, the activity between those regions was very low in the less hypnotizable subjects. Spiegel said his study was the first to show teamwork between the two networks in relation to hypnosis.


The 10 percent


Spiegel estimated that 10 percent of people are highly hypnotizable, one-third are not and the rest fall in between.


It is unclear why some people are more wired for hypnosis than others, but some theories posit that those who are hypnotizable especially enjoyed imaginative activities as children or learned early to focus their thoughts elsewhere in times of physical pain, Spiegel said. Another explanation holds that some people are genetically predisposed to produce certain neurotransmitters in a way that makes them more hypnotizable.


This deeper proof of people's abilities to be hypnotized helps physicians explain to patients that hypnosis "is not just some carnival trick" but a helpful medical tool, said Donald Olson, director of the pediatric epilepsy program at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford. He was not involved in Spiegel's study.


In a 2008 study, Olson and Richard Shaw, a child psychiatrist at the hospital, used hypnosis to properly diagnose nine children who appeared to be epileptic.


The young patients periodically erupted in behavior that included twitching, loss of consciousness, shaking, jerking and falling - all signs of epilepsy. But psychological stresses, such as physical or emotional trauma, manifest in the body in virtually identical episodes in a non-epilepsy-related condition called conversion disorder, Olson said.


Determining epilepsy


The only way to truly know if epilepsy is the cause of those behaviors is to monitor the child's brain activity during such an episode for abnormal electrical impulses, he said.


To figure out who had which condition, the physicians hypnotized the children and, after they connected a panel of electrodes to their scalps, instructed them to envision an unpleasant, stressful situation and recall the feelings or events that usually preceded seizure-like behavior. Eight of the nine children responded with that behavior. To end the test, the children were then instructed to envision their favorite place.


By looking at their brain activity, the researchers found that the eight were actually experiencing non-epileptic episodes. Olson said the method is now in use at the hospital to help diagnose patients.


"Most people can sense these non-epileptic seizures coming on, and many of them can learn a self-hypnosis technique to interrupt it and keep it from coming out in a full-blown manner," Olson said.


Katie Duchscherer, 21, a senior at Stanford, didn't know she was highly hypnotizable until Spiegel mass-hypnotized her class of 150. The psychology major has participated in his studies since then and learned how to slip into that focused state of mind on her own.


Duchscherer likens the feeling to intently reading a book to the point where the rest of the world seems to disappear.


"Hypnosis is actually similar to that, but instead of focusing on the TV you're watching or the book you're reading or the project you're working on, you're focusing on what's going on inside your head and what's going on inside your body," she said.


Self-hypnosis recently proved useful during a doctor's visit, when she had a wart on her foot frozen off with liquid nitrogen.


Was it painful? Sort of - but Duchscherer said she was able to hypnotize herself into believing that she was running barefoot through the snow for fun. When it was over, her mother remarked that she hadn't even winced.


"If you can get into this brain state where you're thinking about it differently, thinking about the pain differently," she said, "it can be a lot less unpleasant."


Stephanie M. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: slee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @stephaniemlee


http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Studying-how-brain-responds-to-hypnosis-3975724.php