Hypnotists can’t control you

Now, those in the University community who are “hypno-curious” can sit in his “hypno-chair.” Hummon, a first-year computer science graduate student, is the president of the newly formed Princeton University Hypnosis Workshop, which met for the first time on Tuesday.

Though the idea of hypnosis often conjures images of predators controlling their subjects, Dracula movies and zombies commanding victims to “look into my eyes,” Hummon said that these are false stigmas and that hypnosis is actually the act of communicating with an individual’s subconscious mental state.

Hypnosis has gained “the stigma that once someone is hypnotized, they lose control, they lose their free will,” he noted. “[On the contrary], a hypnotist could never force someone to do something they don’t want to do.”

While in a hypnotic trance, Hummon said, one’s mind is sharpened, not dulled. In fact, one application of hypnosis is habit formation, such as helping people to stop smoking.

Hummon explained that once the hypnotist induces the subject into a state of “physical and mental relaxation,” the subject engages more directly with the subconscious part of the brain and thus can gain a clearer memory and draw connections previously not apparent to him.

When he hypnotizes people, Hummon said, “They suddenly are remembering things much clearer.”

Hummon gave the example of one of his subjects, a man who worked in the movie industry. Though he found his job stressful and not enjoyable, Hummon said, the man thought that he had no other skill sets.

But when Hummon hypnotized the man, telling him to “let your subconscious talk to you,” the man pictured himself as a 1930s radio host and remembered that someone had suggested he go into media communications when he was younger.

The man is now pursuing a master’s degree in media communications and is much happier with his life, Hummon said.

“He is one of my biggest success stories,” Hummon said.

A hypnotist’s tale

Hummon’s interest in hypnosis was originally piqued after he “was just blown away” by a stage hypnosis performance. The next day, he checked out every book he could find about hypnosis but said he realized after a few years that reading wasn’t enough.

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After three years of learning to hypnotize others through practice, Hummon started his own weekly group in New York in January 2007 — an “open community forum in which anyone off the street could come in with questions about hypnosis,” he explained.

The group attracted people who wanted to use hypnosis to affect their own lives, for purposes like smoking cessation or weight loss, he added.

Hummon came to Princeton “kicking around the idea of opening my own hypnosis practice and doing something along those lines,” he said.

For him, a college campus setting presented a convenient opportunity. “Princeton students are much more apt to consider hypnosis because it’s something that they’ve never been exposed to,” he said.

“When you are young in life and you are first in college and you first get to know yourself — you first kind of take those initial steps — you’re much more open-minded, you’re much more curious, you’re much more willing to take on things” and opportunities that might not be available later in life, Hummon added.

For Hummon, hypnosis is a hobby, not a career. “I love the process of working with people and helping them,” he said. “[But] to me, the whole agree-on-a-fee and schedule-an-appointment sometimes gets in the way.”

Plus, he added, “I’m a pretty lousy businessman.”

About 10 individuals attended the first workshop, and Hummon said that it will be a weekly event. “If we can spend a good amount of time spreading awareness about hypnosis and assuaging the fear that hangs about it, then we’re really doing some good,” he said.

Hypnotism in practice

Dr. Harriet Hollander, a former president of the Clinical Hypnosis Society of New Jersey, said that hypnosis can also be useful to students preparing for tests.

Hypnotists can guide students to recognize what material they’ve studied and what material they’ve “left in a state of inadequate preparation,” she explained.

Hummon cautioned, however, that hypnosis should not be used for manipulation or for personal gain.

He added that a number of young men have approached him and asked him how they could use hypnosis to “pick up girls,” and salesmen have wanted to know how hypnosis can help them influence customers.

Hypnosis “is not going to do [these individuals] any good,” Hummon said, “and ... it just gives the rest of us a bad name.”

An elusive science

Even the hypnosis community disagrees about what hypnosis actually is, Hummon explained. “What is hypnosis? No one really knows,” he said.

The American Psychological Association has a subgroup, called Division 30, that studies hypnosis. The group’s website has a lengthy explanation of hypnosis but explains that “When using hypnosis, one person (the subject) is guided by another (the hypnotist) to respond to suggestions for changes in subjective experience, alterations in perception, sensation, emotion, thought or behavior.”

Neuroscience professor Sam Wang said in an e-mail that “The history of hypnosis has been mixed up in a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo, making it hard for people to study it without being laughed at.”

“We have a mythical view of how our brains work,” he explained, adding that though people think of their senses as “one-way channels” into the brain, the brain actually reacts to stimuli.

Hummon said he and other hypnotists liked to use a model that was rooted in Freudian psychology. The human brain is built so that the conscious controls the main activities and the “subconscious mind is in the backseat,” he noted.

“We have powerful mechanisms that we use to regulate our own brain’s function,” Wang said. “Hypnosis is a means for another person to get access to these mechanisms.”