172 ChapTER 5 Body Rhythms and Mental States
But Caesar died in 44 b.c. and was never crowned
emperor, and dating years as a.d. or b.c. did not
begin until several centuries later.) Not knowing
anything about the language, customs, and events
of their “previous life” did not deter the students
from constructing a story about it. They tried to
fulfill the requirements of the role by weaving
events, places, and people from their present lives
into their accounts, and by picking up cues from
the experimenter.
The researchers concluded that the act of
“remembering” another self involves the construc-
tion of a fantasy that accords with the remember-
er’s own beliefs and also the beliefs of others—in
this case, those of the authoritative hypnotist.In an effort to further illuminate the myster-
ies of hypnosis, psychological scientists are now
using functional MRI, PET scans, and other tech-
nologies to see if they can find out what is going
on in the brain of a hypnotized person. In one
PET study, highly hypnotizable people, under
hypnosis, were able to visually drain color from a
drawing of red, blue, green, and yellow rectangles
and, conversely, to see color when the rectangles
were shown in gray. When told to see color in the
gray drawing, their brains showed activation in
areas associated with color perception; when told
to see gray in the colored drawing, the same areas
showed decreased activation (Kosslyn et al., 2000).
Findings like this one give encouragement to
those who believe that hypnosis is a special state,
different from elaborate role-playing or extreme
concentration. But others feel it’s too soon to draw
any conclusions about the mechanisms or natureSOCIOCOGNITIVE THEORIES OF HYPNOSISSocial in uence of
hypnotist (“You’re
going back in
time”)Person’s own
cognitions (“I
believe in age
regression”)Person conforms
to suggestions
(“I’m 4 years
old”)The hypnotized person is not merely faking
or playacting, however. A person who has been
instructed to fool an observer by faking a hypnotic
state will tend to overplay the role and will stop
playing it as soon as the other person leaves the
room. In contrast, hypnotized subjects continue to
follow the hypnotic suggestions even when they
think they are not being watched (Kirsch et al.,
1989; Spanos et al., 1993). Like many social roles,
the role of “hypnotized person” is so engrossing
and involving that actions required by the role
may occur without the person’s conscious intent.
The sociocognitive view explains why some
people under hypnosis have reported apparent
“memories” of alien abductions (Clancy, 2005;
Spanos, 1996). They go to a therapist or hypnotist
seeking an explanation for loneliness, unhappiness,
nightmares, puzzling symptoms (such as waking up
in the middle of the night in a cold sweat), or the
waking dreams we described previously. A therapist
who already believes in alien abduction may use
hypnosis, along with subtle and not-so-subtle cues
about UFOs (“those cold sweats could mean that
an alien presence was in your bedroom”), to shape
the way the client interprets these symptoms.
The sociocognitive view can also explain
apparent cases of past-life regression. In a fascinat-
ing program of research, Nicholas Spanos and his
colleagues (1991) directed hypnotized Canadian
university students to regress past their own births
to previous lives.
About a third of the
students who already
believed in rein-
carnation reported
being able to do so.
But when they were
asked, while suppos-
edly reliving a past life, to name the leader of their
country, say whether the country was at peace or
at war, or describe the money used in their com-
munity, the students could not do it. (One young
man, who thought he was Julius Caesar, said the
year was 50 a.d. and he was emperor of Rome.About Hypnosis and
“Past Lives”Thinking
CriTiCallySidney Harris/ScienceCartoonsPlus.com