Students left in ‘mass hypnosis’ after demo goes awry

[Luposapien]

Ran into this article yesterday through RT via disinfo.com, and noticed that early in the comments thread from both postings (1st original comment on RT and 3rd on disinfo), were postings from people claiming to be experienced hypnotherapists assuring the reader that hypnosis can do no such thing:

Bunch of morons...why do you think they call it 'sleep'. If you just leave them alone they'll awaken normally. There is no magical place in the mind that someone else can "LOCK" you into niether can a hypnotist make you do things you would not do if uninhibited and wide awake (for instance when you're drunk). I'm 65yrs old and have studied and practiced hypnosis for more than 45 yrs. Sometimes the gulibility of people amazes me. c'mon Brainiac prove me wrong hypnotize someone to shoot a public figure then give them a water pistol but tell them it's the real thing, and see what happens. If things were that easy don't you think somebody would have taken out some of the "TRASH" in this manner by now. Wake up and smell the coffee.

qualified clinical hypnotherapist here.... no one can get "trapped" in trance. It simply isn't possible. It isn't how hypnosis (a mixture of demand characteristics, placebo and a "positive cognitive set") works, and it isn't how the human brain works. These kind of myths are enduring, but there is no reality and no evidence whatsoever for any of them. Sorry to be a party pooper.

So, rest assured, this event did not, in fact, take place as described. Move along.

I notice this coincides nicely with the recent article posted in the Forensic & Evidentiary Case for Sirhan's Acquital thread from a couple days back. Inoculation?

[brekin]

Interestingly, Whitbread said the girls may have been especially vulnerable to Nadeau's suggestions because of his young age and "good looks".

Huh? Sorry son, but you ain't no Svengali.

Maxime Nadeau is the young hypnotist who was unable to break several students out of a trance at a recent show.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/h ... -1.1098514

A hypnosis demonstration left several students "spaced out" (AP)
A group of young students at an all girls school were left in "mass hypnosis" after a demonstration from a fledging hypnotist reportedly left them locked in a trance.

I'm not saying this isn't possible or didn't happen, but how is this different from a pep rally or period of Trigonometry?
Also I think people are forgetting the drama factor operating. I can see the mass suggestion of "Oh, my god I was totally
in a trance to!" (OK my teen slang is probably dated, but you get the picture.) It would be news though if instead "Hypnotist breaks students out of the mass hypnosis that is school."

Maxime Nadeau was forced to call on his mentor for assistance after the hypnotist could not reverse the condition of several 12 and 13-year-old girls at the Collège du Sacré-Coeur private school in Quebec. One of the girls was reportedly left in a trance for five hours.

Look we all know this girl from school, she was in a trance before he arrived. This whole thing really is just a goofy set up for this line:

In related news, television host Dr. Oz recently interviewed "hypnotic motivational guru" Paul McKenna, who says he can help patients achieve long term weight loss through his techniques.

[Wombaticus Rex]

c'mon Brainiac prove me wrong hypnotize someone to shoot a public figure then give them a water pistol but tell them it's the real thing, and see what happens. If things were that easy don't you think somebody would have taken out some of the "TRASH" in this manner by now. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Remarkable how often the idiot/asshole axis overlaps like that. Derren Brown already did that and put it on TV, pity this cat was too busy being smug to catch it.

As for that middle sentence? Creepy and dumb.

[Simulist]

I don't have much time this morning, but if I may I'll offer this just in passing for now.

A decade or two ago, I found myself becoming angry while watching teevee. It would happen whether I was watching a comedy, a crime show, or whatev...I always felt like I was being messed with. To this day, I can only watch a few minutes of the teevee before I become very uncomfortable. I hate it when there's a teevee in a waiting room or somewhere public like that, and I'm forced to be subjected to it. The worst for me is network news. I really can't stomach it.

It might surprise you to consider that you've just touched on the original purpose of monasticism — as you know, it isn't just the "frequency" of television or its programming that brings about the derangement we remark on every day here (television programming is merely one modern, and very powerful, manifestation of that), it's the frequency of this small reality niche we think of as our world. (More properly termed, it isn't the "world," it is the world system that has been built upon it.) The early monastics felt this, too — and set about to remove themselves from its sources.

Of course as Philip K. Dick once remarked, "There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive." And he was right, because the empire soon compromised the monastic effort, infecting even that with its own derangement.

Still, I think we possess within us an innate ability to right ourselves. By removing the sources of irritation, our "immune system" has a way of naturally healing us; if we don't, the effects are clearly visible in the wider culture. As we see every day.

[Canadian_watcher]

May I weigh in?

as to the OP.. judging from the last sentence beginning with "in related news..." the whole thing seems like a viral marketing campaign touting the weight loss hypnotherapist's viability. I mean, if some newb hypnotist was SO effective that he put a few (ADD?) girls into a trance they couldn't easily come out of then OBVIOUSLY a master can hypnotize ANYONE into a state wherein they will easily lose weight. But maybe not.. I'm probably just being too cynical. We all know that marketers aren't that smart and the weight loss industry isn't that lucrative.

Point Two (from my tiny mind)...
.
.
.
.
did I just stumble into the Twilight Zone?
Y'all are acting as if this is the first you've heard of TeeVee's programming capabilities. Shocker! The alpha state induced by the flashes is old news. Then again though, it's only old news when you dare to step outside of 'accepted science' (there's that fucking scientism thing again, eh?) .. Perhaps Krugman's work is 'ignored' (isn't every bit of evidence Wombat posts always ignored except by him?) but that doesn't mean Krugman discovered it, is the only one talking about it or that he's any more believable than anyone else who already knew this shit. By the way.. ignored by who, exactly? We're all talking about it, thousands of websites post about it, Alex Jones (I say this because I know you love him dearly) rants about it... so are we waiting for one of the 'enemies' to stop ignoring it? I mean, is that what it takes these days? To have Rush Limbaugh say it or Obama say it or Rupert Murdoch or something? Please.. don't hold your breath.

I agree with PW's point that the flashes seem to have gotten much, much worse in the last oh.. what.. 12 years or so? And as with neon LX I can barely stand it anymore, particularly the ads. The ads are theeeee worst.

[Wombaticus Rex]

CW, I think people were responding solely to the (rather obscure) data point of Herbert Krugman's experimental results.

[Luposapien]

Not sure where the story originated, but the RT version which I ran into did not include the "In other news" ad blurb at the end about Dr. Oz's interview with Guru McKenna. Speaking of which, "Oz" and "McKenna"? Anyway, I don't exactly trust RT's motives any further than I could throw them either, so not sure what to make of the whole mess, other than it's leaving a bad taste in the back of my brain.

[NeonLX]

Heh. Anything for science!

[tazmic]

CW, I think people were responding solely to the (rather obscure) data point of Herbert Krugman's experimental results.

But not to his intriguing link at the end, from 2002:

A draft government report says we will alter human evolution within 20 years by combining what we know of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences. The 405-page report sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Commerce Department, Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, calls for a broad-based research program to improve human performance leading to telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified personal sensory devices and enhanced intellectual capacity.

People may download their consciousnesses into computers or other bodies even on the other side of the solar system, or participate in a giant "hive mind", a network of intelligences connected through ultra-fast communications networks. "With knowledge no longer encapsulated in individuals, the distinction between individuals and the entirety of humanity would blur," the report says. "Think Vulcan mind-meld. We would perhaps become more of a hive mind - an enormous, single, intelligent entity."

Armies may one day be fielded by machines that think for themselves while devices will respond to soldiers' commands before their thoughts are fully formed, it says. The report says the abilities are within our grasp but will require an intense public-relations effort to "prepare key organisations and societal activities for the changes made possible by converging technologies", and to counter concern over "ethical, legal and moral" issues. Education should be overhauled down to the primary-school level to bridge curriculum gaps between disparate subject areas.

Professional societies should be open to practitioners from other fields, it says. "The success of this convergent-technologies priority area is crucial to the future of humanity," the report says.

Looks like they've made their minds up. All of which reminds me of something Alan Watts wrote, in 1966:

All information will come in by superrealistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body—even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual—an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. There may be specialized types, just as there are specialized cells and organs in our bodies. For the tendency will be for all individuals to coalesce into a single bioelectronic body.

As resources dwindle, population must dwindle in proportion. If, by this time, the race feels itself to be a single mind-body, this superindividual will see itself getting smaller and smaller until the last mouth eats the last morsel. Yet it may also be that, long before that, people will be highly durable plastic replicas of people with no further need to eat. But won't this be the same thing as the death of the race, with nothing but empty plastic echoes of ourselves reverberating on through time? [...] In short, is the next step in evolution to be the transformation of man into nothing more than electronic patterns?

If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it. [...] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!

[Wombaticus Rex]

Yeah, William Sims Bainbridge, my favorite dark side sociologist. He's also got a long-standing interest in Scientology...one of those "memetics," new religious movements kinda guys. Real world as open laboratory.

"It is time to move beyond mere observation of scientistic cults and use the knowledge we have gained of recruitment strategies, cultural innovation, and social needs to create better religions than the world currently possesses. At the very least, unobtrusive observation must be supplemented by active experimentation. Religions are human creations. Our society quite consciously tries to improve every other kind of social institution, why not religion? Members of The Process, founded mainly by students from an architecture school, referred to the creation of their cult as religious engineering, the conscious, systematic, skilled creation of a new religion.

I propose that we become religious engineers."

- William Sims Bainbridge, New Religions, Science, and Secularization, in Religion and the Social Order, 1993

Then the NBIC Converging Technologies report a decade later gives us The Singularity. Awesome work, Professor.