Hypnotism: Real Or Parlor Trick? POLL

"The guy was in my mind," Norwood, 35, of Orlando, said after the ordeal.

More accurately he was in your pocket. Norwood likely has a nice new $50 in his pocket for playing along.

An idiotic title. A diatribe against the frivolous use of hypnosis would be a better use of your time.

Easily, half the people in America are walking around in a hypnotic state. They are not open to logical thinking. They act without using their higher mental faculties.

People are also put in a hypnotic state by trauma.

When I was in my teens, I had a dentist who used hypnotism on patients who were willing. I had to have teeth removed in order to get braces fitted, and volunteered to try hypnotism because I had previously had a bad reaction to Novocaine. I was conscious and aware throughout the entire procedure, even to the point of being able to feel and hear the teeth being removed. Afterward I had no bleeding and no pain. My dentist stressed that he was doing nothing through hypnotism, merely enabling me to do it for myself.

As an adult I attended a pain clinic to learn how to control chronic pain resulting from multiple back injuries and spinal operations; one of the tools they taught was autohypnosis, which again proved very effective in controlling pain.

Pain is literally "all in your mind" even when its cause is obvious: peripheral nerves merely transmit a signal which is then interpreted by the brain as pain. Chronic pain is the result of long-term conditioning of the brain to feel pain even after the proximate cause is healed. Hypnosis is a way to reroute those signals so that your brain interprets them as something else. It is the same process which permits Indian mystics to walk through fire and lie on beds of nails.

The brain has enormous power to control the body's functions, more than we usually are aware of; hypnosis allows the subject to tap that power intentionally rather than just letting it run on autopilot.

Read Milton H. Erickson M.D.'s work on hypnotic induction.

Read Roy Masters' book, The Hypnosis of Life (1988)

I wish I had the quantitative data but i do believe it is somewhat effective with smoking cessation ive done some work on NIH projects and health ed data etc but dont have the final verdict....but know its well under investigation and promising in this area.

I've never personally been hypnotised, but I believe hypnotism is real. I don't know much about it though, or how it works. From what I understand, some people are more susceptible than others to being hypnotised.