Here at Scientific American we pride ourselves on our skepticism toward pseudoscience and on our hard-nosed insistence on solid research. So when we invited Michael R. Nash of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to write the accompanying article on the scientific basis of hypnosis, we warned him that we'd put him through the wringer--which we did. But while editing the article, we began to wonder: Isn't this something we should experience ourselves? How many of us would be hypnotizable?

We invited Nash and research psychologist Grant Benham to New York so we could see what hypnosis was like firsthand. Six editorial staffers--three men and three women, none of whom had been hypnotized before--were willing to give it a try. What we found surprised us.

1 Comments

1. 1. Sauce_Devil 04:24 PM 12/21/07

   Is there any chance that I might contact Carol Ezzel or the other volunteers who participated in this test? I am very skeptical, especially given the misguided use of the "Stanford Scale" which is far from scientific, but if after 6 years they still confirm that they were not fooling themselves and that they experienced genuine "hypnotic" states then I would be quite excited.
   
   Look up my name - Sauce_Devil - on Google and you will see that I have been begging for evidence for the reality of hypnosis on hypnosis websites and have run into walls at every turn. I seriously doubt that any real evidence exists but wouldn't it be wonderful?
   
   
   btw, my apologies if I have posted this same message twice.

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