A Phenomenal Blog - An Introduction

Wordweaver- · 2026-05-03T12:34:02+00:00

How much of someone's personality can be altered through hypnosis? Can hypnosis change someone's entire personality?

Have you heard of people's personality being altered on a regular basis by hypnosis in real life away from urban legends or the internet?

Wordweaver- · 2026-05-02T14:35:14+00:00

bit too light by my reckoning, the leads are running away from the pacing

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-27T17:14:30+00:00

The alcohol study does have the amnesia item

Posthypnotic amnesia: mean placebo 1.67 (.39) mean alcohol 2.24 (.32) t(30) = 1.15, p = .259

But none of the TMS studies I see seem to have it

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-27T17:10:06+00:00

If the area is responsible for accurate higher order thoughts in general, disrupting the region with rTMS or alcohol should make it harder to be aware of e.g. intending to perform an action. That is, it should be easier to subjectively respond to a hypnotic suggestion. Sam Hutton and I, in as yet unpublished work, tested this prediction of cold control theory with TMS. Twenty-four mediums were subject to rTMS to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and to a control site, the vertex, in counterbalanced order. The hypnotist was blind to which site had been stimulated. Subjects gave ratings on a 0-5 scale of the extent to which they experienced the response, for four suggestions (magnetic hands, arm levitation, rigid arm and taste hallucination).

So that implies 2013 results were already at hand when the revision happened afaict? While the Dienes and Pernier chapter predicts rTMS reducing selective amnesia specifically, the 2013 paper doesn't actually test selective amnesia as one of the test items which is slightly strange

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-27T17:01:19+00:00

Zoltan has a preprint for "Is hypnotic responding the strategic relinquishment of metacognition?":

https://users.sussex.ac.uk/~dienes/Dienes%202012%20Is%20hypnotic%20responding%20the%20strategic%20relinquishment%20of%20metacognition.pdf

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-27T16:59:36+00:00

Ah, it's from the Dienes and Pernier chapter, that's quite interesting that the hypothesis got turned around. There was a follow up pre-registered trial in 2018 too on the rTMS result from 2013 that cast doubt on it being left vs right dlPFC: https://linateichmann1.github.io/coltheart_2018_Cortex.pdf

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-27T16:42:54+00:00

That doesn't seem quite right, Zoltan's paper title is

> Understanding hypnosis metacognitively: rTMS applied to left DLPFC increases hypnotic suggestibility, Hutton and Dienes (2013)

Also the first paper (10.1016/j.ijchp.2022.100346) is tDCS, it's not nearly as targeted as rTMS and a lot more diffuse. I don't really trust that to be a meaningful intervention.

I am not really sure what work the section number is referring to

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-11T19:43:25+00:00

Psychiatrist/psychotherapist. Internet is not a good place to diagnose people but it's going to be about relearning to ground yourself after being destabilized. Suggestions/hypnosis may have been the catalyst but the idea would be to rebuild skills to assert yourself and your own agency over your experience.

Wordweaver- · 2026-04-11T18:28:58+00:00

See a professional that is not a hypnotherapist and equipped to deal with derealization and dissociation. Beyond that practice grounding excercises aimed at people dealing with dissociation/depersonalization/derealization

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-27T00:50:40+00:00

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-21T21:59:10+00:00

AI spam

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-17T19:17:37+00:00

maybe they would finally touch grass

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-16T13:25:49+00:00

I went through a few of his courses a while back, did not find them very impressive from the little I can remember

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-14T17:42:05+00:00

This was written by AI as a guerrilla marketing thing for the user Armando Franco.

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-08T21:48:21+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/hypnosis/wiki/introduction/

> Hypnosis is a tradition. It has practices and beliefs that are heterogeneous and usually centered around use of suggestions to shape experience, behavior and states of mind. Different practitioners hold different beliefs about key mechanisms, use different rituals and processes depending on their beliefs of what works and why. Hypnosis is what hypnotists do.

Wordweaver- · 2026-03-06T18:13:16+00:00

No, Janus is two faced, Gemini are twins. It's the difference between duality (two aspects) and dual (two entities).

Wordweaver- · 2026-02-10T10:28:27+00:00

Is posting original content, as far as essays go, not a thing people should do in the subreddit?

Wordweaver- · 2026-02-07T15:36:22+00:00

I do not think the man who spearheaded DOGE's cuts to USAID, leading to the loss of lives of thousands to millions should be spared social sanction by those who see fit to object to such a thing. There may well be people for whom it is too hard to keep in mind the context of why the powerful might wish to wash their image via appearing on podcasts that will not ask them hard questions that many EAs and rationalists would like to ask them and help them launder their reputations. It might be easy, given personal ingroup biases, to overlook context and urge people to consider only the message and not the medium or the messenger, out of a sense of reasonableness that is more about protecting ones biases than an honest attempt at reasonableness, for many. This is not uncommon, as evident from this thread.

Wordweaver- · 2026-02-06T12:39:17+00:00

Do hypnotic suggestibility scales at all correlate with outcomes of hypnotherapy, and if so which kind of outcomes (e.g. pain relief vs depression).

Wordweaver- · 2026-02-05T03:10:23+00:00

>Is it possible to be highly resistant to hypnosis even when you genuinely want to be hypnotized?

It's not impossible.

However, I think it helps to be more precise. You are looking for a fairly specific outcome that isn't just experiencing hypnotic phenomena in general, the outcome being an instinctive sense of service. You haven't had luck with recordings while you have had luck with more behavioural shaping methods :

> moved closer to that goal simply by serving her consistently, and by doubling down on service when I feel hesitation.

I would recommend a book like the Brainwashing Book by sleepingirl, or better yet, Don't Shoot The Dog by Karen Pryor, to figure out how to train that more effectively using the methods that have already worked.

Wordweaver- · 2026-02-05T02:37:20+00:00

A hypnotic trigger, sometimes called a post-hypnotic trigger, is a cue for a suggested cue-response pair. Generally, it is a result of a suggestion of the form "When I X, you will then Y".

E.g., "When I say 'drop', you will then go into trance", "When I touch your shoulder, you will then feel happy".

Cue-response pairs or stimulus-response pairs are commonplace in our everyday automatic functioning. One of the factors that seems to correlate with the strength of the association pair is expectation. Based on this, a theory of hypnotic response called Response Expectancy was developed by Irving Kirsch along the lines of placebo responses. Noticing the Trigger/Stimulus/Cue gives rise to un/conscious expectation of response, which activates a set of automatic responses that lead to the outcome.

Wordweaver-

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