- 2 days ago
The episode explores hypnosis in medical settings, crime, and as a misdirection of attention, with examples of memory recall and pain control.
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00:00Amid the tension and concentration of an operating room, a woman's life is on the line.
00:19Doctors and nurses work intently to bring her through.
00:23A routine enough occurrence, except that this woman is allergic to any form of anesthesia.
00:28She is undergoing her operation using hypnosis as the only anesthetic.
00:38Can she rely on the power of her mind to transport her to another place, a place without pain?
00:44Open that door.
00:51Get in the back of the bus.
00:52A man is plunged into a frightening ordeal.
00:55Crucial details become buried in his memory.
00:58Details he will recall with the help of hypnosis.
01:01The power of hypnosis.
01:02The power of hypnosis.
01:03The power of hypnosis.
01:08What strange force enables a policeman to recall the face of an assailant after living through the trauma of being shot?
01:25He will draw on the hidden and mysterious powers of the mind.
01:46This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
02:03The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanation, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
02:12You shall see nothing, hear nothing, dream of nothing, but Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.
02:33Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.
02:48One, two, and three. You're all chickens at the party.
02:54Stay it out there.
02:56Many people think of hypnosis as frivolous because it is often used that way.
03:01Hey, look at those chickens, ladies and gentlemen.
03:05Oh, this is a new dance.
03:08Hypnosis.
03:09For hundreds of years, a word connected with charlatans, evil magic, and stage shows.
03:15Today, doctors, scientists, police, and others are finding hypnosis an increasingly important tool.
03:22Hypnosis gives us startling new insights into ourselves.
03:25It gives us a shortcut, a threshold to that mysterious, elusive area we call the subconscious mind.
03:34Dr. William Kroger has pioneered medical uses of hypnosis.
03:37It is not a trance. It is not a state of unconsciousness. It is not remotely related to sleep. Rather, it's a state of super alertness.
03:47It's a process.
03:48He believes the key to achieving a hypnotic state is the misdirection of attention.
03:52I can show you what I mean by misdirection of attention by holding this coin here. I take this coin and I get you to look over here.
04:02So as I get you to look over here, I do something here.
04:05All we really know is that it works.
04:09Through trial and error, hypnotists have learned that there are many ways to reach into the mind and unlock the vast, unused powers of the brain.
04:19Deeper and deeper, more and more relaxed.
04:24Dr. Ira Greenberg elicits responses typical of most hypnotized persons.
04:29Your left hand and arm are becoming lighter and lighter.
04:33As their arms float upward, so does their conviction that they are experiencing the altered consciousness we call hypnosis.
04:40I'd like you to let yourself go back to a happy period in your childhood.
04:48Go back, back, back in time.
04:52You're five years old. And where are you right now?
04:57Backyard.
04:58And what are you doing in the backyard?
05:01Playing King of the Hill.
05:03Playing King of the Hill. And who's playing with you?
05:06I was in the backyard with my brother. There's a lot of snow on the ground.
05:11And we dug out a circle around the backyard.
05:16And we just ran around the number of bicycles.
05:19Ah, that's marvelous.
05:21Start coming awake now. I'm going to count backwards.
05:23Five, coming awake now.
05:24Four, even more awake.
05:28Three, more and more awake.
05:30Two, one, zero.
05:35Open your eyes. Wide awake.
05:37I could recall all the details.
05:42I could see my backyard and it had a big hill of ice plants.
05:46It took a while for my arm to get up there. I remember it.
05:49I just thought it was more comfortable laying there and then it just sort of went up by itself.
05:54And yet I always felt as though I knew where I was.
05:59As you know, Don, what we're going to do is provide a demonstration of you going into a hypnotic state.
06:05Dr. Joseph Barber, director of UCLA's pain control clinic, uses hypnosis.
06:11Okay. Okay.
06:13And I'd like you to let yourself begin right now.
06:17Slowly, comfortably, and to go deeper and deeper with every breath you take.
06:23An individual who is experiencing a state of hypnosis, which can be characterized as a somnambulistic state, appears in certain respects to be wide awake.
06:38And although Don can talk, a hypnotic subject tends not to talk unless it's really necessary.
06:44When we compare the brainwave activity of a normal waking state to a hypnotized condition, no difference can be seen.
06:55Scientists still don't really know what forces are at work, only that something does happen.
07:03Under hypnosis, this subject has the ability to control body activity beyond his reach in a normal waking state,
07:10providing a dramatic demonstration of mind over body.
07:15Under medical supervision, this man's skin is pierced in two places.
07:20No bleeding from this side, and just the right amount of bleeding from this side.
07:26He has been asked to bleed from only one of the two puncture wounds.
07:30In spite of the fact that he has never been hypnotized before, he will attempt to control his body in a way that seems impossible.
07:37Okay.
07:39It looks like this side is warmer and this side cooler, is that right?
07:42Right.
07:44Make this side even cooler and this side even warmer.
07:46Okay.
07:48And what you can notice is that of the two sides, one is bleeding more than the other, although...
07:54Incredibly, a single drop of blood appears.
07:58...hypodermic puncture.
07:59During surgery, for instance, if you want to have the patient bleed less, there is a mechanism which the patient has control of.
08:10We don't understand the mechanism, but it's obviously there.
08:13Eastern yogis have shown similar control, but after lifetimes of study, could hypnosis be a shortcut to powers beyond our imaginings?
08:22It's important that the public realize that very often what they see on the stage is not hypnosis, but entertainment.
08:31Mark Yellen was 24 when he learned he had a form of cancer known as Hodgkin's disease.
08:38Seeking to gain back control of his own body, he turned to hypnosis as an adjunct to traditional therapy.
08:44I turned to hypnosis as a way of keeping my attitude together and giving me a positive outlook going through my treatments.
08:55Take a deep breath.
08:57Working with Jean Campot of the Newton Center for Clinical Hypnosis, Mark uses a technique called guided imagery to spur on his body's defense system.
09:05You are going to take a tour of your body and you're going to inspect your lymph glands. What is it you are seeing?
09:18I see myself kind of walking through my body.
09:22I walked into this room, found myself in a room with lymph nodes flying all over the plate, so I proceeded to get all the lymph nodes fired up. Their attitudes changed.
09:43If we have a patient who is sick with something, and he can imagine the reverse of that, in some mysterious way, he's apt to get better.
10:03I do a lot of camping up in Yosemite, so I basically took a waterfall I had seen and then envisioned myself standing under this waterfall.
10:16And then all of a sudden it went from seeing myself under the waterfall to seeing the water rushing through my neck and down through my chest and into my abdomen, through the lymph system and just flushing it clean.
10:26Through hypnosis, my attitudes have changed immensely. I've become much more confident than I ever was. I've been able to accomplish things I never thought I could.
10:39I now feel I'm a winner instead of a loser.
10:46After the treatments, doctors operated but found no signs of the cancer. Mark now walks on the road of life.
10:54Could hypnosis be a signpost pointing us toward a new and better way of living?
11:03Here we go!
11:05In the late 1700s, Franz Anton Mesmer formulated his theory of animal magnetism to explain the remarkable phenomena we call hypnosis.
11:08In the late 1700s, Franz Anton Mesmer formulated his theory of animal magnetism to explain the remarkable phenomena we call hypnosis.
11:26Mesmer established clinics where he used magnets, passes of the hand, and strange magnetized tubs to get people into a hypnotized condition.
11:44As word of his successes grew, so did controversy, until finally he was characterized as a fake and driven from scientific circles by a group headed by Benjamin Franklin.
11:58I had great difficulty getting my colleagues to accept hypnosis.
12:03Dr. Ron Katz, Chairman, UCLA's Department of Anesthesiology.
12:07Mrs. Strom came to see me over a year ago.
12:11She needed to have a breast biopsy and possibly a mastectomy.
12:18Since she had previously been anesthetized and literally been in a coma for days after the operation,
12:24we decided to go ahead and attempt the operation under hypnosis.
12:28Just imagine a giant mole filled with ice surrounding your breast, making your breast colder and colder.
12:37I had a mental image of it being sort of a mystical, magical type of a thing.
12:43Nothing that was really useful to normal people like me.
12:48The colder it becomes, the number it will become, until it becomes so cold and so numb that you're barely aware that your breast is there.
12:58And since you like to ski, you can imagine yourself at Mammoth or somewhere where you've been.
13:05You just concentrate on the skin.
13:16Bits of snow float up, which reinforces the cold sensation on the breast.
13:21At first, Kay was skeptical, but in spite of her doubts, she found herself being transported to a new and separate reality.
13:32When I could hear the doctors and nurses talking, it was like a radio was playing in the background, but really didn't have anything to do with me.
13:54People on the slopes moved out of the way to just watch me coming down.
14:03Hypnosis took her to a distant place, a place without pain, a world that had apparently existed all along, deep within her mind.
14:12If I ever had to have surgery again, that's the only way I would consider doing it at all.
14:21The person has a greater ability to experience fantasy, and to experience that fantasy is real.
14:29The person also has the ability to remember things that are otherwise not so easily remembered.
14:34When a burglary call set Officer Jim Van Pelt and his partner rolling, as dramatized here, he had no idea how far he was to go.
14:51Captain Mike Nielsen, Los Angeles Police Investigative Unit.
14:55The trauma of the incident, the physical damage that was caused by the bullets, the speed with which things transpired, all served to lock these events into Van Pelt's subconscious mind.
15:11With a police artist keeping careful notes, psychologist Dr. Martin Reiser hypnotized Jim and then had him watch the crime again, as though seeing a documentary on a TV screen within his mind.
15:24One, two, three.
15:26Okay, the screen is lighting up.
15:28My partner and I are working the mid-watch in the Northeast Division, and we're the first ones out of the parking lot.
15:40When we receive a call to see the man, a burglary suspect there now.
15:48Eleven Adam, thirty-one, roger on the wall, four, five, nine, there now at twenty-two, thirty, it's a car button.
15:54My partner and I both exit out of the car.
15:59I look over and I see a male Negro, and my partner talks to the individual.
16:06Let me see your identification.
16:08And gets no response to any questioning at all.
16:14He pats him down, which is a normal procedure to check for weapons.
16:22And I'm standing directly in front of the suspect, and something seems amiss.
16:29Suddenly, the suspect let out a blood-curdling scream.
16:41I found myself laying on my back.
16:45I raised up an effort to bring him down.
16:48I fall back, and I hear him running down the street.
16:53I was suddenly alone.
16:57Relying on his notes, as well as experience and training,
17:00the artist narrowed in on the details crucial to an accurate composite drawing.
17:05His hair is cut short.
17:07Look again, as you did before, at this corrected composite drawing, and tell me what you think.
17:23Well, that's good. That's the man that shot me.
17:28By watching a mental movie, Officer Van Pelt reached into his clouded memory
17:33and furnished the precise description that aided in the arrest of the suspect.
17:41Details of astonishing clarity retrieved through hypnosis.
17:45We can introduce information obtained via hypnosis.
17:49It's up to the jury to decide how much credibility they will give that information.
17:58For most people, life is rarely so dramatic.
18:01Children go to school, adults go to work, life goes on.
18:06Routine.
18:08Unless the town you live in is called Chowchilla, and you happen to be Ed Ray.
18:12On my afternoon run, I made about three stop, and I was going down Road 16, and I turned on Avenue 21.
18:23And I saw a white van down there.
18:28And when I got up close, the front door was opened over the white line.
18:32Open that door.
18:33Get in the back of the bus.
18:35Deep in a nightmare, many of the events became confused and blocked in Ed Ray's mind.
18:53Well, in the case of Ed Ray, just as in other cases that we've had, after he'd been hypnotized, instead of asking him to remember the license plate, we prepared him with an appropriate image involving the use of the imagination.
19:12The world comes to you in five senses, and all that data is stored in the five senses.
19:19Nothing is ever forgotten.
19:21The brain stores everything, forgets nothing.
19:23It stores all information in five senses, and it can be tapped in cases of this type.
19:29We give them an image that involves the five senses.
19:33They're walking along a beautiful beach.
19:35It's a warm, hot summer day.
19:37There's a blazing sun overhead.
19:41You feel the hot, dry sand.
19:46See the waves as they're thrashing and smashing.
19:51Step in the cool, wet, squishy sand.
19:54Taste the salty spray.
19:59Gently guided from the beach back to the crime scene, Ray was told he could see through the lens of a camera and could zoom in to study in detail what his conscious mind had blocked.
20:12Under hypnosis, he gave the FBI all but one of the crucial license numbers of his abductor's van.
20:20A remarkable experiment in teaching is underway in a San Francisco classroom.
20:35Well, I'm going to read the dialogue.
20:48And you,
20:50Well, let's do it five times. Five, six.
20:54Let's start.
20:56At the beginning, the music starts, and then, with the music.
21:20Eight days later, in the car, on the road.
21:24These people are increasing their learning speed by using a technique which is enhanced by hypnosis.
21:30Breaking through learning barriers, controlling pain, psychotherapy, and behavior modification
21:35are just a few of the current uses of hypnosis.
21:38Every day that passes, hypnosis is becoming a more important factor in our lives.
21:43What about 50 years from today?
21:46Possibly we'll find self-hypnosis being taught in schools for everyone to use.
21:51Possibly motion pictures will become unnecessary, obsolete, when compared with the vivid pictures in our own minds.
21:59For if the mind is truly the gateway to the heavens, hypnosis may be the key that unlocks that gate.
22:07The hidden
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