Could hypnotoad really take over the world ?

An important question, one which this article unwittingly hints at...

But first, though I've had a passing interest in hypnosis since Paul McKenna's TV stage show (I even saw it live one), I've never read a description of what hypnotic suggestions feel like to experience :

"I want you to pay very close attention to your hand – how it feels, what is going on in it. Notice whether or not your hand is a little numb or tingling. The slight effort it takes to keep from bending your wrist. Pay very close attention to your hand. I want you to imagine you are holding something very heavy in your hand, such as a heavy book. Something very, very heavy. Hold the book in your hand. Now your hand and arm feel very heavy with the weight of the book pressing down."

Out of nowhere, there it is in my hand. Eyes still closed, I marvel at the weight of it. It feels just as though there really is a substantial volume in my outstretched hand – the only way I can tell it's not a real book is that I can't feel the touch of its cover in my palm.

"As it gets heavier and heavier, your arm moves down more and more, getting heavier, heavier, heavier, heavier, your hand goes down, down, all the way down…"

And it does. Terhune hardly has time to finish the suggestion before my hand hits the sofa. From the direction of his desk, I hear the scratching of pencil on paper. I still feel calm and relaxed, but somewhere in my head a small voice is saying, "Wow!"

Then another test – Terhune tells me to hold my arm out straight ahead. "This time what I want you to do is to think of your arm becoming incredibly stiff and rigid," he says.

And it's as if my elbow is made of dry, splintery wood. The sensation isn't as strong as the heavy book, but there is certainly a resistance there as I try to bend at the elbow. After a moment, I'm able to push through it and the sensation eases. But it's an effort.

Which suggests that perhaps the Matrix is in principle possible : you do not need sensory input to experience sensation. You don't need photons to perceive colour... but the mind's eye tends to be a pale shadow of real sensation. This hypnotic state, however, sounds a lot stronger. Interestingly the reporter was not susceptible to other suggestions like hearing music or having a dream, though some people are. Why some suggestions work and others don't is unclear.

This brings in hypnotoad. A few of the most susceptible people can be persuaded to forget the name of objects, but could you persuade them to do something more dangerous, even malevolent ? The difficulty seems to be that ordinary people are actually willing to do dangerous and malevolent things anyway (much more than you might suspect), so establishing whether hypnosis is responsible is complicated :

Barnier also used a control group – people who hadn't been hypnotised, but simply asked to send her a postcard every day. "I said, 'I'm a PhD student and I'm just trying to write up my thesis. Here's some postcards, will you just send me one every single day?'"

Perhaps surprisingly, this group also obliged. When Barnier called them up to talk about their experience, they were more prosaic. "They said, 'Well, you seemed desperate.'"

In 1939, one alarming experiment gave deeply hypnotised participants the suggestion to grab a large diamondback rattlesnake. The participants were told the snake was just a coil of rope. One participant made to grab it – but was prevented from doing so by a pane of glass.  Another came out of hypnosis and refused. Two other hypnotised participants weren't even told the snake was a coil of rope, and both went to grab it anyway. Two of the participants were then given the suggestion that they were angry with an experimental assistant for putting them in such a dangerous situation. They were told they would be unable to resist throwing a flask of concentrated acid in the assistant's face – both did (in a sleight of hand, the real flask of acid had been switched with a harmless liquid the same colour).

A control group of unhypnotised people were also asked to take part – but most didn't get far as they were terrified of the snake and wouldn't go near it. The findings were replicated in another study in 1952, but later investigations criticised that the controls hadn't been put under the same pressure as the hypnotised group, making the comparison unfair.

An experiment in 1973 sought to address the question more robustly, putting hypnotised and non-hypnotised participants on an equal footing. One group of university students was hypnotised and given the suggestion to go out on campus and sell what they were told was heroin, the other group was simply asked – both went out and did it. The experimenters got into trouble though, because the father of one of the participants was a professor on campus. He was "less than delighted" to find his daughter had been attempting to peddle heroin to her peers.

"The conclusion is, undergrad students are willing to do some crazy things," says Terhune. "It's nothing to do with hypnosis."

Nevertheless, since you can make people think they're perceiving something which isn't real, surely that has at least all the problems associated with ordinary manipulation. So I would be very surprised if hypnosis couldn't be used with ill intent; the scene in Doctor Who in which the hypnotised population of Earth refuses to commit suicide may be wishful thinking. Conclusion : hypnotoad probably could take over the world.

Is this yet another sign of how awful we all are ? Are we all just highly suggestible sheeple, craving demagogues to lead us to our own destruction ?

Actually, I don't think so. There's an awful lot of (quite understandable) cynicism around lately, of which more in a future post, about how we're just such a shitty species. I refuse to agree. I think it is more a case that our capacity for great achievement, that is, for great creativity, automatically entails a capacity for great destruction. For as someone once said, every act of creation is also an act of destruction. Even painting a picture destroys the blankness of the canvas. Everything is change.

I think our problem lies not in our nature but in our failure to manage ourselves. Almost all of our often worst impulses - greed, anger, selfishness, even hatred - all of these can be harnessed to good effect. The problem is that we don't have a system anywhere near sufficiently robust to ensure these tendencies are used appropriately, to use our anger to correct injustice, our selfishness to demand higher standards for all, our hatred to tackle the outright villainous. We have ended up in an inequality trap, one that is very difficult to break out of and frighteningly easy to perpetuate.

It might be a step too far to say that how susceptible someone is to being hypnotised depends on how creative they are. But it would also be too simplistic to point to their overall tendency to suggestibility. It's more interesting than that :

There are also some indicators of personality traits linked to hypnotisability – but not at the level of the "Big Five" traits: highs and lows alike can be extroverts or introverts, agreeable or disagreeable, neurotic or emotionally stable, open or closed to new experiences, conscientious or highly disorganised. However, some subtler characteristics are more commonly found in highs – such as being more imaginatively engaged, responsive to environmental cues or predisposed to self-transcendence, says Terhune.

Anecdotally, the hypnotism researchers I spoke to describe a few traits they often see in highs. They're the people who get so engrossed in a book they lose track of their surroundings, or who scream out loud at jump scares in films.

High or low, research shows that you are stuck with your level of hypnotisability throughout life. A 1989 study at Stanford University tested 50 psychology freshmen students for hypnotisability and retested them 25 years later. The former classmates had remarkably stable scores over the years, more stable even than other individual differences such as intelligence.

This capacity for, let us call it... empathy, is certainly one that hypnotoad could exploit. But it's also one of vital importance. Rather than being a fundamentally flawed species, I think we're one whose capabilities form a very sharp but crucially double-edged sword. We have yet to learn how to wield it safely.