How To Hypnotise Anyone: Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist
By: The Rogue Hypnotist
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (March 22, 2014)
112 pages
I read How To Hypnotize Anyone because it was listed on the back-of-the-book reading list in Scott Adam’s book Win Bigly. Adams keeps an online version of this persuasion reading list but has since removed this particular volume. In short, hypnosis is probably not what you think it is. It has more to do with controlling where others focus their attention and less to do with people in a trance on a public stage. This has implications for politics, sales, parenting, and every other part of everyday life.
Two of my favorite quotes:
Hypnosis is a natural state. It is not the same as trance. Hypnosis, which is a daft term really but we’re stuck with it, is just a highly focused state –hypnosis is a state of intense absorption or concentration -that is it. Everyone has experienced this state. You can do it with your eyes wide open. If you are doing something that fully absorbs your attention so that you ignore distractions then you have experienced hypnosis. And everyone has. The man who coined the term hypnosis regretted it latter and tried to call it ‘Monoideism’; that is focusing on one thing. Unsurprisingly that nugget of a term never caught on.
If you can evoke an emotion in someone you are accessing unconscious processes and so you are well on your way to hypnotising them. Simply asking someone, ‘How do you feel about x?’ will elicit an unconscious response that bypasses critical thinking. TV reporters frequently ask this kind of question. If you wanted a conscious response you would ask, ‘What do you think about x?’