- #1
zoobyshoe
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Anyone seen this show?
This guy is a mentalist/hypnotist who goes around doing apparently remarkable feats of suggestion and hypnosis. It's reminiscent of David Blaine in format, but very much more interesting for psychological reasons.
The two remarkable feats he performed on the episode that just aired was to hypnotize a woman into seeing the color red as black without her being aware she was being hypnotized and to hypnotize a girl into completely forgetting the fact she had played the piano all her life.
Having switched the former woman's perception of red to black, he took her out into the parking lot where she was unable to find her red car since it now appeared black to her.
In the case of the piano girl (college aged), it took a week of sessions to set her up. She had complained of being bored with the piano, of it having lost the freshness it had when she was a kid. He proceeded to wipe her memory of all that history such that she was no longer aware she knew how to play, and then he pretended to teach her how to play from scratch in a fake accelerated course and set up a public recital in which she was to play a set of variations by Mozart, which she did. After the recital he explained to her what he'd done, that unbeknownst to her during the recital she had actually been playing all her life, and that he'd wiped her memory of it to make the piano a fresh, exiting thing for her again.
Before each show he assures us that none of these people are schills; it's all done with the power of suggestion, and, indeed, it looks genuine in that the participants don't ring false.
In the case of getting the woman to perceive red as black without her realizing he was doing so, the whole procedure was filmed and only took a couple minutes and, if you paid attention, the strategy he used was clear. It was a bit scary to ponder that anyone could do this to anyone else.
The piano girl said that, while she remembered getting together with him for the sessions she said she could hardly remember anything that happened during them. Wiping her memory of the fact she could play piano also included making her forget how he made her forget.
Feynman's assessment of his experience with hypnosis was that the hypnotist had somehow elicited his cooperation with the notion that he'd been hypnotized. He felt he could have disobeyed the instruction, but that it would be a very bad idea to do so. That being the case, he, obeyed it. And that being the case he decided he probably couldn't have disobeyed it after all.
I have to wonder to what extent the woman who saw red as black merely felt involuntarily compelled to pretend she saw red as black, and to what extent red authentically looked black to her. Likewise, to what extent did the piano girl actually cause her conscious memories of years of piano playing to become inaccessible to her, and to what extent was she was involuntarily compelled to merely pretend she couldn't remember them?
This guy is a mentalist/hypnotist who goes around doing apparently remarkable feats of suggestion and hypnosis. It's reminiscent of David Blaine in format, but very much more interesting for psychological reasons.
The two remarkable feats he performed on the episode that just aired was to hypnotize a woman into seeing the color red as black without her being aware she was being hypnotized and to hypnotize a girl into completely forgetting the fact she had played the piano all her life.
Having switched the former woman's perception of red to black, he took her out into the parking lot where she was unable to find her red car since it now appeared black to her.
In the case of the piano girl (college aged), it took a week of sessions to set her up. She had complained of being bored with the piano, of it having lost the freshness it had when she was a kid. He proceeded to wipe her memory of all that history such that she was no longer aware she knew how to play, and then he pretended to teach her how to play from scratch in a fake accelerated course and set up a public recital in which she was to play a set of variations by Mozart, which she did. After the recital he explained to her what he'd done, that unbeknownst to her during the recital she had actually been playing all her life, and that he'd wiped her memory of it to make the piano a fresh, exiting thing for her again.
Before each show he assures us that none of these people are schills; it's all done with the power of suggestion, and, indeed, it looks genuine in that the participants don't ring false.
In the case of getting the woman to perceive red as black without her realizing he was doing so, the whole procedure was filmed and only took a couple minutes and, if you paid attention, the strategy he used was clear. It was a bit scary to ponder that anyone could do this to anyone else.
The piano girl said that, while she remembered getting together with him for the sessions she said she could hardly remember anything that happened during them. Wiping her memory of the fact she could play piano also included making her forget how he made her forget.
Feynman's assessment of his experience with hypnosis was that the hypnotist had somehow elicited his cooperation with the notion that he'd been hypnotized. He felt he could have disobeyed the instruction, but that it would be a very bad idea to do so. That being the case, he, obeyed it. And that being the case he decided he probably couldn't have disobeyed it after all.
I have to wonder to what extent the woman who saw red as black merely felt involuntarily compelled to pretend she saw red as black, and to what extent red authentically looked black to her. Likewise, to what extent did the piano girl actually cause her conscious memories of years of piano playing to become inaccessible to her, and to what extent was she was involuntarily compelled to merely pretend she couldn't remember them?