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more extraordinary, even paranormal, information transfer, and makes it more
difficult to sort out the precise mechanisms of information transfer involved.
Modern psychological reviews might also focus on the hypothesis that the
paranoid psychotic subject was likely dissociating their perception of what
they were reading from their awareness of its source (rather than the obvious
appearance of receiving it from an extrasensory source). This resembles the
dissociation theory of how trance mediumistic (trance channelling) behaviors
and some religious experiences (such as hearing the voice of God) may occur,
at least in some cases. The concept of cognitive dissociation is a central one to
many modern psychological descriptions of hypnotic and peripheral
phenomena, as we will see in more detail later. In particular, we will see that
dissociation provides an extremely useful description, but not neccessarily an
adequate explanation of all of the data.
Today, most psychologists, and virtually all of those investigators known as
parapsychologists, are aware of the complexity of human perception under
even conventional circumstances. They would generally tend not to consider a
psi hypothesis to be demonstrated in this sort of situation, given the
apparently demonstrated correlation of exceptional body language reading
skills and high hit rates. This is of course entirely different from
demonstrating that a psi faculty is not operating. Just that the experimental
situation in this particular case does not provide evidence of psi.
But there are other experimental results, with protocols more specifically
designed to rule out subtle conventional sensory communication. These give
us reason to at least consider and test a psi hypothesis, with an eye toward
ruling out subtle body reading effects, in hypnotic situations. It appears from
some results that under certain kinds of conditions hypnosis may at least be
slightly conducive to anomalous information transfer, even when subtle cues
are eliminated.
: What is hypnotic trance? Does it provide unusual physical or mental capacities? by Todd I. Stark
One well known difficulty of even this result, though, is that it is not clear
whether hypnosis is facilitating some elusive 'ESP' faculty in some general
way, or more specifically improving the percipient's ability to perform on the
particular kinds of tests in use. In other words, the dramatic interpretation of
hypnosis as an altered state in which paranormal capacities are provided or
enhanced may not be the best or only explanation, even if the psi hypothesis
itself were to receive growing experimental support. There is also the
crucially important matter of just exactly what it is about the process of
hypnotic induction and its effects on the subject that changes hit rates in
certain laboratory psi tests.
In another section, we briefly review T.X. Barber's work demonstrating that
most if not all of the unusual phenomena reported during hypnosis are also
seen under other conditions. He and his colleague Sheryl Wilson in their work
on the theory of the 'Fantasy Prone Personality' also provide us with another
link between psi and hypnosis, the observation that there are distinct
similarities in personality variables between people who are excellent
hypnotic subjects, and those who report large numbers of psychic
experiences.
It should be emphasized here that this theory does not support the once
popular notion that good hypnotic subjects are simply gullible or neurotic, or
otherwise mentally ill; as no correlation with any of these personality
variables has ever been determined. Rather, the FPP theory paints a picture of
natural visionary individuals with a rich inner life and often extraordinary
psychosomatic responses, but who are perfectly well able to distinguish their
vivid fantasy life from reality, just as most of us can distinguish a dream from
a memory of actual events, most of the time.
In other words, among the factors that the FPP does NOT correlate with well
at all is any diminished capacity for reality testing. This should be born in [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]