Treść pytania:
Read the following text and summarise it in no more than 100 words on a separate sheet of paper. Do not provide your name.
how does hypnosis work?
There are many theories about the actual mechanics of hypnosis, and making sense of them can be a bit like playing Snakes and Ladders - you tend to end up back where you started a lot of the time. But before considering how hypnosis works, perhaps the first question should be does hypnosis work?
Decades of research and clinical trials have shown that hypnosis can be remarkably effective for a wide variety of conditions. To take a clinical example, a study published in the June 2007 Journal of Paediatrics showed that hypnosis produced a significant drop in the severity and duration of headaches in children, and even a drop in the frequency of the headaches themselves - something like 75%. In the non-clinical field, a University of Iowa meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt showed that hypnosis was three times more effective than nicotine replacement when it came to giving up smoking.
Theories as to how these results are achieved range from the idea that hypnosis produces changes in brain activity, to the idea that the subject is “method acting” the role of a hypnotized person, to the skeptical point of view that it’s all down to the placebo effect (which, of course, raises the awkward question “how does the placebo effect work?”). All of these theories, however, are essentially saying the same thing - hypnosis works by communicating with the unconscious mind.
Conscious and unconscious are really just shorthand terms to describe the general characteristics of the human mind. The “conscious mind” is the bit where we tend to “live” - the bit you might think of as “you”. If there’s a little voice reading these words out loud in your head, that’s the conscious mind talking. The unconscious mind is everything else!
The unconscious controls all of the autonomic processes that you don’t have to think about - the heart rate, the blood pressure, tissue growth, cell regeneration, the immune system and so on. It’s where our thoughts, memories and accumulated experience reside. It controls our emotions, our habits and our responses to the world.
In many ways, it creates that world for us. The unconscious mind handles about two million bits of sensory information every single second. The conscious mind deals with about seven. That means that the reality you’re actually aware of from moment to moment has been brought to your conscious attention by the unconscious, in a sort of Readers’ Digest version, choosing seven bits which it thinks are important from the two million it’s just processed.
The conscious mind is more logical, critical and analytical - it’s constantly making value judgments. If somebody was to say to you “you really should give up smoking, you know, it’s terribly bad for you”, you’re highly unlikely to become a non-smoker on the spot. You’re more likely to come up with a dozen, rational sounding reasons as to why you should carry on smoking, or you might tell them to shove off and mind their own business. Even if you do consciously accept that you should give up smoking, it’s not the conscious part of the mind that’s keeping the habit in place.
The unconscious part of the mind, on the other hand, is much more accepting. It’s also quite literal and tends to take things personally, relating any information it receives to you as an individual. Hypnosis works by bypassing the critical conscious mind (usually through relaxation or linguistic techniques), and speaking directly to the unconscious in a language which it understands - pattern, association and metaphor.
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