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One of the least awful media treatments of the subject I’ve ever read. There’s still a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about hypnosis, though. Among hypn

• carapace 4y ago
  Yes, not completely terrible. It repeats some common nonsense, like the idea of "highs" and "lows". Everyone is going in and out of trances all the time. The "hypnotize-ability" of a person isn't some intrinsic thing, it's a quality of the relation between the two nodes in the network. In Cybernetic terms, when you connect two devices (like two people in conversation) the element with the greater variability will be the control element. In the case of "lows" the "patient" is hypnotizing the "therapist". Anyway, one the one hand it would be awesome if the knowledge and skill of operating your own mind became more mainstream. Ever since Ben Franklin debunked Mesmer there's been this antagonism in Western Scientific thought for hypnosis, so it's been largely ignored or even ridiculed. On the other hand, once the current semi-underground art of hypnosis starts to go mainstream we see people, like the author of TFA, advocating for government intervention and regulation. I think that's extremely sketchy, because we are essentially talking about the structure of your own mind. You're probably familiar with the idea of "the war on general purpose computing", eh? Well, imagine that but for your own thoughts. We could see patents on "algorithms" that run wholly in the mind.