PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONTROL — Cosmic Pancakes!

What does it all mean?

Times change, hypnosis theories change, hypnosis acts change, and even hypnotherapy changes; but one thing that remains constant is the hypnosis community’s ability to come up with new terminology (literally) All The Time. We were recently at the UK Hypnosis Convention and I’m sure there must have been dozens of new terms that we hadn’t come across before, all being presented by the excited inventors of them. I guess if you don’t name it, then you can’t brand it. And if you can’t brand it, then you can’t sell it.

One term, however, stood out at the convention – and did so too in 2019 – and that’s phenomenological control. And not just because it’s difficult to pronounce, nor that it isn’t attached to something for sale, but because it Actually Means Something, which is a bit of a rare thing in this world. Someone hasn’t just – bizarrely – added the word ‘quantum’ to some therapy words; it came about because it really does represent a useful concept.

And that concept is the changing of one’s experienced reality (Dienes et al, 2020).

It’s kind of that simple, but it is important for a number of reasons. At the 2022 UK Hypnosis Convention, I used the term in my talk. Devin Terhune made reference to the term when he talked about hypnosis nomenclature. At the 2019 conference Zoltan Dienes (my supervisor and all-round hypnosis expert) named his talk ‘Phenomenological control as cold control’ (Dienes et al, 2022). And Zoltan has authored a number of papers with his colleagues about it.

Images created with Midjourney using the prompt ‘phenomenological control’.

So what’s so special about this new term, and what does it really mean? Well, hopefully the link to hypnosis is pretty obvious – we use hypnotic suggestions to modify experienced reality. But there are a number of problems with all the hypnosis terms. After more than a century of scientific enquiry, we are now pretty sure that hypnosis isn’t magic, and that all the work that make suggestions happen is carried out by the participant, and not by the hypnotist.

We know that hypnosis isn’t sleep, or indeed anything like it. Éva Bányai spoke at the 2022 UK Hypnosis Convention on her career, which included the creation of the active-alert induction where people are hypnotised while exercising, such as riding a stationary bike. (Fun fact: Anthony Jacquin and I used this at our first ever stage hypnosis show as a hilarious stunt!) And we know that people don’t enter a hypnotic state, and therefore aren’t actually hypnotised, because many decades of research searching for any microscopic change that could be ascribed to hypnosis has turned up nothing. Zip. De nada. If it exists, we have no way of measuring it. (So it might as well be an invisible unicorn, or a tiny orbiting teapot, for all that it matters.)

The idea of hypnotic suggestions makes the requests to modify experienced reality sound a bit like persuasion and influence, with those accepting them something akin to being gullible or weak-minded. We know that people can refuse suggestions, and indeed break suggestions they’ve already accepted, when it suits them to do so, so this linkage seems wholly unfair.

I think it is worth asking why we persist with this language, which places the hypnotist in charge, the participant in their power or under their control, with implications that the participant is in a hypnotic sleep, state, or trance, and being manipulated by the magic of the words and actions of the hypnotist? Quite probably because hypnotists like this frame – it makes them seem special. (Bless them.)

If we were to redesign the language to better represent reality, we would probably start by labelling the generalised thing that participants do when they act upon a suggestion. And that thing is them exerting their phenomenological control – literally, them changing their experience of reality, based on what they’ve been asked to do.

So what, then, of ‘hypnotisability’? Well, that term is kind of already in the bin. Technically, it refers to the difference in ability to accept suggestions after a participant has been hypnotised, compared to their ability to accept suggestions before, or after they’ve been ‘woken up’ – it is the measure of their increase in suggestibility due to being hypnotised. Well, we already know that nobody is ever hypnotised; but more telling is that the differences, when measured scientifically, are very small, and usually smaller than the difference between measuring the same person on different days or in different sessions. In other words, hypnotisability is typically close to zero for everyone (Braffman and Kirsch, 1999). If you can accept a suggestion after an induction, you are highly likely to be able to accept that suggestion before it.

If hypnotisability is dead, then surely ‘suggestibility’ makes sense? Well, just from a naming perspective, this is problematic. Participants who are good at accepting suggestions may or may not be suggestible in other ways; ie, they don’t have to be gullible to be good at accepting hypnotic suggestions. Instead, we often use the term responsiveness to suggestion, which is a far more accurate term for what is actually being measured – literally, how well does someone respond when given suggestions?

But this term is still stuck in the framing of suggestion, and therefore still carries the association with gullibility, albeit now just in name, if no longer in sentiment. No, in the world of phenomenological control, it makes no sense to talk in terms of responsiveness to suggestion. Instead, we talk in terms of capacity for phenomenological control. In other words, the degree to which someone can modify their own experience of reality.

If we stop talking in terms of responsiveness to suggestion, then perhaps we can dispense with hypnotic suggestions altogether? Well, yes, of course we can. We aren’t suggesting things to the participants; we’re instructing them to modify their experience of reality. I think we probably still need a new term for this, but so far instructions seems much better than suggestions.

And now, having dropped all terms that invoke hypnosis or suggestion, what scale do we use to measure this capacity? We probably don’t want or need to use the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (SHSS), form C, trainspotters; the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (HGSHS), form A; the Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestions Scale (CURSS); the Barber Suggestibility Scale (BSS); the Waterloo Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (WSGS); or the Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability (SWASH), as they all talk in terms of hypnotisability or suggestibility. We almost certainly don’t want to use the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP), as it measures how someone’s eyes ‘roll’ in order to determine how responsive they will be! (If you think that’s some artefact of days gone by, then be aware that David Spiegel [the creator of it] talked about it AS IF IT IS A REAL THING on a neuroscience podcast in 2022!)

We could potentially use the Creative Imagination Scale (CIS), but a better approach would be to use the measurement created specifically with phenomenological control in mind, and that is the Phenomenological Control Scale, or PCS for short (Lush et al, 2021). It was developed by Peter Lush and colleagues at University of Sussex (yep, them again!) by taking the word ‘hypnosis’ out of the SWASH. It purely measures participants’ ability to modify their experiences of reality; interestingly, people tend to score slightly (but significantly) higher on the PCS than that they would do on the SWASH, and that is due to people who would score low on the SWASH, scoring slightly higher. Perhaps the association with hypnosis in the traditional scales actually causes people with low capacity for phenomenological control to do worse, because they don’t feel hypnotised? I mean, why would they, when nobody actually gets hypnotised anyway!?!?

So not only is phenomenological control a better term (even if it is infuriatingly difficult to type), measuring people’s capacity for it in a non-hypnotic context actually causes them to be better at using it than when they are in a hypnotic context.

And the last thing to mention is that people use phenomenological control All The Time outside of the hypnotic context – they convince themselves of past lives (hello, Bridey Murphy), they convince themselves that they’re communicating with aliens (hello, Mrs Keech), they convince themselves that they converse with the spirit world (hello, Derek Acorah), they convince themselves their sports teams will win, they fail to see their keys on their desks, and they find that they can’t type long scientific terms even though they’ve typed the same term a gazillion times already in the same blog post. (Ed: that last one seems a bit questionable.)

Let’s stop hypnotising and let’s start instructing people to use their capacity for phenomenological control! Which is what we were doing anyway; we just didn’t know it. Here’s to 2023!

References

Braffman, W., & Kirsch, I. (1999). Imaginative suggestibility and hypnotizability: an empirical analysis. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(3), 578.

Dienes, Z., Lush, P., Palfi, B., Roseboom, W., Scott, R., Parris, B., ... & Lovell, M. (2022). Phenomenological control as cold control. Psychology of consciousness: theory, research, and practice, 9(2), 101.

Dienes, Z., Palfi, B., & Lush, P. (2020). Controlling phenomenology by being unaware of intentions. In J. Weisberg (Ed.), Qualitative Consciousness: Themes from the Philosophy of David Rosenthal. Cambridge University Press.

Lush, P., Scott, R. B., Seth, A., & Dienes, Z. (2021). The Phenomenological Control Scale: Measuring the capacity for creating illusory nonvolition, hallucination and delusion. Collabra: Psychology, 7(1): 29542.