WHY SCIENCE MATTERS
Why spoil all the fantastic stories with facts?
Most hypnotists I know are happy to defer to science on almost all other matters: electricity, car brakes, aeroplanes, food hygiene, and, most recently, vaccinations. But when it comes to hypnosis, they get all cagey, and even those who like to pretend they’re down with the science, usually end up cherry picking the bits of it that support their own views. I’d like to suggest that accepting the science of hypnosis and suggestion is really important, especially when the results disagree with your pet beliefs.
Not science. Credit: Wellcome Images, WikiCommons.
To start from the very beginning, science is just one method of trying to work out how the world works. This is achieved through iterative attempts at being less wrong. “Less wrong?”, I hear you cry! Surely science is about finding facts and proving hypotheses? Well, no, unfortunately that’s not the case. The very best that science can do is to provide evidence that refutes things that are wrong – it can never prove that something is right. (Proofs live in the world of maths and philosophy by the way, and facts, well, facts never really are, are they? They’re always disproved eventually.)
So if science is a slow process of excluding the theories that are wrong, so that whatever is left points towards the truth, then why is it so important? And why don’t we do something better? The problem is that science is our best process of discovery so far. Before science there was guesswork and conjecture, and it took philosophers to show that the best known path of discovery, was one that ruled out alternatives.
Richard Dawkins’ famous letter to his 10-year-old daughter cited three bad reasons to believe things: ‘tradition’, ’authority’, and ‘revelation’. I’m sure they don’t need spelling out, but: ‘tradition’ refers to believing something because people have always believed it; ‘authority’ means believing because someone important claims it to be true; and ‘revelation’, or superstition, is about believing something because it feels like it should be true.
In place of these, Dawkins prefers evidence, and evidence provides the building blocks on which science is built. But how does this map to hypnosis, and what is the point of this article?
When it comes to people designing and manufacturing car brakes or aeroplanes, we all take for granted that they’ve used science to make those things safe and reliable. Yes, they do fail occasionally, and sometimes can be improved as a result, but, ultimately, scientists worked out really good ways of understanding how they interact with the world, and documented them clearly, so that engineers could build things that work. Nobody (well, practically nobody) objects to the use of science when it comes to things as important as the safety of these.
Yes, we know some of you want this to be science. Credit: Cosmic Pancakes!
However, over in the world of hypnosis, this is rarely the case for those outside of academia. It’s so easy to teach hypnosis, and so easy to do, that the trainers don’t need to know any of the science in order to do so. They can simply rely on tradition, authority, and revelation, and get by just fine. So those learning hypnosis don’t get exposed to the science, but instead learn through these three terrible reasons to believe things. The problem isn’t with knowing how to do it, of course; the problem is with understanding how it works.
At Head Hacking we didn’t claim to know how hypnosis worked, and on The Trilby Connection course we didn’t present any theories of hypnosis (until we started talking about The Automatic Imagination Model, that is, but that’s another story). This was mainly because it’s not necessary to know how it works in order to be good at it; in fact, it’s possible to argue that the majority of non-scientific beliefs about how hypnosis works – conscious/unconscious minds, critical faculties, orientation responses, state, trance, etc – distract and detract from being good at hypnosis.
Most other hypnosis trainers do, however, explain hypnosis through the lens of the theory they were taught –tradition and authority right there. These theories go back to someone simply believing how it works because it felt right – revelation. And then these students of hypnosis go out into the world continuing to believe these things; and some of them become trainers and they pass on the tradition. Obviously, along the way some will read books of competing ideas, also built on nonsense but from different traditions, different authority figures, and different revelatory processes.
The alternative is science. But why does science matter? My view is that if we can work out how hypnosis and suggestion actually work, we can cut away the parts of our approach that don’t work, and remove the parts that hinder it from working. We can focus our attention on the methods that have been shown to work reliably, and we can apply them in ways that are most likely to succeed. In effect, we can become better and more reliable hypnotists. And we can proudly state that what we do works, and is backed by science.
(And if you’re still not convinced by me, here’s a video on the philosophy of science from Professor Zoltan Dienes to better persuade you.)
The problem, however, is that by accepting science, we have to accept it lock, stock and barrel. We can’t just cherry pick bits that we like and ignore the bits we hate. Otherwise we’re not being scientific, we’re just appealing to our own revelations. The best thing about science is that it changes our minds; it changes what we believe when better evidence comes along; evidence that shows our beliefs to be wrong; and evidence that supports alternative theories. Changing our minds for the right reasons, is the best thing we can do – it means that we’re learning and growing.
So, do scientists know how hypnosis works? I would argue that while there is still a lot to discover, and there is still controversy over some of the details, that yes, scientists do know a lot about hypnosis. But are you prepared to accept their findings? You trust car brakes and aeroplanes; you can see that science makes more sense than the tradition/authority/revelation approach of your hypnosis trainer or hypnosis book author; but are you prepared to throw off anything and everything you think you know in order to actually know?
That’s the challenge of science – you might not like what it concludes, but at least what it concludes is less wrong than what you currently believe.