Wakey Wakey… You’ve Been in Trance and Didn’t Realize It

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 Before we get into modern neuroscience, let’s rewind a couple of centuries to when hypnosis first strutted onto the world stage wearing velvet gloves and a slightly theatrical mystique.

Late 1700s Europe. Salons, silk, wigs and people arguing over everything from astronomy to the inner workings of the soul.

Enter Franz Anton Mesmer, physician, thinker and the man whose name eventually gave us mesmerize.

Mesmer believed living beings were influenced by an invisible universal fluid he called animal magnetism. He gathered people in elaborate settings, sometimes around large tubs fitted with iron rods, with music, touch and sweeping gestures that looked somewhere between medicine and theatre.

People reacted. They trembled, laughed, cried, swayed and sometimes reported profound experiences. To the public eye, it could look supernatural.

In 1784, King Louis XVI appointed a commission that included Benjamin Franklin to investigate animal magnetism as practiced by Mesmer’s associate Charles d’Eslon. The commissioners found no evidence for the proposed magnetic fluid and attributed the effects they observed largely to imagination, touch and imitation.

That part fascinates me because Mesmer’s explanation could be wrong while the human experience was still real.

Something happened. People responded to expectation, attention, atmosphere, authority and the people around them. We don’t need an invisible magnetic fluid to find that interesting.

The drama of those early demonstrations also stuck around. So did the idea that hypnosis was mysterious, something special performed on you by somebody with unusual powers.

Meanwhile, ordinary human attention has been doing strange things all along.

We become completely absorbed in films, lose track of time reading or drive a familiar road and suddenly realize our attention was somewhere else for half the trip. We can become so involved in a conversation that everything around us briefly fades into the background.

Those experiences aren’t automatically hypnosis, but they share features that make hypnosis less alien than the stage-show version suggests: focused attention, absorption, imagination and reduced attention to everything else.

No velvet curtain required.

Your Brain: A Beautiful, Suggestible, Slightly Unsupervised Machine

Human attention is selective. We cannot consciously evaluate everything happening around us with equal intensity, so our attention shifts depending on what seems relevant, interesting, threatening or meaningful.

Emotion can influence that process. So can familiarity, trust, expectation and the importance we attach to whoever is speaking.

If someone you barely know says, “You’re too sensitive,” perhaps it bounces straight off. If someone whose opinion matters deeply to you says it at exactly the wrong moment, the sentence may stay around for years.

That doesn’t mean your critical thinking temporarily shut down and let the suggestion sneak through an unlocked neurological back door. It means humans learn in context.

Who said something matters. When they said it matters. How we felt matters. What we already believed matters.

Sometimes an ordinary sentence lands with extraordinary weight.

That interests me far more than pretending the brain becomes a sponge every time emotion appears.

A Little Neuroscience, Soft Nerd Version

Modern hypnosis research is genuinely fascinating without needing to make it magical.

Hypnosis is commonly described in research as involving focused attention, reduced awareness of peripheral stimuli and an increased capacity to respond to suggestion. People also vary considerably in hypnotic responsiveness.

Brain-imaging research has found changes involving networks associated with attention, salience, executive control and self-related processing during hypnosis, particularly in highly hypnotizable participants.

One Stanford study found three notable patterns during hypnosis in highly hypnotizable participants: reduced activity in part of the salience network, increased connectivity between executive-control and bodily-awareness regions, and reduced connectivity between executive-control and default-mode regions.

That’s interesting, but it is not proof that the prefrontal cortex simply switches off and suggestions sail through unchallenged.

Reviews of hypnosis research find substantial variation between studies, and researchers still disagree about the mechanisms responsible for hypnotic responding.

That’s science doing what science is supposed to do.

The brain doesn’t need a neat little diagram saying TRANCE MODE ACTIVATED for hypnosis to be interesting.

The Imaginary 2025 Study That Had to Go

This is also where an earlier version of this article wandered off into the weeds.

I had cited a supposed 2025 imaging study claiming guided imagery, focused attention, embodiment and hypnosis all produced the same neural mechanics.

That study wasn’t what the citation said it was.

The genuine Stanford research was published online in 2016 and did not demonstrate that imagery, ordinary focused attention and hypnosis are neurologically identical.

So that claim is gone. Consider this my small public offering to the gods of check your bloody references.

The larger point still holds without it.

Imagination, focused attention and suggestion can influence subjective experience. What we imagine can affect emotion, perception and bodily responses.

But a vivid experience is not automatically proof that the explanation attached to it is correct.

That distinction matters.

Where It Gets Personal

Most Patterns Don’t Need a Villain

People often imagine influence requires intention. It doesn’t.

Parents, teachers, siblings, partners, coaches, bosses, mentors and friends can influence us without deliberately trying to implant anything.

A child struggling with something hears, “You’re too sensitive.” A teacher says, “Some people just aren’t academic.” A partner says, “You always overreact.”

None of those sentences automatically becomes a lifelong identity. But repeated messages, especially when they come from important people or connect with existing experiences, can contribute to how someone comes to understand themselves.

Children deserve particular care here because cognitive, social and language abilities develop over time, and research shows age-related differences in susceptibility to suggestion.

That still doesn’t mean children live in permanent hypnotic trance. They are learning, developing and trying to work out what the world means from the people around them.

Sometimes an adult spends years unpicking an idea that began as a casual sentence somebody else barely remembers saying.

No evil mastermind required. Just humans influencing humans.

And Yes, Practitioners Can Accidentally Do It Too

This is the bit I care about professionally.

Facilitators, therapists, coaches, hypnotists, healers, mentors and anyone else working with another person’s attention can influence the experience unfolding in front of them.

Language, expectation, imagery and authority all matter.

If someone is emotionally engaged and trusts the person guiding them, the interpretation offered during that experience can carry considerable weight.

A practitioner might say, “That emotion isn’t really you,” or “This proves we’ve reached the root,” or “That reaction means the process is working.”

Perhaps they genuinely believe it.

But the intensity of the experience does not prove the theory. Crying, relief, a vivid image or a profound feeling of recognition can all be meaningful without becoming evidence for every explanation wrapped around them.

That is why informed consent and humility matter to me.

Good intentions do not remove influence, and understanding influence should make us more careful with it, not more impressed with ourselves for possessing it.

Trance and Awareness Aren’t Opposites

I’d change something else from the original version here.

I used to frame trance as automatic absorption and awareness as the thing that rescues us from it. That’s too neat.

Absorption isn’t inherently bad. We become absorbed in music, creativity, sex, sport, conversation, imagination, reading and all sorts of experiences that make life rather wonderful.

Hypnosis itself can also be useful.

The question for me is not whether narrowed or focused attention is happening. It is whether we retain enough room to notice, question and choose.

Maybe something feels overwhelmingly true. Fine. What happens if we give it five minutes?

Does it still make sense? Does the interpretation fit the experience, or did somebody hand us the interpretation while we were still in the middle of feeling it?

Awareness doesn’t need to fight absorption. It can simply sit beside it.

This feels powerful.

And also:

I can still look again.

Both can be true.

The Real Risk Isn’t Hypnosis

The word hypnosis can become a distraction.

The more interesting risk is confusing the strength of an experience with the accuracy of its explanation.

Emotion can feel like certainty. Intensity can feel like insight. Relief can feel like proof. Repetition can feel like truth.

And an interpretation delivered by someone we trust can begin feeling like our own before we’ve really examined it.

None of that means we should distrust every emotional experience or interrogate every meaningful conversation. What an exhausting way to live.

It means we can leave ourselves enough room to check.

Understanding suggestion does not make us immune to suggestion. Understanding influence does not make us influence-proof.

I’ve studied this stuff for years and I still have a human brain.

What it can give us is another angle.

We can notice when something lands unusually hard, when a moment feels absolute or when someone else’s certainty is becoming our explanation. Then we get to ask whether it fits.

Not mystically. Not dramatically. Just honestly.

Perhaps that’s the useful thing to know about trance.

The mind isn’t a fortress we need to defend from every influence, and it isn’t an empty room waiting for somebody else to furnish it.

It’s alive, responsive, relational and continually learning.

Knowing that gives us a little more room to participate in what gets invited inside.

No swinging watch required.

Sources and Further Reading

Franklin et al., Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King with the Examination of Animal Magnetism (1784)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78413

Jiang et al., Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis, Cerebral Cortex (published online 2016; issue 2017)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6248753/

Landry et al., Brain Correlates of Hypnosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-analytic Exploration (2017)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28238944/

Zahedi et al., How Hypnotic Suggestions Work: A Systematic Review of Prominent Theories of Hypnosis (2024)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39032268/

Markovic et al., Functional Changes in Brain Activity Using Hypnosis: A Systematic Review (2022)
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8773773/

Klemfuss and Olaguez, Individual Differences in Children’s Suggestibility: An Updated Review (2020)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30142291/

Bruck and Ceci, The Suggestibility of Children’s Memory (1999)
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.419

Nader and Hardt, A Single Standard for Memory: The Case for Reconsolidation (2009)
https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2590