Sunday, October 11, 2009

You are getting veeeery sleepy . . .



Ever wanted to hypnotize your roommate? Make them bark like a dog or quack like a duck? Well, most of that stuff is a little far-fetched, but if you want to learn how to de-stress before an exam, Princeton Hypnosis might be for you.

The club started last year as a graduate program, and now its undergraduate members, including Axel Shum ’12 and Phil Miller ’12, are advocating for an official undergraduate chapter.

On Wednesday, October 7, they held their latest hypnosis session, led by Shum, in East Pyne. According to Shum, hypnosis is a great way to manage stress and relieve the pressure that we constantly feel, especially as Princeton students.

Aaron Cevallos ’12 volunteered to be hypnotized by Shum who used the Elman technique of physical and mental relaxation. Cevallos said he felt extremely calm afterward, and his hearing seemed to have improved.

The 14 students who attended the session then split into groups of two to try it out for themselves. Jade Moore ’11 is a self-proclaimed skeptic, and she had a hard time keeping a straight face while attempting to hypnotize her partner. However, after being hypnotized, she, too, claimed to be incredibly relaxed.

While the majority of the club’s activities focus on stress management and reduction, they also explore the more entertaining aspects of hypnosis like rapid induction (suggestions for instantaneous hypnosis), negative hallucination (not seeing things that are actually there), and regression.

5 comments:

Ralph Benko said...

Found you in Pnosis.com's RSS Feed.

If you fancy hypnosis, come visit Pnosis, an online magazine with readers in about 100 nations, all about hypnosis and other phenomenological phenomenon. (No cost. Sigh up for the free weekly feature article, too.)

Anonymous said...

I kept waiting for the girls in that video to start making out, but it never happened.

Taylor Sherman said...

Hey guys,

Cool article. It's always great to see people running clubs like this, as I ran one when I was in college and developed a whole social circle around people who wanted to be hypnotized. Great source of volunteers.

Feel free to contact me if you want some good suggestions :)

Taylor

Ralph Benko said...

Very, very impressive that you guys have settled on Elman rather than fractional relaxation, and regression to cause rather than suggestion.

Where did you learn this stuff? It's really pretty state of the art.

Who's in charge of this? Write me at us@pnosis.com....

Went to Amherst, consider Princeton, really, to be in the same league.

Unlike Yale or Harvard.

Ralph Benko
Publisher
Pnosis.com

Josh Houghton said...

Awesome article. Personally I feel we need more groups like this being formed. Hypnosis has a lot of potential, but it's still a mystery to a lot of people when in reality it shouldn't be.

Groups like this help spread the truth about this art and can only make things better for the future of hypnosis.