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Best evidence that hypnotism is real
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Clare Wilson
YOU are feeling sleepy… or are you? In a stage hypnosis performance, ordinary people seem to become puppets, made to talk in silly accents, act like babies or do other embarrassing things. But have they genuinely lost command of their bodies, or are they just pretending? Now we have some of the best evidence yet that people who are hypnotised do feel like they are acting involuntarily. When estimating split-second timings, hypnotised people behaved as though their actions were outside their control, in ways that would have been difficult to fake. Sceptics think that rather than being in some state of altered consciousness, hypnotised people do as they are told because it would be socially awkward not to. People who are highly susceptible to hypnosis – about one in 10 of us – could just be especially suggestible and eager to please, say the cynics. To investigate this mystery, Peter Lush at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, UK, and his team have
Pay crash looms for online gig workers IT’S basic supply and demand. A huge number of people in South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa looking for online “gig economy” work could cause a race to the bottom on pay and conditions, according to a report from the Oxford Internet Institute, UK. Millions of people in countries like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam and Malaysia sign up to websites that
used a known trick of the mind. When we do something that causes something else, we perceive these two events as occurring closer in time than if they are unrelated. For example, if we believe that pushing a button makes a sound, it seems like the sound occurs sooner after pushing the button than if we think they are independent – known as “intentional binding”. Lush’s team asked 18 people who were highly susceptible to hypnotism to sit in front of a very accurate clock and do a task repeatedly where they pressed a button, triggering a beep after 250 milliseconds. If their finger was pulled down involuntarily – by a string – they perceived the period before the beep as 176 milliseconds on average. If the string wasn’t pulled and they chose when to press the button, they estimated it as 91 milliseconds, showing intentional binding. But if they were commanded to press the button while hypnotised, they perceived it as 156 milliseconds – closer to the involuntary state (Psychological Science, doi.org/ b4sh).
pay them to do tasks such as data entry, transcription and graphic design. The jobs can last minutes or months, and are generally outsourced from companies in richer countries. “The sheer variety of people doing this work is surprising. Almost any sort of work is being done digitally,” says Mark Graham, one of the report’s authors. Over three years, Graham and his colleagues conducted 152 interviews and surveyed 456 workers. Seventy per cent of those surveyed said gig work was one of their main sources of income, but nearly half said they felt easily replaceable. One gig-work
SCOTT MACBRIDE/GETTY
Best evidence that hypnotism is real
–Push that button–
“This feeling of involuntariness is a key element of the hypnotic experience,” says David Spiegel of Stanford University, California. This result is more convincing than simply asking hypnotised people whether they feel in control of their actions because they could be lying, says Devin Terhune at Goldsmiths University of London. In this latest study, the volunteers were unlikely to have known what their answers should have been in the three different situations. “It’s much better than self-reports,” says Terhune. Brain scans of hypnotised
people have previously shown that, when they are told to feel pain, similar regions of the brain become active as when people really are in pain. But brain imaging studies can be hard to interpret, says Lush. “This is the most objective evidence yet that people who are hypnotised feel that their actions are not under their own control.” Lush says studying intentional binding could also help us to investigate mental conditions that affect our sense of power over our own bodies, such as schizophrenia. n
platform had 1.75 million registrants, but only 200,000 had completed an hour’s work or earned at least US$1. The team says demand for such work will get higher, because a billion more people are expected to get online by 2020, the majority of whom will come from low- and middleincome countries. “There will be a huge surge in demand for online jobs, and unless strategies and policies are
put in place, it will be a race to the bottom,” says Graham. These gig workers don’t have any employee protections. The report argues that the handful of countries generating the digital work, mostly in North America and western Europe, should enforce minimum standards. But this would be hard to enforce, says Andrea Broughton at the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton, UK. “A lot of work goes under the radar, not registered by any regulators,” she says. “How do you even start to work out what to regulate?” Timothy Revell n
“Unless policies are put in place to protect online workers, it will be a race to the bottom”
1 April 2017 | NewScientist | 15
Clare Wilson
YOU are feeling sleepy… or are you? In a stage hypnosis performance, ordinary people seem to become puppets, made to talk in silly accents, act like babies or do other embarrassing things. But have they genuinely lost command of their bodies, or are they just pretending? Now we have some of the best evidence yet that people who are hypnotised do feel like they are acting involuntarily. When estimating split-second timings, hypnotised people behaved as though their actions were outside their control, in ways that would have been difficult to fake. Sceptics think that rather than being in some state of altered consciousness, hypnotised people do as they are told because it would be socially awkward not to. People who are highly susceptible to hypnosis – about one in 10 of us – could just be especially suggestible and eager to please, say the cynics. To investigate this mystery, Peter Lush at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science in Brighton, UK, and his team have
Pay crash looms for online gig workers IT’S basic supply and demand. A huge number of people in South-East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa looking for online “gig economy” work could cause a race to the bottom on pay and conditions, according to a report from the Oxford Internet Institute, UK. Millions of people in countries like Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Vietnam and Malaysia sign up to websites that
used a known trick of the mind. When we do something that causes something else, we perceive these two events as occurring closer in time than if they are unrelated. For example, if we believe that pushing a button makes a sound, it seems like the sound occurs sooner after pushing the button than if we think they are independent – known as “intentional binding”. Lush’s team asked 18 people who were highly susceptible to hypnotism to sit in front of a very accurate clock and do a task repeatedly where they pressed a button, triggering a beep after 250 milliseconds. If their finger was pulled down involuntarily – by a string – they perceived the period before the beep as 176 milliseconds on average. If the string wasn’t pulled and they chose when to press the button, they estimated it as 91 milliseconds, showing intentional binding. But if they were commanded to press the button while hypnotised, they perceived it as 156 milliseconds – closer to the involuntary state (Psychological Science, doi.org/ b4sh).
pay them to do tasks such as data entry, transcription and graphic design. The jobs can last minutes or months, and are generally outsourced from companies in richer countries. “The sheer variety of people doing this work is surprising. Almost any sort of work is being done digitally,” says Mark Graham, one of the report’s authors. Over three years, Graham and his colleagues conducted 152 interviews and surveyed 456 workers. Seventy per cent of those surveyed said gig work was one of their main sources of income, but nearly half said they felt easily replaceable. One gig-work
SCOTT MACBRIDE/GETTY
Best evidence that hypnotism is real
–Push that button–
“This feeling of involuntariness is a key element of the hypnotic experience,” says David Spiegel of Stanford University, California. This result is more convincing than simply asking hypnotised people whether they feel in control of their actions because they could be lying, says Devin Terhune at Goldsmiths University of London. In this latest study, the volunteers were unlikely to have known what their answers should have been in the three different situations. “It’s much better than self-reports,” says Terhune. Brain scans of hypnotised
people have previously shown that, when they are told to feel pain, similar regions of the brain become active as when people really are in pain. But brain imaging studies can be hard to interpret, says Lush. “This is the most objective evidence yet that people who are hypnotised feel that their actions are not under their own control.” Lush says studying intentional binding could also help us to investigate mental conditions that affect our sense of power over our own bodies, such as schizophrenia. n
platform had 1.75 million registrants, but only 200,000 had completed an hour’s work or earned at least US$1. The team says demand for such work will get higher, because a billion more people are expected to get online by 2020, the majority of whom will come from low- and middleincome countries. “There will be a huge surge in demand for online jobs, and unless strategies and policies are
put in place, it will be a race to the bottom,” says Graham. These gig workers don’t have any employee protections. The report argues that the handful of countries generating the digital work, mostly in North America and western Europe, should enforce minimum standards. But this would be hard to enforce, says Andrea Broughton at the Institute for Employment Studies in Brighton, UK. “A lot of work goes under the radar, not registered by any regulators,” she says. “How do you even start to work out what to regulate?” Timothy Revell n
“Unless policies are put in place to protect online workers, it will be a race to the bottom”
1 April 2017 | NewScientist | 15