Entranced

George Musser, Jr. on the new science of hypnosis.

Portraits of hypnotized participants photographed by Aapo Nikkanen. Ongoing series, 2024–.

In high school, the sheer amount of vocabulary in biology class was driving me mad. I came across a magazine ad that promised help. I mailed a check and they sent a self-hypnosis cassette tape. I turned off the lights in my room and a soft voice told me to take deep breaths. The voice was supposed to put me into a trance and prime my memory to retain long lists of terms—making me like The Manchurian Candidate, except that I would kill not a politician but a test. After a few sessions without noticeable improvement, I gave up on biology and decided to study physics instead.

Long thereafter, I regarded hypnosis with suspicion, but my interest was recently reawakened when I went to a talk by Zoltan Dienes, a psychologist at the University of Sussex. A lot has happened in hypnosis research since my failed youthful experiment. The practice has proven itself useful in pain relief and psychotherapy. YouTube is awash in videos that are entrancing, literally. Although movie depictions still tend to be unfavorable (not to mention unrealistic)—beware the teacup in Get Out—surveys find that most people now have a favorable or at least neutral view of hypnosis. But Dienes, as both a leading researcher on and practitioner of hypnosis, goes further. He proposes that hypnosis is just one aspect of a much broader mental capacity that he calls “phenomenological control.”

As a rebranding exercise, this may not be the best choice of words. “Control” sounds menacing, until you realize that he means self-control. “Phenomenological” is philosopher-speak for subjective experience. In hypnosis and a wide range of other situations—spirit possession, ASMR, the flow state in martial arts, certain illusions—you are exerting control over your experience of the world. You can basically give yourself a DIY hallucination that involves no drugs or psychiatric disorder and, indeed, is uncorrelated with those other sources.

In this framing, hypnosis creates a special context in which people feel safe to exert phenomenological control. A hypnotist typically brings it on through an induction procedure that puts the hypnotized into a trance, and in this focused state of mind they become open to suggestion, including modifying their perception of reality. Some version of the procedure dates at least as far back as the Bhagavad Gita and Ancient Greek healing rites, but it began to take its modern form as a method of exorcism in eighteenth-century Germany. Franz Mesmer, a doctor in Vienna, speculated that these rituals were a type of magnetic healing that dispensed with the actual magnets, instead redirecting the body’s innate “animal magnetism” using a penetrating gaze, the laying-on of hands, and sundry props such as iron rods.

The theory was quickly debunked, but Mesmer’s methods were taken up by doctors, quacks, spiritualists, traveling showmen, and would-be manipulators. In the early days, mesmerists tended to bring on convulsions in their subjects; later, a “nervous sleep” became the norm. The word “hypnotism,” coined in 1843, is derived from the Greek for “sleep.” The evolving responses were an early clue that people had certain expectations for what hypnosis should do to them, and constructed experiences accordingly. In general, phenomenological control requires no sleeplike trance. “You can have people peddling on a bicycle and give them suggestions and it works just as well,” Dienes told me.

---

A year after first hearing Dienes speak, I went to see him in Brighton. After outlining the theory, he asked: “So, do you want to try?” He didn’t swing a pocket watch or tell me I was getting very sleepy, very sleepy. He didn’t even turn down the lights. He just gave me a series of tasks to engage my imagination.

First he asked me to stretch out my arms and imagine a magnetic force between my hands, pulling them together. My palms duly moved together, just a little. They seemed to be doing so on their own, as when I’m standing on the subway and find myself leaning into the motion of the train without meaning to. “Simply imagining the hands moving isn’t quite enough in itself,” he said. “What you need to imagine is that you’re not aware of intending to do it.” This is the essence of phenomenological control: imagining something and then further imagining that you didn’t imagine it, so the products of your imagination seem real.

I soon learned that I am almost totally lacking in this imaginative power. My hands may have moved together, but his subsequent directives had less effect. Dienes asked me to imagine that I was holding a heavy ball. That a helium balloon was attached to my hand. That I couldn’t bend my arm. That I heard a fly buzzing. That I couldn’t see anything blue. That I forgot certain words. I just sat there, wondering how to take in any of his instructions. “You are just very determined to see the truth,” he later reassured me.

I confess it crossed my mind that phenomenological control might be bs, but I read other studies that convinced me that, even if I couldn’t experience it, other people do. For instance, hypnotized people who are prompted to ignore pain really do show muted brain responses to painful stimuli. I’m an outlier—in the fifth percentile of people his team has surveyed, Dienes estimated. A friend of mine who is a cognitive scientist took the online version of the test and said about half of the challenges worked for her. Dienes told me about one woman who could go all the way. “We’re sitting at the table and there was a bottle—a green bottle,” he recalled. “And I said to her, ‘Did you know, because you’re high [in phenomenological control], you can turn that bottle red?’ And she said, ‘No, I can’t do tha—my god, it’s turned red!’”

For Dienes and other researchers I talked to, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It’s a process done not to you, but by you. A hypnotist guides you like a meditation coach, but it’s up to you to suspend your sense of authorship over your own experiences. Amanda Barnier, a psychologist and hypnosis researcher at Macquarie University in Sydney, described how many people can achieve this state on their own and make use of it in everyday life. “They deploy it in different situations—in their creative practices, in their ability to focus attention,” she told me. This can be as simple as becoming carried away by a movie or absorbed in a book.

---

Why you can’t tickle yourself? An age-old question from Aristotle. Last year, Barnier and her colleagues found that hypnotized participants were able to tickle themselves on the palm with a soft brush, because they could convince themselves they weren’t the one doing the tickling. “It’s a really interesting way to explore fundamental issues of human consciousness, human agency, memory, action,” Barnier said, seeing hypnotism as an entry point to mysteries, both small and large, of human psychology.

Dienes has studied the rubber-hand illusion, in which people come to think a glove lying on the table is part of their body. In a study of 353 people, he and his colleagues found that susceptibility to the illusion correlated with hypnotizability. Unlike other psychologists, Dienes doesn’t think the illusion has anything to do with redrawing the boundaries of the self; he thinks it implausible that your sense of your body could be reprogrammed so easily. Rather, he thinks it is a case of phenomenological control. People know they are supposed to feel the glove is their hand and make it so. “They create the experience with a general-purpose experience-creating mechanism,” he said.

Susana Martinez-Conde, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, told me she likes how Dienes places hypnosis in the broader context of phenomenological control. “As a framework, I think it’s intriguing,” she said. She observes an even more general tendency of the brain to mistake an internal process for an external occurrence. “You don’t know if something is happening inside or outside of your mind,” she said.

Other cases in this category include rotating-snakes visual illusions, which look like they’re spinning; the ideomotor effect, in which you move a hand unawares (this is how neuroscientists think Ouija boards work); and the medical placebo effect. But these are distinct from phenomenological control; they do not correlate with hypnotizability, and they do not involve intentional self-deception. Still, all invert a standard narrative in psychology. It is common knowledge that people think they have agency when they don’t—this is the core of neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s argument that we lack free will—but the opposite also occurs. “There are a number of situations in which we have agency, but we are not aware that we do,” Martinez-Conde said.

Dienes connects phenomenological control to a leading theory of consciousness known as higher-order theory, which proposes that consciousness is thinking about thinking. In this view, to have the experience of a happy face, it is not enough for the visual information to register somewhere in your brain. You also have to have the thought that you are seeing it. Phenomenological control is also predicated on a hierarchy of thoughts and perceptions. But it adds the twist that you might never have the lower-level perception, only the higher-level thought.

Dienes has been recruiting people with strong phenomenological control—who are as rare in the population as I am at the other extreme—to see what defines these levels of thought. “We’re getting people to look at a happy face and see it as an angry face,” he told me. When they say they see it, what does that mean? At what stage of visual processing does happy get taken for angry?

Almost everyone has some degree of phenomenological control. The ability is prevalent enough that Dienes thinks it is not incidental to our mental life, but evolved in humans for a purpose. He speculates that it has to do with the cultural cachet of religious visions. Who needs peyote if you have phenomenological control? You can create for yourself a thoroughly convincing vision of a spirit world. And by convincing yourself, you can convince everyone else, too. In many societies, that makes you special, so your imaginative power can be evolutionarily advantageous. Whether or not Dienes is right about this, his conjecture fits into a general framework for why self-deception is ubiquitous in nature. As the late evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers wrote, “We lie to ourselves the better to lie to others.”

---

Were I so inclined, there’d be one way to improve my phenomenological control score: alcohol. In the early 2010s, Dienes and his colleagues concluded that getting drunk does in fact make you slightly more hypnotizable—which is perhaps less surprising in itself than the mixological challenge of conducting a controlled experiment on intoxication. They gave study participants either a mocktail or the real thing, using a mix of tonic water and Angostura bitters to make them taste the same. The subterfuge worked: Three-quarters of the placebo group were convinced they’d been served spirits. But although I feel hypnosis FOMO and want to see what all the fuss is about, the idea of getting drunk to gain experiential self-control seems self-contradictory.

Maybe one reason hypnosis wasn’t working on me is that I fought it, still associating it with Jedi mind tricks. All the researchers and practitioners I talked to sought to reassure me. Their basic point was that phenomenological control involves something that you want to do—even if you then forget that you did—so it’s always coming from your volition. Asking someone to do something they don’t want to do will break the trance state that hypnosis involves for most people.

The fragility of trances, along with the wide variation in people’s hypnotizability, makes hypnosis iffy as a method of mind control. There are plenty of other manipulative techniques that everyone responds to. Martinez-Conde co-wrote a book, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Brains, about how stage magicians hack our minds, and she said they don’t bother with hypnosis or anything like it. “It’s not reliable,” she said, whereas age-old sleight-of-hand techniques work every time. Many scholars think this is why the CIA’s notorious MKUltra brainwashing program of the 1950s and ’60s ultimately gave up on hypnotizing people to become sleeper assassins.

People may cluck like chickens or croon like Elvis when called to the stage in a hypnotist’s show in Vegas, but that’s a setting where people want to act out, so the context, rather than the procedure, is the driver. In 1960, hypnosis researcher Martin Theodore Orne and his team hypnotized people and asked them to throw acid at a lab assistant or pick up a venomous snake. They complied. But so did a control group whom they asked to pretend to be hypnotized. “All the fakers did it as well: They threw the acid; they picked up the snake,” Barnier said. The acid was harmless and the snake was safely constrained, so the whole thing was an act, and participants later said they had assumed as much.

Nevertheless, I don’t feel convinced that hypnosis is entirely benign. Although I might not do anything under hypnosis I wouldn’t otherwise do, that is not altogether reassuring, since a capacity to do harm resides within each of us. My cognitive-scientist friend described her experience with the online phenomenological-control test as a lowering of conscious resistance. “It didn’t feel so much that I was being compelled to do it, but that it would take more energy to not do it,” she said. She added that it made her feel “a bit alarmed.” As for the CIA, Rebecca Lemov, a historian at Harvard and author of The Instability of Truth, told me the agency destroyed most of the MKUltra records, so we can’t be entirely sure what it concluded about hypnosis. “It’s not straightforward mind control, but it could be a component of coercive control,” she said.

Aapo Nikkanen, a Finnish artist and hypnotherapist who completed a residency at Pioneer Works in the spring of 2026, and who takes striking portrait photographs of people he has hypnotized, combined reassurances with caution. Hypnotic induction, even if not manipulative itself, overlaps with manipulative techniques. “I watched one speech of Trump’s, because I’m quite interested in how he uses language,” he said. He was struck by how Trump repeats words, lowers his voice for emphasis, and prefers a vague word to a specific one, so that his audience can hear what it wants to hear. “He does use similar patterns and similar tricks of voice that I would use,” he said. In fact, when I first spoke to Nikkanen, on Zoom, his vocal technique—the way he . . . paused . . . and then resumed—was tranquilizing. It took some force of will for me to keep my interview on track. I began to see how certain rhetorical styles can hack our brains. I also began to think maybe I wasn’t so immune to hypnotic suggestion after all.

When Nikkanen arrived in New York for his residency, I made my way to the third floor of Pioneer Works and he drew the blinds of his office.

He asked me to clasp my hands, extend my index fingers, and imagine a magnetic force pulling the fingers together. “I don’t want you to force it; I don’t want you to fight it,” he said. “Just let it happen.” And it really did feel as though my fingers moved together on their own. He asked me to close my eyes and to take deep, even breaths. He raised my lower right arm and said to keep it suspended above the armrest. That was the only thing I did that even vaguely resembled a Vegas show trick during the session. I never felt that the arm was floating by means of some external force, so I had already reached the limits of my phenomenological control. But I kept it suspended to see how things would play out.

With this and his subsequent directives, Nikkanen seldom just told me to do something. He prepped me by describing something I should do or imagine, and then gave me a cue to begin. This setup made the whole process feel very deliberate. He had me move my attention around my body, imagine I was made of wax and melting, count backwards from 100, and recall a happy memory. After about half an hour, he counted to five and asked me to open my eyes. Overall I’d call the experience a cross between meditation and the twilight preceding sleep. Throughout, I was aware of, but able to ignore, two women who began to talk loudly in the next office. I felt serene for several hours afterwards. So, I may not have as much control over my subjective experience as others, but still benefited from releasing myself into a trance.

Nikkanen said he conducts hypnotherapy sessions to help people stop smoking or manage anxiety. Hypnosis has no special power to flip a switch in your brain, but it can introduce people to new emotional tools. Whenever they crave the taste of tobacco, they can learn to distract themselves by thinking of some alternative sensation. In fact, Nikkanen helped himself quit this way. “I really, really like the smell of citrus fruit,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite smells. So, I was like, every time you want to smoke, from now on, you think of the smell of citrus.” Maybe he could have helped me overcome my fear of biological nomenclature, too.

In his artistic performances, Nikkanen has sought to reimagine stage hypnosis, guiding groups of 20 or 30 people to turn inward and feel time move differently together. In an era when each of us feels our consciousness is under siege, as Michael Pollan recently told a crowd at Pioneer Works, and other people’s thoughts flood in and displace your own, it is a pleasure to carve out time to “reacquaint yourself with your own mind.”Attempting this in concert with others, as in Nikkanen’s practice, shows us how we might try to live more easily with our external reality—noisy, interdependent—while protecting, even fortifying, a space within ourselves. ♦

Become a paid subscriber and join the livestream for Science + Fiction with Kim Stanley Robinson.

Next week, we’ll be joined by Kim Stanley Robinson at Pioneer Works. The titan of speculative fiction will sit down with Broadcast’s co-editor-in-chief, Janna Levin, for a career-spanning conversation. The event is sold out irl, but paid subscribers are welcome to join the livestream.

Who: Kim Stanley Robinson in convo with Janna Levin
What: A free-ranging conversation on Science + Fiction and new ideas for humanity.
Where: Join us on the livestream
When: Tuesday, June 16, 2026, 8 pm
Why: Because KSR has been eerily right about the future, which is now our present.
How: By the grace of gadgets, technology, and subscribing below.