Every science has concepts so fundamental they are nearly impossible to define. Biologists agree on what is alive but not on precisely what life is. In physics, matter and energy elude simple definition. To psychologists, consciousness is similarly a fundamental yet slippery concept.
At its beginning, psychology was "the description and explanation of states of consciousness" (Ladd, 1887). But during the first half of the twentieth century, the difficulty of scientifically studying consciousness led many psychologists-including those in the emerging school of behaviorism (Module 26)-to turn to direct observations of behavior. By the 1960s, psychology had nearly lost consciousness and was defining itself as "the science of behavior." Consciousness was likened to a car's speedometer: "It doesn't make the car go, it just reflects what's happening" (Seligman, 1991, p. 24).
After 1960, mental concepts reemerged. Neuroscience advances related brain activity to sleeping, dreaming, and other mental states. Researchers began studying consciousness altered by hypnosis and drugs. Psychologists of all persuasions were affirming the importance of cognition, or mental processes. Psychology was regaining consciousness.
Most psychologists now define consciousness as our awareness of ourselves and our environment. As we saw in Module 13, our conscious awareness is one part of the dual processing that goes on in our two-track minds. Although much of our information processing is conscious, much is unconscious and automatic-outside our awareness. Module 16 highlighted our selective attention, which directs the spotlight of our awareness, allowing us to assemble information from many sources as we reflect on our past and plan for our future. We are also attentive when we learn a complex concept or behavior. When learning to ride a bike, we focus on obstacles that we have to steer around and on how to use the brakes. With practice, riding a bike becomes semi-automatic, freeing us to focus our attention on other things.As we do so, we experience what the early psychologist William James called a continuous "stream of consciousness," with each moment flowing into the next. Over time, we flit between different states of consciousness, including sleeping, waking, and various altered states (FIGURE 22.1 ).
Note that our modern-day understanding of the unconscious is very different from Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious (Module 55). Freud believed the unconscious was a hiding place for our most anxiety-provoking ideas and emotions, and that uncovering those hidden thoughts could lead to healing. Now, most psychologists simply view the unconscious track as one that operates without awareness. Make sure you keep these two ideas of the unconscious straight.
Imagine you are about to be hypnotized. The hypnotist invites you to sit back, fix your gaze on a spot high on the wall, and relax. In a quiet voice the hypnotist suggests, "Your eyes are growing tired ....Your eyelids are becoming heavy ... now heavier and heavier. .. . They are beginning to close.... You are becoming more deeply relaxed . ...Your breathing is now deep and regular ....Your muscles are becoming more and more relaxed. Your whole body is beginning to feel like lead."
After a few minutes of this hypnotic induction, you may experience hypnosis. When the hypnotist suggests, "Your eyelids are shutting so tight that you cannot open them even if you try," it may indeed seem beyond your control to open your eyelids. Told to forget the number 6, you may be puzzled when you count 11 fingers on your hands. Invited to smell a sensuous perfume that is actually ammonia, you may linger delightedly over its pungent odor. Told that you cannot see a certain object, such as a chair, you may indeed report that it is not there, although you manage to avoid the chair when walking around (illustrating once again that two-track mind of yours).
But is hypnosis really an altered state of consciousness? Let's start with some frequently asked questions.
Hypnotists have no magical mind-control power. Their power resides in the subjects' openness to suggestion, their ability to focus on certain images or behaviors (Bowers, 1984). But how open to suggestions are we?
We have seen that hypnosis involves heightened suggestibility. We have also seen that hypnotic procedures do not endow a person with special powers but can sometimes help people overcome stress-related ailments and cope with pain. So, just what is hypnosis? Psychologists have proposed two explanations.
Our attentional spotlight and interpretations powerfully influence our ordinary perceptions. Might hypnotic phenomena reflect such workings of normal consciousness, as well as the power of social influence (Lynn et al., 1990; Spanos & Coe, 1992)? Advocates of the social influence theory ofhypnosis believe they do.
Does this mean that subjects consciously fake hypnosis? No-like actors caught up in their roles, they begin to feel and behave in ways appropriate for "good hypnotic subjects." The more they like and trust the hypnotist, the more they allow that person to direct their attention and fantasies (Gfeller et a1., 1987). "The hypnotist's ideas become the subject'S thoughts," explained Theodore Barber (2000), "and the subject's thoughts produce the hypnotic experiences and behaviors." Told to scratch their ear later when they hear the word psychology, subjects will likely do so-but only if they think the experiment is still under way. If an experimenter eliminates their motivation for acting hypnotized-by stating that hypnosis reveals their "gullibility"-subjects become unresponsive. Such findings support the idea that hypnotic phenomena are an extension of normal social and cognitive processes.
These views illustrate a principle that Module 75 emphasizes: An authoritative person in a legitimate context can induce people-hypnotized or not-to perform some unlikely acts. Or as hypnosis researcher Nicholas Spanos (1982) put it, "The overt behaviors of hypnotic subjects are well within normal limits."
Other hypnosis researchers believe hypnosis is more than inducing someone to play the role of"good subject." How, they ask, can we explain why hypnotized subjects sometimes carry out suggested behaviors on cue, even when they believe no one is watching (perugini et al., 1998)? And why does distinctive brain activity accompany hypnosis (Oakley & Halligan, 2009)? In one experiment, deeply hypnotized people were asked to imagine a color, and areas of their brain activated as ifthey were really seeing the color. To the hypnotized person's brain, mere imagination had become a compelling hallucination (Kosslyn et al., 2000). In another experiment, researchers invited hypnotizable and nonhypnotizable people to say the color of letters. This is an easy task, but it slows if, say, green letters form the conflicting word RED, a phenomenon known as the Stroop effect (Raz et al., 2005). vVhen easily hypnotized people were given a suggestion to focus on the color and to perceive the letters as irrelevant gibberish, they were much less slowed by the word-color conflict. (Brain areas that decode words and detect conflict remained inactive.)
These results would not have surprised famed researcher Ernest Hilgard (1986, 1992), who believed hypnosis involves not only social influence but also a special dual-processing state of dissociation-a split between different levels of consciousness. Hilgard viewed hypnotic dissociation as a vivid form of everyday mind splits-similar to doodling while listening to a lecture or typing the end of a sentence while starting a conversation. Hilgard felt that when, for example, hypnotized people lower their arm into an ice bath, as in FIGURE 22.2, the hypnosis dissociates the sensation of the pain stimulus (of which the subjects are still aware) from the emotional suffering that defines their experience of pain. The ice water therefore feels cold-very cold-but not painful.
Another form of dual processing - selective attention - may also playa role in hypnotic pain relief. PET scans show that hypnosis reduces brain activity in a region that processes painful stimuli, but not in the sensory cortex, which receives the raw sensory input (Rainville et a1., 1997). Hypnosis does not block sensory input, but it may block our attention to those stimuli. This helps explain why an injured athlete, caught up in the competition, may feel Social-cultural influences: little or no pain until the game ends.
Although the divided-consciousness theory of hypnosis is controversial, this much seems clear: There is, without doubt, much more to thinking and acting than we are conscious of. Our information processing, which starts with selective attention, is divided into simultaneous conscious and nonconscious realms. In hypnosis as in life, much of our behavior occurs on hypnosis from complementary perspectives. autopilot. We have two-track minds (FIGURE 22.3).