So I was wondering, is it possible to hypnotize a person who has Aphantasia. Now, before you get into a debate that a human cannot just make another human to run on commands. I’m no talking about this kind of hypnotism.
Where an expert in this field guide his/her patient/client to close their eyes and imagine a bunch of scenarios to calm their mind, I’m talking about this kind.
What will happen if a client turned out to have aphantasia?
Will the expert be successful in his/her method?
Bower or Bowers wrote a book debunking the “hypnotism doesn’t exist” pseudoscience, decades ago.
Basically, if you get 2 populations, & have 1 population go into hypnosis-session intentionally faking it … and you don’t have the other population going into it faking,
& the hypnotist is competent,
THEN the measurable difference-in-behavior between the 2 groups is proof that it’s real.
Hypnosis is as real as multiple-personality-disorder, or as different-personality-while-in-shock-from-trauma.
It’s just a more unconscious-mind dominant state, is all.
Dreams are real, too, btw.
Lack of visual-imagination doesn’t affect hypnotizability.
I’m aphantasic: it’s wrongly-named.
It means “no imagination”, but the truth is we’ve plenty of imagination, just not visually.
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It’s not a coincidence that the word image is in the word imagination. Most people image to imagine.
We have learned you don’t need to image to imagine. If you would have asked me awhile ago if I saw images in my head I would have said yes because I can hold details of an image in my head and “see” it. It’s like I’m imagining an image to imagine.
Just like I can imagine what would happen if you placed a ball at the top of a hill and let go. I don’t need to see images or a video to “imagine” the ball is going to roll down the hill.
Phantasia is a word used by Aristotle to describe “mental images”. What is thought of as “imagining”. He described it as a mind’s eye.
Imagining is the term that is wrongly named. It could be used for only processing thinking with images but like you said you “imagine”. I have aphantasia and I’m just “thinking” about the ball and it rolling down the hill, not imaging it doing it in my head.