Back to episode — Episode 2833 CWSA 05/08/25
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ady statue. Now I'm not judging and I don't do fat shaming because I don't think people are fat because they want to be. But that's as big a fail as you can get if you put up a statue celebrating black women and half the country calls it the fat lady statue. Oops. Maybe they should have done a little market testing before they went with that model. Anyway, good try. Apparently there's another UF…
← Previous segment →from another planet. Maybe it's part of that ancient civilization on Earth that's been hiding in the ocean. Anyway, I'm going to put that in the category of I don't believe a single part of it.
Let's check and see if there's any science that I can debunk. According to Discover there's a therapy that's targeted at controlling emotions to help ease chronic pain. So they used a type of therapy on emotions and they found out that it seemed to make a big difference in people's chronic pain.
Well I'm going to give you the hypnotist take on that. It might be that it's exactly what it looks like, that if you get rid of people's emotional pain it gives them some relief of their physical pain. Because as I tell you way too often, your brain and your body are really the same thing. We just artificially treat the brain like it's separate because it's in your skull. But it's all kind of one big brain, your body and your little nugget inside your skull.
But here's my question as a hypnotist. Is it possible that what really happened is that they hypnotized some portion of the people they were doing the therapy on? Here's how easy it would be to hypnotize them. We're going to do a thing where we talk to you and it's going to be a bunch of scientists, really smart people, and we're going to see if it eases your pain. That's it. You could have frauds, you know, just actors coming in wearing scientific clothes and having glasses and clipboards and stuff and probably you would have a big impact on the number of people who said, "Yeah, you know what? That therapy really helped me. My emotions are better and my pain went way down." So I don't know how you would do this experiment unless you could somehow reduce the accidental hypnosis. And the accidental hypnosis would just be the suggestion that it might work. It's sort of a placebo effect on steroids.
One of the tricks of being a hypnotist is if you want to do it professionally you need to get an office and wear a suit and you have professional furniture and even put your diploma on the wall because if somebody walks into that environment
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and it looks all professional and somebody spent money on it and there's a diploma, they will get hypnotized much more easily than if it was just your neighbor Bob. Hey Bob, I hear you're a hypnotist. Yeah, just sit on this dining room table and I'll hypnotize you. That would still work if Bob is good at it. But we were trained that you should make it look like it'll work because it makes it easie…
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