Reaction-time and attention in the hypnotic state / [G. Stanley Hall].

  • Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley), 1844-1924.
Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Reaction-time and attention in the hypnotic state / [G. Stanley Hall]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    /3 REACTION-TIME AND ATTENTION IN THE HYPNOTIC STATE. [Reprinted from Mind: a Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. No. XXX.] In the autumn of 1881, a series of public exhibitions was given in Boston by an itinerant “ mesmeriser ” who was attended from city to city by a remarkable hypnotic subject whom we will designate as A. B. He was about 30 years of age, an extreme blonde, with narrow and retreating chin and protuberant brows, a cabinetmaker by trade, of fair intelligence and physical development, the head of a small family, and, he said, prone to sleep-walking from boyhood. Physicians and others elsewhere by whom he had been manipulated, had directed their attention almost solely to the determination or demonstration of the reality of his abnormal state, and had repeatedly used to this end such drastic tests as in the normal state cause considerable pain. Pistols had been discharged near his ear, sharp instruments thrust into his body, caustic substances applied to the sensi- tive parts of the mouth and nostrils, and strong electric shocks given through various parts of his body, so that it was with difficulty and only by promising to abstain from everything painful and unpleasant, by allowing him to bring a friend to watch me, and by a small pecuniary compensa- tion, that he was induced to visit the laboratory at appointed intervals. Dr. James Braid, as is well known, explained most of the phenomena to which he gave the name of hypnotism as due, not to odic or mesmeric or vital force or to any in- fluence which came from without or passed beyond the limits of the human body, but only to an unusual degree of “ concentration of Attention ” variously directed by sug- gestions of many kinds. Although confessedly not a psy- chologist, he believed he had succeeded in showing that nothing transcendent but only subjective phenomena were involved, and quotes approvingly a statement describing his work in this field as a study of the “ pathology of attention ”. The important researches of Heidenhain in Germany, though perhaps fortunately conducted without full under- standing of Braid’s results, and though fruitful and sug- gestive in the highest degree, were not long continued after Burger demonstrated that all his effects upon hypnotic subjects might be produced by suggestion without any