AWAKENED BY HYPNOSIS
extracts from an article about V.L. Raikov
3000 people have taken part in the experiments of the Moscow Laboratory for Study of the Reserve Capacities of the Humab Brain. The aim of the experiments, conducted by Dr. Raikov, the psychoterapist, is to determine how well people can be taught under hypnosis.
If your answer to the question, Do you play the violin? is: I dont know. I never tried, you cannot be accused of hedging. That is the opinion of Dr. Raikov, who believes that the service of art is not the lot of the chosen alone.
His approach impresses many, for all of us secretly think that we are gifted. If our talent has not blossomed, we blame it on the circumstances.
However, Dr. Raikov does not claim that there is a latent Rembrandt or Beethoven in each of us. What he says is that every person has potential artistic gifts which in many remain undeveloped, blocked. Here, he says, hypnosis can play the remarkable role of sesame. Not only does it reveal talent, but it can also develop it. That is what Dr. Raikovs laboratory has been doing for about 15 years now, and the results obtained confirm his belief.
In the complex mosaic pattern of human psychology, the interrelations between subconscious and conscious processes are very meaningful, he says. This is particularly true in the state of deep hypnosis, for in itself this state is - from the viewpoint of the hypnotized persons fully awake ego - the subconscious.
What is hypnosis?
It is hard to say in a few words, says Dr. Raikov. But I would risk putting it this way: Hypnosis is the state of transformed consciousness in which a persons psychophysiological reactions are controlled from the outside.
Induction, as the specialists say, is a normal property of human individuality. According to medical statistics, about 90 per cent of the people can be hypnotized, but to different degrees, depending on the type of the nervous system. The power of hypnotic induction is due largerly to the fact that it enters the persons consciousness not from the front entrance, but by skirting the main guard - critical analysis.
It is this quality of hypnosis that Dr. Raikov uses in his experiments. For instance, inducing the image of an eminent musician or of an artist in stidents of a musical conservatory or an art school will sharply improve their technique. Really sensational results were obtained in developing the gift for drawing. Practically everyone of those who visited Dr. Raikovs laboratory began to draw better after a few sessions of hypnosis, even if a person had never drawn before. More important still, posthypnotic inertia - the desire to draw - lingered on for several days after the session.
It goes without saying that the degree of improvement depends on how much the person is potentially gifted and, naturally, how completely he or she submits to hypnosis, says Dr. Raikov.
Does the particular image induced in the person have any significance? Not at all, says Dr. Raikov. I can make people believe they are Raphael, Van Gogh or Repin, and if they cannot draw, there is no essential difference. The important thing is that the induction revives their concrete ideas of the personality induced. At the moment of hypnosis these ideas become, as it were, the persons own consciousness.
The introduction of a concrete image under hypnosis is only an anxiliary element, says Dr. Raikov. He could limit himself to the formula: You draw well! You are an artist! The main point is the induction of the given quality.
Researchers in the United States, Japan, Switzerland and other countries are all interested in the mysterious role played by hypnosis in fortifying creative capacities. Many now cite the similarity between the hypnotic state and the state of creativity. The point is even made that hypnosis is a form of creative state.
Dr. Raikovs experiments partly support this statement. In any case, all the young people occasionally interviewed in his laboratory admitted that under hypnosis they saw the world around them in an absolutely new way. Their level of perception had changed.
The experiment has convinced me that training in the arts can be done not only rationally, by teaching the pupil a number of technical habits at the beginning, but also emotionally-intuitively, by cultivating the capacity for emotional tension, focusing a persons entire will upon the creative act, says Dr. Raikov. But does this mean that hypnosis and training under hypnosis are suited to emotional and creative personalities only?
Strange as it may seem, it works best with technocrates. Student physicists and mathematicians proved to be the most capable learners! Calculating rationalists.
A paradox? Not at all.
The reason is their greater capacity for abstraction, a longer attention span, better concentration, their ability to direct all their psychic functions to the maximum in one direction - toward the fulfillment of the goal set, says Dr. Raikov. In hypnosis these qualities are sharpened many times over.
What other gifts except of art can be developed through hypnosis?
Theoretically, almost everything that submits to the method of induction. For instance, you can improve memory markedly. The experiments we conducted in one of the Volgograd research institutes showed that induction does much to fortify the process of scientific thinking.
Is the method applicable to sports?
Probably. But would that be ethical? In sports people are testing their capacity to mobilize the reserves of their minds and bodies to the maximum.