Tag Archives: Hypnosis

Personal Reflections, Research

Please Participate in Our March Madness Research Study

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In 2017, I collaborated with Dr. Charles Palmer and Daniel Salois (now Dr. Daniel Salois) on a creative, one-of-a-kind research study evaluating and comparing the effectiveness of an educational intervention vs. a hypnotic induction transporting people to the future in for improving the accuracy of March Madness NCAA Basketball Tournament bracket picks. The results were stunning (but I can’t share them right now because I want to recruit anyone and everyone in the Missoula area to participate in our planned replication of this amazing study). The study has been approved by the University of Montana IRB.To participate, follow these instructions:1.      Email Marchmadnessresearch2023@gmail.com and say “Yes, I’m in!”2.      We will email you back a confirmation.3.      Upon arrival at the study location, you will be randomly assigned to one of two “March Madness Bracket Training” groups:a.      Hypnosis to enhance your natural intuitive powersb.      Educational information from a UM professor4.      All participants will meet in room 123 of the Phyllis J. Washington College of Education building at 7pm on Tuesday, 3/14/23. Enter on the East end of the building. From there, we’ll send you to a room for either the education or hypnosis intervention.5.      When you arrive in your room, you will fill out an informed consent form, a March Madness bracket, and complete a short questionnaire. 6.      Then you will participate in either they educational or hypnosis training.7.      After the training, you will complete another bracket and short questionnaire8.      You will leave your completed packet and your brackets with the researchers; they will be uploaded into the ESPN Tournament Challenge website using the “Team Name” you provide. If you bring a device, we will provide a password so you can upload your own selections into the ESPN system.9.      You will receive information at the “Training” on how to login and track your bracket. On or around April 15, we will post a summary of the research results at: https://johnsommersflanagan.com/ Once again, to sign up for this research project, email: Marchmadnessresearch2023@gmail.com I’m posting this because we’re trying to recruit as many participants as possible. If you live near Missoula, please consider participating. If you know someone who might be interested, please share this with them.  Thanks for reading and have a fabulous day.John S-F 

Happiness, Research, Writing

Research is Hard: Procrastination is Easy

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Before and after a quick trip to NYC (see the photo), I’m teaching the research class in our Department of Counseling this year. This leads me to re-affirm a conclusion I reached long ago: Research is hard.

Research is hard for many reasons, not the least of which is that scientific language can look and feel opaque. If you don’t know the terminology, it’s easy to miss the point. Even worse, it’s easy to dismiss the point, just because the language feels different. I do that all the time. When I come upon terminology that I don’t recognize, one of my common responses is to be annoyed at the jargon and consequently dismiss the content. As my sister Peggy might have said, that’s like “throwing the baby out with the bathtub.”  

Teaching research to Master’s students who want to practice counseling and see research as a bothersome requirement is especially hard. It doesn’t help that my mastery of research design and statistics and qualitative methods is limited. Nevertheless, I’ve thrown myself into the teaching of research this semester; that’s a good thing, because it means I’m learning.

This week I shared a series of audio recordings of a woman bereaved by the suicide of her former husband. The content and affect in the recordings are incredible. Together, we all listened to the woman’s voice, intermittently cracking with pain and grief. We listened to each excerpt twice, pulling out meaning units and then building a theory around our observations and the content. More on the results from that in another blog.

During the class before, I got several volunteers, hypnotized them, and then used a single-case design to evaluate whether my hypnotic interventions improved or adversely affected their physical performance on a coin-tossing task. The results? Sort of and maybe. Before that, I gave them fake math quizzes (to evaluate math anxiety). I also used graphology and palmistry to conduct personality assessments and make behavioral and life predictions. I had written the names of four (out of 24 students) who would volunteer for the graphology and palmistry activities, placed them in an envelope, and got ¾ correct. Am I psychic? Nope. But I do know the basic rule of behavioral prediction: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

Today is Friday, which means I don’t have many appointments, which means I’m working on some long overdue research reports. Two different happiness projects are burning a hole in my metaphorical research pocket. The first is a write-up of a short 2.5-hour happiness workshop on counseling students’ health and wellness. As it turns out, compared with the control group, students who completed the happiness workshop immediately and significantly had lower scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (p = .006). Even better, after 6-months, up to 81% of the participants believed they were still experiencing benefits from the workshop on at least one outcome variable (i.e., mindfulness). The point of writing this up is to emphasize that even brief workshops on evidence-based happiness interventions can have lasting positive effects on graduate students in counseling.

Given that I’m on the cusp of writing up these workshop results, along with a second study of the outcomes of a semester-long happiness course, I’m stopping here so I can get back to work. Not surprisingly, as I mentioned in the beginning of this blog, research is hard; that means it’s much easier for me to write this blog than it is to force myself to do the work I need to do to get these studies published.

As my sister Peggy used to say, I need to stop procrastinating and “put my shoulder to the grindstone.”

Cool Counseling, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Personal Reflections

Counseling Theories — Week One — Hypnosis for Warts

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Theories III Photo

Being holed up in our passive solar Absarokee house made an interesting venue for blasting off this semester’s University of Montana Counseling Theories class. I’m mentioning passive solar not to brag (although Rita did design an awesome set-up for keeping us warm in the winter and cool in the summer using south-facing windows and thermal mass), but to give you a glimpse of our temperature-related passivity: we have no working parts (as in air conditioning). And I’m mentioning holed up because we’re in a stage 1 air pollution alert from California smoke and consequently weren’t able to use our usual manual air conditioning system (opening up the windows in the night to cool off the house). Our need to keep the windows shut created a warmer than typical room temperature and, based on my post-lecture assessment of the armpits of my bright yellow shirt, yesterday just might have been my sweatiest class since 1988, when I was teaching at the University of Portland, and started sweating so much during an Intro Psych class that my glasses fogged up. In case you didn’t already know this about me, I’m an excellent sweater. You haven’t seen sweat until you’ve seen my sweat. Top-notch. The sort of sweating most people only dream about. I’d rate myself a sweating 10.

Aside from my sweating—which I’m guessing you’ve had enough of at this point—the students were pretty darn fantastic. Attendance was virtually perfect, which, given that everything was virtual, exceeded my expectations.

Speaking of expectations, because I’m teaching online via Zoom, one thing I’m adding to the course are a few pre-recorded videos. Yesterday’s pre-recorded video featured me telling my famous “Hypnosis for Warts” story. My goal with the pre-recorded video—aside from letting my students see me and my yellow shirt in a less sweaty condition—was to break up the powerpoints. I could have told the story live, but instead, I clicked out of the powerpoints, told my students we were going to watch a video, and then showed a video of myself . . . telling a story I could have been telling live. I thought I was hilarious. However, mostly, the sea of 55 Hollywood Squares faces just stared into the sea of virtual reality, and so I couldn’t see whether the students appreciated my pre-recorded video of myself teaching strategy. I know I’ve got too many “seas” in that preceding sentence, but redundancy happens. Really, it does. I’m totally serious about redundancy.

Back to expectations . . .

One of Michael Lambert’s four common factors in counseling and psychotherapy is expectancy. He estimated that, in general, expectation accounts for about 15% of the variation in treatment outcomes. But, of course, treatment outcomes are always contextual and always variable and always unique, and so, as in the case of “Hypnosis for Warts,” sometimes the outcome may be a product of a different combination or proportion of therapeutic ingredients. If you watch the video, consider these questions:

  • What do you think “happened” in the counseling office with the 11-year-old boy to cause his eight warts to disappear?
  • Do you think the therapeutic ingredients that helped the boy get rid of his warts were limited to Lambert’s extratherapeutic factors, relationship factors, technical factors, and expectancy factors (his four big common factors) . . . or might something else completely different have been operating?
  • What proportion of factors do you suppose contributed to the positive outcome? For example, might there have been 50% expectancy, instead of 15%?

Here’s the video link to the Wart story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FR4PyTcsKw

That’s about all I’ve got to share for today. However, if you happen to know of some nice 1-5 minute theories-related video clips that I can share with my students, please pass them on. I’d be especially interested if you happen to have video clips of me, but relevant videos of other people would be nice too. Haha. Just joking. Please DON’T send video clips of me. My students and I—we already have far too much of the JSF video scene.

Be well,

John SF

Personal Reflections, Politics, Research, Writing

That time when I conducted a scientific research study designed to test the effectiveness of using hypnosis to break down the space-time continuum and transport 18 people to the future so they could fill-out perfect March Madness brackets.

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Flower in Bricks

You can probably tell by the title of this post that I’m pretty stoked about scientific research right now.

I typically don’t do much empirical research. That’s why it was a surprise to me and my colleagues that, about six weeks ago, I spontaneously developed a research idea, dropped nearly everything else I was doing, and had amazing fun conducting my first ever March Madness bracket research project.

My research experience included a roller coaster of surprises.

I somehow convinced a professor from the Health and Human Performance department at the University of Montana to collaborate with me on a ridiculous study on a ridiculously short timeline.

My university IRB approved our proposal. Seriously. I submitted a proposal that involved me hypnotizing volunteer participants to transport them into the future to make their March Madness bracket selections. Then they approved it in six days. How cool is that?

I managed to network my way onto ESPN radio (where we called the study ESP on ESPN; thanks Lauren and Arianna) and onto the Billings, MT CBS affiliate (thanks Dan).

And, this is the teaser: with only 36 participants, the results were significant at the p < .001 level.

Damn. Now you know. Scientific research is so cool.

Of course, there’s a back-story. While you’re waiting in anticipation to learn about those p < .001 results, you really need to hear this back-story.

Several years ago, while on a 90-minute car ride back from Trapper Creek Job Corps to Missoula, my counseling interns asked me if I could hypnotize someone and take them back in time so they could recall something that happened to them in a previous life. I thought the question was silly and the answer was simple.

“Absolutely yes.” I said, “Of course I could do that.”

Questions followed.

My answers included a ramble about not really believing in past lives and not really thinking that past life hypnotic regression was ethical. But still, I said, “If someone is hypnotizable, then, I’m sure I could get them into a trance and at least make them think they went back to a previous life and retrieved a few memories. No problem.”

Have you ever noticed that once you start to brag, it’s hard to stop. That’s what happened next, for several years.

Somewhat later in another conversation, I started exaggerating bigly. I decided to extend my imaginary prowess into a fool-proof strategy for generating a perfect March Madness bracket. I said something about, “Brains being amazing and that you can suddenly pay attention to the big toe on your right foot and, at nearly the same time, project yourself not only back into your 7-year-old self, but forward in time into the future. That being the case,” I waxed, “it’s pretty obvious that I could hypnotize people, break down the space-time continuum, and take them to a future where all the March Madness basketball games had been played and therefore, they could just copy down the winners and create a perfect March Madness bracket.”

Through this process, I would turn a one-in-a-trillion possibility into absolute certainty.

I enjoyed bragging about my imaginary scenario for several years. That is, until this year, when, I decided that if I was set on bragging bigly, I should also be willing to put my science where my mouth is (or something like that). It was time to test my hypnosis-space-time-continuum hypothesis using the scientific method.

We designed a pre-test, post-test experimental design with random assignment to three conditions.

Condition 1: Education. Participants would receive about 20 minutes of education on statistics relevant to making March Madness bracket picks. My colleague, Dr. Charles Palmer, showed powerpoint slides and provided insights about the statistical probabilities of 12s beating 5s and 9s beating 8s, and “Blue Blood” conferences.

Condition 2: Progressive Muscle Relaxation. The plan was for Daniel Salois, one of my graduate students and an immensely good sport, to do 20 minutes of progressive muscle relaxation with this group.

Condition 3: Hypnosis. I would use a hypnotic induction, a deepening procedure, and then project participants into the future. Instead of having everyone fill out their brackets while in trance, I decided to use a post-hypnotic suggestion. As soon as they heard me clap twice, they would immediately recall the tournament game outcomes and then fill out their brackets perfectly.

Unfortunately, on short notice we only recruited 36 participants. To give ourselves a chance to obtain statistical significance, we dumped the progressive muscle relaxation condition, and just had the EDUCATION and HYPNOSIS conditions go head to head in a winner-take-all battle.

Both groups followed the same basic protocol. Upon arrival at the College of Education, they were randomly assigned to one of two rooms (Charlie or me). When the got to their room, they signed the informed consent, and immediately filled out a bracket along with a confidence rating. Then they received either the EDUCATION or HYPNOSIS training. After their respective trainings, they filled out a second bracket, along with another confidence rating.

We hypothesized that both groups would report an increase in confidence, but that only the EDUCATION group (but not the HYPNOSIS group) would show a statistically significant improvement in bracket-picking accuracy. We based our hypotheses on the fact that although real education should help, there’s no evidence that anyone can use hypnosis to transport themselves to the future. We viewed the HYPNOSIS condition as essentially equivalent to raising false hopes without providing help that had any substance.

IMHO, the results were stunning.

We were dead on about the EDUCATION group. Those participants significantly increased their confidence; they also improved their bracket scores (we used the online ESPN scoring system where participants can obtain up to a maximum of 320 points for each round; this means participants got 10 points for every correct pick in the first round, with their potential points doubling in every round, and concluding with 320 points if they correctly picked the University of North Carolina to win the tournament).

Then there was the HYPNOSIS group.

HYPNOSIS participants experienced a small but nonsignificant increase in their confidence. . . but they totally tanked their predictions. We had a participant who picked Creighton to win it all. We had one bracket that had Virginia Tech vs. Oklahoma State in the final. We had another person who listed a final score in the championship game of 34-23. When I shared these results to our research class, I said, “The HYPNOSIS participants totally sucked. They did so bad that I think they couldn’t have done any worse if we had hit them all on the head with a 2 x 4 and given them concussions and then had them fill out their brackets.”

So what happened? Why did the HYPNOSIS group perform so badly?

When told of the outcome, one student who had participated offered her explanation, “I believe it. I don’t know what happened, but after the hypnosis, I totally forgot about anything I knew, and just wrote down whatever team names popped into my head.”

My interpretation: Most of the people in the HYPNOSIS group completely abandoned rational and logical thought. They decided that whatever thoughts that happened to come into their minds were true and right.

It’s probably too much of a stretch to link this to politics, but it’s hard not to speculate. It’s possible that candidates from both parties are able, from time to time, to use charisma and bold claims to get their supporters to let go of logic and rational thought, and instead, embrace a fantastical future.

Another faculty member in our department offered an alternative explanation. She recalled the old Yerkes-Dodson law. This “law” in psychology predicts that optimal arousal (or stress) is linked to optimal performance. In contrast, too much arousal or too little arousal impairs performance. She theorized that perhaps the hypnosis participants had become too relaxed; they were so under-aroused that they couldn’t perform.

It seems clear that the hypnosis did something. But what? It wasn’t a helpful trip to the future. Some friends suggested that maybe they went to the wrong year. Others have mocked me for being a bragger who couldn’t really use hypnosis to break down the space-time continuum.

What do you think? Do you have any potential explanations you’d like to offer? I’d love to hear them. And, if you have any ideas of which scientific journal to submit our manuscript to, we’d love to hear that as well.