Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

On the Distinction between True and False Visions
under hypnosis less reliable than those recalled without it. A
standard medical school text (Harold I. Kaplan, Comprehensive
Textbook of Psychiatry, 1989) warns of 'a high likelihood that the
beliefs of the hypnotist will be communicated to the patient and
incorporated into what the patient believes to be memories, often
with strong conviction'. So the fact that, when hypnotized, people
sometimes relate alien abduction stories carries little weight.
There's a danger that subjects are - at least on some matters - so
eager to please the hypnotist that they sometimes respond to
subtle cues of which even the hypnotist is unaware.
In a study by Alvin Lawson of California State University, Long
Beach, eight subjects, pre-screened to eliminate UFO buffs, were
hypnotized by a physician and informed that they had been
abducted, brought to a spaceship and examined. With no further
prompting, they were asked to describe the experience. Their
accounts, most of which were easily elicited, were almost indistinguishable
from the accounts that self-described abductees present.
True, Lawson had cued his subjects briefly and directly; but in
many cases the therapists who routinely deal with alien abductions
cue their subjects, some in great detail, others more subtly and
indirectly.
The psychiatrist George Ganaway (as related by Lawrence
Wright) once proposed to a highly suggestible patient under
hypnosis that five hours were missing from her memory of a
certain day. When he mentioned a bright light overhead, she
promptly told him about UFOs and aliens. When he insisted she
had been experimented on, a detailed abduction story emerged.
But when she came out of the trance, and examined a video of the
session, she recognized that something like a dream had been
caught surfacing. Over the next year, though, she repeatedly
flashed back to the dream material.
The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus
has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to
believe they saw something they didn't. In a typical experiment,
subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being
questioned about what they saw, they're casually given false
information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to,
although there wasn't one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully
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