Gypsy Hypnosis: Who It Doesn’t Affect at All
Everyone has heard of hypnosis, some have even experienced its effects.
This craft is skillfully mastered by gypsy women, who force very sensible people to part with considerable sums. Hypnologists say that almost anyone can be hypnotized. However, neurophysiologists think a little differently. Gypsy hypnosis is a special phenomenon, it is more similar to the methods used by fraudsters and swindlers than by professional hypnotists. In contrast to a real hypnosis session, the victim of gypsy fortune-tellers does not go into a deep trance, he is fully conscious, but under the influence of suggestion he retains only the appearance of meaningful actions. However, the power of gypsy suggestion is so great that a person will often not be able to remember either the details of communication or his own actions. Many argue whether the hypnotic abilities of gypsy women are an innate gift or an acquired skill. Apparently, the answer lies somewhere in between. The only thing that is obvious is that stupefiing people is a mechanism that has been worked out over the years, which is constantly being polished. If your daily task is to scam gullible citizens for money, then sooner or later you will succeed in this. Gypsy women always follow the same pattern. They find a suitable object in busy places and try to attract its attention with various tricks. If it is possible to establish contact with the object even for a short time, then there is a high probability that it will be subject to suggestion. Gypsy women know the psychology of a person well and catch his weak spots: “I see that you are in serious trouble, gild the pen and I will help you.” Who is at risk of becoming a victim of a Roma “divorce” in the first place? People are impressionable, labile, gullible, depressed, or simply confused. They are vulnerable and easier to disorient. Experience has shown that women are the most frequent victims of Roma women. Speaking about the mechanisms of gypsy hypnosis, doctor of medical sciences, psychologist Vladimir Malygin notes that fraudsters use suggestion to “turn off” the victim’s left hemisphere of the brain, which is responsible for critical perception of reality, thus increasing the load on the right hemisphere, which operates with non-verbal means of communication. In such a state, a person easily falls under external control. According to the study of physiologists (Ukhtomsky, Bernstein, Pavlov), in the human brain, in the process of suggestion, carried out through the channels of the sense organs, a focus of increased excitation is created – the so-called “dominant”, which has the property of suppressing other parts of the brain. It subjugates the entire brain, psyche, physiology, and ultimately human behavior in turn. Gypsy women hardly understand the intricacies of the functioning of the cerebral cortex, but intuitively do everything to dull the victim’s rational thinking. For these purposes, they use touching, stroking, a set of voice commands, often incomprehensible to the interlocutor. This monotony “overloads” a person’s brain and puts him in a daze. From that moment on, like a robot, he is able to execute any commands. This is how a 22-year-old MGIMO student suffered, from whom Roma lured $150,000 and jewelry worth at least $10,000 under the guise of “removing damage.” Moreover, the girl acted deliberately: she went to the bank, took out everything that was in her safe deposit box and took it out to the fraudsters. According to the bank’s employees, the client behaved quite adequately at that moment. It is extremely important for fraudsters to find a sore spot in order to then proceed to process the client. Volodymyr Damansky, a resident of Odessa, never thought that he would become a victim of gypsy hypnosis, and therefore boldly entered into a dialogue with them. However, when they informed him that “two black women were putting a curse on him,” he “froze.” It turns out that the words of the gypsies resonated with Damansky’s suspicions about the two obsessive relatives. Hardly realizing the situation, he reached into his wallet and carefully took out a five-hryvnia note, but the “fortune tellers” saw larger bills there. “Then I saw what was happening as if from the outside and began to feel like an indifferent, detached spectator who had left his own body,” the Odessa resident described his condition. Despite the fact that he tightly squeezed his wallet with his hands, the money seemed to slip through his fingers – in a moment several hundred hryvnias and 20 bucks were in the hands of the departing swindlers. According to sociological research, only a quarter of the world’s inhabitants do not succumb to hypnosis. The American psychiatrist Milton Erickson explained this by saying that hypnosis is a voluntary cooperation between two people, and if the person being influenced is extremely skeptical or actively resists the hypnotist, then the effect will most likely not take place. It is believed that except for skeptics, hypnosis does not take people who are accustomed to critically perceive reality, subject everything to scrupulous analysis and argue over the slightest trifle. Any doubt will nullify the efforts of the hypnotist. Such a person will certainly not allow a scammer to enter into prolonged contact with him and “confuse” his brains. A separate category of non-hypnotizable people is persons suffering from acute mental disorders, having mental retardation or being in a state of alcoholic or drug intoxication. Even if they want to, they will not be able to go into a trance, because their psyche is not able to process complex verbal and non-verbal images as required by the mechanism of hypnotic influence. Practice shows that the concept of “unhypnotizable” is very relative. There is a category of people who, being convinced of their non-hypnotizability, nevertheless entered a trance after a certain number of attempts. Hypnologist, Dmitry Dombrovsky, said that one of the visitors to his group sessions fell into a deep trance only at the 27th session. According to him, everything depends on both the hypnotherapist and the client’s ability to relax and concentrate. Some people wonder if a hypnotist can put a hypnotist into a trance, or if a gypsy fortune teller can hypnotize her colleague. They are the same people who are subject to the above properties. Much depends on their willingness to yield to suggestion and on the skill of the person who manipulates them. Hypnologist, Nikolai Grigoriev, decided to conduct an experiment and hypnosis gypsy women who worked near a car park. Everything that happened was recorded on a hidden camera. Surprisingly, the youngest of the women easily agreed to Grigoriev’s proposal. In the course of communication, she reluctantly admitted that Gypsies are also susceptible to suggestion. During the session, which took place right on the street, she dutifully followed the commands given to her by the hypnotist: she swayed lightly back and forth, raised her arms, and froze in that position. When Grigoriev began to feel the contents of her pockets, she could neither move nor scream. A recent study by scientists from Stanford University, published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, showed that hypnotic trance does not depend on a person’s ability to master the art of hypnosis, nor on the characteristics of the character and psyche of the suggestible. In the experiment, which involved 12 people who were unresponsive to hypnosis and 12 people who were hypnotized, the activity of three neural circuits was tracked using MRI. The first was responsible for self-awareness and introspection, the second for decision-making, and the third for evaluating and analyzing what was happening. It turned out that in those subjects who succumbed to hypnosis, the other two chains were activated after the first one, but in the representatives of the non-hypnotizable group, the simultaneous activation of all three chains failed. The conclusion of the scientists was as follows: hypnotic trance is possible only when all neural circuits interact, and therefore a positive response to suggestion depends not on the personality of a person, but on the peculiarities of the structure of his brain centers.