Keep your eyes on the watch…
During the most recent SFWA Nebulas Conference I had the opportunity to speak with author Lawrence Schoen about hypnosis. One of the conference events is something called “office hours” during which authors, publishers, and other conference attendees share their time and expertise in scheduled fifteen-minute one-on-one conversations. Lawrence was offering to share his knowledge in regards to hypnosis, and I signed up out of curiosity, and because I already knew and liked Lawrence from last year’s SFWA conference in Pittsburgh, where he was my conference mentor.
Going into the conversation I knew very little about hypnosis. I knew that therapeutic hypnosis could be used for a variety of applications, everything from smoking cessation to wart removal, and also that some susceptibility to hypnosis might be related to dopamine levels in the brain, regulated by activity of the COMT gene. Lawrence confirmed the former and strongly disagreed with the latter, a position which appears to be backed by fairly recent scientific research (susceptibility to hypnosis appears to be unrelated to dopamine levels and the ability to focus attention).