Sokobedy’s Reviews > Tricks of the Mind > Status Update

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In response to all the other Questions, she naturally shifted her gaze to find the information she was looking i()r. Yet the students remembered they had seen the exact opposite, purely because of their expectation.177

One person suggested that she had not been able to keep eye-contact when she had lied, whereas she had kept eye-contact for all the other answers. I asked the rest of the group if they agreed with that theory, and there was general approval. In reality, as I then explained, the time she lied was the only occasion I hat she kept eye-contact. In response to all the other Questions,

How ingrained this common misunderstanding is hit home 10 me after a hypnosis show one evening. I sat a student in front of I he audience, which had remained for a question and answer session, and asked her a few questions about her day. I told her 10 lie once but to try not to give away on which occasion she had lied. I picked out the lie and asked the audience what she had done differently.

"When you wake up, you won't be able to remember your
name. Just like all of those things that you try to remember
but find impossible; all of those things that are right on the tip
of your tongue but just get further and further away the more
you try to remember them. In the same way that you forget a
tune or a name, you will have no recollection of your name
when you awake."

"Students are asked to watch a film involving
a car accident. They are then asked, 'How fast do you think the car
was going when it passed the barn?' or 'How fast was the white
sports car travelling when it hit the bus?' In fact there was no barn,
and the car was not white. In formulating their answers, many of the
students will report afterwards remembering a white sports car or
a barn featuring in the film."

"Pain is famously exaggerated by worry and drastically reduced by the placebo effect,"

" Psychologists were asked to predict the results [of the Milgram experiment], and they guessed that one-tenth of 1 per cent of subjects would continue with the experiment to this point The extraordinary result, which has been sustained through re-creations of the test, is that around 60 per cent of people will go as far as to deliver the lethal shock.

"A hypnotist was having problems one night with his subjects. To remedy the situation, he whispered off-mic to the most extrovert guy on stage, 'Play along and I'll give you fifty quid after the show'. The subject decided to act the part for the cash and lifted the show immensely. At the end of the act, the hypnotist made him go to sleep and said "When you wake up, you will believe that I owe you fifty pounds"

" However, as he left, he turned to the family and
said, 'Of course he wets the bed; he's just a baby nine-year-old. I'm
sure a big grown-up ten-year-old wouldn't do that.' The result was
that the child stopped wetting the bed on his tenth birthday, the idea
being that he wanted to be seen as a grown-up. "