ABSTRACT
The highly hypnotizable person is ‘better at hypnosis’ than is the low or medium hypnotizable person. But this does not mean that all high hypnotizables have the same experience or show the same behaviour during hypnosis. Let’s turn to swimming to better appreciate the issue we seek to address in this chapter. Good swimmers are ‘better at swimming’ than are poor swimmers. Whereas poor swimmers are probably equally poor at freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly, good swimmers are unlikely to be equally good at each of those styles and even when excellent at one they are unlikely to be equally good over 100, 400, or 1500 metres because they will have different natural abilities and preferences and will have been exposed to different training programmes. Let’s turn back to hypnotizability and hypnosis. Highs are better at hypnosis than lows. Whereas lows are probably equally unresponsive to suggestions for visual hallucination, age regression, anaesthesia, and posthypnotic amnesia, highs are unlikely to be equally responsive to each of those suggestions and even when strongly responsive to them, different highs are unlikely to bring the same processes to bear on achieving those strong responses.
