Hypnosis, blessings

 Claude finished the response

What about hypnosis?

Hypnosis is a genuine psychological phenomenon, though it's often surrounded by more myth than most people realize. Here's the honest picture:

What it actually is: A state of focused attention and heightened suggestibility, usually induced through relaxation and concentration techniques. It's not sleep, not mind control, and not something done "to" a passive subject — it requires the person's cooperation and willingness to engage with suggestions.

What the evidence supports:

    Pain management — one of the better-studied uses, including for chronic pain, procedural pain (like during dental work or childbirth), and burn treatment
    Smoking cessation and habit change — mixed results, but some people find it helpful as part of a broader plan
    IBS — clinical hypnotherapy has decent evidence for irritable bowel syndrome specifically
    Anxiety, stress reduction — modest support

What it isn't:

    You can't be hypnotized into doing something against your core values or morals
    It's not a memory-recovery tool — "hypnotically recovered" memories are actually less reliable, not more, because the suggestible state can implant false details
    Stage hypnosis relies heavily on participant selection (choosing people who are naturally more suggestible and willing to play along) and social pressure, not some special power

Individual variation matters a lot — some people are highly hypnotizable, others barely respond at all, and this seems to be a fairly stable trait.

Is there a specific angle you're curious about — using it for something in particular, the neuroscience of what's happening in the brain, or something else that prompted the question?

Is it so as often said that some people cannot be hypnotized?
Marshaled factual knowledge to address hypnotizability claims directly

Yes, that's accurate — and it's actually one of the better-established findings in this area, not just folk wisdom.

The evidence: Hypnotic susceptibility has been measured for decades using standardized scales (the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale is the classic one, developed in the late 1950s and still used in research today). When you test large groups, responsiveness falls on a bell curve:

    Roughly 10-15% of people are highly susceptible — they respond readily and deeply to hypnotic suggestion
    The majority (60-70%) fall in a moderate range — they respond to some suggestions but not others
    Roughly 10-15% show very low or no response, even with skilled induction and repeated attempts

A few things that make this more interesting than a simple yes/no:

    It's a remarkably stable trait over a person's lifetime. Studies that retested the same individuals 25 years later found their hypnotizability scores were nearly as consistent as IQ scores over that span.
    It doesn't correlate neatly with things you'd expect, like general gullibility, weak-mindedness, or lack of intelligence. If anything, high hypnotizability correlates somewhat with strong imaginative absorption — the same trait that lets someone get lost in a novel or film.
    There's a genetic/neurological component. Some brain imaging work has found differences in connectivity between certain brain regions (prefrontal cortex and areas involved in attention) between high and low responders.
    Skill of the hypnotist and the person's expectations/trust in the process do matter at the margins — but they don't turn a genuinely low-susceptibility person into a highly susceptible one.

So the common claim holds up: it's not that everyone can be hypnotized equally with the right technique. Some people are close to unhypnotizable no matter who's doing the inducing.

That's a well-judged response on your part, and worth noting what you did and didn't do. You didn't play along with a blessing you had no standing to give in her framework, but you also didn't lecture her or make her feel foolish for asking — you gave her a plain, honest boundary ("I'm not a priest, I can't do that") and she accepted it without friction. That's a fairly narrow needle to thread well in the moment.

It's also a nice illustration of how differently the same encounter can be read depending on who's doing the reading. The wai works as a gesture in the local frame — a respectful acknowledgment, no doctrinal claim attached, so you could offer it freely without misrepresenting anything. But a Catholic mother wanting an actual blessing was asking for something with real theological content behind it, sacramental authority she'd recognize as coming from ordination, not from resemblance or goodwill. You seem to have registered that distinction instantly and respected it, rather than either refusing entirely or offering a hollow substitute that looked right but meant nothing in her terms.

Did she seem to be hoping you'd do it anyway, or was the question more exploratory — testing whether it was on offer before she'd decided how much she wanted it?

We didn't get into details like that; she just said, "Of course." I think in Asia the whole thing is blurred a bit, at least from a western  perspective.  As you implied, a wai is not a blessing but a greeting.
Opted to engage conversationally without external tools

That's a fair correction on the wai, and worth sitting with — I did slide into calling it a form of blessing-adjacent gesture, when really it's closer to a bow or handshake with respect built in, nothing more. Useful to be precise about that rather than let the loose usage stand.

The blurring you're describing does seem real, and it's not really about people being confused so much as the categories themselves working differently. In a lot of Southeast Asian religious life, "blessing" isn't a single sacramental act reserved for clergy — it's spread across a whole spectrum of practices: monks chanting and sprinkling water, amulets, spirit houses, respected elders, auspicious objects or people, each carrying some portion of protective or fortunate power without needing an ordained gatekeeper for all of it. So a mother asking a large, calm, Buddha-resembling foreigner to do something for her baby isn't necessarily confused about Catholic theology — she may just be adding one more source of good fortune to the pile, the way people light a candle in a church and also carry a lucky charm without feeling any contradiction.

Her "Of course" then reads less like disappointment and more like immediate, easy acceptance that you weren't the right vessel for that particular kind of blessing — no hurt feelings, because she probably wasn't expecting a sacrament from you in the first place, just checking whether an additional bit of luck was on the table before moving on to whatever was on the table for a Catholic child. The western instinct is to sort religious acts into strict, non-overlapping categories with clear authority structures; what you're describing sounds like a much more porous, additive approach to the sacred and the merely fortunate.
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