Historical Experiments on Hypnosis and Unconscious States
conscious; others, as a type of psychological regression, a profound form of physical and cognitive relaxation, a condition of greater suggestibility, a type of dissociation, etc. Many are interested in identifying the neural bases of hypnotic experiences, others warn against significant differences in theoretical approach and research results. Whatever definition we want to give to hypnosis and whatever approach we want to use for it, it is however indisputable that it has to do with the unconscious: the hypnotic state implies decreased vigilance and suggestibility towards the hypnotist. Charcot was able to induce clamorous hysterical crises in his patients which he was then able, always through hypnosis, to neutralize. Even without going into the therapeutic field, anyone who has practiced or attended a genuine hypnotic improvisation show will have realized how hypnosis allows, at least in certain subjects, a temporary modification and rewriting of deep regions of the unconscious, altering not only behaviors resulting from one's education, but also perceptual mechanisms to which one's consciousness has never had access. Under hypnosis it is possible to access regions of the personal, atavistic and collective unconscious normally precluded. An emblematic case is that of hypnotic sleep induced at a distance, which constitutes a persistent anomaly in the History of Science. The observation that a certain area of the subconscious can be influenced independently of physical distance, dates back to the dawn of modern psychology, that is, from the first works of Pierre Janet. Among these are well known and documented the works on hypnotic sleep operated on Madame B. by Dr. Gibert dating back to 1882. Janet carried out numerous double-blind experiments observing Dr. Gibert put Madame B. into hypnotic sleep at a distance of two thirds of a mile at a time suggested by a third person and therefore not even known to Janet. Similar to Janet's experiments were those of the director of the Como psychiatric hospital Ferdinando Cazzamalli. In the early twenties, the psychiatrist had placed a subject capable of falling into a deep hypnotic sleep thanks to verbal suggestion. About half a meter from the experimenter's head, he had then placed a radio receiver that was connected to headphones that the observer held outside the cage. The receiver, as long as the subject remained awake, did not seem to receive any signal and the headphones emitted only weak rustling background noise; when instead the subject entered a state of hypnotic sleep and, under the action of suggestion, began to have hallucinations, various kinds of noises could be heard in the headphones such as discontinuous whistles, loud creaking, undoubted signs of the formation of radio waves inside the cage. These experiments, performed with Eugenio Gnesutta on a series of subjects led him to conclude that during processes with strong emotional tonality such as in the case of hypnotic hallucinations, the human brain radiates electromagnetic energy in the surrounding space in the form of aperiodic radio waves. This experiment, which was then perfected in subsequent years, with better and more sophisticated equipment led to the formulation of what Cazzamalli indicated as psychoradiant reflex, that is, an intense electromagnetic radiation of the brain activated completely involuntarily in states of strong emotionality or hypnotic sleep. Cazzamalli's experiments constituted the starting point of a Russian research group led by Leonid Vasiljev and established in 1926. Vasiljev, based on the encouraging results of the psychiatrist, supposed he could demonstrate an electromagnetic theory of telepathy. However, following years of experimentation, he ended up demonstrating a non-electromagnetic component in telepathic transmission. The Leningrad group, after finding two subjects particularly facilitated in falling into hypnotic states, concentrated on three types of mental suggestion experiments that were to occur during the subject's hypnotic sleep: