Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/720

648 started, they work out their proper results with almost fatal precision.

Turning now from the theory underlying these phenomena to the actual facts, we may say that heightened suggestibility is found under three chief groups of circumstances. First, it is found in sleep occasionally, and more frequently in the states akin to sleep termed hypnotic. Second, it is sometimes found as one of the symptoms produced by certain drugs. As we suppose these symptoms to be due to poisons circulating in the blood, the type is termed toxæmic suggestibility, from two Greek words meaning blood poison. In the last place, heightened suggestibility is found as a spontaneous phenomenon for which no reason can be given. This is called idiopathic suggestibility.

Of these three forms, hypnotic suggestibility is the best known and for many reasons the most interesting. Dreams, as I have already pointed out (February number), are largely due to suggestions given in sleep. A higher degree of suggestibility is sometimes found in normal sleep. A friend of mine told me that, when a boy, he had a schoolmate who became highly suggestible whenever he was slightly disturbed in sleep. Without awaking, he would become partly conscious and would do everything, no matter how preposterous, which the mischievous ingenuity of the boys could suggest. In hypnotic states suggestibility is so constantly found that some propose to regard it as an essential characteristic. Let me give a few illustrations of its varying forms. T B is a laborer, twenty-three years of age, neurotic, intemperate, easily hypnotized. His muscles are entirely at my command. I can stiffen a finger or an arm by a word so that he can not bend it. I can even contract one set of muscles while leaving the opposite set under his control. I bring his hands together, place the tips of his fingers in contact, and tell him he can not separate them. The systems of muscles necessary to hold them together are strongly innervated, while those that pull them apart are left under his control; he struggles in vain to part them, and his struggles are such as could not be easily imitated voluntarily. I can control his sensations in the same way. I can abolish his sensations of pain, of touch, of sight, and of hearing. I tell him he will feel in his right hand what I do to his left; I then put a lighted match to his left hand and it remains at rest, while the right jerks violently about in its efforts to escape from the fire. I tell him he is blind, and he is—deaf, and he can hear nothing. I tell him he can not see or hear such a man, and he acts as if he were unconscious of his presence. I can create hallucinations of all the senses also.

The limitations of suggestibility are even more interesting. R is a college graduate and is now a student of divinity.