Now, before someone brings out the white coat:

I am not saying hypnosis is simply a casual conversation.

Attention, imagination, expectation, and subjective experience all play real roles.

What I am saying is that none of these phenomena need to become magic or mind control.

The absence of a mind-control button does not mean that powerful forms of influence do not exist.

People imagine the mind as a safe.

Find the right combination, and it opens.

I regret to inform you that the human brain is much closer to a room full of cats with conflicting opinions.

The cats fight over territory, hunger, stress, attention, and reasons that probably only they understand.

And then I watch my students argue about one person's induction versus another person's induction, repeating techniques without understanding the underlying structure.

Thinking we fully understand the human mind is a rather ambitious claim.

Almost as ambitious as understanding the meaning of life.

The earliest attempts to explain hypnotic phenomena were filled with interpretations that now seem strange to us.

When an explanation fails, humans often fall into the same temptation:

inventing a hidden agent behind the curtain.

It is easier to believe in a boogeyman with a swinging pocket watch than to accept that our own wills are constantly being shaped by ordinary forces—advertising, social pressure, environment, and relationships—that require no hypnosis at all.