Steve Murray interviewed by Emma Taylor on October 25, 1995 "Even if you just sit there, and don't have a clue what you're doing, then you probably will get hypnotized." Steve Murray is an advocate of Computer Aided Self Hypnosis (CASH). Tripod: Can you explain, briefly, how Computer-Aided Self-Hypnosis works? SM: It's actually very simple. It basically uses a thing called the hypnospiral effect, I've actually got it on the computer screen at the moment. It draws concentric rectangles -- it draws a rectangle on the edge of the screen, and it draws rectangles inside that. And it creates a thing like a tunnel effect, because it'll draw them going in towards the center of the screen, then it erases them again, from the outside. So you have a tunnel effect, with black rectangles flying out into the distance, and then blue rectangles flying out into the distance, and it actually tricks the brain. Your brain can't tell the difference between the tunnel effect, and just seeing rectangles being drawn (and it also looks like a pyramid coming out at you) and what that does is that the left-hand side of the brain often says, "I can't handle this," and just focuses on the center of the screen. Then you flash up words in the center of the screen, timed to coincide with a tone that is going "beep, beep, beep," and there is a very, very strong influence on your subconscious mind to focus on those words. Tripod: How long does all this take? SM: It depends on the setting, but normally I just use it for five or six minutes. It uses hypnotic induction, which is just words saying, "relax, calm, deeper and deeper, deeper into trance, relax, calm, slow." And that's timed, and the tone gradually slows down, which provides another automatic trance-deepener, so even if you just sit there, and don't have a clue what you're doing, then you probably will get hypnotized. Tripod: Even if you've never been hypnotized before? SM: Yes and no. The trouble with hypnosis is that people think that you can just sit down and do it without knowing what you're doing, but the trouble is, that if they've never been hypnotized, then they're not going to know. It doesn't actually feel very different from being awake. It's a different state, it's not like sleep, and it's not like being manipulated by somebody. Most people don't really know how deep they're in, and that worry, of not knowing how deep they're in, actually stops them from getting the benefits out of it. But I do actually encourage people to get hypnotized first of all, by a hypnotherapist, so they know what it feels like. Then when they do it themselves, they feel confident, they know what's going on. Tripod: Is it dangerous to hypnotize yourself? What if you can't get yourself out of the trance? SM: There's a danger with anything. With self-hypnosis, if you're sitting down in your own armchair, if you end up not coming out of it, you are likely to just wake up, as if you're coming out of a sleep. The danger is if people are using hypnosis in places they shouldn't be, like in public places -- that's not a good idea. Overall, it's no more dangerous, I would say, than driving a car. In fact, driving a car is actually far more dangerous than hypnosis. If you're going to ban something because of that, they should have banned the motor car years ago. "...I'd be wary of putting that much information in my brain..." Tripod: I've heard that when someone is hypnotized, they wouldn't do anything more than what they would normally do when drunk. SM: I've heard it. I don't believe a word of it to be honest. I think you can make people do things quite easily against their will. I think that argument is being propagated to discourage people from trying hypnosis. There is stray evidence of government experiments with hypnosis, actually conducting what are called "terminal experiments" -- where the subject actually dies. There's evidence of CIA documents, where they wrote to this American doctor, asking him if he would conduct these experiments, and he wrote back saying that he would do it for free. There's also narco-hypnosis, where if you drug somebody with enough barbiturates or similar drugs, you can hypnotize someone who doesn't want to be hypnotized at all -- and you can then re-hypnotize. It's all well-documented in official government files, but it's not something you hear people talking about too much, because they don't want people to try it. Tripod: If it's so well documented and effective, then why don't more people use it? Speed-reading under hypnosis for example -- you said that under hypnosis you can read 690,000 words a minute. SM: Well, the trouble with speed-reading, when you read 690,000 words a minute, is that you can't recall it verbatim, you just seem to know some of the answers afterwards. You can't regurgitate something you read verbatim. ... I encourage people to use it to review their own information, because if you don't review what you learned, you easily forget 80 percent of it with in 24 hours. If you can review it after ten minutes, an hour, a day, a month, you actually remember 75 percent of it permanently. It makes a colossal difference to how much you can actually learn in any year of academic studying, for example. But I'd be wary of putting that much information in my brain, when you don't know what you're reading or believing. ... Tripod: What about the health benefits of hypnosis? SM: Well, there's a great difference between the accepted, documented in journals, mainstream wisdom of what you can do with that, and what I think myself. What I think myself is if you use computer hypnosis, or any kind of hypnosis, to put yourself in a deep trance, it will boost your immune system. And actually, after suggestions of deep, true spiritual love, then your immune system just goes through the roof. You suddenly start thinking three times faster or articulating much better. You're able to sustain just about anything. You look different -- you're actually much more agile, physically much more alert -- there's a difference in the eyes. And generally you feel so much better. The difference is almost instantaneous after making that suggestion. I think people ought to do that. Frankly, however not that many people seem to take me up on it.