Because the law sees hypnosis as ‘sleep’ could this lead to some real Svengali stuff?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8370674.stm
Rock star Peter Buck used automatism as a defence in court. In court he has been found not guilty of assault on airline cabin crew and to be suffering from “non-insane automatism”, basically his mind is not in control of his body – although clearly something was.
In the UK the law considers hypnosis to be a form of induced “sleep” [1952 Hypnotism Act]. If that’s true then if someone commits a crime under hypnosis does that mean that they are also in a state of non-insane automatism?
The Svengali in me is wondering if it would then be possible to persuade someone to do something and both of us could claim neither was in control?
One thing is for sure. If his actions had been decided to be caused by alcohol or drugs or medicine [legal drugs such as anti-depressants which have been known to cause violent mood swings ] neither the Brewery, dealer or Doctor would be held responsible.
I look forward to your comments on this one.
Hi Jon,
More recently in the news is this tragic case of Automatism.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8364393.stm
I often watch Law & Order with my son and “temporary insanity” is a favourite last resort defence ploy. It seems to me that “non-insane automatism” is a vast improvement on that because a defendant wouldn’t have to choose between jail or psychiatric treatment. He or she could walk free.
Something neuroscience has shown only recently is that our behavioural decisions are made outside conscious awareness and then we become aware of what we’ve decided (hope that makes sense, I’m trying to avoid using the word ‘unconscious’
). This puts our consciousness in the role of an observer not a controller. So, in effect, we’re not consciously responsible for any of our behaviour. We can only modify it in the moment if we notice it (we can’t, for example, stop ourselves from getting angry but we can calm ourselves down) and we can only change it by deliberately rerouting the neural activity running through the associative area of our brain between the sensory area and the motor area (hypnosis/hypnotherapy, for example). That’s the theory anyway I think. So we run our habits and we don’t always notice them running. In fact, I was reading recently about research that suggests that our brains are actually designed to filter out 95% of what’s going on around us so that, for every one thing we notice, which is whatever’s important to us right now, there are probably a million things we don’t notice.
It seems to me, given the neuroscientific findings, that claiming I wasn’t aware of what I was doing when I committed a crime would be pretty easy to support. Perhaps it could be argued every time in every case. Or maybe the law relating to responsibility and self-control already has that covered.
I don’t see it as being the same thing Bob. Whereas with normal behaviour where the brain [conscious] is an observer when really hypnotised although this sometimes happens for the most part people have no idea what they are doing to the point that they even log the memory differently and often don’t remember at all.
I know this is often called false amnesia but in my experiments it isn’t any more ‘false’ than any other sort.
I guess the distinction would also be that killing someone or breaking into somewhere has to have some sort of decision involved. Even if you are not aware of it, it happens even if that is only just staying where you are. Where as with habit none takes place. You don’t decide to breathe for instance.
Automatism appears to be the same thing. Action without any decision, at least without any prior to the event. With hypnosis it’s action on someone else’s decision.
Okay, I understand that.