Some time around 1908, in the small prairie town of Park River, North Dakota, a boy named David Kopelman watched his father die of cancer.
The pain was unbearable, and the medicine of the day could do little about it. Then a family friend, a stage hypnotist, came to the house. He sat with the dying man and talked to him quietly. After a while, the man who had been in agony was sitting up, comfortable, and playing with his children.
The boy never forgot it. He grew up to become Dave Elman, and decades later he would teach thousands of doctors and dentists to do what that hypnotist had done.
He took a remarkably winding route to get there.
Vaudeville, radio, and a hobby show America loved
Elman started as a performer. As a teenager he was doing stage hypnosis, and he went on to work as a comedian, a songwriter and a vaudeville entertainer. Hypnosis was part of the act, and a crowd-pleasing one.
Then he found radio. In 1937 he launched Hobby Lobby, a show in which ordinary Americans came on air to talk about their oddest pastimes. It sounds slight, but it ran for over a decade and made Elman a household name.
Elman might have stayed a broadcaster for the rest of his career if not for a party.
The party trick that changed everything
As Elman told the story, he was at a social gathering in the late 1940s when he was persuaded to demonstrate hypnosis. Among the guests were several doctors. What they saw wasn’t a stage gag. It was a man in a deep state of focus, with apparently reduced sensitivity to pain, produced in minutes.
The doctors asked whether he could teach them.
He could, and he did. From around 1949 until his death in 1967, Elman ran courses for physicians, dentists and psychologists across the United States. He had a firm rule: he didn’t teach the general public, only medical professionals. Dentists used his methods for extractions, and obstetricians used them in childbirth.
His teaching was collected in a 1964 book, Findings in Hypnosis, later reissued as Hypnotherapy. It’s still in print and still argued over in training rooms today.
Elman also went looking for the deepest trance possible. He called it the Esdaile state, after James Esdaile, the Scottish surgeon who operated on hundreds of entranced patients in 1840s Calcutta. Elman claimed people in this state could undergo surgery with no anaesthetic at all, and he gave a name to a phenomenon that had been half-forgotten for a century.
Why it works: the psychology hidden in four steps
Before Elman, inductions were often long, slow and drowsy, sometimes lasting twenty minutes or more. Elman’s could take under four. The speed came from a clever structure, in which every step is quietly doing a second job.
Step one: the eyes that won’t open. The person is asked to relax the small muscles around their eyes so completely that, for now, they simply won’t work. Then they’re invited to test it. When the eyelids stay shut, something important happens: the person has felt hypnosis working. Hypnotists call this a “convincer.” Researchers call it expectancy, and decades of studies show that expecting a response is one of the strongest predictors of getting one. Elman built proof into the first sixty seconds.
Step two: the relaxation spreads. That feeling in the eyes is sent outwards, through the face, shoulders, arms and legs. It’s the familiar part, but it does a quiet job. Relaxation is not the same thing as hypnosis; Elman used it as a doorway into focused attention.
Step three: the eyes open and close. The person opens their eyes and then closes them again, going deeper each time. Each repetition practises the shift and makes it faster.
Step four: the vanishing numbers. This is Elman’s signature move. The person counts backwards aloud from 100, and with each number they relax more, until the numbers simply fade away and there’s nothing left to count. It’s a neat trick of attention. The busy, analytical part of the mind is given a job, and then the job is quietly taken away. Many people are genuinely surprised to find they can’t find the next number.
Only after that do therapeutic suggestions begin. The induction is the door; the therapy is the room behind it.
What a hypnotised brain actually does
Elman worked by instinct and observation. Modern brain imaging has started to catch up with him.
In 2017, a team at Stanford led by psychiatrist David Spiegel scanned the brains of people as they were hypnotised. They found three changes:
- activity dropped in the dorsal anterior cingulate, a region involved in monitoring and worrying about what’s going on
- the connection between the brain’s executive control centre and the insula, which tracks what’s happening in the body, grew stronger
- the link between that control centre and the default mode network, the brain’s self-reflective chatter, weakened.
In plain terms, hypnotised people were less occupied with monitoring and self-commentary, and more tuned in to their bodies.
An even stranger result came from Amir Raz and colleagues in the early 2000s. They used the Stroop test, a classic experiment in which you name the ink colour of a colour word, such as the word RED printed in blue. It’s notoriously hard, because reading is automatic and you can’t switch it off. Yet when highly hypnotisable volunteers were told under hypnosis that the words were meaningless symbols in a foreign script, the interference largely vanished. A suggestion had turned off something most psychologists assumed could not be turned off.
Not everyone goes as deep
People differ a great deal in how readily they respond. On standard scales, roughly 10–15% of people are highly hypnotisable, a similar share barely respond, and most fall somewhere in the middle. Elman’s “convincer” steps work partly because they sort people quickly: within a minute or two, the hypnotist can see how someone is responding and adjust.
It’s worth being clear on one point. There’s no research testing the Elman induction specifically. Studies of hypnosis for pain, procedural anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome test the whole treatment, not the particular doorway used to get in. Elman’s induction is popular because it’s fast, teachable and gives clear feedback, not because it has been proven better than the alternatives.
Three things people get wrong
“I heard everything, so it didn’t work.” Hearing and remembering is normal. Elman’s subjects weren’t unconscious, and neither are yours.
“The hypnotist is in control.” The eye lock only works because the person chooses to relax the muscles. Anyone can open their eyes if they really want to.
“Deeper is always better.” For most purposes, a light-to-moderate trance does the job. The quality of what comes after the induction matters far more than its depth.
Learning it
The Elman induction is still one of the first techniques taught on many hypnotherapy courses, for the reasons that made it popular with doctors in the 1950s: it’s short, structured, and easy to tell whether it’s working. But knowing an induction isn’t the same as knowing what to do with someone once they’re in hypnosis. If you’re wondering how do I learn hypnosis, look for training that teaches the therapy as well as the technique.
Elman spent his life chasing what he saw as a boy in Park River: a frightened, suffering man, made comfortable by nothing more than words. He never claimed it was magic. He just wanted doctors to know how to do it.
Further reading
- Elman D. Findings in Hypnosis. 1964. Reissued as Hypnotherapy, Westwood Publishing.
- Jiang H, White MP, Greicius MD, Waelde LC, Spiegel D. “Brain activity and functional connectivity associated with hypnosis.” Cerebral Cortex. 2017;27(8):4083–4093.
- Raz A, Shapiro T, Fan J, Posner MI. “Hypnotic suggestion and the modulation of Stroop interference.” Archives of General Psychiatry. 2002;59(12):1155–1161.
- Kirsch I. “Response expectancy as a determinant of experience and behavior.” American Psychologist. 1985;40(11):1189–1202.