I had a really interesting theory that is similar to another users post on here a few hrs ago related to Intelligence as a possible correlate with being a member of this community.

So I've been pondering how many of you guys and gals in this community have ever had any experience with HYPNOSIS/HYPNOTISM.

I went to Culver Academies up in Indiana for all of boarding school. It was a pretty prestigious militarized, college prep, boarding school. Every spring we would have a really awesome hypnotist visit our school who's name was Frederick Winters I believe.

And he would hand pick about 12-15 amongst the senior graduating class to be a part of the performance. He would always begin by guiding the students (with the entire performance being watched by an audience of maybe 500) through about a 20 minute meditation that was intended to steadily bring them under a deep half-sleep half-wake state.

As this progressed and he guided the selected group through the meditation, he would slowly eliminate members from the group of seniors who he deemed to be not as susceptible to hypnotism as he desired so that by the end, only those most susceptible to the true hypnosis were left as the participants on the stage set.

The performance was ALWAYS amazing. And despite many people being in disbelief as to whether the students that were on stage were genuinely being hypnotized, there was always a huge awe factor in seeing many typically shy and timid students suddenly performing some outrageous, embarrassing or totally out of character behaviors.

Anyways, for the part 5 or 6 months I've been sharing as much content from this site on Facebook (forgive me i know I hate Fuckerberg) to try and combat the left wing echo chamber and to stand up for my conservative friends who have largely been shut down because of their political beliefs.

After several senseless arguments with lefties, (many of whom would be typically very intelligent individuals whose main error was simply not knowing any better and being subjected to the copious amount of propagandist lies from the mainstream media and news publications), ive been trying to pinpoint what it might be that differentiates between those who can see past the propaganda and lies versus those who see a mainstream publication make an error and unconsciously fall into deep cognitive dissonance and dismiss the notion that they mightve been misleading on purpose.

And so just recently it struck me to explore the possibility that perhaps ones susceptibility to hypnosis might be associated with ones susceptibility to Brainwashing (behavioral conditioning).

So when I finally was a senior back in 2012 and participated in the Hypnotism show at my boarding school, I was really excited to finally be hypnotized. However much to my dissatisfaction, it turned out that I had too much of a resistance to the effects of hypnotism and despite the hypnotists best attempts, I was soon weeded out of the participants.

As a Psychology major at a pretty prestigious Texas university, I've always had a passion for studying human behavior, learning social cues, breaking social norms, etc.. so ive always had it as a personality trait to constantly be analyzing my peers and my environment.

So I guess my question is, have you guys and gals ever had any experience with hypnotism? I'm interested to see if its not just myself who found it to be virtually impossible to be hypnotized (i also had tried it several more times from peers who spent a good deal of time learning hypnosis, and at best I was playing along and pretending).

Have you ever been hypnotized? What are your thoughts on hypnosis? Could ones ability to be hypnotized be related to ones susceptibility to Brainwashing?