Smartphone Use and Hypnotic Trance

Back in 2013 when we lived in San Francisco, a tourist ran a red light and broadsided my car on the driver side. The end result was a concussion that took six months to get over. The upside to this experience was that, because my husband worked in a research lab, a number of inventors saw my accident as an opportunity to learn more about brain science. One of them even gave us an EEG device. 

An EEG device, or electroencephalograph, is a non-invasive medical instrument that measures and records the electrical activity of the brain using electrodes placed on the scalp. This recorded activity shows brain wave patterns,  providing insights into brain function. 

It was fun. I could put the device on my head and watch on my computer how my brain waves had been affected by the concussion. I could also see the benefits of things I was doing to improve my brain health. For example, I saw that breathing exercises do amazing things for the brain.

Living with an inventor owning an EEG device meant that we had to find other purposes for it. We had always been interested in the effects of screen technologies on the brain. So we began testing different methods of reading on screen technologies. We read text on paper, Kindle, iPhone, laptop, and our large screen computer. Although we were only able to test a handful of people, we saw that each mode of reading affected the brain differently. 

At that time, there were no studies to back up what we saw, let alone interpret what it meant,  and the lab wasn't interested in pursuing it. Since then, however, there have been several studies which show that smart phone and digital screen technologies create a trance state similar to hypnosis. 

Friends interacting with screens instead of each other

“Hypnotized by Your Phone? Smartphone Addiction Correlates With Hypnotizability” is the title of the 2020 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2020. The study involved hypnotizing 641 university students (aged 18–47, mostly women) over 11 public lectures, assessing hypnotizability with the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility: Form A  (a questionnaire used to measure the hypnotizability of groups.) Participants then completed the Smartphone Addiction Scale–Short Version. Analysis showed a positive correlation between hypnotizability scores (number of followed suggestions) and smartphone addiction scores, suggesting shared traits like absorption and automaticity (which means engaging in tasks subconsciously.)

In 2022, an article appeared in Brain Imaging and Behavior, Volume 16, Issue 4, called Brain Structural Changes from Excessive Screen Use, citing a neuro-imaging study on adults with smartphone addiction. The study identified reduced gray matter volume in key brain regions including the orbitofrontal cortex (involved in executive function and decision-making), anterior cingulate cortex (linked to emotional regulation), and parahippocampal gyrus (associated with memory). Gray matter is the brain’s computational hub, handling cognition, memory, emotions, and motor/sensory functions. Its degradation can impair critical thinking, emotional stability, and memory, contributing to behavioral and psychological issues like addiction or heightened suggestibility.

These alterations were correlated with addiction severity, suggesting potential impairments in critical thinking and increased susceptibility to passive absorption states.

 A 2022 study titled, “Evening Exposure to Blue Light from Screens Delays Melatonin Onset and Disrupts Circadian Phase in Young Adults: A Controlled Crossover Trial” examined the acute effects of evening blue-enriched light from screens on melatonin dynamics in young adults, demonstrating delayed onset (by 45–60 minutes) and reduced peak levels (20–30% suppression), leading to circadian phase delays of up to 1.2 hours and subsequent sleep fragmentation.  Two hours of pre-bedtime screen exposure significantly delayed dim-light melatonin onset, shortened melatonin duration, and increased next-day sleep inertia, highlighting indirect pathways to altered consciousness via chronic circadian misalignment. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates sleep and circadian rhythms, sensitive to light exposure. Its disruption by late-night screen use, as shown in the 2022 study, can impair sleep quality and promote altered states like drowsiness, indirectly contributing to suggestibility or cognitive deficits seen in excessive screen use research.

In 2022, Frontiers in Psychology published "Digital Hypnosis: Immersive Media Induces Suggestible States via Altered Sensory Gating.” This study gave 120 adults 30-minute Virtual Reality sessions, which resulted in increased alpha wave activity (EEG) and suggestibility scores, demonstrating influence on subconscious processing, with applications to advertising and therapy. This means that virtual reality devices contribute to suggestibility and can be used for good – to heal a client in therapy – or for profit, as in making buyers more likely to purchase.

What's important to remember about screen technologies creating or enhancing hypnotic states is that they can be used by the producers of these technologies to influence the audience much the same way that hypnotherapy can be used to heal. It cannot make you something that you are not, but it can encourage you to do things that you might be drawn to, but would never do without the influence of the technology. For example, a young woman may wish to be attractive to men. She turns to TikTok for ideas on how to improve her clothes and make up. Overtime, the content and the hypnotic format that deliver it convinces her that she needs to have plastic surgery even though all her life people have told her she's fairly good looking. Repetition, combined with the hypnotic state, can get people to believe things they might be inclined to believe, but for which there is no proof. We see this with the current political situation, that both of the left and right believe the other side is lying, and their side is telling the truth. 

Therefore, it's important to limit screen time, to disable nonessential notifications, to avoid using late at night, and to make sure one’s perception of reality is actually grounded in social interactions with real people.

Hypnosis and hypnotherapy can help you follow through on a strategy to keep your brain healthy and to prevent you from being hypnotized by your devices. It’s kind of like fighting fire with fire.

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Smartphones stimulate Alpha waves, which means they induce trance.