Ernest Ropiequet "Jack" Hilgard (July 25, 1904 – October 22, 2001) was an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He became famous in the 1950s for his research on
hypnosis
Hypnosis is a human condition involving focused attention (the selective attention/selective inattention hypothesis, SASI), reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion.In 2015, the American Psychologica ...
, especially with regard to pain control. Along with
André Muller Weitzenhoffer
André Muller Weitzenhoffer (16 January 1921 – 24 February 2004) was one of the most prolific researchers in the field of hypnosis in the latter half of the 20th century, having authored over 100 publications between 1949 and 2004. He was the r ...
, Hilgard developed the Stanford
Hypnotic Susceptibility
Hypnotic susceptibility measures how easily a person can be hypnotized. Several types of scales are used; however, the most common are the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility and the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales.
The Harvard ...
Scales. A ''
Review of General Psychology
''Review of General Psychology'' is the quarterly scientific journal of the American Psychological Association Division 1: The Society for General Psychology. The journal publishes cross-disciplinary psychological articles that are conceptual, the ...
'' survey, published in 2002, ranked Hilgard as the 29th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Biography
Born in
Belleville,
Illinois
Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...
, Ernest Ropiequet Hilgard was the son of a physician, Dr. George Engelmann Hilgard, and Laura Ropiequet Hilgard. Hilgard was initially drawn to engineering; he received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...
in 1924. He then studied psychology, receiving a Ph.D. from
Yale University
Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...
in 1930. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
in 1958.
In 1969, he was elected to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
. In 1984 Hilgard was awarded the
NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing
The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "to recognize authors whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the cours ...
from the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
, of which he was also a member.
Hilgard met fellow psychologist
Josephine Rohrs at Yale; they married in 1931 and had two children, Henry (born 1936) and Elizabeth Ann (born 1944).
Hilgard died in 2001 in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 97.
Hypnosis
Hilgard is specifically known for his theory that a so-called "
hidden observer
Ernest Ropiequet "Jack" Hilgard (July 25, 1904 – October 22, 2001) was an American psychologist and professor at Stanford University. He became famous in the 1950s for his research on hypnosis, especially with regard to pain control. Along wit ...
" is created in the mind while hypnosis is taking place. His research on the hidden observer during hypnotic pain management was intended to provide support for his
neodissociationist theory. This theory held that a person undergoing hypnosis can still observe his or her own pain without consciously experiencing any suffering. The phenomenon of the "hidden observer" was controversial and critics claimed it could be manufactured by suggestions, indicating that it was possibly no more than an artifact of the instructions given to the research participants. Writing in the late 1970s (Hilgard, E. (1977). Divided consciousness: Multiple controls in human thought and action. New York, NY: Wiley), Ernest Hilgard became convinced that we all have another being sharing our lives. Hilgard termed this entity the ''hidden observer.''
In one of his books, Hilgard described a classic test demonstrating how this hidden entity is part of our consciousness. He wrote of a blind student who was hypnotized and, while in a trance state, was told that he would become deaf. The suggestion was so strong that he failed to react to any form of noise, even large sounds next to his ear. Of course, he also failed to respond to any questions he was asked while in his trance state. The hypnotist was keen to discover if ''anybody else'' was able to hear. He quietly said to the student, ''Perhaps there is some part of you that is hearing my voice and processing the information. If there is, I should like the index finger of your right hand to rise as a sign that this is the case''(Hilgard, 1977, p. 186). The finger rose. At this, the student requested that he be brought out of the hypnotically induced period of deafness. On being''awakened,'' the student said that he had requested to come out of the trance state because ''I felt my finger rise in a way that was not a spontaneous twitch, so you must have done something to make it rise, and I want to know what you did'' (p. 186). The hypnotist then asked him what he remembered. Because the trance was light, the student never actually lost consciousness; all that occurred was that his hearing had ceased. In order to deal with the boredom of being deprived of both sight and sound, he had decided to work on some statistical problems in his head. It was while he was doing this that he suddenly felt his finger lift. This was obviously strange to him, because under normal circumstances he was, like all of us, the ''person'' who decides on how the body moves. In this case he was not. Not only that, but ''somebody else'' in his head was responding to an external request that he had not heard. As far as Hilgard was concerned, the person who responded was the ''hidden observer.''
One of Hilgard's subjects made the following interesting statement about what she experienced, making particular reference to what she sensed was her higher self: The hidden observer is cognizant of everything that is going on ... The hidden observer sees more, he questions more, he's aware of what is going on all of the time but getting in touch is totally unnecessary ... He's like a
guardian angel
A guardian angel is a type of angel that is assigned to protect and guide a particular person, group or nation. Belief in tutelary beings can be traced throughout all antiquity. The idea of angels that guard over people played a major role in A ...
that guards you from doing anything that will mess you up ... The hidden observer is looking through the tunnel, and sees everything in the tunnel ... Unless someone tells me to get in touch with the hidden observer I'm not in contact. It's just there. (Hilgard, 1977, p. 210) The hidden observer protects us from doing anything in hypnosis that we would not do under any circumstance consciously, such as causing someone else physical harm.
Duality of personality
This idea of the basic duality of human personality is culturally and historically almost universal. The ancient
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
called these two independent consciousnesses
hun and po
''Hun'' () and ''po'' () are types of souls in Chinese philosophy and traditional religion. Within this ancient soul dualism tradition, every living human has both a spiritual, ethereal, yang soul which leaves the body after death, and also a c ...
, the ancient
Egyptians
Egyptians ( arz, المَصرِيُون, translit=al-Maṣriyyūn, ; arz, المَصرِيِين, translit=al-Maṣriyyīn, ; cop, ⲣⲉⲙⲛ̀ⲭⲏⲙⲓ, remenkhēmi) are an ethnic group native to the Nile, Nile Valley in Egypt. Egyptian ...
the
ka and the
ba, and the ancient
Greeks
The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...
the
Daemon
Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and Hell ...
and the
Eidolon
In ancient Greek literature, an eidolon (; grc, εἴδωλον 'image, idol, double, apparition, phantom, ghost'; plural: eidola or eidolons) is a spirit-image of a living or dead person; a shade or phantom look-alike of the human form.
Liter ...
. In each case, the two entities shared their senses and perceptions of the external world but interpreted those perceptions with regard to their own history, knowledge, and personality.
For the
Greeks
The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...
, the relationship was an unequal one. The higher self, the Daemon, acted as a form of
guardian angel
A guardian angel is a type of angel that is assigned to protect and guide a particular person, group or nation. Belief in tutelary beings can be traced throughout all antiquity. The idea of angels that guard over people played a major role in A ...
or higher self over its lower self, the Eidolon. The
Stoic
Stoic may refer to:
* An adherent of Stoicism; one whose moral quality is associated with that school of philosophy
* STOIC, a programming language
* ''Stoic'' (film), a 2009 film by Uwe Boll
* ''Stoic'' (mixtape), a 2012 mixtape by rapper T-Pain
* ...
philosopher
Epictetus
Epictetus (; grc-gre, Ἐπίκτητος, ''Epíktētos''; 50 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when ...
wrote:
God
In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. Swinburne, R.G. "God" in Honderich, Ted. (ed)''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'', Oxford University Press, 1995. God is typically ...
has placed at every man's side a guardian, the Daemon of each man, who is charged to watch over him; a Daemon that cannot sleep, nor be deceived. To what greater and more watchful guardian could He have entrusted each of us? So, when you have shut the doors, and made darkness in the house, remember, never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone. But God is there, and your Daemon is there (
Epictetus
Epictetus (; grc-gre, Ἐπίκτητος, ''Epíktētos''; 50 135 AD) was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was born into slavery at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present-day Pamukkale, in western Turkey) and lived in Rome until his banishment, when ...
, 1998/2nd century, 14:11) The belief was that the Daemon had foreknowledge of future circumstances and events and as such could warn its Eidolon of the dangers. It was as if in some way the Daemon had already lived the life of its Eidolon.
Textbooks
Hilgard was also the author of three hugely influential textbooks on topics other than hypnosis. The first, "Conditioning and Learning", jointly authored with
Donald Marquis, was very widely cited up until the 1960s. When
Gregory Kimble
Gregory Adams Kimble (October 21, 1917 – January 15, 2006) was an American general psychologist and a professor at Duke University, a position from which he retired in 1984. He was known for his efforts to unify psychology as a single scientifi ...
updated a second edition in 1961, Hilgard and Marquis's names were made part of the title, a distinction, as Hilgard himself noted, usually reserved for deceased authors.
A second text, "Theories of Learning" (1948), was also widely cited, and lasted for five editions (through 1981); the last three editions involved Hilgard's Stanford colleague
Gordon H. Bower.
The third textbook was the well written and wide-ranging "
Introduction to Psychology
''Atkinson & Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology'' is an introductory textbook on psychology written originally by Ernest Hilgard, Richard C. Atkinson and Rita L. Atkinson and edited and revised by Edward E. Smith, Daryl J. Bem, Susan Nolen-Ho ...
" (1953), which was, according to his biography on the website of the American Psychological Association, "for a long period, the most widely used introductory psychology text in the world." Several editions were co-authored by Rita L. Atkinson or
Richard C. Atkinson, another colleague at Stanford and later chancellor of the University of California at San Diego and then president and regent of the University of California. The 15th edition, published in 2009, is called "Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology".
Publications
*Hilgard E.R. and Marquis D.G 1940. ''Conditioning and learning''. New York: Appleton-Century.
**Hilgard E.R. and Marquis D.G. 1961. ''Conditioning and learning''. 2nd ed, Prentice-Hall.
*Hilgard E.R. 1948. ''Theories of learning''. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
**Hilgard E.R. and Bower G.H. 1966. ''Theories of learning''. 3rd ed, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
*Hilgard E.R. 1965. ''Susceptibility to hypnosis''. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
*Hilgard E.R. 1953, 1970. ''Introduction to psychology''. Harcourt.
**Hilgard E.R., Atkinson R.L. and Atkinson R.C. 1975. ''Introduction to psychology''. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
*Hilgard E.R. 1977. ''Divided consciousness: multiple controls in human thought and action''. New York, NY: Wiley.
**Hilgard E.R. 1986. ''Divided consciousness: multiple controls in human thought and action'' (expanded edition). New York, NY: Wiley.
*Hilgard E.R. 1987. ''Psychology in America: a historical survey''. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
*Hilgard E.R. and J. Hilgard. 1994. ''Hypnosis in the relief of pain''. Revised ed. Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel.
See also
*
Alien hand syndrome
*
Bicameral mentality
Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis in psychology and neuroscience which argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part ...
*
Brain asymmetry
In human neuroanatomy, brain asymmetry can refer to at least two quite distinct findings:
* Neuroanatomical differences between the left and right sides of the brain
* Lateralized functional differences: lateralization of brain function
Neuroana ...
*
Dual consciousness
Dual consciousness is a theoretical concept in neuroscience. It is proposed that it is possible that a person may develop two separate conscious entities within their one brain after undergoing a corpus callosotomy. The idea first began circulatin ...
*
Divided consciousness
Divided consciousness is a term coined by Ernest Hilgard to define a psychological state in which one's consciousness is split into distinct components, possibly during hypnosis.
Origin(s)
The theory of a division of consciousness was touched ...
*
Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental process ...
*
Folk psychology
In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure ...
*
Ideomotor phenomenon
The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. Also called ideomotor response (or ideomotor reflex) and abbreviated to IMR, it is a concept in hypnosis and psychological research. It is der ...
*
Julian Jaynes
Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book '' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' ...
*
Laterality
The term laterality refers to the preference most humans show for one side of their body over the other. Examples include left-handedness/right-handedness and left/right- footedness; it may also refer to the primary use of the left or right he ...
*
Lateralization of brain function
The lateralization of brain function is the tendency for some neural functions or cognitive processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other. The median longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebr ...
*
Left brain interpreter
The left-brain interpreter is a neuropsychological concept developed by the psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga and the neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux. It refers to the construction of explanations by the left brain hemisphere in order to make ...
*
Mind-body problem
*
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
*
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
*
Society of Mind
''The Society of Mind'' is both the title of a 1986 book and the name of a theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky.
In his book of the same name, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence step by step, bui ...
*
Split-brain
Split-brain or callosal syndrome is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of, or interference wit ...
*
Theory of mind
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others' mental states may be different fro ...
References
Further reading
*Mestre M.V., Tortosa F., Samper P., and Nácher M.J. 2002. Psychology's evolution through its texts: analysis of E R. Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology. ''Psicothema'', 14, 810–815.
External links
https://web.archive.org/web/20051111062701/http://slick.org/deathwatch/mailarchive/msg00383.htmlhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g2699/is_0004/ai_2699000497*http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1988/A1988M802100001.pdf
*http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1984/A1984SW51700001.pdf
*http://www.apa.org/about/archives/presidents/bio-ernest-hilgard.aspx
National Academy of Sciences Biographical MemoirErnest Ropiequet Hilgard Papers
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hilgard, Ernest
1904 births
2001 deaths
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
20th-century American psychologists
American hypnotists
People from Belleville, Illinois
Stanford University Department of Psychology faculty
University of Illinois alumni
Yale University alumni
Presidents of the American Psychological Association
Members of the American Philosophical Society