![]() ![]() Pre-19th century Predecessors to Mesmer Īvicenna (Ibn Sina) (980–1037), a Persian psychologist and physician, was the earliest to make a distinction between sleep and hypnosis. Later, in his The Physiology of Fascination (1855), Braid conceded that his original terminology was misleading and argued that the term "hypnotism" or "nervous sleep" should be reserved for the minority (10%) of subjects who exhibit amnesia, substituting the term "monoideism", meaning concentration upon a single idea, as a description for the more alert state experienced by the others. Therefore, Braid defined hypnotism as a state of mental concentration that often leads to a form of progressive relaxation. The hypnotic sleep, therefore, is the very antithesis or opposite mental and physical condition to that which precedes and accompanies common sleep ![]() The real origin and essence of the hypnotic condition, is the induction of a habit of abstraction or mental concentration, in which, as in reverie or spontaneous abstraction, the powers of the mind are so much engrossed with a single idea or train of thought, as, for the nonce, to render the individual unconscious of, or indifferently conscious to, all other ideas, impressions, or trains of thought. He contrasted the hypnotic state with normal sleep, and defined it as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye, on one object, not of an exciting nature." īraid elaborated upon this brief definition in a later work, Hypnotic Therapeutics: Braid popularised the terms and gave the earliest definition of hypnosis. ![]()
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