"It's going to be like the bubonic plague all over again!"
If you recognize this saying, you were most likely at hypnotist Tom DeLuca's show last Friday evening. Yet third-year Education student Jeremy Arthur, the enthusiastic supporter of the "Virginia Rats" and speaker of the above quotation, doesn't remember it.
"You know how whenever you have a dream and you wake up and you can't really remember it, but throughout the day you'll have flashbacks? That's kind of what [being hypnotized] is like," Arthur said. "But I don't know if that's because I've heard people talking about it that I think I know [what happened] or if it's because I actually remember doing this."
The last thing Arthur claimed to remember was being told to count down from 300 by threes and to squeeze his hands together so that they went numb. The next thing he said he can recall is waking up on stage at the end of the show. In the two hours he has no clear recollection of, he managed to "forget" the University's mascot, lead a cheer for the "Virginia Rats" and give CPR to an apple.
Arthur, who wasn't even planning on attending the show earlier that day, got to be one of DeLuca's subjects with the help of a large crowd of First Year Players members who later had to tell him what he did while on stage. Because Arthur is the director of this fall's production of "Pippin," some thought his acting abilities might have come into play at some point. Arthur, despite not being able to remember the performance, attributed his enthusiasm during the show to being a member of the Hoo Crew.
DeLuca "couldn't have picked more appropriate stuff for me to do, considering all the yelling I do at football and basketball games," Arthur said. "I guess it came pretty naturally."
But of all choices of mascots, just where did the "Virginia Rats" come from?
A friend of Arthur's suggested he was the inspiration because he has pet rats, Arthur said.
"He was like, 'I'd like to think that I live somewhere deep in the recesses of your subconscious,'" Arthur said.
Yet there were some students, fourth-year College student Laura Juliano one of them, who were intrigued by the possibility of DeLuca's hypnotism show being nothing more than an act.
Juliano is co-director of the Mix program, which brings students together from different walks of life for discussion. She came up with the idea to have an interdisciplinary discussion between psychology and drama students based on hypnosis and how real, or staged, DeLuca's show was.
Psychology Prof. Jonathan Haidt was there to answer questions and tell students about hypnosis. It turns out that only 5 to 10 percent of people are highly hypnotizable. Studies have found the only common trait among these people is being able to imagine things vividly.
One student in attendance observed that DeLuca tended to favor two or three participants throughout the show. It was suggested that out of the original 20, DeLuca could pick up cues from them to determine which ones were deeply under hypnosis, or the highly hypnotizable ones, and therefore would easily comply with DeLuca's instructions. Haidt hypothesized that the other participants were only under a mild hypnosis and, through the power of suggestion, were willing to go along with DeLuca's game.
Haidt went on to say that, though a deep hypnosis won't work on most people, if you can find the small percentage of people who are highly hypnotizable, you can make them perform tasks that normal people cannot do or even hypnotize them into such states as being colorblind.
"I personally learned quite a bit from this, so I can only imagine other people did as well," Juliano said.
Though it has only been a few days since his famed performance, Arthur said he was surprised by the tremendous reaction students have had to it around Grounds.
"There are apparently some people that were rat body-painted at the football game on Saturday, there were signs, there were rat chants going on," Arthur said. "I figure it'll be dead in a couple of weeks, but it'd be cool if it did [continue]. I'll enjoy 20 minutes of fame instead of 15 any day."
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