"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

was like to be hypnotized.
He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said,
"You can't open your eyes."
I said to myself, "I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to
disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes." It was an
interesting situation: You're only slightly fogged out, and although you've
lost a little bit, you're pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of
course, you're not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can't do it.
He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good.
When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he
hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time
the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The
hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't
normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis,
instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I
would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
All through the demonstration I was vaguely aware of what was going on,
and cooperating with the things the hypnotist said, but this time I decided,
"Damn it, enough is enough! I'm gonna go straight to my seat."
When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk
straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so
uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the
hall.
I was hypnotized in another situation some time later by a woman. While
I was hypnotized she said, "I'm going to light a match, blow it out, and
immediately touch the back of your hand with it. You will feel no pain."
I thought, "Baloney!" She took a match, lit it, blew it out, and
touched it to the back of my hand. It felt slightly warm. My eyes were
closed throughout all of this, but I was thinking, "That's easy. She lit one
match, but touched a different match to my hand. There's nothin' to that;
it's a fake!"
When I came out of the hypnosis and looked at the back of my hand, I
got the biggest surprise: There was a burn on the back of my hand. Soon a
blister grew, and it never hurt at all, even when it broke.
So I found hypnosis to be a very interesting experience. All the time
you're saying to yourself, "I could do that, but I won't" - which is just
another way of saying that you can't.


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A Map of the Cat?


In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit
with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought: It
would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit for a
week or two in each of the other groups.
When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very
seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using
words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were saying.