Hypnosis The British Medical Association and the American Medical Association has called it "a temporary condition of altered attention in the subject that may be induced by another person," (Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia) but there is still much about hypnosis that is not understood. Because it resembles normal sleep, it was studied and was found that the brain waves of hypnotized people are more similar to the patterns of deep relaxation than anything else. Rather than a psychic or mystical idea, hypnosis is now looked upon as a form of highly focused concentration in which outside influences are ignored. The most known feature of the hypnotic trance is that hypnotized p