• CLA Discoveries
• About CLA
• Faculty, Teaching & Research
• Students
• In the Community
• Departments & Majors
• Alumni & Friends
• News & Events
  • CLA Events Calendar
  • For the Media
  • Reach Magazine
  • RSS Feeds
  • Publications & Social Media
• Giving to CLA

Home > News & Events > CLA Today Archive > Spring 2004 : Eyes Wide Open

Eyes Wide Open

by Joel Hoekstra

Through active hypnosis, David Wark (Ph.D. '61 psychology) helps students get in the groove and learn.

When his old department asked him to contribute to the proposed Psychology Alumni Graduate Fellowship Fund in Psychology, Professor Emeritus David Wark didn't hesitate.

Since retiring from the Counseling and Consulting Services at the U about seven years ago, Wark has maintained a private practice in psychology. “The training, background, and contacts I made at the University of Minnesota gave me my career,” he says. “I’m glad to give back some of the earnings from that career to the department.”

Wark says that his gift comes without strings. “I have no axe to grind,” he maintains. But he certainly has an interest to declare.

Wark, 70, has spent his professional life rehabilitating the technique of hypnosis as a legitimate therapeutic tool in the arsenal of the practicing psychologist. It's been uphill work, he says, partly because hypnosis acquired an early—and unfortunate—reputation as sideshow entertainment rather than serious work. It's a stereotype that Wark acknowledges ruefully, even as he is determined to distance himself from the gold-watch-dangling, “your-eyes-are-growing- heavy" clichés of a hundred old movies.

“Vee don't deal in tick-tocks,” he says, breaking into the sort of stage accent reminiscent of an academic Robin Williams. Reverting to his normal voice, he adds, “Stage hypnosis is not clinical psychology. It's entertainment. You don't need watches to do hypnosis.”

In fact, you don't even need those heavy eyelids. Wark achieved something of a professional breakthrough when he learned about a technique called alert hypnosis, which permitted subjects to receive hypnotic suggestions while fully conscious.

That understanding lay far in the future, though, when Wark first arrived at the U as a graduate student in the late fifties. Back in those days, he says, “Hypnosis was a no-no" for professional psychologists. “We didn't use the H-word,” he says, only half-joking.

Wark had grown up in Los Angeles and attended Pomona College, where a professor steered him to Minnesota for graduate school. He recalls his send-off to the frozen regions of the Upper Midwest: “Somebody gave me a thick overcoat, because they'd heard it was very cold in Minnesota. Somebody else gave me a bottle of Scotch, because they'd heard it was very dry in Minnesota.”

Half a century later, he says, “I wouldn't go back to Los Angeles on a bet." After earning his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1961 and spending a couple of years in the military, Wark joined Counseling and Consulting Services and eventually became involved with the Reading and Study Skills Center. He says, “I spent my time helping kids get through the U.”

Many of the students he saw suffered from test-taking anxiety and related concentration problems that interfered with their ability to study. Wark employed systematic desensitization techniques in order to help the students relax and lower their fear levels.

“I would get them comfortable thinking about one-week-before-the-test, then three-days-before-the-test, then one day and so on,” he explains. Before long, he noticed that desensitization, as a relaxation device, was not that much different from hypnosis.

Feeling sleepy… Not

Then came the breakthrough—when he learned about the alert hypnosis techniques pioneered by Hungarian psychologist Eva Bányai at Stanford.

Bányai demonstrated that successful hypnosis did not necessarily require a sleep-like trance. She showed that it was possible to hypnotize people even while they were doing something as active as riding bicycles.

Wark immediately grasped the obvious advantages of dispensing with sleep-state hypnosis. As he points out, “When you study, you've got to keep your eyes open.”

Whether you call it achieving “the flow state “being in the groove,” the state that Wark tried to teach students to attain has much in common with the deep concentration used by many high-performing people.

“Athletes and musicians are so focused on what they're doing that they may not even hear the crowd,” he explains.

Through hypnosis, Wark taught students to use the same techniques to screen out the distractions that hindered learning. When they are distraction free, students can use suggestions to improve their learning.

Wark recalls a favorite example—"a student who was having trouble with her astronomy reading. She really improved with this suggestion: ‘I am a space probe flying around the planets, sending data back to NASA to be integrated by experts preparing for a Congressional review.'”

Since his retirement, Wark has continued to work with students eager to improve their academic performance through alert hypnotic auto-suggestion. “I’m responsible for a lot of people passing the law boards and other tests,” he says of his current practice. “Published research gives good evidence that students who use hypnosis get better grades.”

“I don't expect the U to set up a chair in applied hypnosis,” Wark laughs. Yet he is quick to acknowledge the influence Minnesota has had upon his career. “The Minnesota model of scientist-practitioner is an excellent, excellent way to proceed.”