From 'Esquire'

I’ve been working on a biography of a mathematician. The trouble is, I don’t understand a word he says – which is why I’m standing outside 1, Harley Street, staring at a brass plaque stretched thin with names suggesting bank accounts in Barbados: Mindworks, Mindspa Clinics, Management Psychology Ltd, The London Therapy Centre.

I’m going to be hypnotised to be better at maths. ‘I’m not convinced that hypnosis does much,’ says Andrew Cunningham, the person I’ve come to meet, with satisfaction.

A slight, soft-spoken man, Andrew has appeared on dozens of TV shows, curing stage fright, fear of dogs and heights, and cramming the tremulous with braggadocio. For the Channel 4 programme, Faking It, he transformed a City solicitor into a foul-mouthed, shaven-haired Garage MC. But ‘hypnotism can’t add something you haven’t already got.’ He’s had a lot of success helping people to give up smoking because ‘anyone can give up. The potential is already there. You’re not making them do something they can’t.’ Hypnosis ‘removes blocks to what is natural.’

After meeting me at the lift, we have to go up and down so many mouse-sized corridors and back stair-cases, that possibly his office is no longer in London at all. 1, Harley Street is the last chance a hypnotist has to work in this prestigious locale. Fail to fit into some cubbyhole here and you drop off into Cavendish Square; before you know it you’re camping with Clairvoyant Claire under Vauxhall Bridge. It is the high-end street numbers that belong to the satisfying professions like plastic surgery and obesity management.

The noise of traffic outside disturbs his curtains.

‘No don’t lie on the floor, please, Alex – do you mind if I call you Alex? Hypnosis isn’t about sleeping.’

Hypnosis is closer to extreme day dreaming. ‘If you talk to people who’ve been hypnotised, they won’t say “he clicked his fingers and I was under then I woke up and I don’t know what happened.” They’ll say, “I was aware, I just felt like pretending I was an artichoke.”’

‘Even stage hypnosis, which looks like it’s put a person in a particular state, hasn’t actually achieved that. You’re not doing anything you wouldn’t be able to manage ordinarily,’ insists Andrew. ‘You’re just highly motivated and highly suggestible. Freud used hypnosis at first, before analysis; but it’s so easily misunderstood. There’s no point at which you can say, ah, this is a state of hypnosis, and this isn’t. It’s about rapport: get the subject to feel responsive, then make suggestions that are easily taken up.’

‘Such as, “congratulations, you’re a maths genius”?’

‘Exactly. Now, sit in the chair, feet flat on the floor, Alexander, relax and close your eyes.’

That’s when the trouble begins: I can’t close my eyes. They suddenly flicker like beetle wings. Every inch of me starts to itch; every object on the street bellows. That isn’t a van honking; it’s a barricade of French juggernauts. That’s not a scratch in my ear, it’s a weevil boring towards my eye. Instead of feeling sleepy, I’ve jumped in the opposite direction: I’m less hypnotised than ever.

‘Ten, nine …’ counts Andrew. Most of us experience mild hypnotic states every day when we’re shopping, watching TV, or during a boring conversation, he reminds me consolingly in his soothing voice …

‘Eight, seven …’

… our eyes glaze over; the details of the world start to slip away …

Not for me they don’t. He could go on counting down until he squeezed out the other side of zero and counted back to 1000. I’d never realised until now how annoying the world is. I try imagining the street full of integral signs climbing drainpipes, numbers strap-hanging in buses, prams carrying Platonic solids – anything to get me into the world of maths and escape this infuriating place of hyper-wakefulness.

Hypnotisablity has nothing to do with intelligence. Roughly 10% are good subjects. In Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman, the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman, describes a hypnotist sitting him down and getting to the point of, “You can’t open your eyes.”

Unlike me, Professor Feynman got 100% on that bit.

‘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 interesting: 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.’

After another session, on stage, the hypnotist told him that he’d take a long route back to his seat, all the way round the hall. ‘Damn it,’ said Feynman to himself, ‘enough is enough!’ He wasn’t going to play along any longer. ‘I’m gonna go straight to my seat.’

He couldn’t. ‘An annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable’ that he walked the silly route, just as he’d been told.

At about ‘four’, Andrew gives up on me.

One useful approach with therapeutic hypnosis is to find a structure, already present in the client’s mind, then doll it up with fresh encouragement and new suggestions.

Not long ago, a ten-year old stepped into Andrew’s office – extraordinarily, he had exactly the same grouse as mine.

‘I want to do sums better.’

It’s not such peculiar thing to ask for after all.

‘What are you good at already?’ Andrew asked. ‘And why?’

‘Stories. Words come to me through a door.’

‘What colour is the door?’

‘Red. With a big gold handle.’

So Andrew put him in a trance, took him back to the door, and started asking mathematical questions: ‘What’s two times two?’ A four sauntered out.

‘It was blue,’ remembers Andrew. ‘And this was not a weird child. Just an ordinary young boy.’ Numerals had been hiding on the other side of the door all along. Hypnosis simply made them less bashful.

Possibly, my own ‘useful structure’ is that I’ve sometimes noticed that I get a feeling of tightness, just beyond my sternum, when I write a pleasing sentence.

‘I want you to focus on that feeling,’ agrees Andrew in a murmur, ‘and apply that … contentment … that relaxation … to mathem … um, by the way, what do you mean by “I want to be made good at maths”?’

Superficially, I’m already good at it. I have a degree in physics. I took an MSc in applied mathematics at university. But maths is like art. You can go to drawing classes, pass exams, work your way through to a first class degree … and still be rubbish: your faces, technically perfect, seem dead. Your gestures, flawless from the anatomical point of view, look chopped out of cardboard. You have no feel for vigour, unexpectedness or authenticity. You are a good dullard. If what you’re after is genius you might as well drown yourself: you will never be as interesting as a properly talented five-year old. In mathematics it’s the same: I know someone with a PhD in the subject and he still doesn’t feel fit to call himself a mathematician without wincing.

The type of mathematics done by the subject of my book, Simon, rarely needs a calculator. When I asked him for a question to try before and after my hypnosis to see if there was any difference, he proposed, ‘Why is 11 x 11 equal to 121, and 111x111 = 12321 and 1111x1111 = 1234321?’

‘It’s not a question of why,’ I snapped, ‘they just are. They were born like it. Just like you were born with muttonchop whiskers.’

Simon looked at me in despair, shook said whiskers and returned to his usual glassy look. Simon does not take a great deal of interest in me, or in my book about him.

Many of Simon’s academic questions are like this: not, can you solve a particular equation, but why is it that being mathematical with this set of numbers gives answers like the notes of a Chopin etude? Instead of calculation, his mathematics requires an ability to see things in a different light, like those optical illusion games in which you have to blur your eyes to turn a splatter of dots into a three dimensional picture of a dancing goose. The last thing such mathematicians enjoy is rolling back their sleeves and totting up huge columns of digits. That’s drudgery, and a good mathematician hates honest labour. Slyness, corner-cutting and deception are the marks of top quality work. People who debauch their best friend’s daughter, rip off the dole office, steal life savings from OAPs with Nigerian internet companies – these are the characters who have the right minds to be mathematicians. Even if you could multiply thirty digit numbers in twenty seconds you’d not necessarily be good at maths, just fast at sums: you’re a freak as well as a drudge, but still not a genius. Mathematicians like Simon rarely use calculators because their interest is in the underlying structures of all numbers, rather than particular examples.

So Andrew’s question is spot on. What do I mean by being made to be good at mathematics? Shouldn’t I just stop being a lazy bugger and go out and study a textbook? But I’ve already done that and I’m still rotten. The real point is ‘make me think like a good mathematician.’

‘What I mean is, I want to want to see patterns in numbers,’ I suggest. ‘When I get up from this chair, in an hour’s time and £100 lighter, I want to wonder about nothing else but why 1111x1111 = 1234321.’

‘Right, let’s have another go, ten, nine …’

Once again, my brain leaps the opposite way. I jitter and jump the whole of the rest of the session.

The trouble is, respectable hypnotists are too nice for mathematics. They want to reassure me they won’t get inside my head and do lasting damage. But that’s exactly what I want: muck about in there! Do your worst! Just make me good at maths!

What I’m after is a ruthless, foul-mouthed schemer with snake tattoos and a spike in his nose – someone with proper mathematical spirit. Johnny Hillyard glowers thrillingly from his internet photo, arms akimbo. ‘The World’s Top Comedy Hypnotist.’ For forty years Jonny’s been working the beach fronts and cruise ships in a gull-winged leather jacket and silver medallion, mesmerising people to eat lemons believing they’re peaches.

‘Can you make someone do something they don’t want to under hypnosis?’

‘Yes! If you can suggest to someone that a thing is reasonable, then they can be hypnotised to do it.’

‘Assassination?’

‘Yes.’

Sex? Telling the bank manager to give you a million pounds?

‘It’s all down to the imagination and the way the person takes on board the suggestions.’

‘Maths?’

‘What would come out would be rubbish, but you’d think it was wonderful.’

The first thing to know about hypnotism, he says, ‘is that it doesn’t exist. It’s just the power of suggestion and imagination. Hypnotism doesn’t exist, but hypnotism is everything. Think of Germany during the war, or cannibals. You’d be disgusted by the idea of eating someone for supper, but cannibals have been brought up with a different set of suggestions. They eat people happily.’

‘Goodness! How long does it take to learn to become that sort of hypnotist – sorry, suggester to the imagination?’

‘About five minutes.’

So why isn’t he ruling the world?

‘I’m retired. I used to be the chairman of The Federation of Ethical Stage Hypnotists, but I resigned two years ago he says with disgust.

‘Why?’

‘Because the younger generation of performers won’t stop swearing.’

Meanwhile, a thought has occurred to me: perhaps I’m not the one who has to be hypnotised. Perhaps it is Simon who has to be un-hypnotised, whisked away from his patterns. Who wouldn’t have a glazed expression if their minds could comprehend the secrets of the universe? Mathematics is his equivalent of swinging pocket watches and honeyed voices telling him his eyelids feel like lead. Everyone who meets Simon jumps to the conclusion that he’s autistic, but perhaps he’s just perpetually entranced.