Ask HN: Does Spritz or Squirt.io cause hypnosis?

4 points by aculver 12y ago ↗ HN

Has anyone noticed themselves going into a hypnotic state (or a state of trance) when using Spritz or Squirt for more than, say, 15 minutes?

I've been using the bookmarklet from http://squirt.io/ since it appeared here on HN. Before today I had just been using it for relatively short blog posts and slightly longer news articles, but today I started out on a quest to read the whole New King James Version of the Bible in about 15 days at 950 WPM. (To filter out any distraction from outside my home office, I did this with some lyric-less trance music playing through my headphones.)

Well, about 24 chapters in I was noticed I was un-ignorably hungry, (I skipped breakfast this morning,) so I paused the bookmarklet and set out to grab some lunch at Chipotle, which is about a 10 minute drive from our house. I can't adequately describe the feeling or experience, (I tried, but it ended up being long and crazy-sounding enough that I felt a bit self-conscious about it,) but having been hypnotized years ago I can definitely associated the overall experience with that of being hypnotized. (For folks who code, I'd describe it as being in the zone twice over. :-))

Has anyone else experienced the same thing after using Spritz or Squirt for longer reading sessions?

1 comment

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thetrumanshow 12y ago ↗

That is certainly a neat side-effect of concentrating awfully hard. I think I experienced similar things when taking standardized tests for college admission. Haven't experienced anything like that since.

I'm not sure that you're not a notch above the mean when it comes to concentration skills in the first place Andrew. :)