As a teenager living in San Francisco, Edison Liu taught himself how to hypnotize people. "I pulled some books out of the public library, read up on it, and tried it on my friends" - including the kids at the summer music camp he attended. "The peak of susceptibility is during early adolescence," says Liu. "So I could get these guys to actually hallucinate. They loved it."
Their parents, however, did not. Liu got called out during the end-of-summer concert after directing the chorus members to collapse on the stage, one after another. "In my delusion, I thought that maybe I had gotten an award and they needed to inform me," says Liu. "Instead they put me in a car with one of the parents who was a clinical psychologist who interrogated me about my experiences with their children. From that day on, I never hypnotized anybody."
Maybe not directly. ...
