There is, therefore, no need for us to believe that sleep and hypnosis are strictly identical. Their apparent similarity may signify a certain kinship of the two kinds of phenomena, a kinship assumed by the practicians since the days of Braid who called the hypnotic state "a nervous and artificial sleep." The late Professor I. P. Pavlov was the leading champion of the "Differentiation of the Hypnotic Trance from Normal Sleep," Journal of Experimental Psychology, hypothesis that ordinary sleep and hypnosis belong to the same group of phenomena and are merely different manifestations of inhibitory processes. According to him, the distinction between them can be briefly described as follows: "Inhibition is partial sleep, or sleep distributed in localized parts, forced into narrow limits. . . Hypnosis is inhibition spread over the usually active points in special areas of the hemispheres. Sleep is inhibition irradiated over the whole area of active points of the hemispheres and even over some parts of the brain below the cerebral hemispheres."
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