“You’re gaslighting me.” These days, it’s a phrase tossed around casually – sometimes in jest, sometimes over the smallest fib.
But real gaslighting is pretty hardcore. A few carefully chosen words can serve as deliberate psychological manipulation – enough to make you question your memory, your judgment, even your grip on reality.
It’s not just lying – it's a calculated effort to distort reality until a person begins to distrust their own mind.
Our brains, it turns out, are surprisingly susceptible to this. That’s something that neuroscientist Dr Eamonn Walsh knows all too well. He’s spent years studying how words can shape, shift and rewrite our worlds – often in the context of hypnotism.
"The world really only exists inside your head,” he says. "Language is a kind of code. As we’re speaking to each other, that code is transferred into neural activity.”
It’s not just what we hear – what we see and remember is also filtered through this neural code. And that code, Walsh explains, can be “manipulated, hacked, or influenced”.
Our reality is sensory, he says, based on our memory and beliefs about the world, “and each one of those things can be manipulated, because it’s just neural code”.
In this way, Walsh says that such psychological manipulation is surprisingly easy to pull off. And he should know – he’s tested it first-hand.
The power of verbal suggestion on the brain
The term ‘gaslighting’ comes from 1944 film Gaslight, in which a husband manipulates his wife to try to steal from her. He dims the attic gaslights, and she notices – but he denies that the lights have dimmed.
Her senses then disagree with what she’s being told, creating a cognitive dissonance, which her mind attempts to redress.
“Because she loves her husband, she goes, 'I must have imagined it,'” says Walsh. “I must be losing my mind.”
Just as the wife comes to doubt her own reality, verbal suggestion studies suggest our perceptions can be altered with words alone.
In a study by American researcher Stephen Kosslyn and others, a group of people were shown a grid full of vibrant colours. Then they were told those colours were beginning to fade and, by the end of the study, the participants reported seeing a greyscale.
Another group was shown a greyscale grid and told they were seeing it come alive with warm, vibrant colours. The participants said they saw these colours, although they were still looking at a monochrome image.
Meanwhile, Kosslyn was scanning their brains with positron emission tomography (PET) – measuring blood flow and chemical changes – and found activity that suggested these participants really were looking at bright colours.
“It’s often a criticism of hypnosis or suggestion studies, to say people are just doing what you want them to do,” says Walsh. “But people can’t control their blood flow to their left fusiform gyrus – so that’s a more convincing argument.”
In Walsh’s own suggestion studies, he has made participants believe that others were inserting thoughts into their minds, or that their hands were moving by themselves across the page (more on that below).
(Note: participants gave full consent in these studies, and the effects were reversed.)
And in a recent paper called Editing Reality in the Brain, Walsh and his colleagues argued that words could alter reality, much like putting on a virtual reality headset.
“You can render the world in words,” says Walsh. “If you’re reading a book, the same thing happens. You believe in that outer world, and you’re transported there for a while.”
In the same way, our realities can be shaped by language, either targeting our perceptions of the world around us or our memories.
“When we remember the past, we don’t remember it like a video recorder,” says Walsh. “We just remember the gist – so, we can manipulate the details. We can say, no, it was a blue jumper or a red car.”
This can all be manipulated, both in the context of hypnotism and gaslighting.
The slippery slope of gaslighting
That’s not to say that you can simply tell someone their whole reality is false and they’ll believe you – of course not. Walsh says psychological manipulation is a gradual process.
“In an experiment you slowly, in baby steps, go from where we are at the moment to the stage we want to get to,” he says. “For example, for your hand to begin moving by itself – you might start off saying, listen to my voice. Focus on my voice.”
As your attention is directed to a person's voice, the outer world begins to drift away – and then they can invite you to focus on their hand.
Walsh says: “Then you introduce, slowly, step by step: that’s right, hold the pen. Hold on to it and just let what happens happen. Then it’s as if the pen is in control. The pen is moving. You’re simply holding on to it and the pen is moving of its own accord across the page.”
In a similar way, gaslighting is multi-pronged and gradual, he says – and we’re more likely to fall prey to it if we’ve been primed through a relationship with the gaslighter.
Hypnotisers have an array of techniques – such as counting and breathwork – that they can use to prepare the brain, distract it, and get it into a state of calmness, where it is more pliable and easy to influence.
But when you’ve developed a close relationship with somebody, you might feel safe, secure and relaxed in their company. You might trust them wholeheartedly.
More than that, you might feel deeply attached to them, and keen to take them at their word to protect your bond with them.
All of this can leave your mind vulnerable to their influence – much like the wife who desperately wants to believe her husband when he lies about the gas lights.
And, just like the baby steps of hypnotism, manipulative relationships develop gradually; it might not look like gaslighting right out of the gate.
You might be cut off from your friends one by one, isolated from outside influence.
Your manipulator might control what you read or where you go, and begin making you doubt yourself by denying things they’ve said or done.
You may give them the benefit of the doubt, accepting what they say because you love them – but gradually, step by step, you might lose confidence in your own memories, perceptions and thoughts.
Over time, you may become increasingly dependent on your manipulator’s perspective to help shape your world.
How suggestible are you?
Everyone’s brains are somewhat vulnerable to outside influence, but some people are more suggestible than others.
“It’s not clear why,” says Walsh. “If there are 100 people on a bus, 10 of them will be highly suggestible; 10 will be very unsuggestible. Most people will fall in the middle.”
Suggestible people are not less intelligent. Rather, Walsh says the trait seems to be associated with a trait called absorption, meaning “deep engagement with sensory or imaginative experiences.”
For instance, a highly suggestible person might be more likely to look at a fire and be able to vividly imagine it as alive.
Walsh says suggestibility may even come with advantages, such as the ability to imagine a brighter world in the face of disaster, or the ability to block out pain.
But in the context of gaslighting, suggestibility can make some individuals more likely to take their manipulators at their word.
For example, what if a gaslighter tells their partner, “You’re always so dramatic – nobody else saw that happen,” after recounting a troubling event?
Walsh says: “A highly suggestible victim may begin to doubt their memory of the event, even if they were originally confident it happened.
“Over time, suggestible individuals may more easily accept the gaslighter’s version of events, doubting their own emotions or reasoning.”
And our suggestibility is not totally fixed. Drugs such as alcohol can make us more susceptible to the suggestion of others.
“If someone is trying to destabilise you, then alcohol or drugs would not be a good idea, because that could make you more vulnerable,” says Walsh.
How to protect your brain from psychological manipulation
So, if you’re concerned about psychological manipulation, it’s a good idea to stay sober and alert.
The next tool in your arsenal? Other people.
“In a group context, if someone were to stand up and say, this is not true, and more and more people chime in and say, that’s right – that can help stop it,” says Walsh. “If people are held to account and challenged, I think that can help.”
This can be especially powerful, says Walsh, if there is concrete evidence to back that truth up, verified by a trusted source.
For instance, you could look for text messages that you sent or received around the time of a disputed event, or even create diary entries so you have a record of your memories when they’re still fresh in your mind.
Walsh says it also might be helpful to spot the red flags of manipulation earlier in the process, while it’s easier to escape.
“There might be phrases people say,” he says, “like, ‘I never said that’ or ‘no, you misremembered.’
“That’s just one block slipping from the wall, and then something else happens. It can be a very subtle attack.”
So, look out for phrases intended to make you doubt your perceptions or memory. Hold on to people who might help you reaffirm the truth. Search for – and create – evidence when you’re not sure what to believe.
And be wary. Your mind can be manipulated more easily than you might think.
Read more:
- Is there any scientific explanation for hypnosis?
- Red flags: Is there any science to spotting a toxic relationship?
- Is it human nature to be manipulative?
About our expert
Dr Eamonn Walsh is a neuroscientist at King's College London, where he is Programme Lead for MSc Neuroscience and a Reader in Neuroscience Education. His research currently explores how verbal suggestions can affect the representation of one's own body in the brain. Walsh is also the chair of the NHS Health Research Authority, London Queen Square Research Ethics Committee.
