This has interesting information on how little of a state there really is. > If trance simply refers to whatever happens after hypnosis, then it could signify most anything, as each individual’s personal experience is unique, and responses to hypnosis are cued mostly by suggestions and very little, if at all, as we have noted, by the presence of the hypnotic induction (Lynn, Laurence, & Kirsch, 2015). If the term trance implies that the purported state somehow increases suggestibility, then this definition is circular, as hypnotic responsiveness can at once indicate the presence of a hypnotic trance and be explained by it (see Braffman & Kirsch, 1999; Lynn & Green, 2011; Sarbin & Coe, 1972).

One of the more interesting developments I've seen, such as in this systematic review of hypnosis literature, is that different phenomena have different suggestibility, and that hypnotic scales are really unreliable, as people do not fit on a straight line from non-suggestible to suggestible.

I'm also fascinated that the Carleton Skills Training Program (CSTP) can improve suggestibility, so testing for it may not be the right approach, but you might rather find people who are self-taught.

One thing that I found really interesting is that there's some evidence for a region in our brain responsible as to whether we percieve a thought as automatic (e.g. not starting in our consiousness), called the parietal operculum. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207144.2019.16...

This essentially leads to one possibility that hypnosis is little more than a kind of imagination that engages this region versus any other.