Ultimate Facts on Hypnosis and Neuroscience
Relationship Between Neuroscience and Hypnosis
Neuroscience gets serious about hypnosis
Hypnosis is synonymous with stage entertainment where the
performer puts volunteers from the audience into a trance and commands them to
do embarrassing things. This makes it sound like a joke, but in fact hypnosis
is a real phenomenon and it is proving increasingly useful to psychologists and
neuroscientists, granting new insights into mental processes and medically
unexplained neurological disorders.
That's according to David Oakley and Peter Halligan who have
written an authoritative new review, debunking hypnosis myths, and covering
ways that neuroscience is shedding light on hypnosis and ways hypnosis is
aiding neuroscience.
Despite popular folklore, hypnosis is not a form of sleep
(this misconception isn't helped by the fact that hypnosis studies typically
label the control condition the "waking state"). However, Oakley and
Halligan say new brain imaging findings do support the contention that hypnosis
is a distinct form of consciousness. After successful hypnotic induction, which
involves using mental strategies to reach "a focused and absorbed
attentional state", participants show reduced activity in parts of the
brain's default mode network together with increased activity in prefrontal
attentional systems. Oakley and Halligan concede that "it remains to be
seen if these particular changes are unique to hypnosis."
After hypnotic induction (or in some cases even without it)
participants exposed to suggestive statements can experience altered perceptual
or bodily sensations. For instance, told that their arm is getting heavier and
they cannot move it, a suggestible participant may experience paralysis of the
arm. Sceptics may wonder about the veracity of these experiences but brain
imaging results are indicating they are real and not merely imagined.
Consider a study of participants hypnotised and induced to
see colourful Mondrian images in grey. Brain scan results of these participants
showed altered activity in fusiform regions involved in colour processing, and
crucially such changes weren't observed when the participants merely imagined
the Mondrians in grey. Another study showed that the famous Stroop effect
disappeared when hypnotised participants received the suggestion that they
would see words as meaningless symbols.
Another line of research explores the correlates of hypnotic
suggestibility. Apparently it is a highly stable trait and it is heritable. It
doesn't correlate with the main personality dimensions but does correlate with
creativity, empathy, mental absorption, fantasy proneness and people's
expectation that they will be prone to hypnotic procedures.
Many neurological symptoms are medically unexplained with no
apparent organic cause and it is here that hypnosis is proving especially
useful as a new way to model, explore and treat people's symptoms. For instance
people can be hypnotised to experience limb paralysis in a way that appears
similar to the paralysis observed in conversion disorder. People can also be
hypnotically induced to experience the sense that there is a stranger looking
back at them when they peer in a mirror - an apparent analogue of the real
"mirrored-self-misidentification delusion". Hypnosis research is also
exposing the apparent volitional element to mental phenomena previously
considered automatic. For example, a patient who experienced face-colour
synaesthesia received post-hypnotic suggestion that abolished the colours she
usually sees with faces (as confirmed by a colour-naming task in which faces no
longer had an interfering effect).
"The psychological disposition to modify and generate
experiences following targeted suggestion remains one of the most remarkable
but under-researched human cognitive abilities given its striking causal
influence on behaviour and consciousness," said Oakley and Halligan.
Source: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.in/2013/08/neuroscience-gets-serious-about-hypnosis.html
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