A new review of the scientific literature studying hypnosis, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, by Oakley and Halligan, discusses the potential for hypnosis to provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition and also to produce informative analogues of clinical conditions. This is a critical discussion as hypnosis is used as a psychological treatments and, recently, as an investigative tool in cognitive neuroscience.

An iconic vision of the menacing magician involves placing a hapless person from the audience into a hypnotic trance. Svengali. You are getting sleeeepy. A scam, right? Not so fast. According to to this new review, as well as our colleagues who study the brains of people who are prone to trancelike states, hypnosis is not necessarily hocus-pocus. The age-old practice profoundly alters neural circuits involved in perception and decision making, changing what people see, hear, feel, and believe to be true. Recent experiments led people who were hypnotized to “see” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought they were gibberish.

Some of the critical experiments were led by Amir Raz, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, who is an amateur magician. Raz wanted to do something really impressive that other neuroscientists could not ignore. So he hypnotized people and gave them the Stroop test. In this classic paradigm, you are shown words in block letters that are colored red, blue, green, or yellow. But here’s the rub. Sometimes the word “red” is colored green. Or the word “yellow” is shown in blue. You have to press a button stating the correct color. Reading is so deeply engrained in our brains that it will take you a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like “red” and press a button that says “green.”*

Sixteen people, half of them highly hypnotizable and half of them resistant, came into Raz’s lab. (The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance.) After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Raz gave them these instructions:

Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them. This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green, or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self.

Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion—an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized. Days later, they entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when the instruction came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, Raz said. They saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But those who were resistant to hypnosis could not override the conflict, he said. The Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors. When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. In the hypnotizables, Raz found, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened. Top-down processes overrode circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict. Most of the time people see what they expect to see and believe what they already believe—unless hypnosis trips up their brain circuitry. Most of the time, bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, but hypnosis creates a mismatch. You imagine something different, so it is different.

The top-down nature of human cognition goes far to explain not only hypnosis but also the extraordinary powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor can make you ill), talk therapy, meditation, and magical stagecraft. We are not saying that hypnosis can cure your cancer, but these effects all demonstrate that suggestion can physically alter brain function.

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After eight years away from the Premier League, Crystal Palace shouldn't need much motivation ahead of their season opener with Tottenham on Sunday week.

But manager Ian Holloway - taking no chances - has had his players hypnotised before the big match to ensure they're psychologically sharp.

Former world boxing champ Glenn Catley, now a qualified hypnotherapist, has been visiting the club regularly since the players returned for pre-season training last month.
Catley, 41, held the WBC super-middleweight title 13 years ago, bumped into old friend Holloway while out walking the dog and was given the responsibility of preparing Palace for their first season back in the top flight.

He told The Independent: 'I underwent hypnotherapy for 10 years in my boxing career. When I retired eight years ago, I took a course in clinical psychotherapy, hypnosis and sports psychology in Bristol.

'Two months ago I was out walking the dog and bumped into Ian, a good friend from way back in the west country where we both live.


Entranced: The Palace squad have been undergoing the hypnotherapy sessions since returning to pre-season training last month


'After talking to him about what I did, he invited me to meet with his players. He told me they have all the talent but psychologically they were letting a few demons creep in.'

Catley added: 'Now I see them for a few days every week, including the first team squad. We work on a one-to-one basis and part of the therapy is to hypnotise them, putting them in a trance.

'I think it helps to eliminate many psychological problems.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2384708/Crystal-Palace-boss-Ian-Holloway-brings-hypnotherapist-Glenn-Catley-ahead-Premier-League-kick-off.html#ixzz2b5ytxdox 
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Putting patients into a hypnotic trance can be a boon to treating phobias, depression, stuttering, anxiety and many other conditions.

Hypnotism has been practiced for thousands of years, and for most of that time it was associated with magic, witchcraft, meditation, charlatans and entertainment.

Only in the past century have the medical and psychological benefits of hypnotherapy been documented, scientifically proven and significantly utilized to treat a gamut of problems from stuttering, bruxism (teeth grinding) and phobias to painful childbirth, anxieties and psychiatric diseases.

But the layman retains many misunderstandings and myths about hypnotism, and large numbers of people who could benefit have no access because the treatment is not included in the basket of health services.

There are 250 active members in the Israel Society of Hypnosis, chaired by clinical psychologist Dr. Udi Bonstein. Nearly 50 percent of licensed hypnotherapists are clinical psychologists like him, about 30% psychoanalysts/psychiatrists and the rest dentists. All of them have to take and pass a special hypnotism course to be licensed.

The society would like to see other professionals, such as nurses, clinical social workers, midwives and physiotherapists join, but the law would have to be changed – a very complex process.

Dr. Shaul Livnay , a Swiss-born, France-raised and American- and Israeli-trained senior clinical psychologist, licensed supervisor and trainer of hypnosis who has integrated hypnotherapy into his practice for the past 30 years, recalled its background and explained its uses.

In an interview last week with The Jerusalem Post, he said: “I have used it on many hundreds of patients for matters of parental guidance, treatment of children and adolescents, help for adults in their 20s through 50s and through retirement.”

IT CAN be used for hypnotic preparation toward birth; emotional adjustment and behavioral problems in the young; bed wetting; training children with serious illness to hypnotize themselves to reduce pain and anxiety; lack of concentration on studies; conflicts with parents; trichotillomania [hair pulling], fear of heights, flying and other phobias; difficulties with military service; relationships; stress; coping as grandparents; adjustment to aging and much more. However, Livnay admits that there are limitations: getting people to kick the smoking habit using hypnosis, for example, is “very complicated and can easily not succeed,” he says.

Hypnosis, derived from hypnos, the Greek word for sleep, is defined as a “special psychological state with certain physiological attributes, resembling sleep only superficially and marked by a functioning of the individual at a level of awareness other than the ordinary conscious state.” A leading founder was Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century German doctor who suggested that there was a “natural energetic transference” that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called “animal magnetism.” His theory was later called “mesmerism,” and “mesmerized” has long been accepted in the English language.

“He believed in ‘magnetic fluid’ that people had to balance against their illness,” said Livnay. “Mesmer made a special bathtub with rods immersed in it to treat mass hysteria.

He was thrown out of Vienna and went to France, where five investigative committees were set up, one of them headed by the American statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin. But none of them found the device made any difference. They realized that hypnotism was connected to imagination and the power of suggestion.”

Performers claiming to hypnotize subjects, often “stooges,” gave hypnotism “a bad name” for centuries.

The great psychiatrist Sigmund Freud went to study hypnosis in France, said Livnay. “He was very rigid and saw that after hysterical blindness was ‘cured’ in a patient, the condition returned. He didn’t know what to do after the trance ended. Freud had a flirtation with hypnosis, and turned it eventually into free association, but sometimes disliked it because he thought he was not good at it. He also felt uncomfortable when patients stared at him, so he always sat behind the patient, whom he put on a couch. He always preferred that arrangement when dealing with patients.”

ONE OF the most veteran licensed hypnotherapists in Israel, Livnay attended his first hypnosis conference in Jerusalem in 1988. “I felt freed, much more open to patients when I learned it. I began to use it with other techniques, and today I am an integrative therapist.” Asked whether all patients can be “inducted” (urged) into a trance, Livnay said about 10% are not susceptible to it at all, 10% are “always in a trance,” while the rest have to be inducted. “We conduct tests and use scales to determine who can do it. There is no correlation to age, sex, culture, religiosity or other factors.”

Hypnosis, which is a kind of psychotherapy, was in 1892 recognized by a committee of the British Medical Association, the body of experts evaluated the nature and effects of hypnotherapy and decided that it is “frequently effective in relieving pain, procuring sleep, and alleviating many functional ailments.”

Only in 1955 did the BMA officially approve hypnotherapy, and stated that in the previous century that it could be “of great service in the treatment of patients.” The American Medical Association followed with a commission in 1958 that decided “hypnosis has a recognized place in the medical armamentarium and is a useful technique in the treatment of certain illnesses when employed by qualified medical and dental personnel.”

There is no such thing, said Livnay, as doing only hypnosis. “It is a tool to use within your specific specialty.

For example, it can be used on pregnant women to affect the fetus. Babies emerge very calm. Most courses for childbirth include hypnosis without saying so.

“Even though hypnosis has a strong influence on many patients, it doesn’t mean that I use it on everyone.

Some come only for hypnosis, for anxiety or psychosomatic problems, for example. It then takes six to 12 sessions. I tell them it’s part of therapy, even a major part, but never the whole treatment.”

But many people have “more complex problems.

Hypnosis for these conditions usually shortens the number of psychotherapy sessions they need,” he says.

However, he continued, if a person is very unstable “and an untrained therapist opens him up with hypnosis, he could go into psychosis. Untrained people have been sued for harming patients. There was a famous case a few years ago of a Florida high-school principal who tried to help pupils suffering from test anxiety, and a suicide was the result.”

The left brain hemisphere, he explained, controls reasoning and language. The right brain deals with imagery and imagination. “Inducing a hypnotic trance means that the patient leaves the generalized reality orientation and begins to drift, using free associations. He closes his eyes, concentrates and uses his imagination.”

Hypnotists used to use crystals as a pendulum to wave in front of the patient’s face. “We may use it to test the person’s ability to go under or do some investigative work. But today we often use individual colorful marbles; patients choose one and smile, because they have a warm feeling as they associate it with their childhood. When they touch it, it’s so relaxing. Induction can also be verbal. It can take a few seconds to a few hours to get there.”

There are several myths about hypnosis. “One,” says Livnay, “is that the therapist is in control. In fact, the patient is always in control. He might decide to give up conscious control of his left brain and open up the right hemisphere, but the therapist cannot control him like a puppet. A trance can not be used to force a patient to abandon his morals and principles.”

Another myth is that if a patient is inducted, there is a danger that he won’t be able to wake up. Most people close their eyes and become immobile, so they look asleep. But they are still conscious. Some patients fear they will lose their memory, said Livnay, “but they always remember what happened and remain in control during the induction, hearing the therapist and being de-hypnotized.

“If a stage is skipped, and the therapist claps his hands but all stages have not been performed, the patient may go out a bit mixed up and return to reality by themselves. Yet they may be frightened. The hypnotist must make sure to test the patient to ensure that he has ‘come back’ properly. Unless I’m working on a person suffering from insomnia, in which case I put them on a couch or they sit on a lounge chair with their feet up, I have people sit on a regular chair in front of me.”

Although he is not observant himself, he has ultra- Orthodox patients, who he says learn about his service by word of mouth. “I recently treated some yeshiva students who had all kinds of problems caused by their intensive study. I used hypnosis to get them to relax.

Teenagers are complicated, but I got a whole slew of problems yeshiva students who came to get relaxed.”

Phobias are very common. “People are afraid of small or large places [claustrophobia and agoraphobia] or of getting into a plane. There are some people, mostly women, who drive perfectly well in the city and never had an accident but are petrified by the idea of driving on intercity roads.”

Hypnotherapy is very useful for pure medical purposes, including preparing and calming patients before surgery so they are more cooperative with their doctors, Livnay said. For this purpose, many surgeons have learned to do hypnosis themselves.

Some hospitals are strong advocates of hypnosis; Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, for example, has a hypnosis unit headed by Dr.

Eitan Abramovich.

“With hypnosis, recovery takes less time,” said Abramovich, “and there is less bleeding and less need for anesthesia and pain killers. There was a Scottish surgeon back in the 19th century who performed over 5,000 operations using hypnosis; 500 of them involved major surgery, all without anesthesia. But this use was largely replaced by modern anesthesia.

“I have a colleague in Turkey who performed a hysterectomy on a highly motivated woman. He put her into a trance, and a curtain was placed in front of her.

Fully conscious but with no pain, she talked to the surgeons about a recipe she had made.”

Hypnotherapy can help patients with skin conditions; psoriasis has a major psychosomatic element. So does irritable bowel syndrome; hypnosis is almost the treatment of choice. It can give cancer patients getting chemotherapy some relief from nausea. For pain, hypnosis can help no less and probably more than medical marijuana, Livnay said. “But the technique cannot be used on psychotic or other severely disturbed patients.”

Stroke patients, people with tinnitus (chronic ringing in the ears), hypertension, or those with kidney failure who are on dialysis also can benefit from hypnotherapy.

Many dentists use it to pull teeth, make fillings, treat bruxism and a gag reflex in their patients – or a complete dental phobia. One health fund, he concludes, “has had a hypnosis unit in its dental service for many years.”

DR. UDI Bonstein, a physician who studied hypnotherapy at Tel Aviv University Medical School and has practiced it for 15 years, said he would like to have a day at the Israel Society of Hypnosis national conference next May opened to physicians and other professionals who are interested. But some doctors are “still leery, especially as the therapy is not provided by the health funds free, so they don’t want to take the risk and establish a hypnosis institute. If it were included in the basket of health services, many more would do it. And it should be taught to medical students in their final years of studies.”

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The absence of any accreditation in the country for hypnotherapy is making it vulnerable to fake practitioners, said President of the Hypnotique Circle of Madras, Muthiah Ramanathan. He was speaking on the sidelines of a seminar held on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the organisation on Sunday.

“The Indian government does not recognise hypnotherapy while the American Medical Academy and that in Britain has recognised it as a medical tool since the 1950s. Owing to this situation people without any expertise in the field are able to practice here,” he said.

Speaking about the various applications of hypnosis and hypnotherapy, he said the acceptance of the field is growing in the city. “Nowadays there are an increasing number of patients who seek hypnosis and hypnotherapy. The problems can range anywhere between fear of learning to drive to marital problems,”  he said.

Muthiah pointed out that in about 50 per cent of the cases, it is young couples who seek treatment. “Compatibility issues after marriage is the most frequent problems. This is true for both love and arranged marriages.

In about 60 per cent of the cases, it is possible to bring some sort of amicable understanding between the parties,” he said. Experts also pointed out that while young couples were the most frequent seekers of help, there was also a growing number of couples who had been living together for years and have divorce issues now. “More and more couples are coming up with issues of divorce after more than 15 years of living together. The common argument is that they have been waiting for all those years to let their children settle down and that it was now time to move on,” says V V Narayanan, secretary of the association.

Another bunch of people who commonly used this therapy are students, especially school students who are on the road to writing competitive examinations, said the experts.

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STUDENTS at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University are set to benefit from the use of modern hypnosis techniques to help reduce examination stress and improve their grades.
• Visiting Professor Ursula James is introducing the use of clinical hypnosis at RGU
• James recently accepted the position of Visiting Professor in Clinical Hypnosis at the university

The use of clinical hypnosis is being introduced at the university by new Visiting Professor Ursula James who is an internationally renowned expert in the field and the presenter of the Channel 5 show “Sex, Lies and Hypnosis.”

Professor James recently accepted the position of Visiting Professor in Clinical Hypnosis at RGU, the first appointment of its kind in the UK.

A university spokesman explained that Prof James, who is also a visiting teaching fellow at Oxford University Medical School, had been been approached by university authorities to take on her new role after delivering a workshop on self hypnosis for childbirth at the university’s Faculty of Health and Social Care in November last year.

He said: “Staff at RGU’s School of Nursing and Midwifery will work with Professor James to develop new support strategies for students, including hypnotherapy, to alleviate the stress of exams and course work which will also be incorporated into the induction process.

“Whilst at RGU, Professor James will continue her research into the effect of altered states on cognition and the bio-medical markers of stress.”

‘Exciting projects’

Prof James said: “I am honoured to accept the position of Visiting Professor at Robert Gordon University and look forward to working with students and staff on a number of exciting projects designed to reduce stress, improve personal abilities and enhance skills.”

She continued: “There is a fantastic ‘can-do’ attitude at RGU and as part of my appointment I aim to improve the professional standards in hypnosis and develop further research in this field. RGU is the perfect place to do this.”

Experts at the university will also be working with Professor James to develop an MSc in Clinical Hypnosis which will include specific modules on smoking cessation, weight loss and child birth. The course, which will be developed over the next year, will be taught both full-time and part-time, utilising a blended learning approach.

‘Great addition’

Professor Ian Murray, RGU’s Head of School of Nursing and Midwifery, welcomed Professor James’ appointment which he described as a “great addition to the school’s depth of talent and expertise.”

He said: “Clinical Hypnosis is an exciting area of medical practice and we are delighted Professor James has joined our team. We look forward to working with her to develop new courses for the university as well as innovative ways of alleviating stress and improving student performance.”

Professor James currently heads a team which teaches clinical hypnosis at eleven medical schools in Britain, including Oxford and Cambridge. She also had her own TV series on Channel 5 called “Sex, Lies and Hypnosis” which used hypnotherapy for relationships

She is also the Patron of Anxiety UK and the National Centre for Domestic Violence and is actively engaged in research into the applications of altered states of awareness for enhancing performance and reducing anxiety.

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According to The Telegraph in an article published on the 26 June 2013, anxiety and stress are the most popular reasons for missing time off work. An official major nationwide study looked at tens of thousands of sick notes issued by GP’s and found that 35 per cent were for reasons associated with mild to moderate mental health disorders. A spokesperson from the Department for Work and Pensions said:

“Sickness absence is a burden to business, to the taxpayer and to the thousands of people who end up trapped on benefits when they could actually work. Supporting people with mental health problems to return to work more quickly will be an important part of the new independent health and work advisory service.”

One way to help people deal with mild mental health disorders is by using complementary therapies such as hypnotherapy. The National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) gives members of the general public access to local hypnotherapist’s details from all over the UK which can be used to arrange hypnotism sessions. This can help a variety of issues including weight loss, phobias, habits like smoking and anxiety or stress. In this case, hypnotherapy could help the client reduce levels of anxiety and stress through discussing the issue and using hypnotic techniques to control and alleviate symptoms.

“This could help those who are absent from work due to anxiety and stress and reduce symptoms with the goal of returning the client back to the workplace ASAP,” added a spokesperson from the NCH.

The National Council for Hypnotherapy aims to highlight the variety of uses for hypnotherapy.

NCH represents over 1800 hypnotherapy professionals within the UK and is committed to ensuring the highest possible professional standards amongst our members. Those looking for help with smoking, weight, anxiety, panic attacks, habits and phobias may be helped by local NCH accredited therapists, look for the NCH seal of approval on their websites. As one of the largest registers of independent Hypnotherapists, the National Council for Hypnotherapy (NCH) is actively involved with the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) and strives to develop standards for the benefit of the profession, now and into the future.



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I was interested to read in the Complementary & Natural Healthcare Council’s bulletin that there is now an MSc in Clinical Hypnosis which will give more credibility to the therapy and increase its use in a medical setting alongside more conventional treatments.

Some examples where it is being are in anaesthesia for dental treatment and in childbirth where the patient will be taught before the event to use to self-hypnosis to turn off pain.

While this does sound quite a leap of the imagination if you think of self hypnosis as like meditation it all starts to make sense.  In a meditative state we seek to separate the mind from the body to induce relaxation, and in the case of anaesthesia being relaxed then allows you to visualise better.

When I hypnotise someone I merely guide them into hypnosis and eventually they will learn how to do that themselves.  We are all capable going into a state of self hypnosis it is just that we might not realise it, like writers when they are working on a piece and find that the whole morning has passed.

In a clinical situation, during the hypnosis or self hypnosis you can imagine that your hand is in cold water so it feels numb.  If you hold this thought your mind will follow and your hand will start feeling numb and anaesthetised.  The more you practice, you will eventually be able to move the numbness to any part of the body that you want and that is why it is possible to feel no pain when you give birth.

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As mentioned in our previous post we recently found this offer for hypnotherapy training. Unfortunately our profession is not a regulated profession at the moment which leads to some poorly qualified hypnotherapists. The advert below is to become a "Fully Qualified Hypnotherapist". The only training they give is a CD with scripts for the"qualified hypnotherapist" to read to the clients and a DVD with some of the techniques.  Of course you can learn something from watching a DVD but do you think this is enough? I am not sure about you but if i was looking for a hypnotherapist in Birmingham, UK or anywhere else, I would make sure that my hypnotherapist had some proper training.  In the same way I would not get in the car with someone who has just watched a DVD on how to drive a car I would not let someone work with my emotional issues.

So if you are looking for a hypnotherapist in Birmingham UK or for hypnotherapy in Birmingham ensure that your therapist is fully trained and the best what to do this is by checking if they are member of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) which is was established with government support to regulate complementary therapies such as hypnotherapy.

For a list of our hypnotherapy memberships visit our hypnotherapy membership page.