Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic
07841 713394
  • Home
  • About Us
    • The Team
    • Help With >
      • Therapies
      • Stop Smoking Hypnotherapy
      • Anxiety and Stress >
        • Fears and Phobias
        • Social Anxiety
        • Performance Anxiety
        • Public Speaking
        • Stress Busting Sessions
      • Weight Management, Weight loss
      • Depression
      • Life and Past Life Regression
      • HypnoBirth
      • Sports Hypnosis
      • Feel Good Look Good
      • Sleep Problems and Insomnia
      • Irritable Bowel Syndrome IBS
      • Confidence and Self Esteem
      • Habits Addictions Compulsions
      • PsychoSexual Problems
    • Prices
  • Testimonials
  • Contact Us
  • Store
  • Video Blog

The Neural Magic of Hypnotic Suggestion

9/9/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
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.

If you would like to find more about how Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic can help you for problems such as anxiety, confidence, low self esteem, hypnobirth, gastric band hypnosis, sports performance hypnosis, weight loss hypnosis, sexual problems contact Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic.


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Birmingham Hypnotherapy Clinic

    We are here to help you to get the life you want.

    RSS Feed

    Share |
    I offer online scheduling using BookFresh

    Archives

    June 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    July 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Addiction
    Alchoholism
    Anxiety
    Brain Waves
    Celebs
    Cowboy Hypnotherapist
    Cowboys
    Gastric Band
    Habit
    Hypnoband
    Hypno Band
    Hypno-band
    Hypnosis
    Hypnosis Gastric Band
    Hypnotherapist
    Hypnotherapy
    Hypnotherapy Evidence
    Hypnotherapy Research
    Hypnotherapy Training
    Ibs
    Insomnia
    Lack Of Sleep
    Nhs
    Nlp
    Pain Reduction
    Panic Attacks
    Paul Mckenna
    Phobia
    Psychosomatic Disorders
    Research
    Richard Bandler
    Rosario Dawson
    Stop Smoking
    Testimonials
    Training
    Trance
    Weight Loss

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.