16th Nov 2009

Source: BBC News

Hypnosis has a “very real” effect that can be picked up on brain scans, say Hull University researchers.

An imaging study of hypnotised participants showed decreased activity in the parts of the brain linked with daydreaming or letting the mind wander.

The same brain patterns were absent in people who had the tests but who were not susceptible to being hypnotised.

One psychologist said the study backed the theory that hypnosis “primes” the brain to be open to suggestion.

Hypnosis is increasingly being used to help people stop smoking or lose weight and advisers recently recommended its use on the NHS to treat irritable bowel syndrome.

This shows that the changes were due to hypnosis and not just simple relaxation

Dr William McGeown, study leader
It is not the first time researchers have tried to use imaging studies to monitor brain activity in people under hypnosis.

But the Hull team said these had been done while people had been asked to carry out tasks, so it was not clear whether the changes in the brain were due to the act of doing the task or an effect of hypnosis.

In the latest study, the team first tested how people responded to hypnosis and selected 10 individuals who were “highly suggestible” and seven people who did not really respond to the technique other than becoming more relaxed.

The participants were asked to do a task under hypnosis, such as listening to non-existent music, but unknown to them the brain activity was being monitored in the rest periods in between tasks, the team reported in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.

Default mode

In the “highly suggestible” group there was decreased activity in the part of the brain involved in daydreaming or letting the mind wander - also known as the “default mode” network.

One suggestion of how hypnosis works, supported by the results, is that shutting off this activity leaves the brain free to concentrate on other tasks.

Study leader Dr William McGeown, a lecturer in the department of psychology, said the results were unequivocal because they only occurred in the highly suggestible subjects…..MORE

By  Harun Yahya Superficial WorldsModern technology presents many important examples of how sensory experience can be simulated with a high degree of realism, without the help of any external or material world. In particular, the technology called “virtual reality”, which has developed considerably in recent years, gives us some insight on the subject. Simply put, virtual reality involves showing animated three-dimensional images generated on a computer so as to construct “a real world” with the help of some equipment. The most important characteristic of virtual reality is that a person who uses a special device believes that what he sees is real, and moreover he is captivated by that image. The tools used to create a virtual world are a helmet (which houses a screen that provides an image) and a pair of electronic gloves (which provide a feeling of touch). A device in the helmet checks the movements and angle of the head in order to provide an image on the screen which is consistent with the head’s angle and position. People who wander through the room can see themselves through stereo glasses in different places, such as at the side of a waterfall, on the summit of a mountain, or sunbathing on the deck of a ship in the middle of the sea. The helmets create 3D pictures with a realistic sense of depth and space. The pictures are provided in proportion to human sizes, while other equipment, such as gloves, provides the sense of touch. Thus, a person who uses this equipment can touch the objects that he sees in the virtual world and can pick them up and move them. The sounds one hears in such places are also convincing, coming from any direction with different depths and volumes. The system used in the devices that create the virtual world is essentially the same as the system used in our five senses. For example, with the effect of a mechanism inside a glove worn by the user, some signals are given to the fingertips and then transmitted to the brain. When the brain processes these signals, the user has the impression of touching a silk carpet or a vase with a serrated surface, with puffy prints on it, even though there is no silk carpet or vase around. In conclusion, it is possible in principle to create an artificial world with the help of artificial stimuli. So, we cannot claim that the “life image” that we are seeing all the time is the original outside world, and that what we deal with is “the original”. Our senses could well be coming from a very different source. The Important Truth Indicated By Hypnosis One of the best examples of a world created with artificial stimuli is the technique of hypnosis. When a person is hypnotized, he experiences extremely convincing events that are indistinguishable from reality. The person under hypnosis sees pictures, people and various images, and hears, smells and tastes many things, none of which exist in the room. Meanwhile, because of the experience, he becomes happy, upset, excited, bored, worried or flustered. Moreover, the effect of the experience on the person under hypnosis can be watched from outside physically. In very deep hypnotic trances, certain kinds of symptoms can be observed in the hypnotized person, such as an increase in the pulse rate and blood pressure, redness of the skin, high temperature, and the removal of an existing pain or ache.1 When we examine how an image occurs, and follow technological developments, and also when we add consciousness-altering methods such as hypnosis to this knowledge, a certain truth becomes clear. Everything referred to as the world is only our brain’s interpretation of the signals that reach the sense centers. In other words, we can never deal with any world other than the one that occurs in our mind. We can never know what happens or exists outside us. We cannot claim that the sources of signals reaching the brain are material existences that exist outside. Who Is It That Experiences All These Perceptions? As we know, the electric signals coming from the cells in our eyes are transformed into an image in our brains. For example, the brain interprets some electrical signals coming to the visual center in the brain as a field filled with sunflowers. In reality, it is not the eye that is seeing. Therefore, if it is not our eyes that are seeing, what is it that sees the electrical signals as a sunflower field, at the back of our brain, in a pitch-dark place, without feeling any necessity for any eyes, retina, lens, visual nerves or pupil and enjoys the view in the sight? Or who is it that hears (without needing an ear) the voice of a very close friend, becomes happy on hearing it, and misses it when he cannot hear it, when the brain is totally sound proof? Or who is it in the brain that feels the fur of the cat when stroking it, without having any need for a hand, fingers or muscles? Who is it then that sees the sights in a brain as if watching television, and becomes excited, happy, sad, nervous, or feels pleasure, anxiety or curiosity while watching them? Who is responsible for the consciousness, which is capable of interpreting everything seen, and everything felt? What is the entity in the brain that has consciousness and throughout life is capable of seeing all the sights shown to him in a dark, quiet head, which is capable of thinking, and reaches conclusions and makes decisions in the end? It is obvious that it is not the brain, made up of water, lipid and protein, and unconscious atoms that perceives all this and is responsible for consciousness. There must be a being beyond the brain. In the following passage, Karl Pribram describes this important search by science and philosophy for the identity of the perceiver: Philosophers, since the Greeks, have speculated about the “ghost” in the machine, the “little man inside the little man” and so on. Where is the I-the entity that uses the brain? Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint Francis of Assisi once put it, “What we are looking for is what is looking“.2 Although many people venture close to this reality in answering the question “who is the entity that sees”, they hesitate to accept all of its implications. As demonstrated in the example above, in discussing the entity in our brains, some refer to the “little man”, while others say “the ghost in the machine”, some refer to “the being using the brain” while some say “the internal eye”. All these terms have been used to describe the entity beyond the brain that possesses consciousness, and the means of reaching this entity. However, materialist assumptions keep many people from understanding the true nature of this being which actually sees and hears. The only source that answers this question is religion. In the Koran, God states that He created man in a physical way initially and then “breathed His Spirit” to the man He created: When your Lord said to the angels, “I am creating a human being out of dried clay formed from fetid black mud when I have formed him and breathed My Spirit into him, fall down in prostration in front of him!” (The Koran, 15: 28-29) (He) then formed him and breathed His Spirit into him and gave you hearing, sight and hearts. What little thanks you show!(The Koran, 32: 9) In other words, the human being has another existence besides its physical body. That entity inside the brain which says “I am seeing” the sight inside the brain, and “I am hearing” the sound inside the brain and aware of its own existence, and which says “I am me”, is the soul given to human beings by God. Any human being with a mind and a conscience can understand this: the being that watches every incident inside the brain-watches as if looking at a screen throughout his life-is his soul. Every human being has a soul that sees without the need for an eye, hears without the need for an ear and thinks without the need for a brain. Who Lets Our Souls Watch All Of These Views? At this level there is another question that should be asked: Our soul watches the sights in our brains. But who is it that creates these sights? Could the brain itself form a bright, colorful, clear, shadowy sight and form a whole world through electrical signals in a tiny space? The brain is no more than a wet, soft, curvy piece of meat. Could a simple piece of meat like this create a sight clearer than any that could be provided by a television set with the latest technology, without any snow or horizontal jitter? Could a vision of such high quality be formed inside a piece of meat? Could this wet piece of meat form a stereo sound of higher quality than a stereo hi-fi system with the highest technology, without any sizzling noises? Of course, it is impossible for a brain, which is made of one and a half kilograms (four pounds) of meat to form such perfect perceptions. Here we arrive at another truth. Since together with everything surrounding us, the body we have, our hands, arms and faces are the shadow beings, then our brains are also shadow beings. Thus we cannot say that this brain that is itself actually only a visual sensation, forms these visual sensations. Who, then, is the being that shows these sights to our souls, with all their reality and clarity, and lets us live a life with all of these perceptions and without any interruptions? The being that shows all the sights to our souls, lets us hear all the sounds, and creates all the tastes and smells for our pleasure, is the Lord of all the worlds, the Creator of everything, God. Harun Yahya is the author, who writes under the pen name Harun Yahya, was born in Ankara in 1956. He studied arts at Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan University and philosophy at Istanbul University. Since the 1980s, the author has published many books on political, faith-related and scientific issues. Harun Yahya is well known as an author who has written very important works disclosing the imposture of evolutionists, the invalidity of their claims and the dark liaisons between Darwinism and bloody ideologies. Some of the books of the author have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Albanian, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Indonesian, Turkish, Tatar, Urdu and Malay and published in the countries concerned. Harun Yahya’s books appeal to all people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, regardless of their age, race and nationality, as they center around one goal: to open the readers’ mind by presenting the sign’s of God’s eternal existence to them. Please visit :www.harunyahya.com e-mail : info@harunyahya.com 1- William Kroger, Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. 2- Poul Thorsen, Die Hypnose in Dienste der Menschheit, Bauer-Verlag, Freiburg-Haslach, 1960, pp. 52-53 what is this? Send content to your friend

Related Links The World Within The World Within: Part 2

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Posted: Tue - August 30, 2005 at 11:33 PM   Science Related Brain OtBot Previous Next

Mention hypnosis, and the image that springs to mind is a caped magician swinging a pocket watch, seducing otherwise sensible people into barking like dogs.

But hypnosis is more than a stage show act. For years, psychologists have used it to help patients calm preflight jitters, get a good night’s sleep or chuck a cigarette habit. Hypnosis even has uses in mainstream medicine for reducing the side effects of cancer treatments and helping patients cope with pain. Some physicians routinely employ hypnosis as an adjunct to mainstream anesthesia to help block pain during surgery or childbirth.

Most recently, hypnosis has advanced from stage and clinic into the laboratory. It is now used as a research tool to temporarily create hallucinations, compulsions, delusions and certain types of seizures in the lab so that these phenomena can be investigated in detail..

Such studies may lead to more effective treatments for a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders, assert psychologists Peter W. Halligan and David Oakley in the June issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Other scientists, intrigued by the many practical uses of hypnosis, are striving to figure out how it works. Using the latest neuroimaging tools, these scientists are getting a look at what goes on in the hypnotized brain. The findings are mesmerizing.

When hypnotized people act on a hypnotic suggestion, they really do see, hear and feel differently, such research shows. When they’re told to see colors, for example, the color-processing parts of their brains light up–despite the absence of any real color in view. When they are told to envision color objects in black and white, these color-processing areas are less active. Other imaging studies show that hypnotically induced pain activates the same brain areas as “real” pain.

Still, questions remain, says Halligan, of Cardiff University in Wales, who has studied hypnosis for more than a decade. Scientists have yet to discover how hypnosis produces physiological changes. And some scientists question whether such changes are confined to hypnosis. Perhaps the patterns of brain activity seen during hypnosis can occur during everyday experiences when people are fully absorbed in an activity, some researchers say.

The real question, says Halligan, is whether hypnosis is a specific brain state that differs from any other.

“In other words, is there some sort of neural correlate, or biological marker, within the brain during a hypnotic trance?” he asks.

The answer so far, emerging from studies done during the past few years, is maybe. New research at the University of Geneva suggests that hypnosis alters neural activity by rerouting some of the usual connections between brain regions. Such neurological detours don’t happen when subjects merely imagine a scenario.

Changing your mind

Hypnosis got its start as a “miracle cure” in 1774, when physician Franz Mesmer found away, using ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, to induce a hypnotic trance in patients suffering from various unexplained medical problems. Though eventually discredited as a healer, Mesmer demonstrated that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to produce an effect in the body. So powerful is this effect that the practice was resurrected in the 19th century, before the discovery of ether, to block pain during major surgeries.

In this mysterious state of mind, the brain is “quiet” focused and superattentive. People sometimes report feeling disconnected from their surroundings and lost in thought. During hypnosis, subjects are more open than usual to suggestions and have the ability to focus intensely on a specific thought, feeling or sensation.

Most adults, about two-thirds, are hypnotizable to some degree, though some people experience the effects of hypnosis more intensely than others do, says David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine who uses hypnosis in his medical practice. Ten to 15 percent of adults are “highly hypnotizable,” he says, meaning they can experience dramatic changes in perception with hypnosis.

A person’s ability to become hypnotized is unrelated to intelligence, compliancy or gullibility, but may be linked to an ability to become deeply absorbed in activities such as reading listening to music or daydreaming. People who find themselves engrossed in a best seller even while the television is blaring, or swept away by a movie and losing track of time, are likely to be quite hypnotizable.

During hypnosis, the hypnotherapist tries to direct thoughts, feelings and behavior by instructing a person to concentrate on particular images or ideas. A typical session starts with some sort of induction procedure that helps the subject relax–say, counting down from 20 to one or mentally descending a set of stairs.

To produce a specific behavior or thought, the hypnotherapist will make suggestions targeted toward the goal. To reduce the pain of a medical procedure, for example, a hypnotherapist might invoke an image of pain being turned down like the volume on a radio.

Over the years, rigorously controlled studies have shown that hypnosis can also control blood pressure and even make warts go away. But because very few studies have attempted to find out how it works, some scientists are still skeptical of its power.

Critics suggest hypnosis is nothing more than playacting, with subjects trying to please the hypnotist. That skepticism has driven some researchers to take a hard look at what happens in the brain during hypnosis. Over the past few years, scientists have begun gathering evidence that hypnosis can indeed measurably change how the brain works.

In 2005, scientists at Weill Medical College of Cornell University in New York City used functional MRI to show how hypnotic suggestions can override “automatic” processes in the brain. When shown the names of colors printed in different colors of ink–for example, the word red printed in blue–subjects were instructed to name the ink color while ignoring the word.

Though this task may sound easy, it’s often difficult for people who can read because the tendency is to automatically read the word instead of naming the color. When told under hypnosis that the words would appear as gibberish, highly hypnotizable subjects were able to perform the task faster, and with fewer errors, than subjects who were less hypnotizable and therefore less likely to respond to suggestion.

The fMRI results were also striking. Highly hypnotizable participants showed less activity in a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is active when people are trying to sort out conflicting information from different sources, such as contradictory word names and colors. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Going deeper

Scientists agree that there is a pattern or “orchestra” of brain activity during hypnosis. Halligan and his colleagues are working to figure out what this particular pattern might be, and which–if any–brain region serves as conductor. As part of a collaboration with psychiatrist Quinton Deeley of King’s College London, the researchers are looking at how patterns of brain activity in the induction phase–the countdown–prepare the brain for suggestions.

Preliminary findings suggest that hypnosis boosts activity in the brain’s prefrontal cortex–a region responsible for various executive functions such as decision making and regulating attention–while suppressing activity in other brain regions.

Still, researchers are stumped to explain how these changes in brain patterns work to make hypnotized people feel and see things differently. Recent theories, discussed in the article in Trends by Halligan and Oakley, of University College London, propose that hypnotic suggestions may inhibit or disconnect certain mental processes from the brain’s executive control systems.

Until recently, such hypotheses had remained untested. But in the June 25 issue of Neuron, Yann Cojan of the University of Geneva and colleagues report a direct test.

The researchers put 18 subjects in a brain scanner, instructing them to push a button using one hand or the other. Each trial began with a cue indicating which hand to prepare for movement. After a brief interval, an image of a hand would turn green–signaling to press the button–or red, a command to inhibit any motion. Twelve subjects did half of the trials while hypnotized, with the suggestion that their left hand was “paralyzed,” and the other half in a normal, unhypnotized state. Six subjects did trials without hypnosis under instructions to pretend their left hand was paralyzed.

When volunteers used their right hands, the motor cortex linked up with brain regions that control body movement to carry out the task.

But fMRI scans showed changes in several brain areas when hypnotic paralysis prevented subjects from responding to the “go” signal with their left hands. Under hypnosis, neurons in the brain’s motor cortex fired up as usual to prepare for the task. But when instructed to use the left, or “paralyzed” hand, the motor cortex failed to send signals to motor execution regions. Instead, it directed its signals to another brain region, the precuneus.

The precuneus is a sort of center for self-consciousness. If you’ve ever-pictured yourself falling flat on your face in the middle of an important event, that’s your precuneus working overtime. Its function is to help retrieve memories and images of yourself from the brain’s archives and help to visualize movements.

By rerouting motor signals to the precuneus, hypnosis appeared to decouple the typical relationship between brain areas that generate the signals for hand movement and the areas that carry out such movements. Subjects who were not hypnotized and were asked to fake paralysis showed no such disconnect between these regions.

Because the precuneus is involved in mental imagery and self-awareness, Cojan says, hypnosis appeared to enhance the brain’s self-monitoring processes to allow images generated by suggestion–”your hand is heavy and cannot move”–to guide behavior.

By linking to the precuneus, “the motor cortex is connected to the idea that it cannot move the left hand” Cojan says. “So even if you try to move, it will neglect to send signals to the motor execution areas.”

Because the motor cortex fired up as usual to prepare for the task, the findings suggest that mental images created through hypnotic suggestions work by redirecting normal brain functions rather than actively suppressing them, he adds.

Generating piece of mind

Using insights gleaned from the brain scans of subjects paralyzed under hypnosis, Cojan conducted a follow-up study to see whether something like hypnosis happens in the brains of patients during hysterical paralysis. In such instances, patients become paralyzed even though the condition can’t be traced to any physical or neurological brain damage.

An fMRI study of patients with hysterical hand paralysis did not find the heightened precuneus activity that is seen in hypnosis, Cojan’s group reported in the September NeuroImage.

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Previously, it had been suggested that hysterical paralysis was “a kind of self-hypnosis,” Cojan says. “Our findings show that’s not the case.”

Halligan points to the recent paralysis studies as examples of how hypnosis can be used to further studies on the nature of hypnosis and to provide insights on a variety of real-life syndromes and disorders.

In 2000, he and Oakley began looking at ways to use hypnosis to simulate psychosomatic conditions, such as hysterical paralysis or hysterical blindness, in the lab. By creating virtual patients through hypnosis, scientists might be able to better understand the basis for such disorders by comparing patients’ brains with hypnotized brains, the researchers reckoned.

Deeley, who treats psychiatric patients at his private practice in London, says using hypnosis also allows him to track brain processes involved in other kinds of disorders that would not ordinarily be possible to study with brain imaging.

In an ongoing series of experiments, he and his colleagues are using hypnosis to study conditions in which patients sense a “lack of control” over their movements or behavior. Such perceptual experiences may be reported by people who experience nonepileptic seizures or who suffer delusions caused by schizophrenia.

By making some targeted suggestions–”Your left hand is now shaking at your side” or “Your right leg is twitching”–the scientists can model a particular symptom in a consistent and controlled way, Deeley says.

“You can’t have somebody having a full-blown seizure within an MRI scanner,” he says. “It’s not safe because they’re moving fast, and you wouldn’t get any useful information. But if you actually restrict an involuntary movement to a particular limb or a hand, it is possible to create a partial model of these involuntary movements.”

Another advantage of hypnosis is that it allows researchers to untangle the many components that make up a complex disorder, such as schizophrenia. In such cases, patients may feel not only that they’re losing control, but also that their actions or behavior are guided by an outside force or agent, such as the CIA.

Scientists then have the problem of sorting out whether a change in brain activity is associated with the physical experience of a movement or whether it is tied to the delusional beliefs behind the movement.

“In such cases, you’ve got two processes going on associated with complex change in brain activity, and you just can’t unpack them in terms of working out what’s associated with what,” Deeley says.

Experimental manipulations using hypnosis could provide a window into a wide range of disorders, he says, and could help explain other types of altered states, such as meditation.

Halligan agrees, noting that hypnosis could be used to simulate various disorders commonly associated with brain injury, such as visual impairment. In a recent study, he used hypnotic suggestions to replicate conditions described by injured soldiers who are still capable of detecting motion in certain visual fields but are unable to make out any distinguishing features of the moving object.

“That’s not to say that the same psychological consequences of pathology seen in patients are somehow replicated in hypnosis,” Halligan says. “But using hypnosis to simulate a specific condition for imaging may tell us which brain systems are involved.” This information may then feed back into the development of new treatments and rehabilitation tools, he says.

Such advancements, however, hinge on learning more about the underlying processes involved in hypnosis itself. Current efforts may help scientists differentiate between the brain structures that play a role in hypnosis and those that are involved in the tasks subjects are asked to perform.

“These are still early days,” Halligan says, noting that it has yet to be seen how well hypnotically simulated disorders will actually match the conditions they’re intended to mimic. Still, he says, hypnosis provides a way to “test and probe.”

Best of all, no pocket watches are involved.

Your brain on hypnosis

Studies show hypnosis reroutes brain signals. Hypnotized people who are told that their left hand is paralyzed show brain patterns (yellow) that differ from those who aren’t hypnotized (red) and from those who aren’t hypnotized but are told to pretend their left hand is paralyzed (green).

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When told to move their right or “unparalyzed” hand, the motor cortex fired up in all subjects to prepare the hand to move.

When told to move the left hand, the motor cortex again got ready to move in all subjects.

In hypnotized subjects told to move their left, “paralyzed” hand, the motor cortex routed signals to the precuneus, an area involved in mental imagery and memory about oneself. Pretenders (green) did not use the precuneus.

Explore more

* Explore the science behind hypnosis at the Hypnosis and Suggestion website: www.hypnosisandsuggestion.org

Illustration by Lou Beach

Susan Gaidos is a freelance science writer based in Maine.