Hypnosis Home Blog

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

2005-11-28T11:58:00.000-05:00

This article has been reprinted from the New York Times and was written by Sandra Blakeslee.

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized “saw” colors where there were none.

Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

“The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations” is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. “But now we’re really getting at the mechanisms”.

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950’s to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18^th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible “magnetic fluid” that only he was able to muster.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19^th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestions is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of the normal brain function.

One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher – in terms of function – region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower’s identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call “top down processing”. What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.

One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that proves conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he “wanted to do something really impressive” that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The prove, called Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz’s lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. 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, Dr. Raz said:

“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.”

Dr. 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, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz’s instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, 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 brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to “drain” color from a colorful abstract drawing or “add” color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. “We imagine something different, so it is different,” he said.

news article Weight Loss

2005-11-23T12:30:00.000-05:00

Did you ever have an experience that came out of the blue but made so much sense when it happened? If you are of the mind that there are unexplained parts of our lives that become clear during hypnosis then this story will appeal to you.

Why hypnosis? It’s about healing. Whether food, or smoking, fears or anxiety, stress or confidence, we all need to occasionally tap into that great source of infinite possibility, which lies within each and every one of us.

Once upon a time and not too long ago a lovely lady came and asked if I could help her to overcome a life long battle of over eating. She was tired of feeling tired. She was sick of feeling sick. She was disgusted with never fitting into her clothes. She was angry with herself for knowing better than her behavior would suggest.

Why can’t I eat healthy balanced meals?

Why do I eat junk food?

Why do I stick my head into the refrigerator five minutes after I finish my dinner?

Why do I keep on eating even after I am full?

Why do I eat so much sugar?

Why don’t I exercise?

Why don’t I meditate?

Why don’t I make myself the same priority I give to everyone else in my life?

Why don’t I drink more water?

What is the matter with me?

I am not stupid. I know what is good for me and what is not good for me and yet I continue to do what is literally killing me.

Am I crazy?

Am I self-destructive?

I need help now!

So we began the process of understanding her individual issues and spent about an hour just talking about what she wanted for herself and how she would like to see her new behavior developing and growing.

She said the four things she wanted to do more than anything else were the following:

1. Stop eating after seven pm

2. Exercise for forty five minutes every day

3. Eat healthy portion controlled meals

4. Snack seldom but on healthy food only

Her most important motivation was to feel strong and healthy as she had felt many years ago when she was slim and fit.

Since these were the most important issues to her, we were certain to include these items as her special suggestions made while she was in the state of hypnosis.

When it was time for her to experience hypnosis I spent about twenty minutes just speaking to her softly and getting her into the very relaxed and peaceful place we all have available within us.

When she was fully at ease I did several tests just to make certain she was deep enough to continue. She passed the tests with flying colors and we went on to take her back to the origin of her over eating habits.

Now here is where it really became interesting.

I asked her to return to the origin of the behavior of over eating and

Instead of going back to her early childhood, which seems to be where most of my clients go, she went back even further. She went back so far that some would say she went all the way back to yet another lifetime.

No one was as surprised as I was when she began to describe a different place and time.

I must admit it was the first time this happened during weight loss hypnosis and I was as excited as a kid in a candy shop to see where this was all going.

Well she proceeded to tell me about the place where she lived as a little girl in another country. She spoke in detail of the rooms and what they looked like and the composition of the floor and walls. She spoke of her mother and her illness and the feeling she had watching all of this as though she were truly there observing the surroundings. The description, lead me to believe this took place a couple of hundred years ago and the language was probably Spanish.

What she learned from the experience was that the reason she was over eating now was connected to her trauma in the past and so it no longer had any relevance to the present.

With that she was able to release it and forgive the people and herself for any transgressions and move forward free from the debilitating burden of the past.

I continued to work with her and prepared an audiotape for her of the session so that she could use it every day as a way of reinforcing all of the work she had done.

I saw her just a couple of weeks ago and was so happy to see her still losing weight.

There can be a spiritual healing which can takes place as we visit our past and forgive.

As all great traditions teach us, the power of forgiveness is life affirming and life altering.

In this particular case it spanned the course of centuries.

It is never too late to begin again. It is never too late to renew and give birth to a new self.

Some people ask me if I believe in past lives. My answer is simply this. I believe that the experience people have during regression can be life saving. Whether the experience is real or imagined is kind of irrelevant.

What is most important is that the healing occurs. That is what matters to me. Let us heal ourselves in whatever manner we are able to heal ourselves and not get too caught up in the mystery of life we all share and all stand in awe of no matter what our beliefs.