Hypnotic suggestion: opportunities for cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

Hypnosis uses the powerful effects of attention and suggestion to produce, modify and enhance a broad range of subjectively compelling experiences and behaviours. For more than a century, hypnotic suggestion has been used successfully as an adjunctive procedure to treat a wide range of clinical conditions. More recently, hypnosis has attracted a growing interest from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Recent studies using hypnotic suggestion show how manipulating subjective awareness in the laboratory can provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition. Moreover, they indicate that hypnotic suggestion can create informative analogues of clinical conditions that may be useful for understanding these conditions and their treatments.

Neurophysiology of hypnosis

“…In the normal awake state, we identified a negative correlation between external and internal awareness in healthy volunteers: explicit subjective reports for increased intensity of internal awareness were related to increased connectivity in the DMN, whereas increased external awareness scores were associated with increased connectivity in the external network [64]. Under hypnosis, the external network exhibited reduced functional connectivity, whereas the DMN showed reduced connectivity in its posterior midline and parahippocampal structures but increased connectivity in its lateral parietal and middle frontal areas [12], while other works showed opposite results with increased activity in posterior regions of the DMN as compared to decreased metabolic activity in anterior DMN areas [36,46]. Other fMRI studies have shown a hypnosis-related reduction in DMN connectivity [10,39], and increased activity in lateral prefrontal regions (involved in attentional/extrinsic systems) [10].…”

“…Finally, while we cannot clearly conclude that conversion disorders and hypnotically suggested conversion symptoms share strictly the same neuropsychological processes, studies nevertheless suggest many parallels between the features of clinical conversion symptoms and hypnosis. Hypnosis can be considered as a useful analogue for creating conversion and dissociation symptoms in healthy subjects, by the generation and easy termination of clinically similar experiences in laboratory conditions [46].…”

“…Other studies found that the most relevant EEG changes in highly hypnotizable subjects consisted in a decrease of alpha band activities (localized over motor and visual areas) [36], as well as the fact that mean alpha power seems not to be a predictor of hypnotic susceptibility [54]. Regarding other EEG rhythms, several studies have shown that level of theta activity (associated with inhibition of responses) increased as a function of hypnotizability [46]. It appears that highly hypnotizable subjects generated substantially more theta power than did low subjects, with a larger difference in frontal locations [3,33,54].…”

Discrete response patterns in the upper range of hypnotic suggestibility: A latent profile analysis

“…In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the possibility of using hypnosis to model different psychological and neurological phenomena (Oakley & Halligan, 2009, 2013 , and motor paralysis (Cojan et al, 2009). The value of such research is closely tied to the assumption that HS individuals respond to hypnotic suggestions through uniform mechanisms.…”

Developing Synaesthesia

“…Hypnosis is able to alter the phenomenological properties of participants' subjective experience (Kihlstrom, 2013;Oakley and Halligan, 2013). The process of hypnosis can be divided into induction and suggestion stages.…”