The stereotypical idea of hypnosis–the swinging pocket watch, the “You are getting sleepy…” patter, etc.–is so ingrained in us from countless depictions on stage and screen that it’s sometimes hard to take hypnosis seriously. Aggravating the problem, there has been no scientific consensus on how hypnotism works.
That’s beginning to change: a new study is one of the first to show that hypnosis actually changes the way the brain operates.
The modern history of hypnosis begins with Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), who claimed that disease was caused by imbalances of “animal magnetism.” His elaborate procedure for fixing those imbalances seems to have hypnotized (“mesmerized,” it was called then) his patients, who sometimes acted as though they were having convulsions–or did other strange things.
Mesmerism was discredited in 1784 by a French royal commission, but one of Mesmer’s followers mesmerized a young shepherd named Victor Race, putting him into a sleep-like state in which he was very responsive to instructions. This state became known as “mesmeric somnambulism.” Later in the 19th century a British physician, James Braid, hypothesizing that mesmeric somnambulism resulted from the paralysis of nerve centers, induced by fixing the eyes on an object (like a pocket watch), renamed it “neurhypnotism” (nervous sleep), later shortened to hypnotism.
Hypnotism has fallen in and out of vogue several times since, but over the years scientists learned a few things about it. First, a person’s responsiveness to hypnosis has little or nothing to do with the age, gender or experience of the hypnotist. In other words, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis: the hypnotist is just a coach helping the individual enter the hypnotic state.
Second, an individual’s hypnotizability remains at least as constant as his or her IQ. (And it may have a hereditary component; identical twins are more likely have similar levels of susceptibility than fraternal twins.)
Third, motivation doesn’t matter. Those who aren’t responsive to hypnotism are difficult to hypnotize no matter how much they want to be.
Finally, hypnotizability isn’t related to an individual’s gullibility, trust, aggressiveness, submissiveness, social compliance–or imagination. (Many imaginative people make particularly poor subjects.) There does seem to be a correlation to an individual’s ability to get “lost” in some activity, such as reading or playing the piano.
Those who were hypnotized often feel the things they did under hypnosis “just happened,” rather than being consciously directed. This seems to indicate that under hypnosis, some part of the brain usually involved in directing action is somehow disconnected.
Support for that notion has now come from John Gruzelier, a psychologist at Imperial College in London. Gruzelier used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to see what parts of the brain “lit up” in 24 subjects, 12 of whom were highly susceptible to hypnosis and 12 of whom were not, as they performed a standard cognitive exercise.
Their mental state did not affect the overall scores and, when the subjects were not hypnotized, there was little difference in brain activity between the two groups. Under hypnosis, however, the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus, an area of the brain that responds to errors and evaluates emotional outcomes, and in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, involved with higher-level cognitive processing and behavior.
This could mean that people are willing to do outrageous things while hypnotized because the part of the brain which normally monitors the emotional consequences of future behavior–i.e., “if you act like a chicken in public you’ll be embarrassed,”–is sending out a busy signal instead of a warning.
Of course, there’s more to hypnosis than making people act funny. Clinical tests have shown hypnosis can help with obesity, insomnia, anxiety and hypertension. (Drug addiction and alcoholism don’t respond well, and the jury is still out on how well hypnosis helps people quit smoking.)
Hypnosis works particularly well at alleviating pain. An analysis of multiple recent studies discovered that hypnotic suggestions relieved the pain of 75 percent of 933 subjects in 27 different experiments, sometimes better than morphine. And a new study by Dr. Christina Liossi of the University of Wales in Swansea of 80 young cancer patients in Greece indicates that children as young as six show less reaction to pain when hypnosis techniques are used than when they are not. Dr. Liossi is convinced hypnotism should become part of standard clinical practice.
Now that the brain mechanism behind hypnosis is beginning to be revealed, we may soon understand this mysterious state of mind better–and learn how to put it to even greater and more effective medical use.
Some links with more detail:
A Scientific American article on hypnosis
