A person’s susceptibility to hypnosis has long been thought to be a fairly static characteristic. You may be highly hypnotizable. Or you may be part of the approximately 25% of people who cannot be hypnotized at all. Twenty-five years of research has revealed that hypnotic susceptibility is a surprisingly stable trait. Like personality and IQ, these traits do not change much over time, regardless of life experiences.
But now a team of researchers at Stanford University has discovered a way to increase your hypnotic susceptibility. Researchers have successfully used targeted, non-invasive neurostimulation to amplify a person’s response to hypnosis, and this breakthrough could change the way hypnotherapy is performed. There is sex.
For decades, David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford University have been studying hypnosis. The study not only explored how it could be used to treat conditions such as addiction and chronic pain, but also sought to highlight the neural correlates of effective hypnotherapy. Essentially, researchers have been trying to understand why some people’s brains are more susceptible to hypnosis.
One of the biggest advances in Spiegel’s research was a 2016 study that compared brain activity between a highly hypnotic cohort and a control group that was less susceptible to hypnosis. The study found that one important factor that appears to influence hypnotic susceptibility is the functional connectivity between two brain regions: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. did.
These two brain regions balance stimulus detection and information processing. And according to Spiegel, the stronger the connection between these two areas, the more effective your ability to focus when hypnotized.
“It stands to reason that people who can naturally coordinate their activities between these two areas are better able to focus,” Spiegel explained. “It’s because you’re focusing and adjusting your distraction system.”
Therefore, the next logical step in the research was to investigate whether there are ways to amplify the functional connections between these brain regions. Here Spiegel collaborated with Nolan Williams, an expert in transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a non-invasive method of stimulating targeted areas of the brain.
Researchers enrolled 80 subjects with fibromyalgia. Each subject’s hypnotic susceptibility was rated as low or moderate. Half of the cohort received a brief TMS burst to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the other half received a sham treatment. Immediately after treatment, patients underwent a hypnotherapy session focused on their chronic pain condition.
Tracking hypnosis on commonly used measures, the researchers found that subjects who received TMS had significantly higher hypnotic susceptibility scores. And even more interestingly, the effect disappeared after about an hour, and scores returned to normal between both groups.
“We were pleasantly surprised that with just 92 seconds of stimulation, we were able to change stable brain properties that people have been trying to change for 100 years,” Williams said. “We’ve finally cracked the code on how to do that.”
Although more research is needed to better understand how to optimize this treatment, lead author Afik Faerman is excited about the potential offered by neural stimulation to enhance this type of treatment. Fuhrman says that if a stable trait, such as hypnotizability, is amplified by neural stimulation, other stable traits may be affected. Or does this type of therapy simply enhance the effectiveness of simple psychotherapy?
“My personal vision as a clinical psychologist is that in the future patients will come into the office, have a quick non-invasive brain stimulation session, and then see a psychologist,” Fuhrman surmises. “The benefits of treatment could be even greater.”
The new research natural mental health.
Source: Stanford Medicine
