Hypnosis may involve a therapist bringing a patient into a deeply relaxed state to treat symptoms or change habits.
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Sending electrical pulses to certain parts of the brain can make people more susceptible to hypnosis. Although the research is still in its early stages, it could eventually lead to more widespread use of hypnotherapy for conditions such as chronic pain.
“In both psychology and psychiatry, there are many different ways to treat different disorders and symptoms,” says Afik Furman of Stanford University in California. “Hypnosis is one psychological technique that has been proven to be effective for anxiety, depression, and especially pain.”
Previous research suggests that people who are highly susceptible to hypnosis have better connections between two parts of the brain: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. They also suggest that stimulating the former region increases this connectivity.
Faerman and colleagues focused on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, located at the front of the brain, and administered transcranial magnetic stimulation to 40 people with the chronic pain condition fibromyalgia. This was administered as 800 pulses to the scalp via a paddle, and the procedure lasted just over 1.5 minutes. This method uses a magnetic field to stimulate nerve cells in the target tissue.
Another 40 people with the same symptoms were given the sham treatment. At the start of the study, none of the participants were thought to be susceptible to hypnosis.
Hypnotherapy is generally defined as the use of hypnosis to treat symptoms or change habits. Susceptibility to hypnosis was assessed by the “hypnoinduction profile,” a standard method for measuring hypnotic efficacy.
After just one session, the group that received electrical brain stimulation had increased hypnotic susceptibility for up to an hour, while the other groups showed no change.
The researchers did not measure whether fibromyalgia symptoms improved in either group. “Our main goal was to figure out if it was possible to alter hypnosis, so we were really excited to be able to do that,” said team member Nolan Williams from Stanford University. I’ll tell you.
Researchers now hope to repeat the study with more people with more diverse symptoms. They also want to see whether fine-tuning the length or number of electrical stimulation pulses a person receives affects hypnotic susceptibility.
Despite showing some promise as a medical use, hypnotherapy is not routinely covered by health insurance companies in the United States or the National Health Service in the United Kingdom.
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