{"id":436,"date":"2016-07-28T17:09:42","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T17:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/?p=436"},"modified":"2024-06-27T00:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T00:10:28","slug":"study-identifies-brain-areas-altered-during-hypnotic-trances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/study-identifies-brain-areas-altered-during-hypnotic-trances\/","title":{"rendered":"Study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stanford Medicine News Center
\n28-7-2016
\nSource hyperlink<\/a><\/p>\n

Study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances<\/strong><\/p>\n

Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you\u2019re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your mind and body like this is all thanks to changes in a few specific areas of the brain, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.<\/p>\n

The scientists scanned the brains of 57 people during guided hypnosis sessions similar to those that might be used clinically to treat anxiety, pain or trauma. Distinct sections of the brain have altered activity and connectivity while someone is hypnotized, they report in a study published online July 28 in Cerebral Cortex.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that we know which brain regions are involved, we may be able to use this knowledge to alter someone\u2019s capacity to be hypnotized or the effectiveness of hypnosis for problems like pain control,\u201d said the study\u2019s senior author, David Spiegel, MD, professor and associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.<\/p>\n

A serious science
\nFor some people, hypnosis is associated with loss of control or stage tricks. But doctors like Spiegel know it to be a serious science, revealing the brain\u2019s ability to heal medical and psychiatric conditions.<\/p>\n

\u201cHypnosis is the oldest Western form of psychotherapy, but it\u2019s been tarred with the brush of dangling watches and purple capes,\u201d said Spiegel, who holds the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professorship in Medicine. \u201cIn fact, it\u2019s a very powerful means of changing the way we use our minds to control perception and our bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite a growing appreciation of the clinical potential of hypnosis, though, little is known about how it works at a physiological level. While researchers have previously scanned the brains of people undergoing hypnosis, those studies have been designed to pinpoint the effects of hypnosis on pain, vision and other forms of perception, and not the state of hypnosis itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere had not been any studies in which the goal was to simply ask what\u2019s going on in the brain when you\u2019re hypnotized,\u201d said Spiegel.<\/p>\n

Finding the most susceptible
\nTo study hypnosis itself, researchers first had to find people who could or couldn\u2019t be hypnotized. Only about 10 percent of the population is generally categorized as \u201chighly hypnotizable,\u201d while others are less able to enter the trancelike state of hypnosis. Spiegel and his colleagues screened 545 healthy participants and found 36 people who consistently scored high on tests of hypnotizability, as well as 21 control subjects who scored on the extreme low end of the scales.<\/p>\n

Then, they observed the brains of those 57 participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Each person was scanned under four different conditions \u2014 while resting, while recalling a memory and during two different hypnosis sessions.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was important to have the people who aren\u2019t able to be hypnotized as controls,\u201d said Spiegel. \u201cOtherwise, you might see things happening in the brains of those being hypnotized but you wouldn\u2019t be sure whether it was associated with hypnosis or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brain activity and connectivity
\nSpiegel and his colleagues discovered three hallmarks of the brain under hypnosis. Each change was seen only in the highly hypnotizable group and only while they were undergoing hypnosis.<\/p>\n

First, they saw a decrease in activity in an area called the dorsal anterior cingulate, part of the brain\u2019s salience network. \u201cIn hypnosis, you\u2019re so absorbed that you\u2019re not worrying about anything else,\u201d Spiegel explained.<\/p>\n

Secondly, they saw an increase in connections between two other areas of the brain \u2014 the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula. He described this as a brain-body connection that helps the brain process and control what\u2019s going on in the body.<\/p>\n

Finally, Spiegel\u2019s team also observed reduced connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the default mode network, which includes the medial prefrontal and the posterior cingulate cortex. This decrease in functional connectivity likely represents a disconnect between someone\u2019s actions and their awareness of their actions, Spiegel said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re really engaged in something, you don\u2019t really think about doing it \u2014 you just do it,\u201d he said. During hypnosis, this kind of disassociation between action and reflection allows the person to engage in activities either suggested by a clinician or self-suggested without devoting mental resources to being self-conscious about the activity.<\/p>\n

Treating pain and anxiety without pills
\nIn patients who can be easily hypnotized, hypnosis sessions have been shown to be effective in lessening chronic pain, the pain of childbirth and other medical procedures; treating smoking addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder; and easing anxiety or phobias. The new findings about how hypnosis affects the brain might pave the way toward developing treatments for the rest of the population \u2014 those who aren\u2019t naturally as susceptible to hypnosis.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re certainly interested in the idea that you can change people\u2019s ability to be hypnotized by stimulating specific areas of the brain,\u201d said Spiegel.<\/p>\n

A treatment that combines brain stimulation with hypnosis could improve the known analgesic effects of hypnosis and potentially replace addictive and side-effect-laden painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs, he said. More research, however, is needed before such a therapy could be implemented.<\/p>\n

The study\u2019s lead author is Heidi Jiang, a former research assistant at Stanford who is currently a graduate student in neuroscience at Northwestern University.<\/p>\n

Other Stanford co-authors are clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Matthew White, MD; and associate professor of neurology Michael Greicius, MD, MPH.<\/p>\n

The study was funded by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (grant RCIAT0005733), the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (grant P41EB015891), the Randolph H. Chase, M.D. Fund II, the Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation and the Nissan Research Center.<\/p>\n

Stanford\u2019s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences also supported the work.<\/p>\n

Sarah C.P. Williams
\nSarah C.P. Williams is a freelance science writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stanford Medicine News Center 28-7-2016 Source hyperlink Study identifies brain areas altered during hypnotic trances Your eyelids are getting heavy, your arms are going limp and you feel like you\u2019re floating through space. The power of hypnosis to alter your … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hypno"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions\/437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrativemedicine.org\/go\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}