In the Aug. 8 edition or Science Daily, Eva A Sylwester reports on a new study that found hypnosis can override reading ability. This really isn’t anything new, I’ve done the effect with hypnosis clients and subjects many times. However, what is important is that this is a formal study done with brain scans during the process. While the summary gives the wrong impression regarding hypersuggestibility within the general population (implying that deep trance hypnosis is a rare occurrence when suggestibility and hypnotizeability are actually not the same thing, something a number of hypnotists are also not aware of):

It does not seem possible to forget how to read, but U.S. researchers say they have achieved that effect in some people through hypnosis. The researchers — at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Medical College of Cornell University — said contrary to the stylized depictions of hypnosis in movies, hypnosis is the ability to concentrate intensely on certain information at the cost of disregarding other information. Amir Raz, the lead researcher — who is now an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia University — said this state of focused attention often occurs naturally, while a person is wholly involved with an activity such as exercise, meditation, eating or reading. “People go into hypnotic states … every day as part of a normal routine,” Raz told United Press International. The ability to become hypnotized by an outside entity is less widespread, however. Raz said only 10 percent to 15 percent of adults qualify as highly suggestible, while 80 percent to 90 percent of children are. He said many people think of suggestibility as a bad thing, worrying it might mean they could be manipulated, but he described it as a “special gift of being able to modulate brain action.” For the study, published in the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 adults were selected from a pool of 90 volunteers based on their score on the Harvard Group Scale, which measures suggestibility. Eight of the study participants scored as highly hypnotizable and eight scored as less hypnotizable. While hypnotized, participants were told, “Every time you will hear my voice talking to you over the intercom system, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters of a foreign language that you do not know.” Participants were then brought out of hypnosis, and they took a test on a computer while their brain activity was recorded in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Instructions for the test were provided either verbally — in accordance with the posthypnotic suggestion — or on the computer screen. The test was a Stroop task, a test of automatic processing widely used since 1935 in which names of colors are written in different colors of ink and a person is asked to name the color of the ink. The written color name is often different from the ink color — for instance, the word “red” may be written in green ink. Raz said that even if a person tries not to let the contradicting colors affect his or her decisions, performance is still heavily influenced by the interference. However, for many participants in Raz’s study, the written word was not an issue. “As far as they were concerned, and this was confirmed over and over again … they would swear up and down that this was in a foreign language,” Raz said. All of the participants were proficient English readers, and all of the words in the Stroop task were written in English. The directive to read the word as foreign was so powerful, though, that Raz heard all kinds of speculation as to the language of the text. Recalling one participant, Raz said, “I told him, ‘What language was it in?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know. It looked like bird droppings.'” The fMRI images, along with the participants’ quicker and more accurate processing of the test items, confirmed that the participants truly were unable to read the words. Study co-author Michael Posner, former director of the Sackler Institute and adjunct professor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Cornell, told UPI that typically the conflict between written word and color in a Stroop task produces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain that plays a role in decision making. With the posthypnotic suggestion engaged, however, the anterior cingulate cortex was inactive, as well as the lingual gyrus, which functions in the processing of words. “We’re thinking that these areas are very important in voluntary control of thought processes,” said Posner, now a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon. Raz said that although posthypnotic suggestions usually fade over time, he briefly re-hypnotized the participants at the end of the experiment and told them to disregard any other suggestions he had made, to comply with Weill Cornell’s institutional review board. Raz said the hypnosis study came out of work he and Posner had been doing on attention. Currently, Raz is working on another study about hypnosis and Tourette Syndrome, which causes uncontrollable tics and vocalizations. Raz said the hypnosis findings could also be important for clinical psychologists seeking to change patients’ patterns of ingrained behavior regarding eating, sleeping, smoking or interpersonal relationships. According to the London College of Clinical Hypnosis, therapies involving hypnosis have already been used for anxiety disorders, alcoholism, pain and other medical conditions. “The ability to look at an automatic process in the making is a very exciting prospect,” Raz said.

Of course, in this sort of study where a generic uniform group induction is used, responsiveness will be lower than it is with individual one-on-one hypnosis with a face-to-face hypnotist who is skilled.