This is cool and a half. Many regular readers here have seen me (in person or one of the hundreds of videos available online) suggest to a person who has been hypnotized that they can't move this or that limb. Or that they're stuck to this or that object. If you're not sure, take a look at the video I posted here yesterday – https://briandavidphillips.net/2009/06/sticky-stuck-stuck-reimaged.html – as a reminder of the sort of thing I'm discussing.
Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland have published a study on just what happens in the brain when hypnotists give hypnotic paralysis (catalepsy) suggestions.
"It's "a kind of reconnection between different
brain regions," said Yann Cojan, a researcher at the University of
Geneva in Switzerland. He's an author of the study in Thursday's issue
of the journal Neuron. It used brain scans to show what happened when
12 volunteers tried to move a hand that had been paralyzed by hypnosis.Results showed the right motor cortex prepared
itself as usual to tell the left hand to move. But the cortex appeared
to be ignoring the parts of the brain it normally communicates with in
controlling movement. Instead, it acted more in sync than usual with a
different brain region called the precuneus. That was a surprise, Cojan
said. The precuneus is involved in mental imagery and
memory about oneself. Cojan suggests it was brimming with the metaphors
the participants had heard from the hypnotist: Your hand is very heavy,
it is stuck on the table, etc. So, he said, it might have been telling
the motor cortex, "Oh, but your hand is too heavy, you can't move your
hand." It's as if the motor cortex "is connected to the
idea that it cannot move (the hand) and so … it doesn't send the
message to move," Cojan said. For the research, 12 participants had their
brains scanned while doing a task that required them to push a button
with one hand or the other. For some sessions, they were hypnotized and
told their left hands were paralyzed. For other sessions, their mental
status was normal. For comparison, six other participants simply
pretended their left hands were paralyzed. Dr. Richard Frackowiak, a brain expert at the
University of Lausanne in Switzerland who didn't participate in the
study, called the new work a "very valuable addition" to research into
hypnotic paralysis. Amir Raz, who studies hypnosis and the brain at
McGill University in Montreal, said he found the work interesting. But
he wondered if the results might partially reflect general effects of
being under hypnosis, rather than the paralysis suggestion itself."
Read the article on Brain Scans Show How Hypnosis Can Paralyze a Limb from USA Today at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-06-24-paralyzed-hypnosis_N.htm for more on Yann Cojan's study.
All the best,
Brian
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Brian David Phillips, PhD, CH [brian@briandavidphillips.com]
Hypnotist, Hypnotherapist, Intuitionist, Trance Wizard
President, Society of Experiential Trance
Associate Professor, NCCU, Taipei, Taiwan
