Hypnotherapy

The following is from yesterday's New York Times. RJ: You may wish to post this in Resources or somewhere for future reference.

November 22, 2005
This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured.

Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century, physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia, even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether was discovered.

Now, Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

One area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data. Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher regions where interpretation occurs.

For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up.

These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.

This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.

According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.

One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said.

In some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr. Raz said that he "wanted to do something really impressive" that other neuroscientists could not ignore.

The probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr. Raz's lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:

"Very soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

"This gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back to your regular reading self."

Dr. Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action while not hypnotized.

Days later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz's instructions came over the intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was similarly dampened.

Top-down processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly hypnotizable people were able to "drain" color from a colorful abstract drawing or "add" color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were differently activated.

Brain scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr. Kosslyn said.

Most of the time bottom-up information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. "We imagine something different, so it is different," he said.

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rigpaseeker

Hi to all.
I'm kind of an "old timer". I don't post much, but I do read alot. I started the program back in July. I am responding to the question of the cd's. I've got to say that I think that one of the biggest transformations (for me) came with the use of the cd's. If you read back over some of the other posts from other old timer's, maybe in the best of the boards, you may find something to give you some stronger motivation. I've had some set backs lately and I will tell you that the topa and the supps aren't enough to keep you on track. Now that life is getting back to normal my plan is to start back on the cd's (keeping up with the rest of the program) the way they are outlined in the beginning of the book. I KNOW that I need that right now to get me back on track. When it is a mental thing rather than a physical thing the cd's are so powerful in helping you believe in yourself. Hope this will help to dispell some of your disbelieve in the process. I know it sounds a little "new age" but it's really very relaxing. The clearing cd is great, if for nothing else just to release tension and anxiety. I hope you will enjoy them. They have been great for me and I actually want to get more for other areas of my life now!

Best of luck in your journeys!

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DMcDesigns

Hi shellseeker.

I wholly believe in subliminal learning . . . years ago I was carrying two jobs, no days off all week at all, and I got an "energy" subliminal tape. I remember listening to it for a while, and while at work on my weekend job, I actually noticed myself thinking to myself things like "I feel so good today" "I just feel so alive and full of energy" and I thought, that's weird, that just ain't me lately. I explored the tape case, and I hadn't realized it before, but when you pulled out the paper insert with the title on it and unfolded it, it had inside all the subliminal suggestions printed on the inside. Do you know what they said? "I feel so good today" etc. etc. etc. My thoughts were just echoing was I was "hearing." Sometimes if you turn subliminal recordings up and hush all other noises, you will almost be able to catch words without recognizing them.

What about contacting www.hypnotictapes.com and asking them if they have a printed list of the suggestions on these CDs?
Just a thought,
Ter

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TooMuch

I think that the person that finds them making them thinking about drinking might be having these feelings with or without the CDs because of the physical and mental effects of quitting alcohol. It is scary to think about the void that you are going to have to fill when alcohol no longer occupies a big part of your life.

My experience with the CDs. I haven't had enough time and quiet to do the regimen exactly as RJ recommended. However, I have done Clearing 1 and 2 and Hypnotic 1 and 2. I love the Hypnotic tracks. I have done it as soon as I wake up when I'm already relaxed and the house is quiet and I get so relaxed I can't feel my arms and legs by the end. I love having the opportunity to "enter" my visualizations into my subconscious. At night I have my computer set up to play Subliminal twice because the ocean sound helps me fall asleep and then the Sleep learning starts after I am asleep. I can't sleep while listening to the Sleep learning CD because the stream sound makes me feel like I'm going to need to go to the bathroom one more time! The Subliminal cd starts up again in the morning so the stream sound doesn't wake me up before my alarm with the bathroom urge. How funny is that? I intend to start getting up earlier so I can fit in more hypnosis time before work because I really enjoy it and feel very healthy, optimistic and energized after I do the Hypnotic tracks.

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1234mwqv

Sleeping CD:

I have a little trouble sleeping to it as well, but I started doing better when: I turned the volume down quite a bit and bought a more comfortable set of headphones.

Subliminal CD:

Easiest of all! I have several "Environmental" CDs I listen to almost all the time at work to drown out the loud, inconsiderate boob who works two cubes down from me. Believe it or not, I can't tell much difference in my ocean and the subliminal tape!

Clearing CD:

I absolutely adore this one! I listen to part 2 almost every day, and certainly every night that I try to go to bed without a drink.

Hypno CD:

I agree it is the most difficult to completely relax in to, but it gets a little easier each time. Fixed my CD player to run on AC after my batteries gave out in the middle of my "special euphoric place" one time

I do find that if I'm going to go to sleep during any of them unintentionally, it is Hypno #2.....

All in all, I like the whole idea of the CDs very much. I've not had any additional cravings, but hadn't been craving free when I started them either.

A humerous side note: I told a coworker who had commented on the fact that I was drinking water at a rate unheard of......that I was doing hypnosis for a healthier lifestyle. She was concerned that I might be subliminal messages to go postal

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Iwanttobelieve