The emerging neuroscience of hypnosis

In recent years, hypnosis has begun to gain traction as a potentially valuable tool in the increasingly diverse repertoires of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychiatry (Oakley and Halligan, 2009). Hypnosis consists of a set of procedures beginning with an induction, which involves instructions and suggestions to promote absorption in (i.e., effortless attention towards) the words of the operator. An induction is typically followed by a series of suggestions for alterations in various dimensions of consciousness, perception, action, and cognition. In response to specific hypnotic suggestions , highly suggestible individuals are capable of experiencing marked changes in affect, attention, memory, and perception. Hypnotic suggestions can be used to model psychiatric and neurological conditions or test predictions that are otherwise difficult to address in the laboratory (instrumental research); alternatively, researchers may investigate the phenomenology and mechanisms underlying response to a hypnotic induction and particular suggestions or the determinants of hypnotic suggestibility (intrinsic research) (Reyher, 1962; Oakley and Halligan, 2009). As neuroscientific research on hypnosis continues to grow, it becomes increasingly necessary to integrate it with contemporary neurophysiological models of cognition, to ensure that neuroscientists using hypnosis have a sound understanding of its mechanisms, and to critically examine the prospects and limitations of the utilization of hypnotic suggestion as an experimental tool. Taken within this context, Graham Jamieson's edited volume, Hypnosis and conscious states: A cognitive neuroscience perspective fulfils a much-needed gap in this literature and is a welcome contribution to this nascent area of neuroscience. In what follows, we briefly review the emerging neuroscience of hypnosis through the lens of this book's chapters. A common concern among cognitive neuroscientists is whether hypnotic responses are real, in the sense of whether highly suggestible individuals are actually experiencing what they report. Although the extent to which the mechanisms underlying hypnotic responses (e.g., hallucinations) parallel those of their referent non-hypnotic responses is not yet fully clear, there is a wealth of data pointing to a close correspondence. Boly et al. (chapter 2), Miltner and Weiss (chapter 4), De Pascalis (chapter 5), and Lynn et al. (chapter 9) review electrophysiological and functional neuroimaging results bearing on this issue. As an example, Derbyshire et al. (2004) found a remarkably close correspondence between the brain activation patterns associated with real pain and hypnotically suggested pain, both of which included activation of insula, thalamus, and anterior cingulate, inferior parietal, prefrontal, and secondary somatosensory cortices, which comprise a pain network …