Hypnosis news blog
If you have any news about upcoming events, research papers in press, new sites, or anything hypnosis related let me know.
23/10/2010 Another great hypnosis site
I just found a great hypnosis website. The Klingenberger Institute for Clinical Hypnosis is a German site with pages translated in English. The scientific advisor is Professor Walter Bongartz so the quality is really high. It includes great summaries of hypnosis research as well as clinical information. It also has an illustrated virtual museum covering the history of hypnosis. Well worth a look.
17/10/2010 Research published in Consciousness and Cognition
A number of noteworthy papers have recently been published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition and are definitely worth a look:
Naish, P. Hypnosis and hemispheric asymmetry. Consciousness and Cognition, in press.
17/01/2010 Herbert Spiegel Obituary
The New York times has an obituary for the late Herbert Spiegel
13/10/2010 Hypnosis in New Scientist
New Scientist have just published an interesting article about hypnosis. It focuses on some of the work David Oakley and Peter Halligan have done using hypnosis to model neurological conditions such a hysterical paralysis, prosopagnosia, or alien limb syndrome. There is also a video demonstrating some of the effects.
Link to the New Scientist article
11/10/2009 Martin Orne - Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Hypnotist
I just came across a wonderful website by the Psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania dedicated to the late Martin Orne. Orne was a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, and researcher, and he made an enormous contribution to the field of hypnosis research in particular. One idea which he is credited with is that of 'demand characteristics' - the idea that human participants in research studies will consciously or unconsciously try to 'please' the experiementer which can bias the results. In hypnosis research, since it is often difficult for participants to be blind to the experimenters goals, Orne developed the use of the real-simular paradigm where a control group of low-hypnotisable participants are used in addition to other groups. The logic is that 'lows' will try to please the experimenter to the same extent as the other groups and any group differences can thus not be attributed to demands.
The website contains full text of many of Orne's papers and book chapters and is well worth a read.
06/07/209 TICS Hypnosis and brain imaging review
David Oakley and Peter Halligan have written a state-of-the-art review of neuroscientific research involving hypnosis, published in the latest copy of the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences:
The growing acceptance of consciousness as a legitimate field of enquiry and the availability of functional imaging has rekindled research interest in the use of hypnosis and suggestion to manipulate subjective experience and to gain insights into healthy and pathological cognitive functioning. Current research forms two strands. The first comprises studies exploring the cognitive and neural nature of hypnosis itself. The second employs hypnosis to explore known psychological processes using specifically targeted suggestions. An extension of this second approach involves using hypnotic suggestion to create clinically informed analogues of established structural and functional neuropsychological disorders. With functional imaging, this type of experimental neuropsychopathology offers a productive means of investigating brain activity involved in many symptom-based disorders and their related phenomenology.
05/07/2009 Hypnotic limb paralysis
A new neuroimaging study of limb paralysis in hypnosis has been published in Neuron. Yann Cojan and colleagues looked at brain activity while participants performed a go-nogo task in 3 conditions: normal state, hypnotic left-hand paralysis, and feigned paralysis. In the task a picture of a hand would appear. It would then either turn green, in which case participants had to respond as quickly as possible, or it would turn red, and participants would have to inhibit a response. The study is neat in that it utilises an active cognitive task to probe brain activity as a result of suggestion
The authors found that motor systems prepared to move in the normal and hypnotic paralysis conditions indicating that motor intentions were preserved. However, in the hypnotic paralysis condition extra activity was seen in the precuneus - an area involved in mental imagery. Precuneus activity also seemed to be associated with decreases in motor regions which the authors suggest could indicate that motor controls are being influenced by self-related imagery.
Link to article in NeuronLink to page on Hypnosis And Suggestion about neuroimaging research