Tag: hypnosis

Categories : Mental Health NeurologyTags :

Targeted Neurostimulation Makes People More Hypnotisable

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

Hypnotisability appears to be a stable trait that changes little throughout adulthood, much like personality and IQ. But now, for the first time, Stanford Medicine researchers have demonstrated a way to temporarily heighten hypnotisablity, potentially allowing more people to access the benefits of hypnosis-based therapy.

In the new study, published in Nature Mental Health, the researchers found that less than two minutes of electrical stimulation targeting a precise area of the brain could boost participants’ hypnotisability for about one hour.

“We know hypnosis is an effective treatment for many different symptoms and disorders, in particular pain,” said lead author Afik Faerman, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry. “But we also know that not everyone benefits equally from hypnosis.”

Focused attention

Approximately two-thirds of adults are at least somewhat hypnotisable, and 15% are considered highly hypnotisable, meaning they score 9 or 10 on a standard 10-point measure of hypnotisability.

“Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, and higher hypnotisability improves the odds of your doing better with techniques using hypnosis,” said David Spiegel, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences and a senior author of the study.

Spiegel has devoted decades to studying hypnotherapy and using it to help patients control pain, lower stress, stop smoking and more. Several years ago, Spiegel led a team that used brain imaging to uncover the neurobiological basis of the practice. They found that highly hypnotisable people had stronger functional connectivity between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in information processing and decision making; and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, involved in detecting stimuli.

“It made sense that people who naturally coordinate activity between these two regions would be able to concentrate more intently,” Spiegel said. “It’s because you’re coordinating what you are focusing on with the system that distracts you.”

Shifting a stable trait

With these insights, Spiegel teamed up with Nolan Williams, MD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, who has pioneered non-invasive neurostimulation techniques to treat conditions such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicidal ideation.

The hope was that neurostimulation could alter even a stable trait like hypnotisability.

In the new study, the researchers recruited 80 participants with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that can be treated with hypnotherapy. They excluded those who were already highly hypnotisable.

Half of the participants received transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which paddles applied to the scalp deliver electrical pulses to the brain. Specifically, they received two 46-second applications that delivered 800 pulses of electricity to a precise location in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The exact locations depended on the unique structure and activity of each person’s brain.

“A novel aspect of this trial is that we used the person’s own brain networks, based on brain imaging, to target the right spot,” said Williams, also a senior author of the study.

The other half of participants received a sham treatment with the same look and feel, but without electrical stimulation. Hypnotisability was assessed by clinicians immediately before and after the treatments, with neither patients nor clinicians knowing who was in which group.

The researchers found that participants who received the neurostimulation showed a statistically significant increase in hypnotisability, scoring roughly one point higher. The sham group experienced no effect.

When the participants were assessed again one hour later, the effect had worn off and there was no longer a statistically significant difference between the two groups.

“We were pleasantly surprised that we were able to, with 92 seconds of stimulation, change a stable brain trait that people have been trying to change for 100 years,” Williams said. “We finally cracked the code on how to do it.”

The researchers plan to test whether different dosages of neurostimulation could enhance hypnotisability even more.

“It’s unusual to be able to change hypnotisability,” Spiegel said. A study of Stanford University students that began in the 1950s, for example, found that the trait remained relatively consistent when the students were tested 25 years later, as consistent as IQ over that time period. Recent research by Spiegel’s lab also suggests that hypnotisability may have a genetic basis.

Bigger implications

Clinically, a transient bump in hypnotisability may be enough to allow more people living with chronic pain to choose hypnosis as an alternative to long-term opioid use. Spiegel will follow up with the study participants to see how they fare in hypnotherapy.

The new results could have implications beyond hypnosis. Faerman noted that neurostimulation may be able to temporarily shift other stable traits or enhance people’s response to other forms of psychotherapy.

“As a clinical psychologist, my personal vision is that, in the future, patients come in, they go into a quick, non-invasive brain stimulation session, then they go in to see their psychologist,” he said. “Their benefit from treatment could be much higher.”

Story Source: Stanford Medicine

Categories : Mental HealthTags :

You’re Not Getting Sleepy: Six Myths and Misconceptions about Hypnosis

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

A strange mystic swings a pocket watch back and forth, repeating the phrase “You’re getting sleepy, very sleepy,” giving them absolute command over their subject. That’s not how hypnotism really works, but it’s the way it’s often depicted in pop culture. Even some clinicians and hypnosis educators propagate harmful myths about hypnosis.

Steven Jay Lynn, a professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York, is an expert on hypnosis who has made major contributions to the judicial system for his insight on the practice. Lynn believes that hypnosis has many useful clinical applications, but that myths keep it from being utilised to its full potential.

In a recent paper published in BJPsych Advances, he and his colleagues, Madeline Stein and Devin Terhune from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College, addressed a number of errors and misconceptions regarding the characteristics and practice of hypnosis. These are a few of the common myths that are widely believed and commonly circulated in popular culture.

Hypnotised people can’t resist suggestions

A deeply hypnotised person is believed to display “blind obedience,” going along automatically with whatever the hypnotist suggests. Yet individuals do not lose control over their actions during hypnosis – contrary to the notion the media reinforces that hypnosis is something done to you and that hypnosis can be used to control someone. In fact, people can resist and even oppose hypnotic suggestions. Their experience of control during hypnosis depends on their intentions and expectations regarding whether or not they retain voluntary control.

Hypnosis is a “special state”

Hypnosis is often mischaracterised as a “special state” where defence mechanisms are reduced and a “unique state of physical relaxation and conscious unconsciousness’ allows us to ‘enter our subconscious depths through hypnosis. However, people can respond to hypnotic suggestions even while they are alert and on an exercise bicycle. Aside from being a contradiction in terms, ‘conscious unconsciousness’ is an inaccurate depiction, because during hypnosis even the most highly suggestible individuals remain fully conscious and cognisant of their surroundings. It is more accurate to consider hypnosis as a set of procedures in which verbal suggestions are used to modulate awareness, perception and cognition, rather than to unnecessarily invoke ‘special states.’

People are either hypnotisable or they are not

People’s responsiveness to hypnosis can be relatively stable over time. Yet it is inaccurate to assume that people are either hypnotisable or not. People vary greatly in their responsiveness and often respond to some suggestions but not others. Still, most people are sufficiently hypnotisable to reap substantial benefits from therapeutic suggestions.

Responsiveness to suggestions reflects nothing more than compliance or faking

Suggested behaviours during hypnosis can seem so much a departure from the mundane that questions inevitably arise regarding whether hypnotic responses are genuine. However, neuroimaging studies reveal that the effects of hypnotic suggestions activate brain regions (eg, visual processing) consistent with suggested events (eg, hallucinating an object).These findings provide convincing evidence that hypnotic effects are represented at the neurophysiological level consistent with what people report.

Hypnotic methods require great skill to administer

One popular misconception is that of the mesmerist, or magician-like hypnotist with special powers of influence who can “hypnotise” anyone. This widespread idea is pure myth; in actuality, administering a hypnotic induction and specific suggestions do not require any special skills or abilities beyond those required for basic social interactions and administration of experimental or clinical procedures, such as the ability to establish rapport. However, hypnosis should be practiced only by professionals trained in the use of hypnosis.

Hypnotic age regression can retrieve accurate memories from the distant past

TV shows and movies often feature people being able to recall extremely accurate memories from a distant past life under hypnosis. But research suggests a contrary view. When researchers check the accuracy of memories of people who are “age regressed” to an earlier time (e.g., 10th century) against factual information from the suggested period, they find that the information is almost invariably incorrect. What people report is mostly consistent with information experimenters provide regarding their supposed past life experiences and identities (eg, different race, culture, sex). These findings imply that “recall” reflects participants’ expectancies, fantasies, and beliefs regarding personal characteristics and events during a given historical period.

Source: Binghamton University

Categories : Genetics Pain ManagementTags :

Whether Hypnosis for Pain is Effective Depends on a Patient’s Genetics

On By ModernMedia
Photo by Bruce Christianson on Unsplash

Studies have shown that hypnosis is an effective treatment for pain for many individuals – but it depends on the patient’s susceptibility to hypnosis. Testing for hypnotisability requires special training and in-person evaluation rarely available in the clinical setting. Now, investigators have developed a fast, point-of-care molecular diagnostic test that identifies a subset of individuals. Their study, published in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, also found that a subset of highly hypnotisable individuals may be more likely to experience high levels of postoperative pain.

“Since hypnotisability is a stable cognitive trait with a genetic basis, our goal was to create a molecular diagnostic tool for objectively identifying individuals who would benefit from hypnosis by determining ‘treatability’ at the point-of-care,” explained co-lead investigator Dana L. Cortade, a recently graduated PhD at Stanford University. “The advancement of nonpharmacological adjuvant treatments for pain is of the utmost importance in light of the opioid epidemic.”

Prior research established that the genetic basis for hypnotisability includes four specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), or genetic variations, found in the catechol-o-methyltransferase (COMT) gene for a brain enzyme responsible for dopamine metabolism in the prefrontal cortex. Although SNPs can contain valuable information on disease risk and treatment response, cost, complexity and time prevent widespread use.

The investigators developed a SNP genotyping assay on a giant magnetoresistive (GMR) biosensor array to detect the optimal combination of the COMT SNPs in patient DNA samples. GMR biosensor arrays are reliable, cheaper, sensitive, and can be easily deployed in point-of-care settings using saliva or blood samples.

The study investigated the association between COMT diplotypes and hypnotisability using a clinical hypnotisability scale called the Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP) in individuals who had participated in one of the three previous clinical trials in which an HIP was administered. An additional exploratory study of the association between perioperative pain, COMT genotypes, and HIP scores was conducted with the patients in the third cohort, who had undergone total knee arthroplasty (TKA). DNA was extracted from blood samples previously collected in the first cohort, and saliva samples were collected by mail from participants in the other two trials. Participants were considered treatable by hypnosis if they had HIP scores of 3 or higher on a scale of zero to 10.

For participants identified with the optimal COMT diplotypes by the GMR biosensor array, 89.5% scored highly on the HIP, which identified 40.5% of the treatable population. The optimal COMT group mean HIP score was significantly higher than that in the suboptimal COMT group. Interestingly, further analysis revealed that the difference was observed only in women.

“Although we had expected some difference in effect between females and males, the association between hypnotisability and COMT genotypes was strongest in the females in the cohort,” said co-lead investigator Jessie Markovits, MD, Department of Internal Medicine, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA. “The difference may be due to lower numbers of males in the cohort, or because COMT is known to have interactions with oestrogen and to differ in activity by sex. Additional gene targets including COMT, with stratification by sex, could be the focus of future study.”

In the exploratory analysis of the relationship between COMT genotypes and pain after TKA surgery, the same optimal COMT individuals had significantly higher postoperative pain scores than the suboptimal group, indicating a greater need for treatment. “This supports the body of evidence that COMT genotypes impact pain, and it is also known that COMT genotypes affect opioid use after surgery. Pain researchers can use this technology to correlate genetic predisposition to pain sensitivity and opioid use with response to an evidence-based, alternative remedy: hypnosis,” Dr Cortade said.

COMT SNPs alone are not a complete biomarker for identifying all individuals who will score highly on a hypnotisability scale and experience high pain sensitivity. The GMR sensor nanoarray can accommodate up to 80 SNPs, and it is possible that other SNPs, such as those for dopamine receptors, are needed to further stratify individuals.

The investigators observe that this study highlights the utility and potential of the evolving applications of precision medicine. “It is a step towards enabling researchers and healthcare professionals to identify a subset of patients who are most likely to benefit from hypnotic analgesia,” Dr Markovits said. “Precision medicine has made great strides in identifying differences in drug metabolism that can impact medication decisions for perioperative pain. We hope to provide similar precision in offering hypnosis as an effective, non-pharmacological treatment that can improve patient comfort while reducing opioid use.”

Source: Elsevier