Scientists want humans to be more susceptible to hypnosis, but why?

When Daniel Kaluuya’s character gets against his will into quitting smoking by a very creepy Catherine Keener in the 2017 horror movie ‘Get Out,’ we were all terrified to our core. While it is unlikely that stirring tea with a spoon could covertly induce a trance, hypnosis could help patients with chronic pain.

Scientists heighten hypnotizability A new study undertaken by Stanford Medicine researchers says that hypnotizability, a trait that remains stable throughout adulthood, can be temporarily heightened using less than two minutes of electrical stimulation targeted at a specific brain area. This breakthrough could expand the accessibility of hypnosis based therapy for a broader population.

“We know hypnosis is an effective treatment for many different symptoms and disorders, in particular pain,” Afik Faerman, a postdoctoral scholar in psychiatry and lead author of the study. “But we also know that not everyone benefits equally from hypnosis.” Hypnosis itself is not inherently scary is a therapeutic technique often used to help individuals relax, focus their minds, and access their subconscious.

In a clinical or therapeutic setting, hypnosis is typically a safe and controlled process guided by a trained professional. In the realm of hypnotizability, roughly two thirds of adults possess some degree of susceptibility to hypnosis. 15 percent of individuals emerge as highly hypnotizable. They score nine or 10 on a standard 10 point measure of hypnotizability.

Dr David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and a senior author of the study, has spent many years studying hypnotherapy. “Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention, and higher hypnotizability improves the odds of your doing better with techniques using hypnosis,” said Dr Spiegel.

A few years ago, Dr Spiegel and his team used to understand how hypnosis works in the brain. They discovered that people who are highly hypnotizable have strong connections between specific parts of their brain: the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (involved in thinking and decision making) and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (involved in recognizing stimuli or signals).

“It made sense that people who naturally coordinate activity between these two regions would be able to concentrate more intently,” explained Spiegel. “It’s because you’re coordinating what you are focusing on with the system that distracts you.” They conducted hypnotherapy on 80 people In the new study, researchers, led by Dr Spiegel and Dr Nolan Williams, also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, conducted a study involving 80 participants with fibromyalgia, a pain condition treatable with hypnotherapy.

Seeking to alter hypnotizability, half received transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non invasive neurostimulation technique, while the other half received a sham treatment. The neurostimulation group exhibited a significant increase in hypnotizability, lasting for about an hour. The researchers plan to explore different neurostimulation dosages to enhance hypnotizability further, recognizing the potential to influence a trait that has remained unchanged for decades.

The study was published in the journal ..