Hypnosis
Research
Research into the state of hypnosis has been widely covered with varying results.
Nevertheless, some modern research seems to suggest that hypnosis has a genuine effect on brain functioning. For example, one controlled scientific experiment postulates that hypnosis may change conscious experience in a way not possible when people are not 'hypnotized', at least in "highly hypnotizable" people. In this experiment, color perception was changed by hypnosis in "highly hypnotizable" people as determined by positron emission tomography (PET) scans (Kosslyn et al., 2000).
(This research does not compare the effects of hypnosis on less hypnotizable people and could therefore show little causal effect due to the lack of a control group.) Another research example, employing event-related fMRI and EEG coherence measures, compared certain specific neural activity "during Stroop task performance between participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility, at baseline and after hypnotic induction".
According to its authors, "the fMRI data revealed that conflict-related ACC activity interacted with hypnosis and hypnotic susceptibility, in that highly susceptible participants displayed increased conflict-related neural activity in the hypnosis condition compared to baseline, as well as with respect to subjects with low susceptibility." (Egner et al., 2005) The subject is still a matter of current research and scientific debate.
Other claims that hypnosis has been used with variable success for hundreds of applications, including entertainment, analgesia and psychoanalysis are widespread and well-documented.
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