The oxygen traces blood flow and makes visible the most active parts of the brain when a subject is hypnotized and not hypnotized. They inhaled a short-lived, slightly radioactive type of oxygen. The highly hypnotizables slid horizontally into a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Harvard teaching hospital in Boston. “We pre-tested 125 subjects and for those who scored lowest in hypnotizability, the results were just garbage,” Kosslyn says. “Then they still turned down our report even after we answered all their criticisms.” After three years, their study has finally been published as the cover story in the August issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.īoth Kosslyn and Thompson emphasize that the experiment worked only on “highly hypnotizable” people, a category that includes only about 8 percent of all people. “One of them asked for three separate revisions,” notes William Thompson, a research assistant in Harvard’s department of psychology. Two of the world’s largest scientific journals wouldn’t publish the results. To show how controversial hypnotism is among scientists, Kosslyn and colleagues had great difficulty in getting their research published. The answer apparently is yes, at least in the case of color perception. “It all comes down to the question of whether the brain is doing something different,” Kossyln says. That result favors a suggestibility, or role-playing explanation. However, if you tell males that some females who were just tested held the brick out for 20 minutes, they, too, will hold it for that long without being hypnotized. That result favors the idea that hypnotism creates a unique state of mind. But if you hypnotize them, they will hold the brick out for 15-20 minutes. As an example, if you give some men a brick and ask them to hold it at arm’s length for as long as they can, they will be able to do it for about five minutes. Such a result shows that hypnosis can change the state of the brain. “Some insist it’s a state of mind that differs from normal states and involves unique consequences others say it’s nothing more than state-show gimmickry.”ĬOLOR ME HYNOTIZED: Under hypnosis, some people see only shades of gray in this pattern of brightly-colored rectangles. “Hypnosis has a contentious history,” notes Stephen Kosslyn, professor of psychology at Harvard and leader of the study. The records of cerebral activity clearly show that hypnosis can change the state of the brain. They also attempted to do the same thing when not hypnotized. These subjects then tried to drain bright color from pictures, or see color where none existed. Researchers separately hypnotized eight people as they lay in a scanning machine that recorded activity in their brains. That result wouldn’t be so surprising at a carnival or stage show, but it comes from a tightly controlled scientific experiment done at a Harvard University medical facility. People have been hypnotized to see color where only shades of gray exist, and to see gray when actually looking at brightly colored rectangles.
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