Hypnosis and cognitive processing
What can hypnosis teach us about how people’s pre-formed views influence their interpretation of the world?
In This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis, the New York Times reported on research carried out by Columbia’s Dr. Amir Raz which found that subjects, instructed under hypnosis to ignore the lexical content of colored color words shown to them (the word “red” written in green letters), bypassed the normal conflict between the lexical content (the letters) and their color—the so-called “Stroop effect” (Wikipedia) which causes people to answer slowly when asked the letters’ colors. The abstract is available on PNAS. (An aside: although the researcher emphasizes “conflict reduction”, to me it would seem that the hypnotic suggestion eliminated the entire lexical input mechanism, preventing any conflict from occurring in the first place.)
I have not read the original article. However, the NYT reporting raises some questions. It points out that there are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up, concluding that “consciousness” is “top down”:
What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information – as a flower or a hammer or a face.
But this is wrong. The framework does not “stand ready to interpret the raw information”—it drives the way the raw information is collected. Anyway, I think we already knew that.
The real problems start with its (or the researchers?) claim that the research sheds light both on the mechanism of hypnosis and simultaneously on the process of cognition. It’s like claiming that if I find that I do A and B results, I’ve learned about both A and B. Well I have, but only that A results in B and B results from A.
What would be truly interesting would be to understand the general processes—of which hypnosis is merely a minor one—by which the top-down constructs are built in our brain. Then we might start seeing how people suggest to themselves that God exists.
My favorite part of the article is this quote by Dr. Stephen M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard:
People think that sights, sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience.
Wow, our nation’s newspaper of record is now reporting on neuroscientists’ theories of reality.
February 17th, 2006 at 9:33 am
That last quote is such an oversimplification. There are some sensations that are very hard for people to experience differently; then there are some combinations of perception and cognition, such as guessing another person’s motivation, that different people can see very differently, depending on learned prejudices and worldviews.
I am fairly easily hypnotized. I remember when under hypnosis, I actually could see an extra object in addition to a few that were really there. The thing is that part of me knew which one was imaginary, no matter how good a virtual reality my brain had conjured up for me to see it. None of these mechanisms should be seen as black and white.
March 16th, 2008 at 5:27 am
Although there does seem to be some controversy over certian hypnosis
courses on the internet, is there really cause for concern?
At the end of the day most people never carry out the “underhand” or “underground”
courses available as they lose interest and move on to something else.
Its long been an opinion of most that hypnosis does not work, but i disagree.
Just my opinion though