This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis - New York Times

This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis - New York Times: "Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized 'saw' colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.

'The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations' is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. 'But now we're really getting at the mechanisms.'

Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in medicine since the 1950's to treat pain and, more recently, as a treatment for anxiety, depression, trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating disorders.

There is, however, still disa"