Salient findings: identifying the building blocks of hypnotizability, and neural underpinnings

Two papers of special interest to the hypnosis community have appeared in the general scientific literatures. One of these papers examines the building blocks of hypnotic response. Using expanded hypnotic protocols and sophisticated multivariate statistical analyses, the authors found evidence for 4 components of hypnotizability: direct motor, motor challenge, perceptual-cognitive, and posthypnotic amnesia. The second paper examines brain correlates of the subjective reality of physically and hypnotically induced pain by tracking regional brain activation across conditions using fMRI. During suggestion-induced pain, the extent to which subjects judged the pain to be real correlated with activity in the rostral and perigenual anterior cingulate cortex and in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Psychology Department, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. mnash@utk.edu