Hypnosis and the control of attention: Where to from here?

Can suggestion, particularly hypnotic suggestion, influence cognition? Addressing this intriguing question experimentally is on the rise in cognitive research, nowhere more prevalently than in the domain of cognitive control and attention. This may well rest on the intuitive connection between hypnotic suggestion and attention, where the hypnotist controls the subject's attention. Particularly impressive has been the work of Raz and his colleagues demonstrating the modulation and even the complete elimination of classic Stroop color-word interference when subjects are given a posthypnotic suggestion that words are meaningless. Overriding a highly practiced, possibly even automatic response like reading is testament to the attentional control that can be exerted under (post)hypnotic suggestion. What else do we need to know-in the Stroop context and more broadly-to obtain a clear picture of how suggestion can orchestrate attention?

Conscious Cogn. 2009 Dec 5. Macleod CM. Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1.