Hypnotic suggestion: opportunities for cognitive neuroscience.

Hypnosis uses the powerful effects of attention and suggestion to produce, modify and enhance a broad range of subjectively compelling experiences and behaviours. For more than a century, hypnotic suggestion has been used successfully as an adjunctive procedure to treat a wide range of clinical conditions. More recently, hypnosis has attracted a growing interest from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Recent studies using hypnotic suggestion show how manipulating subjective awareness in the laboratory can provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition. Moreover, they indicate that hypnotic suggestion can create informative analogues of clinical conditions that may be useful for understanding these conditions and their treatments.

Nat Rev Neurosci. 2013 Aug;14(8):565-76. doi: 10.1038/nrn3538. Epub 2013 Jul 17. Oakley DA, Halligan PW. Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, WC1H 0AP, UK. d.oakley@ucl.ac.uk