Hypnosis, synaesthesia and creativity
After yesterday’s post about self-hypnosis and creativity, I’ve just been reading another article that provides more evidence that hypnosis helps our brains to access our own innate creative abilities.
The article in Science Daily , reports new research on hypnosis and synaesthesia:
‘Hypnosis can induce synaesthetic experiences – where one sense triggers the involuntary use of another – according to a new study by UCL (University College London) researchers. The findings suggests that people with synaesthesia, contrary to popular belief, do not necessarily have extra connections in their brain; rather, their brains may simply do more ‘cross talking’ and this can be induced by changing inhibitory processes in the average brain.’
We tend to think of synaesthesia – for example, feeling colours, tasting shapes – as being a rather unusual ‘condition’ and yet past research has shown that highly creative people often have a certain degree of synaesthesia. Cross-sensory experience is surprisingly common to some degree in poets and musicians. Rather than being an on-off kind of neurological state, it is probably more like a continuum.
Interestingly, this latest research by scientists at UCL ‘used posthypnotic suggestion to show that people who are not synaesthetes can be induced to have synaesthetic experiences.’
Here’s how they did it:
‘After inducing digit-colour synaesthesia, the volunteers reported similar experiences to those undergone by real synaesthetes in their everyday life. For example, one participant described seeing the numbers on car number plates in specific colours, while walking around under posthypnotic suggestion. Moreover, hypnotized participants failed trick tests which were also failed by real synaesthetes: in one test, when subjects were hypnotized to experience seven as red, they could not detect the number when a black seven was presented on a red background.
Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, says: “Our study shows that posthypnotic suggestion can induce synaesthetic experiences in people, suggesting that extra brain connections are not needed to experience cross-sensory interactions and that it is more cross talk within the brain that causes these experiences. This takes us one step closer to understanding the causes of synaesthesia and abnormal cross-brain interactions.”
Very interesting to see hypnosis being used in this way. We still understand so little about the brain and particularly about the subconscious mind. However, I know from my own work and research that, when we are in the particular state of awareness that is self-hypnosis, our ‘inhibitory processes’ calm down and relax. This may be why we are more open to suggestion – such as seeing the number seven as red.
However, even without hypnotic suggestion, the state of self-hypnosis itself enables our brains to make all kinds of connections and learnings – the kind of ‘cross-talk within the brain’ that is proposed by this study. Perhaps it is this ‘cross-talk’ that helps us to access more and more of our natural ability to create change, find solutions, make things happen.
As Albert Einstein famously said: ‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’ Cognitive scientists studying ‘intuition’ have found that people tend to describe it as a more bodily, felt kind of state, a state of expansion, relaxation or opening outwards…
Perhaps this new study of synaesthesia is showing us this kind of shift at a neurological level.
