‘Hang on a minute!’ I hear you cry. ‘But you have been lecturing us for the last three years about how important it is to recognise that hypnosis is not the same as being asleep…”

Exactly. Which is why a new study led by Chien-Ming Yang from the National Chengchi University in Taipei, and reported here in the wonderful Mindhacks blog, is so interesting.

The new study investigates the early phases of sleep, the transitions between wakefulness and sleep often referred to as the hypnagogic state.

The way that our mind works in this phase is, as yet, poorly understood – just as the phenomena of hypnosis are poorly understood from anything other than a phenomenological level. As yet, neuroscience can’t explain hypnosis, just as it can’t yet fully explain the complex mechanisms of sleep and dreaming.

This new study took a very small sample size – 20 people – and asked them to take an afternoon nap in the lab whilst wired up to an EEG monitor measuring electrical activity in the brain, eye movement,  heart rate and muscular movements. It combined this data with accounts from the participants themselves about their experiences. Here is how Mindhacks reports the study:

‘As the participants drifted off they were awakened at different times: either just after eye-closing, the onset of ’stage 1′ sleep where you’re still aware of the external world, the onset of ’stage 2′ sleep where awareness starts to diminish, and after five minutes at ’stage 2′ where awareness should have largely disappeared.

After wakening, participants were asked questions about their perception of being asleep and the experience of their own minds: “Did you fall asleep?”, “Did you see any visual images?”, “Were you able to control your perceptual experiences?”, “How real did any of the experiences seem to you?”, “How well were you able to control your thoughts?”, “Were your thoughts logical?” and several questions to try and capture the conscious experience of sleep onset.’

The study found that the experience of having control over their own thoughts, and how coherent and logical these thoughts appeared to be, began to change almost as soon as the participants closed their eyes. As time went on, the thoughts appeared increasingly unusual and autonomous.

However, as soon as ’stage 2′ sleep began, participants seemed to experience a marked change into a state of mind where thoughts became much more freewheeling and seemingly illogical, almost as if they took on a life of their own.

Participants’ awareness of the outside world remained largely present until ’stage 2′ kicked in, at which point it quickly dropped off.

It seems that, when woken, people largely reported the experience that ‘I was asleep’ when they felt that they no longer had control over their increasingly illogical thoughts and not when their awareness of their surroundings was reduced.

This is very interesting on a number of levels for a hypnotherapist. Firstly, as hypnotherapists, we will have experienced our clients returning to full conscious awareness of the room, reporting things like: ‘That was weird. I know I wasn’t asleep. I could hear everything you were saying but it was as if my thoughts kept drifting around.’ Or ‘I was aware of everything and I could hear your voice but I can’t quite remember now what you were saying. I went to all kinds of places.’

If I were to guess, I would say that the ’stage 1′ phase of hypnagogia certainly seems quite similar to that of hypnosis – with the marked difference that the hypnotherapist is using language and suggestion that is designed to enable the client to  experience a more focused quality of awareness, with their thoughts directed towards particular imagery, ideas, feelings and sounds.

Another way of interpreting the test data might be that thoughts become less consciously directed as participants drift from ’stage 1′ to ’stage 2.’

I often feel that these fascinating studies are just barely touching the surface of some of the richest and most mysterious experiences of our inner life: thought, day-dreaming, fantasy, creative imagination, trance.

What I like about this small study is its methodology – correlating EEG data with interviews with the participants themselves. I think it’s only when we start to put the two kinds of research together  that we begin to get a picture of what happens when we turn our attention inside ourselves.

Tags: hypnagogia, hypnosis, hypnotherapy research, sleep research, trance
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Every Monday, I’m going to be addressing a common myth around hypnosis and hypnotherapy…

This week, let’s look at the one that goes: ‘Hypnosis is weird/ scary/ mystical/ mind-control/ utter hippy nonsense/ what that bloke off the telly does/ brain-washing/ something you do to me to fix my head  *

* or a combination of the above.

Firstly, I want to let you into a secret. Noone knows exactly what hypnosis is. Nope. Hypnotherapists don’t know what hypnosis actually is, and neither do researchers looking at people’s brains whilst in this apparent state of hypnosis with MRI scans and other neuroimaging techniques.

In MRI scans, we can see parts of the brain either ‘light up’ or get ‘turned off’ when people are apparently in hypnosis. Here is an example of the kind of research into hypnosis that neuroimaging is making possible, carried out by Amir Raz, who wanted to look at how hypnotic suggestions might affect the regulation of pain in the brain. This particular research gives us fascinating data about how hypnotic suggestions ‘turn off’ the area of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which would normally get activated when performing certain tasks. It has many interesting possibilities for further research and application.

But it still doesn’t really tell us what hypnosis actually is.

The question of whether hypnosis is an actual state of attention (state theory) or a set of beliefs, attitudes and expectations (non-state theory) is hotly contested in the field of hypnotherapy and hypnosis. In fact, you will find people arguing about it all over the internet.

The state theory maintains that hypnosis is an actual change in the quality of our attention and awareness, a kind of experiential shift or hypnotic ‘trance’ state that is often described by people in terms of changes in temporal and spatial awareness (‘My body feels so heavy,’ ‘My hands feel so huge’ or ‘Has that really been half an hour? It felt like ten minutes’).

The non-state theory of hypnosis claims that there is no such thing as this altered state of awareness or hypnotic ‘trance’ and that the effects of hypnosis can be explained by the motivation, cognitive set and expectation of the person being hypnotised and the way that he or she is prepared to work towards a therapeutic goal.

You will notice that, so far, there has been no mention in either of these theories of a sleep-like or unconscious state, nor of vaudevillian stunts. Contrary to popular misconception – and I do still meet people who think of hypnosis in this way – hypnosis is not like being asleep or unconscious. It is not something that a hypnotist or therapist does to you.

In hypnotherapy, the therapist does not go inside your mind and flick levers and switches or make things disappear or convince you that something you previously thought true is now suddenly untrue. (I don’t know about you but I would personally find that rather unnerving. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a hypnotherapist if I believed that s/he could do that to me!)

We know that hypnosis is something that you actively need to co-create with the therapist you choose to work with. The therapist guides you through the process of going into hypnosis (state theory) or you yourself create the mindset and beliefs within which the changes can happen (non-state theory) because you want to make the changes you want to make. Or a combination of these two.

To illustrate this more clearly, we know that if a person sits in the chair with their arms crossed and says, ‘Humph. Well you’re not going to put me under. You’re not going to hypnotise me, matey,’ well, then they are right. They will not be experiencing anything very soon except their own desire not to go into hypnosis. And maybe their own fear, which may be what is preventing them from making the changes in the first place.

So if we assume that most people seeking the help of a hypnotherapist actually want to make some changes in their lives, is hypnosis a state that therapists guide them into or a description of their set of beliefs and expectations that will make it possible for the therapist to work with them?

Personally, I think it is a combination of these two.

Many people who come to work with me are worried that they won’t be able to ‘do it right’ or relax sufficiently (see last Monday’ Myth-Busting) or go into hypnosis but, despite these fears and apprehensions, they learn exactly how to use the power of their minds and the power of self-hypnosis in helpful ways.

Whether you think that hypnosis is a weird (or mystical or in some way spiritual) state or non-state really depends upon your own set of beliefs around turning your attention inside yourself in a focused way. Some people think this is a very ordinary thing to do. For others, it is actually something quite special.

What I do know and continue to notice all the time in my own practice – both as a hypnotherapist and as someone who regularly uses self-hypnosis – is that it’s so easy to be carried away by the busy-ness of our everyday lives so that making time to direct our attention inwards in a focused way and really notice what we are feeling and thinking and how, in a sense, we are doing or creating or imagining our lives can feel strange, weird, pleasant, a relief or even slightly scary at first. It may be something we haven’t done for a long time.

When we begin to learn and understand how to do our lives and thoughts and internal experience in more helpful and progressive ways, I do personally think that is a very powerful experience. Learning to relax deeply or notice our thoughts or the way that our body feels in the midst of our busy-ness can be a kind of special or transformative experience.

There are some who would say that all our experiences are kinds of ‘trance state,’ either positive, neutral or negative, until we become consciously aware that we are doing them. So we find ourselves going into the trance of a particular relationship (he says that, she says that, you say that) or the trance of work (everything is so hard and it will never get any better) or the one about money (I need more and never seem to have enough and if only I had more my life would be so much better), for example.

Hypnosis, then, in this regard, is a kind of waking up from the trance of our everyday lives.

Tags: hypnosis, hypnotherapy, hypnotic suggestibility, non-state theory, state theory, suggestion, trance
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