New study sheds light on cognitive mechanisms linked to hypnosis (Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost, May 30 2021)
“Both tests were used to assess a cognitive phenomenon known as perseveration, meaning the tendency to apply previously learned (but incorrect) logical rules after being presented with new (correct) rules.
“We found an association between people’s ability to respond to suggestions in hypnosis (i.e., hypnotizability or hypnotic suggestibility) and how easy it is for them to shift between different cognitive sets (less perseveration).
“This provides behavioral evidence for a potential shared mechanism between hypnotizability and executive functions,” Faerman told PsyPost.
“Practically, the more hypnotizable one is, the easier it was for them to drop an old rule system and transition to a new rule system.
While there is a need for further evidence to substantiate this, some might interpret our findings as increased cognitive flexibility.”
The researchers had also predicted that hypnotizability would be associated with faster performance on simple attention tasks and with slower performance on more complex cognitive tasks.
However, the results from the neuropsychological tests showed no evidence of this. (…)
“Coupling behavioral performance with neuroimaging can shed more light on the neurocognitive mechanism at play in hypnotizability.
When we have targets for neural mechanisms, we can try to modulate them to improve the effects of hypnosis,” Faerman said.
“In fact, we recently succeeded in doing that; we temporarily increased hypnotizability by using non-invasive brain stimulation of a neurocognitive mechanism we identified using neuroimaging.””












