Category: Inside the Brain

The neuroscience of suggestion and hypnosis are helping us to understand mysterious disorders where people are blind or paralysed with no apparent medical explanation, and may be useful in investigating altered states from diverse cultures – according to an engaging discussion in the monthly JNNP podcast.

The JNNP is the slightly catchier name for The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry and let me ‘fess up and say the interview is with a colleague of mine, psychiatrist Quinton Deeley, who discusses our recent article on how cognitive neuroscience is providing tantalising evidence for an old theory on how hypnosis and hysteria might be linked.

Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot believed that there may be a connection because he could simulate almost any aspect of hysteria through suggestion in susceptible individuals. Hysteria is now typically diagnosed as conversion disorder and its a condition where people appear to have neurological problems despite their nervous system seeming to be in perfect working order.

It turns out that the idea of hypnosis is a bit of a smokescreen because it depends much more on the person listening to the suggestions, than the person making the suggestions.

We now know that we all have a certain capacity to allow other people to suggest changes to our mental state. This differs between people and the ability is normally distributed, like many psychological traits, and we know its partly genetic and there’s evidence its linked to differences in brain structure.

Contrary to the popular myth, if you are experiences the effects of suggestion, your mind isn’t ‘under control’ and it’s much like watching a film. You can choose to turn away at any point but you don’t decide to be scared or amused by the movie – it just happens. Highly suggestible people can allow suggestions of paralysis, amnesia or even hallucinations.

I wrote more about the neuroscience of suggestion in an article for The Guardian but as happens with almost any piece about this area, it got given a daft headline and a ridiculous picture of someone swinging a watch. However, it remains a good place to start if you want an introduction to the science, rather than the myths.

Our recent research looked at neuroscience studies on both ‘hysteria’ and hypnosis and found there is intriguing evidence that both may involve the frontal cortex inhibiting other brain functions. For example, in cases of both ‘hysterical paralysis’ and suggested paralysis you can often see the motor areas of the brain being deactivated as the frontal cortex ramps up its activity when the person tries to move.

Quinton has a long-standing interest in anthropology and another line of this work is to look at whether this has links with ritual trance states or altered states of consciousness that happen in cultures across the world where people feel that they are making involuntary movements or feel they are not in control of their actions – even when drugs are not being used.

The discussion on the podcast touches on all these areas, and you can download the whole thing with the other half on multiple sclerosis and Vitamin D, or grab the mp3 with just the bit on suggestion, hysteria and altered states.
 

Link to March JNNP podcast page.
mp3 of just the suggestion, hysteria and altered states discussion.
Link to full scientific paper.
Link to Guardian article on the neuroscience of suggestion and hypnosis.

I’ve just read a completely fascinating New York Times article on the neuropsychology of courage – a core human attribute that curiously seems to be largely ignored by cognitive science.

The piece looks at how we define courage, it’s relation to fear and the sometimes wonderfully innovative research that has tackled the area.

In pioneering work from 1970s and beyond, Stanley J. Rachman of the University of British Columbia and others studied the physiology and behavior of paratroopers as they prepared for their first parachute jump.

The work revealed three basic groups: the preternaturally fearless, who displayed scant signs of the racing heart, sweaty palms, spike in blood pressure and other fight-or-flight responses associated with ordinary fear, and who jumped without hesitation; the handwringers, whose powerful fear response at the critical moment kept them from jumping; and finally, the ones who reacted physiologically like the handwringers but who acted like the fearless leapers, and, down the hatch.

These last Dr. Rachman deemed courageous, defining courage as “behavioral approach in spite of the experience of fear.” By that expansive definition, courage becomes democratized and demilitarized, the property of any wallflower who manages to give the convention speech, or the math phobe who decides to take calculus.

It is also a wonderfully written article, by the way, so well worth making the leap for.
 

Link to NYT article ‘Searching for the Source of a Fountain of Courage’.

Seed Magazine has an absolutely wonderful article on the neuroscience of musical improvisation that looks at how skilled musicians from the jazz greats to the classical masters take us on unplanned melodic journeys.

It’s a brilliantly written piece, a compelling fusion of music and science journalism, that skilfully captures the emerging scientific interest in musical spontaneity.

Aaron Berkowitz, a cognitive ethnomusicologist, who took on the task of demystifying improvisation as the focus of his dissertation work at Harvard, has a theory. He likens the process of learning to improvise to that of learning a second language. Initially, he says, it’s all about memorizing vocabulary words, useful phrases and verb conjugation tables. Your first day, you might learn to say: How are you? I’m fine. “These are like the baby steps beginning improvisers take. They learn the structure of the blues. They learn basic chords and get the form down,” said Berkowitz. But they’re still very limited in what they can do…

The trajectory of acquiring a language, according to Berkowitz, where you begin with learned phrases, achieve fluency, and are eventually able to create poetry mirrors perfectly the process of learning to improvise. In the same way a language student learns words, phrases and grammatical structure so that later he can recombine them to best communicate his thoughts, a musician collects and commits to memory patterns of notes, chords and progressions, which he can later draw from to express his musical ideas.

After reading the piece I wondered if the brain handles musical improvisation in a similar way to how it manages freestyle rap, as they both require unplanned spontaneity but within the restrictions of ‘what works’.

Sadly, so far, science has completely neglected the neural basis of hip-hop, but we live in hope homey.
 

UPDATE: Mind Hacks posse in full effect. In the comments NT mentioned that neuroscientist Charles Limb has got a freestyle rap study in progress and neuromusic noted that DJ and neuroscientist @djenygma tweeted earlier today he was “Sitting in on #fMRI experiment using local rappers in a freestyle-vs-memorized processing task”.

Link to excellent article on musical improvisation.

The brain may manage anger differently depending on whether we’re lying down or sitting up, according to a study published in Psychological Science that may also have worrying implications for how we are trying to understand brain function.

Anger experiments that have measured electrical signals from the brain (using EEG) or that have altered neural activity with magnetic pulses (using TMS) have found that the left frontal lobe is more active than the right, but studies using fMRI functional brain scans have found no differences.

Psychologists Eddie Harmon-Jones and Carly Peterson wondered whether the brain might be working differently in EEG and TMS experiments because the participant is usually sitting upright, while in fMRI, the person is usually lying flat on their back.

If this seems like a trivial distinction as far as emotion is concerned, it actually has some sound theory behind it. A field of study called ‘embodied cognition‘ has found lots of curious interactions between how the mind and brain manage our responses depending on the possibilities for action.

For example, we perceive distances as shorter when we have a tool in our hand and intend to use it, and wearing a heavy backpack causes hills to appear steeper.

Anger is a prime example where we feel motivated to ‘do something’. In the sitting position we’re much more ready to approach whatever’s annoying us than when we’re flat on our backs, and the researchers wondered whether these body positions were interacting with our motivations to change the brain’s response.

So Harmon-Jones and Peterson asked 46 participants to write a short essay before wiring them up to an EEG that measured the electrical activity across the brain.

The participants then put on headphones and listened as someone else read their essay and rated the author on personal characteristics, such as intelligence and competence. Some participants listened while lying down, others while in the sitting position.

What they didn’t know was that the ‘raters’ were actually pre-recorded audio, and while some heard a benign commentary on their work, other participants heard the other ‘person’ slagging-off them off and harshly rating the participant and their personality.

In line with the ‘ready to respond’ theory, when the participants were angry and sitting up, the left frontal lobe was much more active than the right – but when angry and lying down, there was no difference.

First off, the findings provide evidence that body position interacts with how the brain processes emotion, perhaps depending on which actions are immediately possible.

But more importantly, the experiment might also indicate that different neuroscience techniques may be throwing up varying results because of the differing body positions needed to take the tests.

Although this is only an initial study, it could be a major spanner in the works for cognitive science which often assumes that clumping together evidence from a whole range of techniques gives a better idea of what’s going on.
 

pdf of full-text of study.
Link to PubMed entry for study.
Link to DOI entry for study.