...Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.
The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish.
"The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."...
... If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled.
This brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome reality.
According to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly hypnotizable.
One adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The rest are in between, he said...
Some of us don't get the mass hypnosis, either. The baloney detection kit Carl Sagan devised helps. As does knowing you live in a natural world with real explanations for everything.
You might bounce over to patriotboy's site, where he sets aside the satire and ties together some excellent recent posts by Digby, Billmon, and Sy Hersch. And the BBC's photographs of us using white phosphorous as a chemical weapon in broad daylight against unarmed civilians. Along with his own observations.
Even our Iraqi puppets want us out now.
Still, Dick Cheney inhabits a hall of mirrors, accusing people who accuse him of lying, of lying.
...Now you know it's a meaningless question
To ask if those stories are right
'Cause what matters most is the feeling
You get when you're hypnotized...
-Fleetwood Mac/ Bob Welch
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
You might enjoy The Science of Coercion by Christopher Simpson. Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article Damaged is also pertinent to our collective state of mind.
I love reading this stuff. There is more going on in the brain than we know. We STILL don't have all the data about the brain and how it works. Even changing our understanding of what happens on the level of synapses as QUANTUM not mechanical.
In the book about the neuroplasticity of the mind and the power of mental force the author, Schmitz talks about this very different way to look at the brain that is still not considered.
I think fMRI is great, but it is only one tool of many that we will need to understand what is going on at a deeper level in the brain.
That explains a lot, I wonder if this hypnotizing is done in church?
Post a Comment