Neuroscientists Find Way to Make People More Hypnotizable

For the first time, neuroscientists at Stanford University have discovered how to make people more susceptible to hypnosis.

The technique promises to make hypnotherapy more accessible, allowing more people to benefit from its noninvasive results.

"Hypnosis is an ability many people have to control problems like stress, phobias, insomnia and pain without medications or their side effects," senior author David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, told Newsweek.

He continued: "With the benefit of decades of research on how to best use hypnosis and the reach of digital apps, hypnosis provides great promise for helping people to learn how to better manage their minds and bodies."

When we think of hypnosis, many of us have images of Marvel supervillains and Kaa the snake from Disney's Jungle Book. But far from the swirling eyes and zombie-like mind control that we tend to associate it with, hypnosis actually involves transporting patients into a state of intense focus.

"It is very helpful in managing stress, anxiety and phobias because you can better manage your physiological reactions to it," Spiegel said. "Hypnosis is also a powerful analgesic [painkiller]. It has been shown in randomized clinical trials to help people control and reduce pain in both acute surgical procedures and with chronic pain, such as with metastatic breast cancer.

"It is useful in getting to sleep—again by reducing response to frustration and stressful thoughts. It helps people to enhance focus and plan work and performance. [And] it is useful in managing habits, such as stopping smoking and eating more healthily," he said.

However, not everyone is equally susceptible to this method of treatment.

"Hypnotizability is as stable a trait in adult life as IQ," Spiegel said. "About 20 percent of adults are highly hypnotizable, 50 percent moderately hypnotizable and 30 percent not very hypnotizable. Hypnotizability can be measured easily in about five minutes, and we have even developed a point-of-care genetic test from a small blood sample."

In previous work, Spiegel and his colleagues determined that highly hypnotizable people have more connectivity between areas in the brain involved in information processing and stimulus detection.

"It made sense that people who naturally coordinate activity between these two regions would be able to concentrate more intently," he said. "It's because you're coordinating what you are focusing on with the system that distracts you."

Using this knowledge, the team has pioneered a noninvasive brain stimulation technique to mimic these effects and increase an individual's hypnotizability, albeit temporarily. In its recent study, published in the journal Nature Mental Health, the team tested its technique on a sample of 80 patients with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that can be treated with hypnotherapy.

Half of these participants received transcranial magnetic stimulation, a technique in which paddles are applied to the scalp to deliver pulses of electricity to the brain. Using brain imaging, the team was able to direct these pulses directly to the areas in each individual's brain involved in hypnotizability.

Compared with those who received a sham treatment (the same apparatus with no electric pulse), the participants who received neurostimulation were significantly more susceptible to hypnotherapy after just two minutes of treatment. However, after one hour this effect had worn off, and both groups of participants became equally susceptible.

"We were pleasantly surprised that we were able to, with 92 seconds of stimulation, change a stable brain trait that people have been trying to change for 100 years," co-author Nolan Williams, also a psychiatry professor at Stanford, said in a statement. "We finally cracked the code on how to do it."

But could this technique be used by malignant forces to control the minds of the masses, as in Incredibles 2?

"Anything that has the power to help also has the power to hurt," Spiegel said. "But all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis, so people retain the ability to manage their response to exploitative hypnotic instructions, though perhaps with more difficulty. Remember that people can 'go along' with stupid or malicious suggestions without hypnosis too. We are all susceptible to some degree to social influence."

The team now plans to test whether different dosages of neurostimulation can enhance hypnotizability even more, allowing more patients to benefit from this quick, noninvasive treatment.

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