Clare Wilson, features editor, Brighton, UK
Hypnosis researchers have something of a wacky reputation among more mainstream scientists. So do those who study mind-altering drugs. So where does that leave people who study using mind-altering drugs to make people easier to hypnotise?
Chemical help to hypnotise people would be invaluable, because normally only 10 to 15 per cent of us can be fully hypnotised. About 10 per cent do not respond to hypnosis at all and the rest lie somewhere in between.
Hypnosis is increasingly being investigated by neuroscientists, not only to find out what goes on in the brain during the experience, but also as a research tool to study consciousness and as a potential aid to many medical treatments.
For this, highly susceptible people are needed, and they're thin on the ground, complained Devin Terhune at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference in Brighton this week.
Terhune, a hypnosis researcher at the University of Oxford, once had to test 600 volunteers to get enough suitable subjects. He saves time by initially trying to hypnotise people in large groups, before working with individuals. If you could make more people hypnotically suggestible with a drug, it would have many practical implications, he says.
So what works?
So far most success has been with nitrous oxide, a commonly used anaesthetic gas. That caused about a 25 per cent increase in people's hypnotic suggestibility, although it's too early to say how many people would be converted to a level of high susceptibility. Some success has also been reported with oxytocin, a hormone thought to promote trust and social bonding.
And, perhaps unsurprisingly, alcohol also does the trick, according to a small study by researchers at the University of Sussex in Brighton, presented at the conference this week. People given the equivalent of 2.5 pints (1.4 litres) of lager showed a marked increase in their hypnotic susceptibility to commands like feeling the urge to brush a mosquito off their hand.
Alcohol might have this effect because it impairs our awareness, says Rebecca Semmens-Wheeler of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex, who did the study. Some think hypnosis involves reduced awareness of intentions to perform actions, which is why it feels like those actions are involuntary.
A hypnosis drug could be helpful when the technique is used medically, to treat chronic pain, for instance. Perhaps it could also shed light on the neural mechanisms behind hypnosis. There is still debate about what this phenomenon represents. True believers think that hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness. Sceptics think it is just unusually suggestible people following commands because it's less socially awkward than ignoring them.
Terhune thinks that's an old row and "a complete waste of time". Whether it's an altered state or not, hypnosis is useful, he says, as it can be used to switch on and off different behaviours that allow researchers to answer questions that are otherwise difficult to address. He just wishes other scientists saw it that way, admitting: "Everybody in my department thinks I'm a little bit strange."
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