So, we undertook with help
from the Institute here and
several other sources to
understand first of all what
the brain basis was of these
differences and the ability to
experience hypnosis.
And one other thing to
understand is if you're
hypnotizable you can go 
into a hypnotic state in
a matter of seconds, it
doesn't take hours,
it doesn't take counting
upstairs and downstairs,
if you've got the ability,
you can shift gears and do it
extremely quickly.
And that means people will use
it in ordinary life and with
my colleagues, Fumiko
Hoeft, now at UCSF,
Allan Reiss at Stanford, Susan
Whitfield-Gabrieli and John
Gabrieli, who unfortunately
left Stanford and are
flourishing at
MIT, Mike Greicius,
with whom I
collaborate at Stanford,
Vinod Menon, also a
colleague at Stanford,
we recruited a group of
high and low hypnotizable
individuals and did resting
state fMRI on them in the scanner.
So, at this point we weren't
trying to hypnotize them,
we were just putting
them in the scanner,
but carefully screened to be
extremely high or extremely
low in hypnotizability using
a brief clinical measure,
the Hypnotic
Induction Profile,
which I have used
with probably 8 or 9,000
patients and research
subjects in my career.
It's a great way to
start a hypnotic experience,
because you're not trying
to talk them into anything,
you're just assessing how well
they can respond to a series
of structured
hypnotic instructions,
in this case about your hand 
feeling light, if you
pull it down the hand seems to 
want to go back up in the air.
And that experience of
involuntariness and some
sensory alterations are items
that we score coming up with a
measurement of
0-10 on this scale.
So, we had people who
were either extremely high,
median score of 8.48 or low .79 
on the Hypnotic Induction Profile.
And we were particularly
interested in resting state
functional connectivity.
And three primary networks in
resting state connectivity are
the salience network, activity
there is related to things
like anxiety scores
after the trailmaking task.
It primarily involves regions
of the brain like the dorsal
anterior cingulate, which is part 
of our attention control network.
When air traffic controllers
are matching flight paths of
planes, their anterior
cingulate is firing away.
So, it's a way of looking at
what to pay attention to and
what to ignore.
There is the default 
mode network,
which is what you do when
you're just kind of resting
and ruminating, you tend to be
reflecting about yourself and
what you've done.
It tends to get turned off
when you're engaged actively
in a task but turned on
when your mind is wandering.
That tends to be
pre-central gyrus and,
or post central gyrus and
dorsomedial frontal cortex,
post central gyrus and
dorsomedial pre-frontal.
And finally the
executive control network,
which we use when
we're engaged in a task.
I hopefully am using it
now as I'm talking to you,
left dorsolateral
pre-frontal cortex,
primarily helps us
decide what to do.
So, those are three
of the major networks.
And what we did then was look
at functional connectivity in
those networks in high and
low hypnotizables at rest.
And what you see here is
for low hypnotizables,
there's not much connectivity
particularly with the dorsal
anterior cingulate here, the
salience network is not at
rest doing much, but there
is between in particular the
anterior cingulate gyrus and
the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex.
And you see none of that
in the low hypnotizables,
comparing these two
here with these two here.
We didn't see as much with the
default mode or the executive
control network, but the
connection between the
executive control network and 
the ACC was particularly notable.
And so the idea
here is basically,
hypnotizable people when
they are engaged in some task
really get immersed in it, and
it's that sense of altering,
self-altering attention,
getting so caught up in a
movie or a novel that you
forget that you're watching
the movie, you
decontextualized it.
And if the part of your brain
that's engaged in the task and
the part that is worried about
whether you should be doing
other things are firing together, 
you're more likely
to have one of those 
self-altering experiences.
So, here you see that same
difference here and it's a
highly significant effect.
Functional connectivity
between the dorsolateral
pre-frontal cortex and the dorsal 
anterior cingulate gyrus here.
That's the major distinction
between high and low
hypnotizables at rest.
And it means that
spontaneously they can go into
a state where they get
fully absorbed and engaged.
And [inaud.] at the University
of Minnesota has shown that
people who are more highly
hypnotizable have more of
these self-altering attentional 
states in everyday life.
They get lost in a sunset or
a movie or reading a novel.
All right and this just shows
the difference between the
highs and lows in functional
connectivity between the ACC
and the dorsolateral prefrontal 
cortex, highly significant
difference between high 
and low hypnotizables.
Again, not actually using
hypnosis at that point.
So we can see a brain
difference between people who
are high and low
in hypnotizability.
And so there are now, there
have been a number of studies,
I'm sorry that Dr. Bushnell
apparently is ill today,
I was hoping to see her, but
she and others have done some
very interesting work looking
at the role of the anterior
cingulate in hypnotizability
and in particular the ACC
because it's involved
in attention monitoring,
is important in tasks
like the Stroop effect.
There have been a number of
other studies that they and
others have done showing
that regions related to pain
control and the Stroop effect
are managed in the anterior
cingulate, which is also we
think a crucial part of the
brain for hypnotic experience.
And I'll show you some
data that they have generated
showing that if you change
how distressing pain is,
not the sensation itself,
but how much it bothers you,
you reduce activity in
the anterior cingulate.
Many of you may know
what the Stroop effect is,
it's basically a
color word naming task,
where if you show somebody the
word green written in red and
ask them to read the word,
tell you what the color is,
they're inhibited by
reading what the word says.
So, there's a natural
inhibition between your
lexical processing and your 
visual processing of the color.
And that's considered a
fundamental phenomenon in
psychophysics except that with
hypnosis you can reverse and
eliminate the Stroop effect.
So, you just hypnotize someone
and say these words are
written in a language
you don't understand,
in a foreign language, and
you can inhibit the lexical
process and they read it just
as fast and the activity here
is in the dorsal
anterior cingulate gyrus.
The ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex inhibitory process is
also related to
hypnotic experience,
so these earlier studies are
very consistent with what we
found about prefrontal
cortex and anterior cingulate
inhibition and it's related
also to the hypnotic reduction
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of the Stroop effect.
