Hypnosis uses the powerful effects of attention and suggestion to produce, modify and enhance a broad range of subjectively compelling experiences and behaviours. For more than a century, hypnotic ...suggestion has been used successfully as an adjunctive procedure to treat a wide range of clinical conditions. More recently, hypnosis has attracted a growing interest from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Recent studies using hypnotic suggestion show how manipulating subjective awareness in the laboratory can provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition. Moreover, they indicate that hypnotic suggestion can create informative analogues of clinical conditions that may be useful for understanding these conditions and their treatments.
Despite the compelling subjective experience of executive self-control, we argue that "consciousness" contains no top-down control processes and that "consciousness" involves no executive, causal, or ...controlling relationship with any of the familiar psychological processes conventionally attributed to it. In our view, psychological processing and psychological products are not under the control of consciousness. In particular, we argue that all "contents of consciousness" are generated by and within non-conscious brain systems in the form of a continuous self-referential personal narrative that is not directed or influenced in any way by the "experience of consciousness." This continuously updated personal narrative arises from selective "internal broadcasting" of outputs from non-conscious executive systems that have access to all forms of cognitive processing, sensory information, and motor control. The personal narrative provides information for storage in autobiographical memory and is underpinned by constructs of self and agency, also created in non-conscious systems. The experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them. Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage-not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
Consciousness as used here, refers to the private, subjective experience of being aware of our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, actions, memories (psychological contents) including the intimate ...experience of a unified self with the capacity to generate and control actions and psychological contents. This compelling, intuitive consciousness-centric account has, and continues to shape folk and scientific accounts of psychology and human behavior. Over the last 30 years, research from the cognitive neurosciences has challenged this intuitive social construct account when providing a neurocognitive architecture for a human psychology. Growing evidence suggests that the executive functions typically attributed to the experience of consciousness are carried out competently, backstage and outside subjective awareness by a myriad of fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems. While it remains unclear how and where the experience of consciousness is generated in the brain, we suggested that the traditional intuitive explanation that consciousness is causally efficacious is wrong-headed when providing a cognitive neuroscientific account of human psychology. Notwithstanding the compelling 1st-person experience (inside view) that convinces us that subjective awareness is the mental curator of our actions and thoughts, we argue that the best framework for building a scientific account is to be consistent with the biophysical causal dependency of prior neural processes. From a 3rd person perspective, (outside view), we propose that subjective awareness lacking causal influence, is (no more) than our experience of being aware, our awareness of our psychological content, knowing that we are aware, and the belief that that such experiences are evidence of an agentive capacity shared by others. While the human mind can be described as comprising both conscious and nonconscious aspects, both ultimately depend on neural process in the brain. In arguing for the counter-intuitive epiphenomenal perspective, we suggest that a scientific approach considers all mental aspects of mind including consciousness in terms of their underlying, preceding (causal) biological changes, in the realization that most brain processes are not accompanied by any discernible change in subjective awareness.
Geo-electric anisotropy in the shallow subsurface, often expressed as the “paradox of anisotropy”, is seldom accounted for in colinear array resistivity models of the critical zone. The paradox of ...anisotropy can be observed in areas of inclined bedding planes or fractures where longitudinal apparent resistivities are greater than transverse apparent resistivities, which is opposite of the true resistivities. In this study, we illustrate the paradox of anisotropy for fractured shale bedrock in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory (Shale Hills) using square and Wenner array data, and derive an anisotropy correction from the square array data, which is not influenced by the anisotropy. Square array measurements were made around a center point near the middle of a planar slope on the north-facing side of the Shale Hills watershed at four a-spacings (5, 10, 25, and 50 m), each rotated at 15° increments until a full rotation (0° to 165°) of measurements were collected. Coefficients of anisotropy, estimated from the square array data, were then applied to Wenner array data collected at the same location in the watershed to correct the anisotropic flow of current affecting the colinear (i.e., Wenner) array data. Correction of Wenner array data for profiles parallel and orthogonal to bedding strike yield favorable model results when compared to expected resistivity ranges with respect to bedding strike. We further demonstrate that application of the anisotropy corrections to several Wenner array profiles, followed by a pseudo 3D inversion of the profiles, yields a resistivity model of the subsurface providing new insights into groundwater flow through the Shale Hills' critical zone.
•Fractured bedrock geo-electric anisotropy affects 2-D resistivity model output.•Paradox of anisotropy correction factors can be derived from square array data.•Corrected resistivity models aid in understanding critical zone groundwater flow.
Propaganda, more politely called 'information operations' these days, has been a prominent feature of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Both the Russians and Ukrainians have used propaganda to court global ...public opinion, shape military operations, and secure or destabilize alliances. However, although they have each tried to control the war's narrative through propaganda, they cannot control social media - the enormous, entangled web of technology, actors, and interests that allows billions of users to interact, argue, and influence. This article will explain how the combination of propaganda and social media in the Russo-Ukrainian War has destabilized American civil-intelligence relations and raised political, social, and ethical questions concerning the role of citizens, both individually and collectively, in foreign wars.
The growing acceptance of consciousness as a legitimate field of enquiry and the availability of functional imaging has rekindled research interest in the use of hypnosis and suggestion to manipulate ...subjective experience and to gain insights into healthy and pathological cognitive functioning. Current research forms two strands. The first comprises studies exploring the cognitive and neural nature of hypnosis itself. The second employs hypnosis to explore known psychological processes using specifically targeted suggestions. An extension of this second approach involves using hypnotic suggestion to create clinically informed analogues of established structural and functional neuropsychological disorders. With functional imaging, this type of experimental neuropsychopathology offers a productive means of investigating brain activity involved in many symptom-based disorders and their related phenomenology.
Hypnotic suggestibility is part of the wider psychological trait of direct verbal suggestibility (DVS). Historically, DVS in hypnosis has informed theories of consciousness and of conversion ...disorder. More recently it has served as a research tool in cognitive science and in cognitive neuroscience in particular. Here we consider DVS as a general trait, its relation to other psychological characteristics and abilities, and to the origin and treatment of clinical conditions. We then outline the distribution of DVS in the population, its measurement, relationship to other forms of suggestibility, placebo responsiveness, personal characteristics, gender, neurological processes and other factors, such as expectancy. There is currently no scale specifically designed to measure DVS outside a hypnotic context. The most commonly used and well-researched of the hypnosis-based scales, the Harvard Group Scale, is described and identified as a basis for a more broadly based measure of DVS for use in psychological research.
Functional neurological disorder (FND) involves the presence of neurological symptoms that cannot be explained by neurological disease. FND has long been linked to hypnosis and suggestion, both of ...which have been used as treatments. Given ongoing interest, this review examined evidence for the efficacy of hypnosis and suggestion as treatment interventions for FND.
A systematic search of bibliographic databases was conducted to identify group studies published over the last hundred years. No restrictions were placed on study design, language, or clinical setting. Two reviewers independently assessed papers for inclusion, extracted data, and rated study quality.
The search identified 35 studies, including 5 randomised controlled trials, 2 non-randomised trials, and 28 pre-post studies. Of 1584 patients receiving either intervention, 1379 (87%) showed significant improvements, including many who demonstrated resolution of their symptoms in the short-term. Given the heterogeneity of interventions and limitations in study quality overall, more formal quantitative synthesis was not possible.
The findings highlight longstanding and ongoing interest in using hypnosis and suggestion as interventions for FND. While the findings appear promising, limitations in the evidence base, reflecting limitations in FND research more broadly, prevent definitive recommendations. Further research seems warranted given these supportive findings.
•Studies were identified across the last century involving 1584 participants.•>85% of patients demonstrated clinically significant improvements.•>75% had a resolution or near resolution of symptoms in the short-term.•The evidence base shared limitations with that for other interventions in FND.•Further research is warranted given the promising findings.
Jean-Martin Charcot proposed the radical hypothesis that similar brain processes were responsible for the unexplained neurological symptoms of ‘hysteria’, now typically diagnosed as ‘conversion ...disorder’ or ‘dissociative (conversion) disorder’, and the temporary effects of hypnosis. While this idea has been largely ignored, recent cognitive neuroscience studies indicate that (i) hypnotisability traits are associated with a tendency to develop dissociative symptoms in the sensorimotor domain; (ii) dissociative symptoms can be modelled with suggestions in highly hypnotisable subjects; and (iii) hypnotic phenomena engage brain processes similar to those seen in patients with symptoms of hysteria. One clear theme to emerge from the findings is that ‘symptom’ presentation, whether clinically diagnosed or simulated using hypnosis, is associated with increases in prefrontal cortex activity suggesting that intervention by the executive system in both automatic and voluntary cognitive processing is common to both hysteria and hypnosis. Nevertheless, while the recent literature provides some compelling leads into the understanding of these phenomena, the field still lacks well controlled systematically designed studies to give a clear insight into the neurocognitive processes underlying dissociation in both hysteria and hypnosis. The aim of this review is to provide an agenda for future research.
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