Brain imaging has yielded insight into how hypnosis can work as an anesthetic while validating the technique for medicine.
While hypnosis has been shown to reduce pain perception, it's not clear how.
To help find out, researchers at the University of Iowa and the Technical University of Aachen, Germany used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on volunteers under hypnosis.
They found that the volunteers had significant pain reduction in response to painful heat.
They also had a distinctly different pattern of brain activity compared to when they experienced the heat while not hypnotized.
The changes suggest that hypnosis somehow blocks pain signals from getting to parts of the brain that perceive pain.
"The major finding from our study, which used fMRI for the first time to investigate brain activity under hypnosis for pain suppression, is that we see reduced activity in areas of the pain network and increased activity in other areas of the brain under hypnosis," says Iowa researcher Sebastian Schulz-Stubner, the study's first author.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY
No comments:
Post a Comment