Erotic and Femdom Hypnosis With Lady Izzabelle

Hypnosis,
with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is
receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies
of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act
on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they
process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally
change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.

The
new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were
hypnotized “saw” colors where there were none. Others lost the ability
to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words
and thought that they were gibberish.

“The
idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations” is
fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an
emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and
expert on attention. “But now we’re really getting at the mechanisms.”

Even
with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has been used in
medicine since the 1950’s to treat pain and, more recently, as a
treatment for anxiety, depression,
trauma, irritable bowel syndrome and eating
disorders. 

There
is, however, still disagreement about what exactly the hypnotic state
is or, indeed, whether it is anything more than an effort to please the
hypnotist or a natural form of extreme concentration where people
become oblivious to their surroundings while lost in thought.

Hypnosis
had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr.
Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner
of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music
played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible
“magnetic fluid” that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized,
clients were cured.

Although
Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show
that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body,
historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James
Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis
after the Greek word for sleep.

Braid
reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he
did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was
adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold
watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and
make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at
a hand clap and laughter from the crowd.

In
medical hands, hypnosis was no laughing matter. In the 19th century,
physicians in India successfully used hypnosis as anesthesia,
even for limb amputations. The practice fell from favor only when ether
was discovered.

Now,
Dr. Posner and others said, new research on hypnosis and suggestion is
providing a new view into the cogs and wheels of normal brain function.

One
area that it may have illuminated is the processing of sensory data.
Information from the eyes, ears and body is carried to primary sensory
regions in the brain. From there, it is carried to so-called higher
regions where interpretation occurs.

For
example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they
are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex.
There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized. The pattern is next
sent to a higher – in terms of function – region, where color is
recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower’s identity is
encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.

The
same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for
sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this
direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part
of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the
data is moving from bottom to top.

Bundles
of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information. The
surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom,
called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying
information down as there are carrying it up.

These
extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see,
hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call “top down
processing.” What you see is not always what you get, because what you
see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to
interpret the raw information – as a flower or a hammer or a face.

The
top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has
so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of
placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch
doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is
convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled. 

This
brain structure would also explain hypnosis, which is all about
creating such formidable top-down processing that suggestions overcome
reality.

According
to decades of research, 10 to 15 percent of adults are highly
hypnotizable, said Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford who
studies the clinical uses of hypnosis. Up to age 12, however, before
top-down circuits mature, 80 to 85 percent of children are highly
hypnotizable.

One
adult in five is flat out resistant to hypnosis, Dr. Spiegel said. The
rest are in between, he said.

In
some of the most recent work, Dr. Amir Raz, an assistant professor of
clinical neuroscience at Columbia, chose to study highly hypnotizable
people with the help of a standard psychological test that probes
conflict in the brain. As a professional magician who became a
scientist to understand better the slippery nature of attention, Dr.
Raz said that he “wanted to do something really impressive” that other
neuroscientists could not ignore.

The
probe, called the Stroop test, presents words in block letters in the
colors red, blue, green and yellow. The subject has to press a button
identifying the color of the letters. The difficulty is that sometimes
the word RED is colored green. Or the word YELLOW is colored blue.

For
people who are literate, reading is so deeply ingrained that it
invariably takes them a little bit longer to override the automatic
reading of a word like RED and press a button that says green. This is
called the Stroop effect.

Sixteen
people, half highly hypnotizable and half resistant, went into Dr.
Raz’s lab after having been covertly tested for hypnotizability. The
purpose of the study, they were told, was to investigate the effects of
suggestion on cognitive performance. After each person underwent a
hypnotic induction, Dr. Raz said:

“Very
soon you will be playing a computer game inside a brain scanner. Every
time you hear my voice over the intercom, you will immediately realize
that meaningless symbols are going to appear in the middle of the
screen. They will feel like characters in a foreign language that you
do not know, and you will not attempt to attribute any meaning to them.

“This
gibberish will be printed in one of four ink colors: red, blue, green
or yellow. Although you will only attend to color, you will see all the
scrambled signs crisply. Your job is to quickly and accurately depress
the key that corresponds to the color shown. You can play this game
effortlessly. As soon as the scanning noise stops, you will relax back
to your regular reading self.”

Dr.
Raz then ended the hypnosis session, leaving each person with what is
called a posthypnotic suggestion, an instruction to carry out an action
while not hypnotized.

Days
later, the subjects entered the brain scanner.

In
highly hypnotizables, when Dr. Raz’s instructions came over the
intercom, the Stroop effect was obliterated, he said. The subjects saw
English words as gibberish and named colors instantly. But for those
who were resistant to hypnosis, the Stroop effect prevailed, rendering
them significantly slower in naming the colors.

When
the brain scans of the two groups were compared, a distinct pattern
appeared. Among the hypnotizables, Dr. Raz said, the visual area of the
brain that usually decodes written words did not become active. And a
region in the front of the brain that usually detects conflict was
similarly dampened.

Top-down
processes overrode brain circuits devoted to reading and detecting
conflict, Dr. Raz said, although he did not know exactly how that
happened. Those results appeared in July in The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

A
number of other recent studies of brain imaging point to similar
top-down brain mechanisms under the influence of suggestion. Highly
hypnotizable people were able to “drain” color from a colorful abstract
drawing or “add” color to the same drawing rendered in gray tones. In
each case, the parts of their brains involved in color perception were
differently activated.

Brain
scans show that the control mechanisms for deciding what to do in the
face of conflict become uncoupled when people are hypnotized. Top-down
processes override sensory, or bottom-up information, said Dr. Stephen
M. Kosslyn, a neuroscientist at Harvard. People think that sights,
sounds and touch from the outside world constitute reality. But the
brain constructs what it perceives based on past experience, Dr.
Kosslyn said.

Most of the time
bottom-up
information matches top-down expectation, Dr. Spiegel said. But
hypnosis is interesting because it creates a mismatch. “We imagine
something different, so it is different,” he said.