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Hypnosis Gets Positive Recognition
An anonymous reader writes to tell us the New York Times is reporting that, despite its negative history, hypnosis is now getting some favorable attention from neuroscientists. From the article: "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 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. " Hypnotised subjects recognised the words more often than unhypnotised subjects.
The Stroop test also differentiates between subjects with a thick corpus callosum and those with a thin corpus callosum - eg: left handers and right handers. Considering the small sample was this factor controlled for?
Also psych experiments use very small samples and have to use the repeated measures statistical technique. This can identify significance but is restricted in other information it can provide.
<jedi>
There will not come a day when marketers abuse this.
No marketers are abusing this.
No privacy law is required.
</jedi>
Nothing for me to see here. I'll move along.
The whole idea of 'top-down' or cognitive drive for the sensory systems is very addictive, since among other things, it allows you to explain perception as some type of baysian method. However it is simply untrue. The visual system is replete with examples, from the Craik-O'Brien-Cornsweet illusion, to stuff like Julesz' Random Dot stereograms (that CANNOT have top down effects), that defy a top-down framework.
Even with effects that might be top-down modulated (like illusory contours) the physiological evidence is totally towards these things happening in the early nervous system. Although there is definitely some feedback present even in this area, one has to consider that RC constants for most neurons are about ~10ms, and much of our perception takes place in ~100ms. These timeframes are VERY well studied, and generally accepted.. and of that 100ms, about 50ms of the time is the signal travelling from the retina to the cortex (see Bullier & DeAngelis, among others). That doesn't leave much room for dramatic top down feedback for general sensory perception.... Your visual system, bottom up, manages to figure out edges, what colors to fill them in with, various levels of depth, what's moving (in relation to your eye movements.. no easy challenge.. how can you tell when your eye moves whether you're looking at a pen, or a moving streak?) and in relation to what else, all within 100-150ms of the stimulus. That just doesn't leave time for very dramatic 'high level' feedback like this article assumes.
Although I've only mentioned vision, there are similar issues in all sensory modalities except audition, which is a special case, since audition is optimized for temporal accuity, but it has its own issues that make it look like much of your perception happens without much top-down activity.
From our current understanding it appears that top-down activity does two things: 1) Equalize 'gain' in the sensory system.. if the amplification levels across you're visual field were different, you wouldn't be able to tell whether a line was something that had to do with the outside world or noise. And 2) Modulate acuity for attention.. which is very complicated in and of itself, but there is good evidence that most early perception occurs even in areas we aren't attending to.
The main 'evidence' in this article is from a 'brain scanner' which is probably fMRI. As one of my professor's liked to say, "In fMRI we show people a picture of their ass, then a picture of a hole in the ground, and subract them." Most fMRI statistics include averaging across areas... which is nice, until you remember that our brain isn't on a sphere, but something with fissures in it, and so you just averaged two things that were (cortically speaking) in other worlds (since because of the fissure they might be centimeters apart! Remember the Cortex is a laminar archiecture around the surface)... so I'm highly skeptical, to say the least.
Not by any conventional definition of reality. What is real doesn't change depending on perception. Reality by definition is objective, not subjective.
I've noticed pseudoscience types and religious people use "reality" as a synonym for "belief". That's not the accepted definition for reality, and pretty much anything can be considered "real" by that definition, which makes it useless. Don't use "reality" as a synonym for "belief".
No, change the perception, change the belief. Change the perception, change the conclusion. You cannot change reality by perceiving it a different way.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Not only is it being used today, but you might even say that 'cognitive suggestion' forms a definition of modern marketing.
Discussing this with my company's experienced sales and marketing director was enlightening and shocking. Billions of US dollars are spent to harness our subconsious traits. Emotional reaction to certain colours or shapes are used convince us to part with our money.
Next time you see an ad with an animated character, note the proportion of the characters eyes and head. Most of the time you will see that the eyes and head are proportionally larger than those of an adult human but closer to those of a baby/young child. Why? Because we are genetically tuned to respond in a positive way to children.
Surf around a few corp websites that offer services to other companies. What percentage use blue as their main colour? Supposedly blue is a 'trustworthy' colour.
The common misconception is that hypnosis is about swinging a pocket watch and chanting "You are feeling sleepy". The fact is, you are essentially hypnotised by marketing specialised many times (perhaps hundreds of times) daily. It is the reason why millions of people will go to the supermarket and pay double the price of the exact same shit in a different colour box.
What? you are saying that a material absorbs electromagnetic radiation of particular frequencies only because it is being observed?
It's true that if nobody was around to see it, nobody would be calling it "red". But the process would still be going on.
Again, I don't see your point. Are you arguing that if a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, the laws of physics change so that it doesn't cause the air molecules nearby to vibrate?
Who cares about what words mean? The meaning of things is defined by interpretation - it's not reality in the slightest.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha