Abstract

INTRODUCTION

ERPs AND HYPNOTIC HALLUCINATIONS

HYPNOTIC ANALGESIA

HYPNOTIC ANALGESIA : OUR RECENT FINDINGS

OUR RECENT FINDINGS: DISCUSSION

Discussion
Board

This presentation reviews some of our published psychophysiological research supporting that: (a) highly hypnotizable individuals possess stronger abilities in the focussing of attention on relevant stimuli and this ability is associated to task-related hemisphere functioning; and (b) hypnotic absorption, defined as the individual ability to experience episodes of 'total' attention on relevant events (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974), is a mechanism facilitating dissociation and essential to describe hypnotic obstruction phenomena. Both attentional and absorption mechanisms involve the activity of a supervisory attentional control system in the frontal cortex interacting with posterior cortical and subcortical brain regions. The validity of these statements was derived from a number of studies carried out in our laboratory in which were obtained: (1) measures of a fast EEG activity in the 36-44 Hz band (40-Hz EEG); (2) peak amplitude measures of event-related potentials (ERPs) during obstructive hallucination; (3) EEG spectral analyses and ERPs during different types of hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Findings from these studies suggested that different suggestions of hypnotic analgesia are associated to different processes at cortical level. Hypnotic analgesia is the product of a top-down inhibitory process that starts from frontal cerebral cortex and modulates thalamocortical activity by acting as a filter for the sensory component of the incoming inputs.

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Presentation Number SAde pascalis0311
Keywords: 40-Hz EEG, ERP, EEG, Hypnosis, Hypnotic analgesia