Published on: August 14, 2013
Source: MedicalXpress.com
A recent article from Medical Xpress stated that a group of researchers from University of Turku, Helsinki, and Skovde, have found evidence that hypnotic suggestion can involuntarily change one’s perception from a targeted stimulus for both hypnotized and non-hypnotized participants.
The study showed that hypnosis can possibly create a memory trace which occurs during stages of visual processing already about 1/10 second after the appearance of a stimulus. For example, series of blue/red shapes are displayed and participants who are under hypnosis are given the suggestions that certain shapes have a corresponding color, such as all squares are red. Then, participants experienced a constant change in color right after a suggested shape is projected in which they see a red square though the real color was blue.
These results show that hypnosis or hypnotic suggestion can modulate highly automatic features of perception such as color experiences and had become an important allegation in the field of psychology and cognitive neurosciences that study memory, consciousness and visual perception.
