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140-410: Hypnosis is a human condition involving focused attention (the selective attention/selective inattention hypothesis, SASI), reduced peripheral awareness, and an enhanced capacity to respond to suggestion . There are competing theories explaining hypnosis and related phenomena. Altered state theories see hypnosis as an altered state of mind or trance , marked by a level of awareness different from

280-577: A psychological construct forms a research approach to its study. In scientific works, attention often coincides and substitutes the notion of intentionality due to the extent of semantic uncertainty in the linguistic explanations of these notions' definitions. Intentionality has in turn been defined as "the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs". Although these two psychological constructs (attention and intentionality) appear to be defined by similar terms, they are different notions. To clarify

420-455: A July 2001 article for Scientific American titled "The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis", Michael Nash wrote that, "using hypnosis, scientists have temporarily created hallucinations, compulsions, certain types of memory loss, false memories, and delusions in the laboratory so that these phenomena can be studied in a controlled environment." There is evidence supporting the use of hypnotherapy in

560-406: A bottom-up saliency map, which is received by the superior colliculus in the midbrain area to guide attention or gaze shifts. The second aspect is called top-down processing, also known as goal-driven, endogenous attention, attentional control or executive attention. This aspect of our attentional orienting is under the control of the person who is attending. It is mediated primarily by

700-432: A child, and grew up with parents who encouraged imaginary play. Dissociaters often have a history of childhood abuse or other trauma, learned to escape into numbness, and to forget unpleasant events. Their association to "daydreaming" was often going blank rather than creating vividly recalled fantasies. Both score equally high on formal scales of hypnotic susceptibility. Individuals with dissociative identity disorder have

840-470: A combination of behavioural, physiological, and subjective responses, some of which were due to direct suggestion and some of which were not. In the first few decades of the 20th century, these early clinical "depth" scales were superseded by more sophisticated "hypnotic susceptibility" scales based on experimental research. The most influential were the Davis–Husband and Friedlander–Sarbin scales developed in

980-520: A common neural architecture, in that they control both covert and overt attentional systems. For example, if individuals attend to the right hand corner field of view, movement of the eyes in that direction may have to be actively suppressed. Covert attention has been argued to reflect the existence of processes "programming explicit ocular movement". However, this has been questioned on the grounds that N2 , "a neural measure of covert attentional allocation—does not always precede eye movements". However,

1120-644: A complex social community with multiple relationships. Many Indigenous children in the Americas predominantly learn by observing and pitching in. There are several studies to support that the use of keen attention towards learning is much more common in Indigenous Communities of North and Central America than in a middle-class European-American setting. This is a direct result of the Learning by Observing and Pitching In model. Keen attention

1260-443: A dominant idea (or suggestion). Different views regarding the nature of the mind have led to different conceptions of suggestion. Hypnotists who believe that responses are mediated primarily by an "unconscious mind", like Milton Erickson , make use of indirect suggestions such as metaphors or stories whose intended meaning may be concealed from the subject's conscious mind. The concept of subliminal suggestion depends upon this view of

1400-494: A high tendency to be especially keen observers. This learning by observing and pitching-in model requires active levels of attention management. The child is present while caretakers engage in daily activities and responsibilities such as: weaving, farming, and other skills necessary for survival. Being present allows the child to focus their attention on the actions being performed by their parents, elders, and/or older siblings. In order to learn in this way, keen attention and focus

1540-462: A high tendency to be especially wide, keen observers. This points to a strong cultural difference in attention management. Attention may be differentiated into "overt" versus "covert" orienting. Overt orienting is the act of selectively attending to an item or location over others by moving the eyes to point in that direction. Overt orienting can be directly observed in the form of eye movements. Although overt eye movements are quite common, there

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1680-401: A lifetime in duration. The hypnotherapeutic ones are often repeated in multiple sessions before they achieve peak effectiveness. Some hypnotists view suggestion as a form of communication that is directed primarily to the subject's conscious mind, whereas others view it as a means of communicating with the " unconscious " or " subconscious " mind. These concepts were introduced into hypnotism at

1820-468: A message while carrying on a meaningful conversation. This relies on the reflexive response due to "overlearning" the skill of morse code reception/detection/transcription so that it is an autonomous function requiring no specific attention to perform. This overtraining of the brain comes as the "practice of a skill [surpasses] 100% accuracy," allowing the activity to become autonomic, while your mind has room to process other actions simultaneously. Based on

1960-399: A much more crude fashion (i.e., low-resolution). This fringe extends out to a specified area, and the cut-off is called the margin. The second model is called the zoom-lens model and was first introduced in 1986. This model inherits all properties of the spotlight model (i.e., the focus, the fringe, and the margin), but it has the added property of changing in size. This size-change mechanism

2100-525: A panic retreat by the therapist'. Peter Blos suggested that 'revisiting of early psychic positions...helps the adolescent come out of the family envelope', and that 'Regression during adolescence thus advances the cause of development'. Stanley Olinick speaks of 'regression in the service of the other' on the part of the analyst 'during his or her clinical work. Such ego regression is a pre-condition for empathy '. Demonstration of pain, impairment, etc. also relates to regression. When regression becomes

2240-542: A paragraph to The Interpretation of Dreams that distinguished three kinds of regression, which he called topographical regression, temporal regression, and formal regression. Freud saw inhibited development, fixation , and regression as centrally formative elements in the creation of a neurosis. Arguing that "the libidinal function goes through a lengthy development", he assumed that "a development of this kind involves two dangers – first, of inhibition , and secondly, of regression ". Inhibitions produced fixations, and

2380-685: A person's susceptibility as "high", "medium", or "low". Approximately 80% of the population are medium, 10% are high, and 10% are low. There is some controversy as to whether this is distributed on a "normal" bell-shaped curve or whether it is bi-modal with a small "blip" of people at the high end. Hypnotisability scores are highly stable over a person's lifetime. Research by Deirdre Barrett has found that there are two distinct types of highly susceptible subjects, which she terms fantasisers and dissociaters. Fantasisers score high on absorption scales, find it easy to block out real-world stimuli without hypnosis, spend much time daydreaming, report imaginary companions as

2520-436: A quasi- Romantic image of the creative process, in which 'it is only in the fiery storm of a profound regression, in the course of which the personality undergoes both dissolution of structure and reorganization, that the genius becomes capable of wresting himself from the traditional pattern that he had been forced to integrate through the identifications necessitated and enforced by the oedipal constellation'. From there it

2660-526: A rough distinction between different stages of hypnosis, which he termed the first and second conscious stage of hypnotism; he later replaced this with a distinction between "sub-hypnotic", "full hypnotic", and "hypnotic coma" stages. Jean-Martin Charcot made a similar distinction between stages which he named somnambulism, lethargy, and catalepsy. However, Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim introduced more complex hypnotic "depth" scales based on

2800-408: A sense, all learning is post-hypnotic, which they say explains why the number of ways people can be put into a hypnotic state are so varied: according to them, anything that focuses a person's attention, inward or outward, puts them into a trance. Medical hypnosis is often considered pseudoscience or quackery . Hypnosis is normally preceded by a "hypnotic induction" technique. Traditionally, this

2940-445: A series of preliminary instructions and suggestions. The use of hypnosis for therapeutic purposes is referred to as " hypnotherapy ", while its use as a form of entertainment for an audience is known as " stage hypnosis ", a form of mentalism . Hypnosis-based therapies for the management of irritable bowel syndrome and menopause are supported by evidence. The use of hypnosis as a form of therapy to retrieve and integrate early trauma

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3080-463: A specific notion of "regression in the service of the ego"...the specific means whereby preconscious and unconscious material appear in the creator's consciousness'. Kris thus opened the way for ego psychology to take a more positive view of regression. Carl Jung had earlier argued that 'the patient's regressive tendency...is not just a relapse into infantilism, but an attempt to get at something necessary...the universal feeling of childhood innocence,

3220-416: A study comparing the effects of hypnosis, ordinary suggestion, and placebo in reducing pain. The study found that highly suggestible individuals experienced a greater reduction in pain from hypnosis compared with placebo, whereas less suggestible subjects experienced no pain reduction from hypnosis when compared with placebo. Ordinary non-hypnotic suggestion also caused reduction in pain compared to placebo, but

3360-436: A supplemental approach to cognitive behavioral therapy since as early as 1949. Hypnosis was defined in relation to classical conditioning ; where the words of the therapist were the stimuli and the hypnosis would be the conditioned response. Some traditional cognitive behavioral therapy methods were based in classical conditioning. It would include inducing a relaxed state and introducing a feared stimulus. One way of inducing

3500-502: A surrender to the non-rational side which had to be paid for by a sacrifice of the rational and individual side'; and Freud for his part had dourly noted that 'this extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted in direction; it may be described as a special capacity for involution – regression – since it may well happen that a later and higher level of development, once abandoned, cannot be reached again'. Anna Freud (1936) ranked regression first in her enumeration of

3640-488: A trance can profoundly alter their behavior. As they rehearse the new ways they want to think and feel, they lay the groundwork for changes in their future actions... Barrett described specific ways this is operationalised for habit change and amelioration of phobias. In her 1998 book of hypnotherapy case studies, she reviews the clinical research on hypnosis with dissociative disorders, smoking cessation, and insomnia, and describes successful treatments of these complaints. In

3780-467: A twofold one: a temporal one, in so far as the libido, the erotic needs, hark back to stages of development that are earlier in time, and a formal one, in that the original and primitive methods of psychic expression are employed in manifesting those needs". Behaviors associated with regression can vary greatly depending upon the stage of fixation: one at the oral stage might result in excessive eating or smoking, or verbal aggression, whereas one at

3920-639: A way to soothe skin ailments. A number of studies show that hypnosis can reduce the pain experienced during burn-wound debridement , bone marrow aspirations, and childbirth . The International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis found that hypnosis relieved the pain of 75% of 933 subjects participating in 27 different experiments. Hypnosis is effective in decreasing the fear of cancer treatment reducing pain from and coping with cancer and other chronic conditions. Nausea and other symptoms related to incurable diseases may also be managed with hypnosis. Some practitioners have claimed hypnosis might help boost

4060-722: Is "a special case of psychological regression ": Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell (the originators of the human givens approach ) define hypnosis as "any artificial way of accessing the REM state, the same brain state in which dreaming occurs" and suggest that this definition, when properly understood, resolves "many of the mysteries and controversies surrounding hypnosis". They see the REM state as being vitally important for life itself, for programming in our instinctive knowledge initially (after Dement and Jouvet) and then for adding to this throughout life. They attempt to explain this by asserting that, in

4200-435: Is a defense mechanism involving the reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of psychosexual development , as a reaction to an overwhelming external problem or internal conflict. Sigmund Freud invoked the notion of regression in relation to his theory of dreams (1900) and sexual perversions (1905), but the concept itself was first elaborated in his paper "The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis" (1913). In 1914, he added

4340-401: Is a distinction that can be made between two types of eye movements; reflexive and controlled. Reflexive movements are commanded by the superior colliculus of the midbrain . These movements are fast and are activated by the sudden appearance of stimuli. In contrast, controlled eye movements are commanded by areas in the frontal lobe . These movements are slow and voluntary. Covert orienting

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4480-480: Is a lack of measurement surrounding distributions of temporal and spatial attention. Only a concentrated amount of attention on how effective one is completing the task and how long they take is being analyzed making a more redundant analysis on overall cognition of being able to process multiple stimuli through perception. Attention is best described as the sustained focus of cognitive resources on information while filtering or ignoring extraneous information. Attention

4620-440: Is a mental state (“the power of the mind to be about something”, arising even unconsciously), the description of the construct of attention should be understood in the dynamical sense as the ability to elevate the clear perception of the narrow region of the content of consciousness and to keep in mind this state for a time. The attention threshold would be the period of minimum time needed for employing perception to clearly apprehend

4760-467: Is a single pool of attentional resources that can be freely divided among multiple tasks. This model seems oversimplified, however, due to the different modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, verbal) that are perceived. When the two simultaneous tasks use the same modality, such as listening to a radio station and writing a paper, it is much more difficult to concentrate on both because the tasks are likely to interfere with each other. The specific modality model

4900-529: Is a very basic function that often is a precursor to all other neurological/cognitive functions. As is frequently the case, clinical models of attention differ from investigation models. One of the most used models for the evaluation of attention in patients with very different neurologic pathologies is the model of Sohlberg and Mateer. This hierarchic model is based in the recovering of attention processes of brain damage patients after coma . Five different kinds of activities of growing difficulty are described in

5040-472: Is an initial pre-attentive parallel phase of perceptual segmentation and analysis that encompasses all of the visual items present in a scene. At this phase, descriptions of the objects in a visual scene are generated into structural units; the outcome of this parallel phase is a multiple-spatial-scale structured representation. Selective attention intervenes after this stage to select information that will be entered into visual short-term memory." The contrast of

5180-539: Is based on performance of doing two tasks simultaneously, usually that involves driving while performing another task, such as texting, eating, or even speaking to passengers in the vehicle, or with a friend over a cellphone. This research reveals that the human attentional system has limits for what it can process: driving performance is worse while engaged in other tasks; drivers make more mistakes, brake harder and later, get into more accidents, veer into other lanes, and/or are less aware of their surroundings when engaged in

5320-440: Is because they are typically presented at the center of a display, where an observer's eyes are likely to be fixated. Central cues, such as an arrow or digit presented at fixation, tell observers to attend to a specific location. When examining differences between exogenous and endogenous orienting, some researchers suggest that there are four differences between the two kinds of cues: There exist both overlaps and differences in

5460-576: Is both a requirement and result of learning by observing and pitching-in. Incorporating the children in the community gives them the opportunity to keenly observe and contribute to activities that were not directed towards them. It can be seen from different Indigenous communities and cultures, such as the Mayans of San Pedro , that children can simultaneously attend to multiple events. Most Maya children have learned to pay attention to several events at once in order to make useful observations. One example

5600-463: Is both ancient and continually relevant, as it can have effects in fields ranging from mental health and the study of disorders of consciousness to artificial intelligence and its domains of research. Prior to the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, attention was studied in the field of philosophy . Thus, many of the discoveries in the field of attention were made by philosophers. Psychologist John B. Watson calls Juan Luis Vives

5740-449: Is controversial within the scientific mainstream. Research indicates that hypnotising an individual may aid the formation of false memories, and that hypnosis "does not help people recall events more accurately". Medical hypnosis is often considered pseudoscience or quackery . The words hypnosis and hypnotism both derive from the term neuro-hypnotism (nervous sleep), all of which were coined by Étienne Félix d'Henin de Cuvillers in

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5880-434: Is driven by the properties of the objects themselves. Some processes, such as motion or a sudden loud noise, can attract our attention in a pre-conscious, or non-volitional way. We attend to them whether we want to or not. These aspects of attention are thought to involve parietal and temporal cortices, as well as the brainstem . More recent experimental evidence support the idea that the primary visual cortex creates

6020-436: Is enhanced firing. If a neuron has a different response to a stimulus when an animal is not attending to a stimulus, versus when the animal does attend to the stimulus, then the neuron's response will be enhanced even if the physical characteristics of the stimulus remain the same. In a 2007 review, Professor Eric Knudsen describes a more general model which identifies four core processes of attention, with working memory at

6160-541: Is linked to eye movement circuitry that sets up a slower saccade to that location. There are studies that suggest the mechanisms of overt and covert orienting may not be controlled separately and independently as previously believed. Central mechanisms that may control covert orienting, such as the parietal lobe , also receive input from subcortical centres involved in overt orienting. In support of this, general theories of attention actively assume bottom-up (reflexive) processes and top-down (voluntary) processes converge on

6300-527: Is permitted only when they have been completely trained about their clinical side effects and while under supervision when administering it. The use of hypnosis to exhume information thought to be buried within the mind in the investigative process and as evidence in court became increasingly popular from the 1950s to the early 1980s with its use being debated into the 1990s when its popular use mostly diminished. Forensic hypnosis's uses are hindered by concerns with its reliability and accuracy. Controversy surrounds

6440-422: Is popularly used to quit smoking , alleviate stress and anxiety, promote weight loss , and induce sleep hypnosis. Stage hypnosis can persuade people to perform unusual public feats. Some people have drawn analogies between certain aspects of hypnotism and areas such as crowd psychology , religious hysteria, and ritual trances in preliterate tribal cultures. Hypnotherapy is a use of hypnosis in psychotherapy. It

6580-488: Is present in the ways in which children of indigenous backgrounds interact both with their surroundings and with other individuals. Simultaneous attention requires focus on multiple simultaneous activities or occurrences. This differs from multitasking, which is characterized by alternating attention and focus between multiple activities, or halting one activity before switching to the next. Simultaneous attention involves uninterrupted attention to several activities occurring at

6720-493: Is required. Eventually the child is expected to be able to perform these skills themselves. In the domain of computer vision , efforts have been made to model the mechanism of human attention, especially the bottom-up intentional mechanism and its semantic significance in classification of video contents. Both spatial attention and temporal attention have been incorporated in such classification efforts. Regression (psychology) In psychoanalytic theory , regression

6860-471: Is simultaneous attention which involves uninterrupted attention to several activities occurring at the same time. Another cultural practice that may relate to simultaneous attention strategies is coordination within a group. San Pedro toddlers and caregivers frequently coordinated their activities with other members of a group in multiway engagements rather than in a dyadic fashion. Research concludes that children with close ties to Indigenous American roots have

7000-533: Is small at best. Hypnosis may be useful as an adjunct therapy for weight loss. A 1996 meta-analysis studying hypnosis combined with cognitive behavioural therapy found that people using both treatments lost more weight than people using cognitive behavioural therapy alone. American psychiatric nurses, in most medical facilities, are allowed to administer hypnosis to patients in order to relieve symptoms such as anxiety, arousal, negative behaviours, uncontrollable behaviour, and to improve self-esteem and confidence. This

7140-448: Is the act of mentally shifting one's focus without moving one's eyes. Simply, it is changes in attention that are not attributable to overt eye movements. Covert orienting has the potential to affect the output of perceptual processes by governing attention to particular items or locations (for example, the activity of a V4 neuron whose receptive field lies on an attended stimuli will be enhanced by covert attention) but does not influence

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7280-452: Is the intentional allocation of attentional resources to a predetermined location or space. Simply stated, endogenous orienting occurs when attention is oriented according to an observer's goals or desires, allowing the focus of attention to be manipulated by the demands of a task. In order to have an effect, endogenous cues must be processed by the observer and acted upon purposefully. These cues are frequently referred to as central cues . This

7420-402: Is the spotlight model. The term "spotlight" was inspired by the work of William James , who described attention as having a focus, a margin, and a fringe. The focus is an area that extracts information from the visual scene with a high-resolution, the geometric center of which being where visual attention is directed. Surrounding the focus is the fringe of attention, which extracts information in

7560-402: Is thought to operate as a two-stage process. In the first stage, attention is distributed uniformly over the external visual scene and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second stage, attention is concentrated to a specific area of the visual scene (i.e., it is focused), and processing is performed in a serial fashion. The first of these models to appear in the literature

7700-430: Is used by licensed physicians, psychologists, and others. Physicians and psychologists may use hypnosis to treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders , sleep disorders , compulsive gambling , phobias and post-traumatic stress , while certified hypnotherapists who are not physicians or psychologists often treat smoking and weight management. Hypnotherapy was historically used in psychiatric and legal settings to enhance

7840-436: The anal stage might result in excessive tidiness or messiness. Freud recognised that "it is possible for several fixations to be left behind in the course of development, and each of these may allow an irruption of the libido that has been pushed off – beginning, perhaps, with the later acquired fixations, and going on, as the lifestyle develops, to the original ones". Ernst Kris supplements Freud's general formulations with

7980-455: The frontal cortex and basal ganglia as one of the executive functions . Research has shown that it is related to other aspects of the executive functions, such as working memory , and conflict resolution and inhibition. A "hugely influential" theory regarding selective attention is the perceptual load theory , which states that there are two mechanisms that affect attention: cognitive and perceptual. The perceptual mechanism considers

8120-402: The ideo-motor reflex response to account for the phenomenon of hypnotism. Carpenter had observed from close examination of everyday experience that, under certain circumstances, the mere idea of a muscular movement could be sufficient to produce a reflexive, or automatic, contraction or movement of the muscles involved, albeit in a very small degree. Braid extended Carpenter's theory to encompass

8260-420: The "benign" regression of the basic-fault patient. The problem then is what the analyst can do 'to ensure that his patient's regression should be therapeutic and any danger of a pathological regression avoided'. Others have highlighted the technical dilemmas of dealing with regression from different if complementary angles. On the one hand, making premature 'assumptions about the patient's state of regression in

8400-420: The "stronger the fixations on its path of development, the more readily will the function evade external difficulties by regressing to the fixations". Neurosis for Freud was thus the product of a flight from an unsatisfactory reality "along the path of involution, of regression, of a return to earlier phases of sexual life, phases from which at one time satisfaction was not withheld. This regression appears to be

8540-553: The 1820s. The term hypnosis is derived from the ancient Greek ὑπνος hypnos , "sleep", and the suffix -ωσις - osis , or from ὑπνόω hypnoō , "put to sleep" ( stem of aorist hypnōs -) and the suffix - is . These words were popularised in English by the Scottish surgeon James Braid (to whom they are sometimes wrongly attributed) around 1841. Braid based his practice on that developed by Franz Mesmer and his followers (which

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8680-478: The 1930s. André Weitzenhoffer and Ernest R. Hilgard developed the Stanford Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility in 1959, consisting of 12 suggestion test items following a standardised hypnotic eye-fixation induction script, and this has become one of the most widely referenced research tools in the field of hypnosis. Soon after, in 1962, Ronald Shor and Emily Carota Orne developed a similar group scale called

8820-554: The Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (HGSHS). Whereas the older "depth scales" tried to infer the level of "hypnotic trance" from supposed observable signs such as spontaneous amnesia, most subsequent scales have measured the degree of observed or self-evaluated responsiveness to specific suggestion tests such as direct suggestions of arm rigidity (catalepsy). The Stanford, Harvard, HIP, and most other susceptibility scales convert numbers into an assessment of

8960-493: The US Freedom of Information Act archive shows that hypnosis was investigated for military applications. The full paper explores the potentials of operational uses. The overall conclusion of the study was that there was no evidence that hypnosis could be used for military applications, and no clear evidence whether "hypnosis" is a definable phenomenon outside ordinary suggestion, motivation, and subject expectancy. According to

9100-406: The ability of people to learn new information when there were multiple tasks to be performed, or to probe the limits of our perception (c.f. Donald Broadbent ). There is also older literature on people's performance on multiple tasks performed simultaneously, such as driving a car while tuning a radio or driving while being on the phone. The vast majority of current research on human multitasking

9240-552: The ability to teach self-hypnosis to patients, the cost-effectiveness of the intervention, and the advantage of using such an intervention as opposed to the use of pharmaceutical drugs. Modern hypnotherapy has been used, with varying success, in a variety of forms, such as: In a January 2001 article in Psychology Today , Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett wrote: A hypnotic trance is not therapeutic in and of itself, but specific suggestions and images fed to clients in

9380-456: The act of focusing the conscious mind of the subject upon a single dominant idea. Braid's main therapeutic strategy involved stimulating or reducing physiological functioning in different regions of the body. In his later works, however, Braid placed increasing emphasis upon the use of a variety of different verbal and non-verbal forms of suggestion, including the use of "waking suggestion" and self-hypnosis. Subsequently, Hippolyte Bernheim shifted

9520-461: The altered state theory of hypnosis, pain relief in response to hypnosis is said to be the result of the brain's dual-processing functionality. This effect is obtained either through the process of selective attention or dissociation, in which both theories involve the presence of activity in pain receptive regions of the brain, and a difference in the processing of the stimuli by the hypnotised subject. The American Psychological Association published

9660-517: The areas of the brain that are responsible for endogenous and exogenous orientating. Another approach to this discussion has been covered under the topic heading of "bottom-up" versus "top-down" orientations to attention. Researchers of this school have described two different aspects of how the mind focuses attention to items present in the environment. The first aspect is called bottom-up processing, also known as stimulus-driven attention or exogenous attention. These describe attentional processing which

9800-420: The brain activity underlying selective attention by cognitive psychophysiologists , the ability of the newer techniques to measure precisely localized activity inside the brain generated renewed interest by a wider community of researchers. A growing body of such neuroimaging research has identified a frontoparietal attention network which appears to be responsible for control of attention. A definition of

9940-425: The brain while monitoring tasks involving attention. Considering this expensive equipment was generally only available in hospitals, psychologists sought cooperation with neurologists. Psychologist Michael Posner (then already renowned for his influential work on visual selective attention) and neurologist Marcus Raichle pioneered brain imaging studies of selective attention. Their results soon sparked interest from

10080-741: The center: Neurally, at different hierarchical levels spatial maps can enhance or inhibit activity in sensory areas, and induce orienting behaviors like eye movement. In many cases attention produces changes in the EEG . Many animals, including humans, produce gamma waves (40–60 Hz) when focusing attention on a particular object or activity. Another commonly used model for the attention system has been put forth by researchers such as Michael Posner . He divides attention into three functional components: alerting, orienting, and executive attention that can also interact and influence each other. Children appear to develop patterns of attention related to

10220-429: The combined research of Vygotsky and Luria have determined a large part of the contemporary understanding and definition of attention as it is understood at the start of the 21st-century. Multitasking can be defined as the attempt to perform two or more tasks simultaneously; however, research shows that when multitasking, people make more mistakes or perform their tasks more slowly. Attention must be divided among all of

10360-493: The component tasks to perform them. In divided attention, individuals attend or give attention to multiple sources of information at once or perform more than one task at the same time. Older research involved looking at the limits of people performing simultaneous tasks like reading stories, while listening and writing something else, or listening to two separate messages through different ears (i.e., dichotic listening ). Generally, classical research into attention investigated

10500-415: The conversation based upon the needs of the driver. For example, if traffic intensifies, a passenger may stop talking to allow the driver to navigate the increasingly difficult roadway; a conversation partner over a phone would not be aware of the change in environment. There have been multiple theories regarding divided attention. One, conceived by cognitive scientist Daniel Kahneman , explains that there

10640-416: The cue will not relay reliable, accurate information about where a target is going to occur. This means that the mere presence of an exogenous cue will affect the response to other stimuli that are subsequently presented in the cue's previous location. Several studies have investigated the influence of valid and invalid cues. They concluded that valid peripheral cues benefit performance, for instance when

10780-403: The cultural practices of their families, communities, and the institutions in which they participate. In 1955, Jules Henry suggested that there are societal differences in sensitivity to signals from many ongoing sources that call for the awareness of several levels of attention simultaneously. He tied his speculation to ethnographic observations of communities in which children are involved in

10920-469: The defense mechanisms', and similarly suggested that people act out behaviors from the stage of psychosexual development in which they are fixated. For example, an individual fixated at an earlier developmental stage might cry or sulk upon hearing unpleasant news. Michael Balint distinguishes between two types of regression: a nasty "malignant" regression that the Oedipal level neurotic is prone to... and

11060-412: The definition of attention, it would be correct to consider the origin of this notion to review the meaning of the term given to it when the experimental study on attention was initiated. It is thought that the experimental approach began with famous experiments with a 4 x 4 matrix of sixteen randomly chosen letters – the experimental paradigm that informed Wundt 's theory of attention. Wundt interpreted

11200-403: The document: Attention Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education , psychology , neuroscience , cognitive neuroscience , and neuropsychology . Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the sensory cues and signals that generate attention, the effects of these sensory cues and signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons , and

11340-466: The effects of the suggestions may be extended (post-hypnotically) into the subject's subsequent waking activity. It could be said that hypnotic suggestion is explicitly intended to make use of the placebo effect. For example, in 1994, Irving Kirsch characterized hypnosis as a "non-deceptive placebo", i.e., a method that openly makes use of suggestion and employs methods to amplify its effects. A definition of hypnosis, derived from academic psychology ,

11480-496: The elevation into the focus of attention - apperception." Wundt's theory of attention postulated one of the main features of this notion that attention is an active, voluntary process realized during a certain time. In contrast, neuroscience research shows that intentionality may emerge instantly, even unconsciously; research reported to register neuronal correlates of an intentional act that preceded this conscious act (also see shared intentionality ). Therefore, while intentionality

11620-429: The emphasis from the physical state of hypnosis on to the psychological process of verbal suggestion: I define hypnotism as the induction of a peculiar psychical [i.e., mental] condition which increases the susceptibility to suggestion. Often, it is true, the [hypnotic] sleep that may be induced facilitates suggestion, but it is not the necessary preliminary. It is suggestion that rules hypnotism. Bernheim's conception of

11760-483: The end of the 19th century by Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet . Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory describes conscious thoughts as being at the surface of the mind and unconscious processes as being deeper in the mind. Braid, Bernheim, and other Victorian pioneers of hypnotism did not refer to the unconscious mind but saw hypnotic suggestions as being addressed to the subject's conscious mind. Indeed, Braid actually defines hypnotism as focused (conscious) attention upon

11900-448: The environment other than those pointed out by the hypnotist. In a hypnotic state an individual tends to see, feel, smell, and otherwise perceive in accordance with the hypnotist's suggestions, even though these suggestions may be in apparent contradiction to the actual stimuli present in the environment. The effects of hypnosis are not limited to sensory change; even the subject's memory and awareness of self may be altered by suggestion, and

12040-424: The experimental outcome introducing the meaning of attention as "that psychical process, which is operative in the clear perception of the narrow region of the content of consciousness." These experiments showed the physical limits of attention threshold, which were 3-6 letters observing the matrix during 1/10 s of their exposition. "We shall call the entrance into the large region of consciousness - apprehension, and

12180-404: The eyes, most probably the eyelids will close involuntarily, with a vibratory motion. If this is not the case, or the patient allows the eyeballs to move, desire him to begin anew, giving him to understand that he is to allow the eyelids to close when the fingers are again carried towards the eyes, but that the eyeballs must be kept fixed, in the same position, and the mind riveted to the one idea of

12320-429: The father of modern psychology because, in his book De Anima et Vita ( The Soul and Life ), he was the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation. In his work on memory, Vives found that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained. By the 1990s, psychologists began using positron emission tomography (PET) and later functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image

12460-495: The form of mental imagery, voice tonality, and physical manipulation. A distinction is commonly made between suggestions delivered "permissively" and those delivered in a more "authoritarian" manner. Harvard hypnotherapist Deirdre Barrett writes that most modern research suggestions are designed to bring about immediate responses, whereas hypnotherapeutic suggestions are usually post-hypnotic ones that are intended to trigger responses affecting behaviour for periods ranging from days to

12600-414: The highest hypnotisability of any clinical group, followed by those with post-traumatic stress disorder . There are numerous applications for hypnosis across multiple fields of interest, including medical/psychotherapeutic uses, military uses, self-improvement, and entertainment. The American Medical Association currently has no official stance on the medical use of hypnosis. Hypnosis has been used as

12740-764: The immune system of people with cancer. However, according to the American Cancer Society , "available scientific evidence does not support the idea that hypnosis can influence the development or progression of cancer." Hypnosis has been used as a pain relieving technique during dental surgery , and related pain management regimens as well. Researchers like Jerjes and his team have reported that hypnosis can help even those patients who have acute to severe orodental pain. Additionally, Meyerson and Uziel have suggested that hypnotic methods have been found to be highly fruitful for alleviating anxiety in patients with severe dental phobia. For some psychologists who uphold

12880-583: The individual's limited-capacity attentional resources. Other variables play a part in our ability to pay attention to and concentrate on many tasks at once. These include, but are not limited to, anxiety, arousal, task difficulty, and skills. Simultaneous attention is a type of attention, classified by attending to multiple events at the same time. Simultaneous attention is demonstrated by children in Indigenous communities, who learn through this type of attention to their surroundings. Simultaneous attention

13020-449: The information he requires and on the process of choosing an algorithm for response actions, which involves the intensification of sensory and intellectual activities”. In cognitive psychology there are at least two models which describe how visual attention operates. These models may be considered metaphors which are used to describe internal processes and to generate hypotheses that are falsifiable . Generally speaking, visual attention

13160-410: The information that is processed by the senses. Researchers often use "filtering" tasks to study the role of covert attention of selecting information. These tasks often require participants to observe a number of stimuli, but attend to only one. The current view is that visual covert attention is a mechanism for quickly scanning the field of view for interesting locations. This shift in covert attention

13300-422: The introduction. A hypnotic procedure is used to encourage and evaluate responses to suggestions. When using hypnosis, one person (the subject) is guided by another (the hypnotist) to respond to suggestions for changes in subjective experience, alterations in perception, sensation, emotion, thought or behavior. Persons can also learn self-hypnosis, which is the act of administering hypnotic procedures on one's own. If

13440-504: The lack of evidence indicating any level of efficiency, it is regarded as a type of alternative medicine by numerous reputable medical organisations, such as the National Health Service . Preliminary research has expressed brief hypnosis interventions as possibly being a useful tool for managing painful HIV-DSP because of its history of usefulness in pain management , its long-term effectiveness of brief interventions,

13580-461: The limits of a human ability to concentrate awareness on a task. Latvian prof. Sandra Mihailova and prof. Igor Val Danilov drew an essential conclusion from the Wundtian approach to the study of attention: the scope of attention is related to cognitive development. As the mind grasps more details about an event, it also increases the number of reasonable combinations within that event, enhancing

13720-402: The mind riveted on the idea of that one object. It will be observed, that owing to the consensual adjustment of the eyes, the pupils will be at first contracted: They will shortly begin to dilate, and, after they have done so to a considerable extent, and have assumed a wavy motion, if the fore and middle fingers of the right hand, extended and a little separated, are carried from the object toward

13860-411: The mind. By contrast, hypnotists who believe that responses to suggestion are primarily mediated by the conscious mind, such as Theodore Barber and Nicholas Spanos , have tended to make more use of direct verbal suggestions and instructions. The first neuropsychological theory of hypnotic suggestion was introduced early by James Braid who adopted his friend and colleague William Carpenter's theory of

14000-481: The model; connecting with the activities those patients could do as their recovering process advanced. This model has been shown to be very useful in evaluating attention in very different pathologies, correlates strongly with daily difficulties and is especially helpful in designing stimulation programs such as attention process training, a rehabilitation program for neurological patients of the same authors. Most experiments show that one neural correlate of attention

14140-503: The most influential methods was Braid's "eye-fixation" technique, also known as "Braidism". Many variations of the eye-fixation approach exist, including the induction used in the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (SHSS), the most widely used research tool in the field of hypnotism. Braid's original description of his induction is as follows: Take any bright object (e.g. a lancet case) between

14280-408: The neuroscience community, which until then had been focused on monkey brains. With the development of these technological innovations, neuroscientists became interested in this type of research that combines sophisticated experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with these new brain imaging techniques. Although the older technique of electroencephalography (EEG) had long been used to study

14420-417: The object held above the eyes. In general, it will be found, that the eyelids close with a vibratory motion, or become spasmodically closed. Braid later acknowledged that the hypnotic induction technique was not necessary in every case, and subsequent researchers have generally found that on average it contributes less than previously expected to the effect of hypnotic suggestions. Variations and alternatives to

14560-584: The objects that result from this initial grouping." In the twentieth century, the pioneering research of Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria led to the three-part model of neuropsychology defining the working brain as being represented by three co-active processes listed as Attention, Memory, and Activation. A.R. Luria published his well-known book The Working Brain in 1973 as a concise adjunct volume to his previous 1962 book Higher Cortical Functions in Man . In this volume, Luria summarized his three-part global theory of

14700-419: The observation that a wide variety of bodily responses besides muscular movement can be thus affected, for example, the idea of sucking a lemon can automatically stimulate salivation, a secretory response. Braid, therefore, adopted the term "ideo-dynamic", meaning "by the power of an idea", to explain a broad range of "psycho-physiological" (mind–body) phenomena. Braid coined the term "mono-ideodynamic" to refer to

14840-404: The ordinary state of consciousness . In contrast, non-state theories see hypnosis as, variously, a type of placebo effect, a redefinition of an interaction with a therapist or a form of imaginative role enactment . During hypnosis, a person is said to have heightened focus and concentration and an increased response to suggestions. Hypnosis usually begins with a hypnotic induction involving

14980-427: The original hypnotic induction techniques were subsequently developed. However, this method is still considered authoritative. In 1941, Robert White wrote: "It can be safely stated that nine out of ten hypnotic techniques call for reclining posture, muscular relaxation, and optical fixation followed by eye closure." When James Braid first described hypnotism, he did not use the term "suggestion" but referred instead to

15120-497: The peripheral cues are brief flashes at the relevant location before the onset of a visual stimulus. Psychologists Michael Posner and Yoav Cohen (1984) noted a reversal of this benefit takes place when the interval between the onset of the cue and the onset of the target is longer than about 300 ms. The phenomenon of valid cues producing longer reaction times than invalid cues is called inhibition of return . Endogenous (from Greek endo , meaning "within" or "internally") orienting

15260-423: The previously discussed tasks. There has been little difference found between speaking on a hands-free cell phone or a hand-held cell phone, which suggests that it is the strain of attentional system that causes problems, rather than what the driver is doing with his or her hands. While speaking with a passenger is as cognitively demanding as speaking with a friend over the phone, passengers are able to change

15400-408: The primacy of verbal suggestion in hypnotism dominated the subject throughout the 20th century, leading some authorities to declare him the father of modern hypnotism. Contemporary hypnotism uses a variety of suggestion forms including direct verbal suggestions, "indirect" verbal suggestions such as requests or insinuations, metaphors and other rhetorical figures of speech, and non-verbal suggestion in

15540-489: The primary role of the perceptual load theory, assumptions regarding its functionality surrounding that attentional resources are that of limited capacity which signify the need for all of the attentional resources to be used. This performance, however, is halted when put hand in hand with accuracy and reaction time (RT). This limitation arises through the measurement of literature when obtaining outcomes for scores. This affects both cognitive and perceptual attention because there

15680-414: The probability of better understanding its features and particularity. For example, three items in the focal point of consciousness have six possible combinations (3 factorial), and four items have 24 (4 factorial) combinations. This number of combinations becomes significantly prominent in the case of a focal point with six items with 720 possible combinations (6 factorial). Empirical evidence suggests that

15820-474: The recall of repressed or degraded memories, but this application of the technique has declined as scientific evidence accumulated that hypnotherapy can increase confidence in false memories . Hypnotherapy is viewed as a helpful adjunct by proponents, having additive effects when treating psychological disorders, such as these, along with scientifically proven cognitive therapies . The effectiveness of hypnotherapy has not yet been accurately assessed, and, due to

15960-537: The relationship between attention and other behavioral and cognitive processes, which may include working memory and psychological vigilance . A relatively new body of research, which expands upon earlier research within psychopathology, is investigating the diagnostic symptoms associated with traumatic brain injury and its effects on attention. Attention also varies across cultures. The relationships between attention and consciousness are complex enough that they have warranted philosophical exploration. Such exploration

16100-450: The relaxed state was through hypnosis. Hypnotism has also been used in forensics , sports , education, physical therapy , and rehabilitation . Hypnotism has also been employed by artists for creative purposes, most notably the surrealist circle of André Breton who employed hypnosis, automatic writing , and sketches for creative purposes. Hypnotic methods have been used to re-experience drug states and mystical experiences. Self-hypnosis

16240-489: The researchers acknowledge, "it may be impossible to definitively rule out the possibility that some kind of shift of covert attention precedes every shift of overt attention". Orienting attention is vital and can be controlled through external (exogenous) or internal (endogenous) processes. However, comparing these two processes is challenging because external signals do not operate completely exogenously, but will only summon attention and eye movements if they are important to

16380-607: The same location into forming objects." Treismans's theory is based on a two-stage process to help solve the binding problem of attention. These two stages are the preattentive stage and the focused attention stage. Through sequencing these steps, parallel and serial search is better exhibited through the formation of conjunctions of objects. Conjunctive searches, according to Treismans, are done through both stages in order to create selective and focused attention on an object, though Duncan and Humphrey would disagree. Duncan and Humphrey's AET understanding of attention maintained that "there

16520-567: The same time. Another cultural practice that may relate to simultaneous attention strategies is coordination within a group. Indigenous heritage toddlers and caregivers in San Pedro were observed to frequently coordinate their activities with other members of a group in ways parallel to a model of simultaneous attention, whereas middle-class European-descent families in the U.S. would move back and forth between events. Research concludes that children with close ties to Indigenous American roots have

16660-407: The scope of attention in young children develops from two items in the focal point at age up to six months to five or more items in the focal point at age about five years. As follows from the most recent studies in relation to teaching activities in school , “attention” should be understood as “the state of concentration of an individual’s consciousness on the process of selecting by his own psyche

16800-436: The scope of intention. From this perspective, a scientific approach to attention is relevant when it considers the difference between these two concepts (first of all, between their statical and dynamical statuses). The growing body of literature shows empirical evidence that attention is conditioned by the number of elements and the duration of exposition. Decades of research on subitizing have supported Wundt's findings about

16940-436: The sense of security, of protection, of reciprocated love, of trust'. Kris however was concerned rather to differentiate the way that 'Inspiration -...in which the ego controls the primary process and puts it into its service – needs to be contrasted with the opposite...condition, in which the ego is overwhelmed by the primary process'. Nevertheless his view of regression in the service of the ego could be readily extended into

17080-461: The stimuli. Studies regarding this showed that the ability to process stimuli decreased with age, meaning that younger people were able to perceive more stimuli and fully process them, but were likely to process both relevant and irrelevant information, while older people could process fewer stimuli, but usually processed only relevant information. Some people can process multiple stimuli, e.g. trained Morse code operators have been able to copy 100% of

17220-455: The subject responds to hypnotic suggestions, it is generally inferred that hypnosis has been induced. Many believe that hypnotic responses and experiences are characteristic of a hypnotic state. While some think that it is not necessary to use the word "hypnosis" as part of the hypnotic induction, others view it as essential. Michael Nash provides a list of eight definitions of hypnosis by different authors, in addition to his own view that hypnosis

17360-400: The subject's ability to perceive or ignore stimuli, both task-related and non task-related. Studies show that if there are many stimuli present (especially if they are task-related), it is much easier to ignore the non-task related stimuli, but if there are few stimuli the mind will perceive the irrelevant stimuli as well as the relevant. The cognitive mechanism refers to the actual processing of

17500-514: The subject. Exogenous (from Greek exo , meaning "outside", and genein , meaning "to produce") orienting is frequently described as being under control of a stimulus. Exogenous orienting is considered to be reflexive and automatic and is caused by a sudden change in the periphery. This often results in a reflexive saccade. Since exogenous cues are typically presented in the periphery, they are referred to as peripheral cues . Exogenous orienting can even be observed when individuals are aware that

17640-497: The theory that hypnotism operates by concentrating attention on a single idea in order to amplify the ideo-dynamic reflex response. Variations of the basic ideo-motor, or ideo-dynamic, theory of suggestion have continued to exercise considerable influence over subsequent theories of hypnosis, including those of Clark L. Hull , Hans Eysenck , and Ernest Rossi. In Victorian psychology the word "idea" encompasses any mental representation, including mental imagery, memories, etc. Braid made

17780-446: The therapy...regarded as still at the breast', for example, might block awareness of more adult functioning on the patient's part: of the patient's view of the therapist '. The opposite mistake would be 'justifying a retreat from regressive material presented by a patient. When a patient begins to trust the analyst or therapist it will be just such disturbing aspects of the internal world that will be presented for understanding – not for

17920-412: The thumb and fore and middle fingers of the left hand; hold it from about eight to fifteen inches from the eyes, at such position above the forehead as may be necessary to produce the greatest possible strain upon the eyes and eyelids, and enable the patient to maintain a steady fixed stare at the object. The patient must be made to understand that he is to keep the eyes steadily fixed on the object, and

18060-649: The treatment of menopause related symptoms, including hot flashes . The North American Menopause Society recommends hypnotherapy for the nonhormonal management of menopause-associated vasomotor symptoms, giving it the highest level of evidence. Hypnotherapy has been studied for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome . Hypnosis for IBS has received moderate support in the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidance published for UK health services. It has been used as an aid or alternative to chemical anesthesia , and it has been studied as

18200-458: The two theories placed a new emphasis on the separation of visual attention tasks alone and those mediated by supplementary cognitive processes. As Rastophopoulos summarizes the debate: "Against Treisman's FIT, which posits spatial attention as a necessary condition for detection of objects, Humphreys argues that visual elements are encoded and bound together in an initial parallel phase without focal attention, and that attention serves to select among

18340-552: The use of hypnotherapy to retrieve memories, especially those from early childhood. The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association caution against recovered-memory therapy in cases of alleged childhood trauma, stating that "it is impossible, without corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one." Past life regression is regarded as pseudoscience . A 2006 declassified 1966 document obtained by

18480-631: The visual scene, since this fixed resource will be distributed over a larger area. It is thought that the focus of attention can subtend a minimum of 1° of visual angle , however the maximum size has not yet been determined. A significant debate emerged in the last decade of the 20th century in which Treisman's 1993 Feature Integration Theory (FIT) was compared to Duncan and Humphrey's 1989 attentional engagement theory (AET). FIT posits that "objects are retrieved from scenes by means of selective spatial attention that picks out objects' features, forms feature maps, and integrates those features that are found at

18620-416: The working brain as being composed of three constantly co-active processes which he described as the; (1) Attention system, (2) Mnestic (memory) system, and (3) Cortical activation system. The two books together are considered by Homskaya's account as "among Luria's major works in neuropsychology, most fully reflecting all the aspects (theoretical, clinical, experimental) of this new discipline." The product of

18760-421: Was able to reduce pain in a wider range of subjects (both high and low suggestible) than hypnosis. The results showed that it is primarily the subject's responsiveness to suggestion, whether within the context of hypnosis or not, that is the main determinant of causing reduction in pain. In 2019, a Cochrane review was unable to find evidence of benefit of hypnosis in smoking cessation, and suggested if there is, it

18900-415: Was called "Mesmerism" or " animal magnetism "), but differed in his theory as to how the procedure worked. A person in a state of hypnosis has focused attention, deeply relaxed physical and mental state and has increased suggestibility . The hypnotized individual appears to heed only the communications of the hypnotist and typically responds in an uncritical, automatic fashion while ignoring all aspects of

19040-432: Was inspired by the zoom lens one might find on a camera, and any change in size can be described by a trade-off in the efficiency of processing. The zoom-lens of attention can be described in terms of an inverse trade-off between the size of focus and the efficiency of processing: because attention resources are assumed to be fixed, then it follows that the larger the focus is, the slower processing will be of that region of

19180-536: Was interpreted as a method of putting the subject into a "hypnotic trance"; however, subsequent "nonstate" theorists have viewed it differently, seeing it as a means of heightening client expectation, defining their role, focusing attention, etc. The induction techniques and methods are dependent on the depth of hypnotic trance level and for each stage of trance, the number of which in some sources ranges from 30 stages to 50 stages, there are different types of inductions. There are several different induction techniques. One of

19320-403: Was perhaps only a small step to the 1960s valorisation of regression as a positive good in itself. 'In this particular type of journey, the direction we have to take is back and in ....They will say we are regressed and withdrawn and out of contact with them. True enough, we have a long, long way to back to contact the reality'. Jungians had however already warned that 'romantic regression meant

19460-513: Was provided in 2005, when the Society for Psychological Hypnosis, Division 30 of the American Psychological Association (APA), published the following formal definition: Hypnosis typically involves an introduction to the procedure during which the subject is told that suggestions for imaginative experiences will be presented. The hypnotic induction is an extended initial suggestion for using one's imagination, and may contain further elaborations of

19600-426: Was theorized by Cognitive Psychologists David Navon and Daniel Gopher in 1979. However, more recent research using well controlled dual-task paradigms points at the importance of tasks. As an alternative, resource theory has been proposed as a more accurate metaphor for explaining divided attention on complex tasks. Resource theory states that as each complex task is automatized, performing that task requires less of

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