Hypnotic Suggestions Can Make a Complex Task Easy by Helping Vision Fill in the Blanks
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Hypnotic Suggestions Can Make a Complex Task Easy by Helping Vision Fill in the Blanks:
Popular folklore and anecdotal evidence suggest that people in a hypnotic or suggestible state can experience sensory hallucinations, such as perceiving sounds and sights that are not actually there. Reliable scientific evidence of these experiences, however, has been notoriously challenging to obtain because of their subjective nature.
New research published in the journal Psychological Science provides compelling evidence that hypnotic suggestions can help highly susceptible people "see" imaginary objects, equipping them with the missing details needed to solve an otherwise challenging visual puzzle.
"Hypnosis holds intriguing effects on human behavior," said Amir Raz, a researcher at McGill University and coauthor on the paper. "The careful, systematic study of hypnotic phenomena can answer important questions about mind-body interactions and advance novel therapies in medicine, psychology, and dentistry."
[...] "Our findings support the idea that, at least in some people, suggestions can add perceptual information to sensory input," said Raz. "This observation adds meaningful weight to theoretical, clinical, and applied aspects of the brain and psychological sciences."
Journal Reference:
Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jerome Sackur, et al. Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders a Challenging Visual Task Simple:, Psychological Science (DOI: 10.1177/0956797620954856)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.