Hypnosis, Absorption and the Neurobiology of Self-Regulation

In hypnosis, suggested behaviours are characteristically accompanied by a diminished sense of effort and personal agency while suggested experiences, which strongly contradict objective reality, appear to be accepted without conflict. Dissociated control theory is a cognitive neuroscience account of hypnosis that emphasises functional disconnections (dissociations) within the predominantly anterior brain networks, which implement cognitive control. Profound alterations in the ongoing experience of the self outside the hypnotic context (labelled by Tellegen as absorption) are a key predictor of a person's ability to experience suggested distortions of reality. Tellegen (1981) defined the trait of absorption as arising from the interplay of two mutually inhibitory mental sets, the instrumental and the experiential mental sets. The capacity to set aside an instrumental set finds a clear counterpart in current neuroimaging and EEG studies of dissociated control in hypnosis. The consequent ability to adopt an experiential set has a clear counterpart in the recent discovery of a characteristic brain network during quiescent mental activity. Neuroimaging studies of suggestions used to induce hypnotic analgesia show strongly overlapping activations with the loci of this network which generates core aspects of internally focused self experience. Tellegen pointed to distinctive roles for the instrumental and experiential mental sets in psychophysiological self-regulation in order to explain the importance of the trait absorption in mediating the mixed pattern of results in earlier biofeedback studies. This account finds further support in recent studies on the roles of these mutually inhibitory neural networks in differing patterns of regulation of peripheral physiology. These findings provide an important foundation from which to understand the unique contributions of absorption and hypnosis in effective practices of self-regulation.