Brain Mechanism of Hypnosis

Dear Colleagues,

Hypnosis is an area of scientific inquiry and clinical practice that dates back over 250 years. Although it has remained an elusive concept for science for a long time, explosive advances in neuroscience in recent decades have provided a "bridge of understanding" between classical neurophysiological studies and psychophysiological studies of cognitive, affective, and sensory systems. These studies have shed new light on the neural bases of the hypnotic experience, enabling neuroscience to consider and use hypnosis as a viable and appropriate tool to explore and modulate complex human behavior and experience, such as pain.

With the use of neuroscientific techniques, hypnosis can be probed into brain mechanisms, and reciprocally, serve as a means of studying hypnosis itself. Neuroscientists have identified intriguing domains of investigation such as attentional processes, processing and control of pain, as well as the investigations of mnestic processes, and conscious and unconscious processes.

Moreover, a new area of research aims to map the core processes of psychotherapy and the neurobiology underlying them. Hypnosis research offers powerful techniques to isolate psychological processes, allowing their neural bases to be mapped, enhancing research and clinical applications.

The current Special Issue aims to gather recent studies and findings on the neural bases of hypnosis, providing new mechanistic insights on some of the most prominent brain mechanisms of hypnosis from a neurophysiological and neurocognitive perspective.

We invite papers on two types of research:

• intrinsic research concerned with the functional anatomy of hypnosis per se, the so-called 'neutral hypnosis,' or 'default hypnosis,' and the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying hypnotic experience in dynamic conditions;
• instrumental research, or extrinsic studies, which use hypnosis and suggestion to study a wide range of cognitive and emotional processes and create 'virtual analogues' of neurological and psychopathological conditions for elucidating their underpinnings and positively transforming treatment approaches.

Dr. Giuseppe De Benedittis
Guest Editor

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