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Scientists have figured out why some people don't succumb to hypnosis
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
Not all people are equally susceptible to hypnosis. The explanation for this is the coordinated work of the nerve centers that are responsible for decision-making and assessing its importance.
It has long been known that people react differently to hypnosis. Some are easy to put into a hypnotic trance, while others are simply impossible. But what is hidden behind these differences, scientists have decided to find out only now. Scientists from Stanford University have taken up the study of this issue. Their achievements are published in the journal "Archives of General Psychiatry".
In fact, this is the first study to compare the effects of hypnosis and the activity of certain areas of the brain.
Statistics show that about a quarter of patients seeking help from neuropsychiatrists and psychologists are resistant to hypnosis. It is this circumstance that prompted scientists to think that the reason for such resistance lies not in the individual characteristics of people, but in the peculiarities of the functioning of the brain departments, the activity of which manifested itself in some, preventing a person from being led into a hypnotic trance, and did not manifest itself in other people who calmly succumbed to hypnotic influence.
To participate in the experiment, scientists recruited 12 people who were resistant to hypnosis and 12 who were susceptible to hypnotic influence. Specialists tracked the activity of three neural circuits using MRI. One of them was responsible for self-awareness and introspection, the second for decision-making, and the third evaluated the task at hand and analyzed its advantages over the others.
It turned out that for those who are easy to put into a hypnotic trance, all the others are activated along with the first chain, but the group of people resistant to hypnosis showed different results. They could not activate all three chains at the same time.
If a person was not hypnotized, then the functional connection between areas of the cerebral cortex was weak.
This means that during a hypnosis session, a person put into a trance can concentrate and focus on a problem that worries him precisely with the help of functional communication between the areas of the cerebral cortex that make decisions and evaluate its importance. Therefore, susceptibility or a stable reaction to hypnosis does not depend on the psychological characteristics of a person, but comes from the features of the structure of his brain centers.
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