RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Hypnotic visual hallucination induces greater lateralised brain activity than visual imagery
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.03.04.434014
DO 10.1101/2021.03.04.434014
A1 Renzo C. Lanfranco
A1 Álvaro Rivera-Rei
A1 David Huepe
A1 Agustín Ibáñez
A1 Andrés Canales-Johnson
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/03/05/2021.03.04.434014.abstract
AB Hypnotic suggestions can produce a broad range of perceptual experiences, including hallucinations. Visual hypnotic hallucinations differ in many ways from regular mental images. For example, they are usually experienced as automatic, vivid, and real images, typically compromising the sense of reality. While both hypnotic hallucination and mental imagery are believed to mainly rely on the activation of the visual cortex via top-down mechanisms, it is unknown how they differ in the neural processes they engage. Here we used an adaptation paradigm to test and compare top-down processing between hypnotic hallucination, mental imagery, and visual perception in very highly hypnotisable individuals whose ability to hallucinate was assessed. By measuring the N170/VPP event-related complex and using multivariate decoding analysis, we found that hypnotic hallucination of faces involves greater top-down activation of sensory processing through lateralised mechanisms in the right hemisphere compared to mental imagery. Our findings suggest that the neural signatures that distinguish hypnotically hallucinated faces from imagined faces lie in the right brain hemisphere.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.