An insula view of predictive processing in hypnotic responses.

Abstract

The experience of being hypnotized is closely linked to changes in bodily experience or interoceptive sensations. Progress in the neuroscience of hypnotic motor suggestions, both ideomotor and challenge, implicates changes in the comparison processes between predicted (expected) and actual proprioceptive consequences of current action models and plans in behavioral and experiential response to these suggestions. These findings are interpreted as a form of active inference, minimizing prediction errors in the motor system. Hypnotic responses are proposed to be implemented as active inference of predictions (response expectancies) contained in the multilayered hierarchical self-world models generated by the acceptance of hypnotic suggestions. Acceptance of counterfactual suggested "realities" and active inference-like responses are enabled and sustained by a process of interoceptive predictive coding in which interoceptive inference suppresses interoceptive prediction errors and hence salience network and executive control network responses (effecting a form of dissociated control). These processes are mapped to known functional networks of posterior insula, dorsal anterior insula, and ventral anterior insula. Finally, this interoceptive predictive coding model of active inference in hypnotic responses is contrasted with the Martin and Pacherie (2019) model in which attention manipulates the precision of prediction errors.

Hypnotic suggestibility in dissociative and related disorders: A meta-analysis

“…Delayed intention awareness has also been observed in FND (Baek et al, 2017;Jungilligens et al, 2020) and conceptually similar results have been reported in those displaying high dissociative absorption (Bregman-Hai et al, 2020). An alternative interpretation of this association can be drawn from predictive processing models of FND (Edwards et al, 2012;Keynejad et al, 2019), and hypnosis (Jamieson, 2021;Martin & Pacherie, 2019). Within the context of predictive processing, highly suggestible individuals may possess an enhanced capacity to form precise symptom priors that override somatic and psychological states, resulting in aberrant motor, cognitive, and perceptual phenomena.…”

The neurochemical bases of verbal suggestion and hypnosis

“…Although a wealth of evidence indicates that response expectancies are a reliable predictor of responsiveness to (hypnotic) suggestions, there are ongoing questions regarding the magnitude of these effects as well as the underlying mechanisms (for reviews, see (Lynn et al, 2022;Lynn et al, 2008;Terhune et al, 2017). Similar ideas are present in more recent theories of hypnotic suggestion (Jamieson, 2018(Jamieson, , 2022Martin & Pacherie, 2019) embedded within the predictive coding framework (Clark, 2013;Friston, 2010). This framework views the brain as a hierarchical Bayesian inference machine that works to minimize the discrepancy between predictions and sensory evidence while weighting these factors based on their respective confidence levels (precision).…”

Can hypnosis make you ticklish? Using suggestion to modulate agency.

“…But how is it that hypnotic suggestion, that is, high-level, top-down, cognitive instructions, can so dramatically alter relatively low-level, bottom-up processes, such as the functioning of comparator processes in the motor system? One way to explain these changes is in terms of predictive coding or ideomotor frameworks (Dogge, Custers, & Aarts, 2019; Jamieson, 2016, 2022; Martin & Pacherie, 2019; Woody & McConkey, 2003). Woody and McConkey (2003) provided an account of how this might occur, based on Friston’s (2002) “predictive architecture” model of sensory processing.…”