MRI evidence on how hypnosis works

The exact nature of a hypnotic state is widely debated. But hypnosis being hogwash and hypnosis working for some are not mutually exclusive hypotheses. The test shows that there were differences of some kind between hypnotized and non hypnotized patients. Maybe it is hogwash, and only works because they think it will, but that doesn't change the fact that they are in a measurably different state.

That's why reading this blog post is inferior to actually reading the paper, although it's better than most of what passes for science journalism these days in that they at least bothered to give a proper link to the paper's abstract. In the third paragraph of the paper's introduction, the authors cite six prior fMRI studies of hypnotic vs. non-hypnotic states, the first of them dating back as far as 1997. If those six papers employed careful methodology and measured a statistically significant result, then I'd say it's pretty well established. I don't particularly care enough about it to go look up all of those other papers, but I suspect the phenomenon's neurological basis is probably well established and the detractors calling it hogwash are probably not neuroscientists.

I haven't tried it, but the first thing that comes to mind is that your skepticism is likely to have a causal influence on it's efficacy.

I studied hypnosis intermittently for a couple of years. It's a powerful tool that can help one make changes. But it's not a mechanical process that produces the same results every time; there's a lot of mutable state involved. It's better to treat it as an exploration and see what happens. Skepticism need not get in your way. Just let it take the form of curiosity for a while.

The most important variable is probably how good the practitioner is (and whether there's a good fit between that person and you).