(June 13, 2013 at 5:46 pm)Doubting Thomas Wrote: Makes me wonder how any of them can actually believe that faith healing works. I guess when you're still in pain they just accuse you of not having enough faith.
Quote:In 1998 Henry Szechtman of McMaster University in Ontario and his co-workers used PET to image the brain activity of hypnotized subjects who were invited to imagine a scenario and who then experienced a hallucination. The researchers noted that an auditory hallucination and the act of imagining a sound are both self-generated and that, like real hearing, a hallucination is experienced as coming from an external source. By monitoring regional blood flow in areas activated during both hearing and auditory hallucination but not during simple imagining, the investigators sought to determine where in the brain a hallucinated sound is mistakenly "tagged" as authentic and originating in the outside world.
Szechtman and his colleagues imaged the brain activity of eight very hypnotizable subjects who had been prescreened for their ability to hallucinate under hypnosis. During the session, the subjects were under hypnosis and lay in the PET scanner with their eyes covered. Their brain activity was monitored under four conditions: at rest; while hearing an audiotape of a voice saying, "The man did not speak often, but when he did, it was worth hearing what he had to say"; while imagining hearing the voice again; and during the auditory hallucination they experienced after being told that the tape was playing once more, although it was not.
The tests showed that a region of the brain called the right anterior cingulate cortex was just as active while the volunteers were hallucinating as it was while they were actually hearing the stimulus. In contrast, that brain area was not active while the subjects were imagining that they heard the stimulus. Somehow hypnosis had tricked this area of the brain into registering the hallucinated voice as real.
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A lot is happening to the brain during religious rituals and behaviors that isn't immediately obvious.