Working memory is a cognitive function that allows for storage and manipulation of information. Working memory impairments have been a common phenomenon resulting from brain injury, affecting executive brain function. Despite this fact, working memory impairment affects individuals at different severity levels, and the affected individuals often exhibit varied effects in their neuropsychological performance.
This makes working memory and other factors such as executive functioning, attractive-general purpose, and attention easy targets for neurorehabilitation. However, most of the treatment methods have not yielded clinically significant results in improving high-level cognitive functioning following brain injury incident. The use of pharmaceutical drugs, neurostimulation, physical exercise, and nutrition, has not had significant effect on the condition. The fact that these treatment techniques are always non-targeted may be the reason for their failure. Recent studies show that the use of targeted hypnosis could improve cognition after one suffers brain injury.
Lindeløv, Overgaard & Overgaard (2017) examined the extent to which hypnotherapy directed towards working memory could improve working memory in patients with brain injury. The participants of this study were 52 patients who had experienced brain injury at least a year ago. The participants were affected in different lesion sites and had different severities of the condition.
Participants were divided into two groups, each group receiving similar hypnotic suggestions during the first phase of the experiment. The second phase of the experiment consisted of targeted and non-targeted hypnotherapy for the first and second group respectively. The targeted hypnotherapy procedure had suggestions aimed at improving working memory functions through the instantiation of pre-injury working memory ability. The non-targeted hypnotherapy had no suggestions for working memory ability, hence was used as an active control group.
The findings of this study supported the researchers’ hypothesis that targeted hypnotic suggestion has a significant and lasting effect on working memory. The intervention group reported significant improvement after undergoing the hypnotic sessions. The researchers conclude that hypnotic suggestion can improve working memory performance after memory impairment due to brain injury. It was determined that between a half and two-thirds of the patients under this group had positive outcomes and could later join the healthy population.
A study by Zahedi, Stürmer & Sommer (2020) also investigated whether posthypnotic suggestions can help improve updating in working memory. Updating is an executive function of the working memory that helps in storing, retrieving and substituting information. The researchers investigated whether posthypnotic suggestions given to highly hypnotizable patients can improve updating in working memory, and to determine the neural correlates of these effects.
The study participants were taken through different sessions of hypnotic suggestions targeting their working memory. It was determined that hypnotherapy enhanced control-related attention and updating-related cognitive control processes. The suggestions also led to a reduction in updating load effects, which indicated that there were reduced demands on working memory buffers. The findings show that posthypnotic suggestions can enhance updating in working memory by strengthening proactive control.
These results show that targeted hypnotherapy suggestion can lead to a significant and lasting improvement in working memory following brain injury. The studies provide evidence that hypnotherapy can be more effective than the conventional behavioral and biological approaches to neurorehabilitation.
References
Lindeløv, J. K., Overgaard, R., & Overgaard, M. (2017). Improving working memory performance in brain-injured patients using hypnotic suggestion. Brain, 140(4), 1100-1106.
Zahedi, A., Stürmer, B., & Sommer, W. (2020). Can posthypnotic suggestions boost updating in working memory? Behavioral and ERP evidence. Neuropsychologia, 148, 107632.
Melvin S. Marsh is a certified hypnotherapist serving Augusta GA and Statesboro GA. He performs hypnotherapy appointments both in person and worldwide virtually. He can be reached at www.afterhourshypnotherapy.com .
