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'Mind's Eye' Influences Visual Perception

Saturday, July 5th, 2008

This was posted on ScienceDaily, showing scientific proof of what NLP has known for about 25 years.

ScienceDaily (July 4, 2008) — Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly impacts our visual perception.

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors write.

It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner—or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?

“You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact,” says Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right.”

To test how imagery affects perception, Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes, which are strongly represented in the primary visual areas of the brain. They then presented a green horizontal grated pattern to one eye and a red vertical grated pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry, an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researcher’s hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle.

Additional experiments found that the effect of imagery on perception was approximately the same as showing the research subject a faint representation of one of the patterns between trials. Stronger shifts in perception were found if subjects either viewed or imagined a particular pattern for longer periods of time. They found that both imagery and perception can lead to a build-up of a “perceptual trace” that influences subsequent perception.

Pearson, Clifford and Tong also discovered that changing the orientation of the image from what had been imagined greatly reduced the impact of imagery on perception. Because orientation is processed in early visual areas, this suggests that imagery’s interaction with perception may occur at early stages of visual processing.

The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination.

“It has been very hard to pin down in the laboratory what exactly someone is experiencing when it comes to imagery, because it is so subjective,” Tong says. “We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects. So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception.”

The findings may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual—that one imagines something just as one sees it—or more abstract.

“More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson says. “So there’s more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant and an Australia National Health and Mental Research Council Martin Fellowship. Pearson is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center. Tong is a member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center and the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Journal reference:
  1. Pearson et al. The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception. Current Biology, 2008; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.05.048
Adapted from materials provided by Vanderbilt University.

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The Relationships We Have With Food

Friday, May 9th, 2008

 

I am a member of an online site called Mumsclick (www.mumsclick.co.uk). As the name suggests it is mainly for mums, so that they may have ‘me’ time. A number of weeks ago, an article was posted by another Mumsclick member, Felicity, about her experiences with regard to her daughters anorexia. It got me thinking, and lead to me writing the following article, which was posted over two weeks, and is reproduced here in full.

 
 

 

 

 

I read the very moving story that Felicity was kind enough to share with us recently on this site (mumsclick), about the experiences of her and her family around her daughter’s anorexia. I know that it stirred a lot of thoughts amongst the members, and it certainly got me thinking about the relationships that we have with something so simple as the food we eat.

In my Cognitive Hypnotherapy practice (http://www.anitamitchell.co.uk), I see many people who would like help with weight control. Quite simply, they are overweight and would like to be slimmer. Usually they have tried more diets than they care to remember, and they may come to me with mixed ideas of what is achievable. I’m sure that many of us can relate to this sort of thing – I know that in the past I have had my own, not very healthy relationship, with food that was along these lines. So my client and myself will begin to work together. One of the first things I will tell them is that with my approach, they are not ‘on a diet’. If this is going to work long term, we need to tackle the relationship that they have with food. So, weight control in these circumstances can be a fairly easy thing to help people with, and over a number of weeks, together, we look into the relationship that the client has with food, and work to change it. If they are really committed to the process, we get to the stage were my clients are able to have a normal eating pattern, so that food doesn’t have the emotional attachment that it might once have had. People begin to eat consciously, body weight can naturally begin to stabilise to a sustainable level over time. Depending on how much they need to lose, it can take from a few weeks or months, to a few years. Occasionally, I will have a (usually) young person come to see me whose relationship with food has gone beyond this to the stage that it may even be life threatening if something isn’t done soon. Quite often they have already been through mainstream approaches which have not had the desired affect. Sometimes, it’s their parents who bring them to see me, at their wits end because they don’t know where to go from here. Occasionally the clients may themselves recognise that they need more help than they are presently receiving. However they end up in my office, unlike the person who might want to lose weight, those diagnosed with anorexia or bulimia nervosa, are unlikely to be with me for only a short number of sessions. But this is still brief therapy! I say that because we presently have a system were a patient may often see a psychiatrist for a long period, some will need to enter residential treatment, others will be seen as day patients. With this traditional way of treatment, it can often continue for many years. Mainstream approaches tends to centre on group therapy, action planning with a key worker, and health and weight monitoring. Therapeutic interventions are mainly behavioural. So, they may focus on changing eating habits and routines, food choices, portion size, or the feelings surrounding food, rather than their feelings about themselves, which in my opinion is key. It may also be that by focusing on altering conscious behaviour towards food rather than the unconscious intention behind their behaviour towards food, that the motivation behind the behaviour is being overlooked. Could that be why recovery levels in such places appears to be quite low and subsequent relapse upon discharge so high?
When I was in training to be a Cognitive Hypnotherapist, my trainer, Trevor Silvester of The Quest Institute (www.questinstitute.co.uk), talked about his thoughts on these places of residential treatment. As an ex-policeman, he recognised a parallel between young offender’s institutes and residential treatment homes. In his opinion, young criminals are often sent to young offender’s institutes as inexperienced juveniles, only to re-emerge at the end of their time there having learned the tricks of their criminal trade. In the same way, residential treatment homes could be seen as places where those suffering from anorexia or bulimia go to learn how to do it properly! If we bear in mind the competitive nature that those with eating disorders quite often have, then it is easy to understand why. If each person wants to be ‘the best’ at being anorexic/bulimic, what better place to learn! The result may be that sufferers could get worse and not better in this environment. Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that this mainstream approach hasn’t had its successes, or that it is not the right way for some people. All I am saying is that it is not necessarily the best course of action for everyone, and that alternatives need to be available so that there is choice. We need to ask ourselves if this is always the most effective way of dealing with the problem?
Another common factor of people who have eating disorders is the avoidance of adulthood. By not eating, the body re-enters a pre-pubescent stage. What better place to stay a child than somewhere that has adults controlling almost all areas of someone’s life?

One of the main things with people who have eating disorders is that they often use food and the control of food in an attempt to compensate for feelings and emotions that may otherwise seem overwhelming. Sometimes they feel that it is the only area in their lives that they can control, after all, no one can make them eat if they don’t want to, or indeed stop them from vomiting afterwards. This is how it often starts; dieting, bingeing, and purging may begin as a way to cope with painful emotions and to feel in control of one’s life. Ultimately, these behaviours damage a person’s physical and emotional health; their confidence and self-esteem diminished. The irony is that the sufferer ends up being controlled by the behaviour, instead of the other way around.

From the point of view of a Cognitive Hypnotherapy approach, the first step in treatment is to change “I am an anorexic,” into “I am doing anorexia,” so that it is no longer the person’s identity, but merely a series of behaviours – it is no longer who I am, but something that I am doing. Quite often clients with this illness have grown up with a poor sense of identity and low self-esteem. They may fell like being labelled anorexic or bulimic somehow makes them feel like they are somebody. Better a label than invisibility. Often this desire for a label is a defence to hide the belief they hold at an unconscious level about their relationship with themselves and the world. This might typically be expressed as “I am not loved” or “I am not loveable.” They will usually rate their liking of themselves very low, so there is much work to do to improve self-esteem and confidence. Initially food and eating habits are not focused on at all. It is important to pace the client, so that we only move forward at a rate they are comfortable with. So it may be some time before food is even mentioned during therapy sessions. Instead work is done in two main areas, to improve their relationship with themselves, and also to de-identifying themselves with their illness. It is about getting to the root of a problem and dealing with it, rather than putting a sticking plaster over it – doing the ‘head stuff’ as one of my clients once put it.

Cognitive Hypnotherapy is not THE answer to eating disorders, and of course, may not be right for everyone, but it certainly has the potential to be the difference that makes the difference for many.

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

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Supersize v Superskinny – Channel 4

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

I have to admit to watching the repeat of this programme just the other evening. It’s not my usual viewing, I confess, but someone had mentioned something about it, which meant it had my interest.

 A friend had said that she had watched it every week. She is one of those people, who have been unfortunate enough to have been on every imaginable diet known to man. So this type of programme  is right up her street.

One part of the programme had presenter, Anna Richardson trying different diets, including diet pill and of course the fad diets that many people are tempted to do (I think she even had a maple syrup and water diet – imagine that for a week!).

Anyway, the crux of the matter was that at the end of trying all these different things, the one thing that she felt had really helped her was the hypnosis. By the end of the first week she had lost three pounds without too much effort. She felt that because it dealt with the mind, it was able to be effective.

It’s exactly the way that I like to approach weight control. It’s not about being on a diet. In fact, when I say the word ‘diet’, I mean it in it’s true form ie, the things that we eat and drink – not a calorie controlled diet. In my opinion, diets don’t work, and I can say this from experience because up until the point I discovered hypnotherapy, I had been on one for most of my adult life.  When we diet, in a very short period of time, the body enters starvation mode because it thinks there is a famine coming. So the metabolism of the body slows down, burning up less calories. This is why we tend to lose weight most quickly in the first few weeks of a calorie controlled diet, and why after a while, we have to cut down our intact of calories again when a plateau is reached. Of course, once goal weight has been reached and we start eating ‘normally’ again what happens? The calorie intact is higher than that being used by the body, and the weight starts to pile on again – probably more than was lost in the first place. And so continues this yo-yo style of dieting, which does our bodies no good at all.

Using cognitive hypnotherapy and combining it with NLP techniques, I work together with my clients to find the underlying causes to their relationship with food, and together we try to change that. Once the relationship has altered, it can be surprisingly easy to have a different attitude to food, so that it is not longer the obsession that it might once have been. By making sure that we eat consciously, instead of the trance-like way which may have been normal before, I help my clients to be able to eat in such a way that they don’t have the guilt that can sometimes accompanys eating. So it’s not a quick-fix, but over a number of sessions, a changing of habits and mind-sets so that you can get to a point of conscious eating – where you can enjoy eating healthily.

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