attribute the sense

People often attribute the sense of involuntariness and the alteration of their sense of self to the magical power of the hypnotist. However, I would like to propose that the real magic may come from the way their empathic perceptions of the world are based in a neural process called theory of mind (TOM). TOM (Gallese, 2009; Mahy, Moses, & Pfeifer, 2014) can be understood to be the neural process by which we attribute agency and a sense of self to our own actions and the actions of others. It is a deeply empathic process in that it represents a process that is fundamental to empathy, such as how we attribute a sense of self or a sense of other to actions, experiences, mentation, and objects in the world, including our body. TOM is also thought to be embodied by the activity of brain regions in the DMN, such as the cingulate cortex (Gallese, 2009; Mahy et al., 2014). Our experience of the self is therefore an emergent property (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) from the neuromatrix (Melzack, 1999) of empathy and TOM-related processing embodied in our DMN. Our experience of self is derived in a neuromatrix as in other experiences, such as the somatosensory cortex, which underlies our con- scious experience of the body (Melzack, 1999). In a sense then, it is in fact a believed-in imagining consistent with socio-cognitive tradition of hypnosis as well as the Dzogchen tradition of meditation. It is therefore not that surprising that research in hypnosis has been so successful in altering the self (Barnier et al., 2010; Cox & Barnier, 2010, 2013; Hilgard, 1977) since its creation depends critically on empathy-related processes.

Previously I have hypothesized that the experience of alterations in our experience of identity (self/other) and agency (voluntary/involuntary) may be due to the empathic processes involved in TOM (Wickramasekera II, 2007b). Specifically, I propose that

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empathic processes involving TOM that are embodied by the DMN can alter the sense of agency and identity that we readily experience in hypnosis as predicted by both neo- dissociative and socio-cognitive theories. The executive ego, of which neo-dissociation speaks, may in fact be embodied in the empathy-related processes of the DMN. Thus our experience in hypnosis that a magnetic force is “acting on our hands and moving them together” is due to an alteration in our sense of agency by TOM-related processing in the DMN in which we dissociate away our attribution that we are moving our hands together in accordance with neo-dissociative theory. However, the effect is also mediated by our ability to empathically experience the hypnotic roles and expectancies that we have embodied using the DMN in accordance with socio-cognitive theory.

The empathic nature of this alteration in identity and agency can also of course be observed in deeply empathic settings outside of hypnosis, such as when we feel at one with our friends, lovers, family, and our communities in the right social psychological contexts. I hypothesize that just as empathy can create an experience of trance outside of hypnosis, so too can empathy alter our sense of identity and agency without any hyp- notic induction at all. A strong empathic experience is all that is needed is to create hypnotic-like phenomena. This may help explain why the hypnosis community has had such difficulty in defining what hypnosis is since its empathic nature makes these phe- nomena appear in a myriad of other empathy-related situations, such as falling in love, receiving and practicing meditation instructions, and even empathically following a yoga teacher in class.

What Lies Beyond the Self?