By Judy Siegel
The Jerusalem Post
People
who easily fall into a hypnotic spell are not simple-minded, spiritual, or easily
controlled by others. Instead, according to researchers in Jerusalem, they share
a gene responsible for hypnotizability.
The gene was discovered by Dr.
Pesach Lichtenberg and Prof. Richard Ebstein of Herzog Memorial Hospital, who
studied 51 healthy men and 59 healthy women who had never before been hypnotized.
Lichtenberg, who heads the geriatric and psychiatric hospital in the capital's
Givat Shaul quarter, conducted a special test for assessment of the hypnotizability
rate of these subjects.
It proved an inverse relationship between one
form of this gene and hypnotizability: The more active the enzyme, the lesser
the person is likely to go under a hypnotic trance, and vice versa. Lichtenberg
and Ebstein will in future analyze additional genes that could be involved in
hypnosis, as it is a complex trait and other genes are surely involved, they said. |
