Interview with Amir Raz, Ph.D., July 14, 2005

American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis,  Oct 2006  by Parsons-Fein, Jane

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[Editor, Stephen Lankton's note:] The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (AJCH) rarely publishes interviews. However, the recent work from Dr. Amir Raz is of such potential interest to our readers that I wanted AJCH readers to become aware of him and his work. Jane Parsons-Fein helped reach this goal with the following interview.

Dr. Raz holds a master's and a doctorate from Hebrew University. He received his Ph.D. in Brain Science: Computation and Information Processing in 2001. He was a Research Fellow of Psychology in Psychiatry working with Dr. Michael I. Posner, Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and Director of The Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York in 1999 and again in 2001. He became Assistant Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College ofComell University in 2002. Currently, he has two titles: Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience at the Department of Psychiatry of Columbia University and Research Scientist with the (now merged) New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is a Diplomate of the American Hypnosis Board in Psychology.

This interview often refers to the Stroop effect and his recent research concerning the use of hypnotic suggestion as it related to the Stroop effect. Readers who are unfamiliar with this phenomenon may find useful the following summary: The Stroop Effect is based on the work of John Ridley Stroop (Stroop, 1935). It involves having a subject report the color of letters that appear in words. The words are: "red" written in a font that is blue in color; "yellow" written in a font that is green in color; "green" written in a font that is red in color; and "blue" written in a font that is yellow in color, etc. When the subjects look at one of the words, they see both its color and its meaning. If those two pieces of evidence are in conflict, they have to make a choice. Because experience has taught them that word meaning is more important than ink color, interference occurs when they try to attend only to the ink color. The interference effect suggests a person is not always in control of attention. This is the Stroop effect.

Dr. Raz's recent research shows how a posthypnotic suggestion to construe words as nonsense strings reduces and even removes the Stroop interference in highly hypnotizable participants (Raz, 2005). The ramifications of the research illustrate interesting questions about how hypnosis can dramatically influence attention.

Interview by Jane Parsons-Fein

At our annual ASCH meeting in 2005,1 heard the excitement in Peter Bloom's description of his visit to the research lab of Amir Raz at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He described how Raz was interested in communicating his recent findings to clinicians as well as to the scientific community. I knew that his paper on the Stroop conflict in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) had created enormous interest and had been considered an important breakthrough in brain research and hypnosis. (Since this interview, two more papers have been published. One in Nature Reviews Neuroscience and the other in Psychological Science. These three papers cover different aspects of his work.) This contribution bridges research and clinical work.

His interest in hypnosis came from his interest in deception, which is also how he became interested in magic. As he described it to me:

Whereas magicians, like social psychologists, often employ deception, cognitive psychologists rarely do. 1 was intrigued by the influence that expectation, suggestion and motivation impart on human behavior and performance. I happened to stumble upon hypnosis from the vantage point of stage hypnosis, and it was striking to me that most of the people who were involved in stage hypnosis knew little about it in terms of what was happening and why it was happening.

I started reading about hypnosis not realizing that this was going to become part of my research. But the more 1 learned about the field, the more I realized that I could actually use my expertise, my skills, and my training in order to unravel and elucidate some of these fascinating behavioral effects. I learned very quickly that when you perform in front of an audience there is a big element of what people think that you are going to do - not so much what you actually do...The combination of my knowledge of computational neuroscience, my training in psychology and my showmanship skills fused together to place me in an attractive position to launch this kind of research.

Jane Parsons-Fein (JP): When you look back, what milestones stand out that moved you forward to where you are now?

Amir Raz (AR): The most substantial scientific influence on me came from working with Michael Posner. Mike was my post-doctoral advisor at Cornell. He is not just a nice and smart man, he is a giant in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Posner literally shaped the field with his ideas and his contributions. It was a humbling, rewarding and gratifying experience to work with Mike Posner for 3-1/2 years. He works unusual hours. He often walks into the office at 4:00 in the morning, and is a productive and effective researcher. I am quite the opposite, certainly in terms of the hours I keep. I would stay in the office until 4:00 in the morning. Mike would walk in, and we would sometimes discuss things over breakfast. For me it was, you know....