Niia Nikolova

At the University of Strathclyde, I am working on understanding how the anatomy and activity of people's brains differ, depending on whether they are more or less suggestible to hypnosis. There are some people among us who are very easy to hypnotise, and generally they are also more likely to follow if you give them a suggestion without hypnosis; for example, if you tell them that they will hear the song 'Jingle bells', and that they will nod along to the beat, they are likely to do it, even though no music is actually playing. These people tend to also have other characteristics, like getting easily absorbed in what they are doing, or that things they imagine feel very vivid. We would like to find out what differences in peoples brains bring this about. Self awareness is one interesting component of hypnosis and suggestibility,

Before this, I researched vision - specifically, how paying attention to movement affected how we actually perceive the movement. I am interested in perception, this thing we call consciousness, and many things in between!