Interview
Thalia Wheatley
Dartmouth Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Derek Racine ‘14
it is to someone asleep. Recently, there
have been studies using fMRI that have
shown actual brain processes going on
during hypnosis that are interesting,
different, and definitely worth studying.
Is everyone equally
susceptible to being
hypnotized?
Image courtesy of Thalia Wheatley.
Thalia Wheatley, Dartmouth assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences.
T
he DUJS talked to Thalia Wheatley, Dartmouth assistant professor of psychological and brain
sciences, to gain insight into her research techniques, including hypnosis,
how they are applied in a laboratory
setting, and the ways that students can
get involved. She currently teaches
Psychology 23, Social Psychology.
What has been the focus of
your personal research?
I have done a lot of different things.
I have worked in morality, free will,
animacy, emotion, and synchrony, and
now I’m getting into abstract thought.
But the center of my research is really on
how people understand others or how
the brain makes sense of other people
and understands their emotions, social
motives, and other things like that. This
field is called “social neuroscience” because it merges social psychology with
methods of cognitive neuroscience.
We are social beings all the way down.
Everything we do relates to our social
networks and our social hierarchies.
For other animals, it is all about peckFALL 2011
ing order. And then we think, well, we
must be more sophisticated and civilized, but it really comes down to this.
What is hypnosis? How does
it work?
What we know about hypnosis is
that it seems to be an altered state of
consciousness, but it is only recently
that there has really been a big push to
study hypnosis scientifically. Before, it
was just seen a bit like the third rail in
science. If you studied hypnosis, you
were the hypnosis person. There is a
weird taint with hypnosis—it has been
the domain of gypsies, black magic, and
stage shows for so long that it just does
not seem possible that it could be a scientific topic of inquiry. However, that
is not correct. Hypnosis is, very simply,
an altered state of consciousness. It is
not the same thing as sleep; people are
not asleep when they’re under hypnosis
and people have known this for a long
time. If you put electrodes on people’s
scalps while they’re under hypnosis,
the activity that you see is actually more
akin to someone awake and alert than
While hypnosis is a real thing, not
everybody can be hypnotized. How do
you figure out who can be hypnotized
and who cannot be? There is simply
no easy way to do so; you really have
to just hypnotize people and see. You
have to be open to it as a real thing because you kind of have to let yourself
let go, and let yourself get into it as a
state of mind. If you are skeptical or
you do not think it is real, or you are
not open to trying to experience it,
then it will just not work. [Hypnosis]
is like any kind of meditation; if people
do not believe that meditation is real,
how are they going to get into a state
of meditation? You have to feel like it
is possible in order to experience it.
How has the technique of
hypnosis been applied to
your research?
When I hypnotize people, they
can do whatever I ask of them. For example, I could have a conversation with
them, I could ask them to do certain
things with their body or make certain
decisions. They perform these things,
but they do not necessarily perform
them willfully. It is an altered state of
consciousness that takes out their sense
of agency; so, I can make people experience things that they themselves are
creating, but they do not have a sense
that they are themselves creating them.
A hypnotist would say something like,
“Clasp your fingers together, interlock
your fingers together.” He would follow
this with, “Your fingers are so tightly
locked together. They are so tightly in9
terlocked that you can’t take them apart.
You would like to take them apart but
you cannot because they’re just locked
in place.” You will see people actively
struggling and squirming, with strain
on their faces trying to take their hands
apart to no avail. The hypnotist creates this state of mind, but the volunteer cannot recognize the situation. It
is an interesting state where people can
do all sorts of things, but not necessarily feel agency for what they’re doing.
Regarding your work on
animacy, could you describe
what the mirror system is
and how it contributes to
our social understanding of
movement?
There are regions of the brain
where people suggest there might be
these things called mirror neurons,
but we are not completely certain.
Mirror neurons are typically found in
monkeys, but there are regions of the
human brain that respond the same
way to how you behave as to how I behave. They have mirror properties in
the sense that they respond to action
in general and help us understand action. I have done a little bit of work
with them in terms of how people
move to express emotion, as well as
the way we express emotion in music,
or any kind of dynamic stimulus that
might express some social information.
How do you assess
how people react while
undergoing these different
social interactions, or do you
use monkeys as a model?
The way we tend to assess that
at Dartmouth is with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). As to
your other question though, there’s a
difference between humans and monkeys, so some of the really high-level
social understanding and social interactions cannot be assessed using monkeys. Humans are the right species to
study sophisticated social intelligence.
With respect to your study of
consciousness, how do you
think the development of
this experience might have
contributed to our survival as
a species?
Do you think other
animals also experience
consciousness?
As far as I know, we are the only
species that can really contemplate our
own mortality and have a “50,000-foot
view” of our lives and plan for the future
in that kind of sense. Because we can see
our lives stretch out ahead of us and see
our death looming in the future, I think
it is necessary to develop this sense of
self and will to kind of cope with these
things. I think other animals have experience but we seem to have this other ability, a “meta-consciousness,” to
think about our thoughts. We consider
not just our experiences, but also what’s
happening to us in the present, and,
as a result, we plan in different ways.
Concerning your research
on morality, do you believe
that all humans are innately
moral by some standard?
I think the belief that you are
a free conscious agent making your
own choices is critical. The belief of “What’s the point of life if I
am just sort an observer of my actions and I’m not deciding anything,”
would make things seem hopeless.
There is evidence that people
find others’ distress aversive, and this
causes brain activity associated with
aversion to victim distress. I think
that is just true of all healthy human
brains. These things are just biologically innate to us; we experience strong
dislikes of certain things that are bad,
even if they are bad just for others.
Certainly, within our communities, it
would have been evolutionarily advantageous to support each other. A
more recent example is in the trench
warfare of World War I, between the
English and the Germans, where they
had to keep moving the troops along
the front lines because they would set
up these cooperations across; a German solider would fire over the heads
of the English soldiers on the other side
just to say, “Look! I could kill you if I
wanted to, but I don’t want to, so I’m
going to shoot over you.” They would
keep doing this to each other, using up
the artillery without actually killing any
soldiers on the other side. These spontaneous cooperative alliances formed;
thus, the generals would have to keep
moving the troops in an effort to try and
break this spontaneous cooperation.
Image retrieved from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Varian4T.jpg (Accessed 29 October 2011).
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a recently developed way to measure neural activity.
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Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science
What did your career path
consist of and how did you
arrive at Dartmouth?
First, I will say that I love my job
and I cannot imagine doing anything
else. I think it is an embarrassment of
riches to be able to come in and think,
“Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting if people
do this?” or “I wonder why people do
that?” From that, I design some studies, go downstairs, and put some people in a scanner to see what happens
to their brains when they interact with
each other. It is just fantastic. That
said, getting here from college took
a really long time and a lot of dedication. It is difficult. When I was an undergraduate, I was actually a political
science major. I took an introduction to
social psychology course as an elective
because it sounded easy. I planned to
take this course and get my degree in
three years, but I loved social psychology and realized that I wanted to do it
for the rest of my life. I started working
in a research lab, applied to graduate
school in social psychology, entered a
social psychology Ph.D. program, and
spent the next seven years there. It
was kind of a crazy time, but I loved it
so much. Most people take five years,
which is still a long time. In today’s
FALL 2011
world of psychology or neuroscience,
after the five years necessary to get a
Ph.D., you have to have a post-doctoral
experience if you want to do research.
This involves going somewhere else for
two to five years for further training
in imaging, behavioral methods, etc.
Then, you go on the job market, hopefully with an assistant professorship,
followed by six or seven years on tenure track; eventually you come up for
tenure, and that is when people decide
whether or not you get to actually stay in
your job or not. I am forty and about to
come up for tenure. It has been a long,
tough road, but it is my life and I love it.
What would be your advice
to someone interested in
scientific research in the
psychological and brain
sciences?
hours a week, and they run studies. We
brainstorm at lab meetings. They do all
sorts of different things. Oftentimes, I
will get them in as freshmen and they
will end up staying all four years, and
they will even do honors theses in their
senior year. It is the best sort of experience you can have for what graduate
school would really be like. Then, when
it comes time for you to write your application for graduate school, [admissions committees] look at potential
graduate students [to see] if they really
know what life is like as a researcher—
have they been in a lab, do they have
letters of recommendation from people
who say “this person has been in my
lab for a year or two, they are excellent, this is what they have done, they
are committed…” and so forth. So,
that’s my best advice: get into a lab.
If students are interested in psychology as undergraduates and they
think they might want to go to graduate
school, then get into a lab. That is my
best advice—get into a lab and get into
a lab as soon as you can. Even if you are
a senior and you are just figuring it out,
try to get into a lab. I have research assistants in my lab that work about ten
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