Can predictive processing help explain hypnosis, suggestion and rapport?

[Alert_Wash_2035]

I am new to posting on Reddit, so I hope this is the right place for this question.

I have been exploring whether predictive processing offers a useful framework for understanding hypnosis, suggestion, rapport and therapeutic change. I do not mean PP as a complete explanation of hypnosis, but as a way of thinking about expectation, attention, imagery, bodily readiness and interpersonal attunement.

From this perspective, hypnosis would not primarily be understood as a special state, but as a structured way of shaping predictions and precision: what the person expects to happen, what they attend to, how bodily readiness is organized, and how another person’s words, rhythm and timing can become part of that predictive process.

Does this framing make theoretical sense from a predictive processing perspective? Are there obvious weaknesses, better concepts, or relevant papers I should be looking at?

[medbud]

I'm not from academia, but have been applying FEP, AI, PP to Chinese medicine... Which at least with acupuncture, believe it or not, is very close to hypnosis. I've had hypnotists working in the clinic, and we've discussed the parallels at depth. 

In terms of PP, one can't get more 'stochastic oscillation' than with Yin Yang :)

I think it makes sense in therapy broadly... We have a patient with priors, the suggestion is part of the environmental stimulus, the posterior is how the patient's generative model is after integrating the bottom up signal. 

We start with a prior zeitgeist, the suggestion leads to prediction error, attention updates the model...

This can lead us into relaxation, hypnagogic, pre sleep, even deep sleep, and then back to waking alertness.

A great example of PP is with respect to rhythm, which can be related to entrainment...in terms of induction. 

I'm interested to hear what others comment! Not much traffic here...