Discussion
Interoception represents one of the most important information conveyed to the cerebral cortex, as it also influences somatosensory perception and its neural correlates (Al et al., 2020). The present study was aimed at investigating the relation between the HEP amplitude, considered an index of interoceptive accuracy, hypnotizability, which is associated with variations of interoceptive brain regions (Landry et al., 2017), and the state of consciousness, which changes during hypnosis in highs, but not in lows (Elkins, et al., 2015; Pekala et al., 2017). Interoceptive signals (and thus, the HEP), in fact, are influenced by the state of consciousness differently from exteroceptive information (Baranauskas et al., 2021), and during wakefulness highs display lower interoceptive accuracy than lows, according to the heartbeat counting task.
In the present study, self-reports indicate that hypnotizability-related differences were not biased by sleepiness, and that only highs experienced a change in their state of consciousness, possibly facilitated by their greater attentional abilities enabling them to be deeply absorbed in the induction procedure.