That's why reading this blog post is inferior to actually reading the paper, although it's better than most of what passes for science journalism these days in

That's why reading this blog post is inferior to actually reading the paper, although it's better than most of what passes for science journalism these days in that they at least bothered to give a proper link to the paper's abstract. In the third paragraph of the paper's introduction, the authors cite six prior fMRI studies of hypnotic vs. non-hypnotic states, the first of them dating back as far as 1997. If those six papers employed careful methodology and measured a statistically significant result, then I'd say it's pretty well established. I don't particularly care enough about it to go look up all of those other papers, but I suspect the phenomenon's neurological basis is probably well established and the detractors calling it hogwash are probably not neuroscientists.