Globe and Mail: From magic trick to medical treatment

Before he was a neuroscientist, Amir Raz was a magician. He regularly performed stage shows to finance his university studies, but resisted introducing hypnosis to his act because he didn’t understand the science underlying the crowd-pleasing stunt. “The scientist in me would not let me perform it without understanding the mechanism and what is actually happening,” said Dr. Raz, who gave up magic in the final years of his scientific training. Now a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, he is one of a small but growing number of brain scientists giving hypnosis serious attention.