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Amir Raz gets some funny looks when he talks about using hypnosis and meditation techniques to build attention spans in a hyperactive MTV world. "Mention contemplation to a lot of people, and all they think of is some kind of (wacky) spiritualism, people sitting around a darkened room with candles, chanting," says Raz, a McGill University professor who holds the Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention. "Our ideas are shaped by Hollywood movies. So you talk about hypnosis, and people see something out of a Woody Allen movie, a guy in a turban with bushy eyebrows who wants to put you to sleep." But "trim away the folkloric fat," and Raz, a cognitive psychologist who worked his way through graduate school doing magic tricks, sees mindfulness training as a valuable, drug-free tool in the struggle to foster attention skills, with positive spinoffs for controlling our emotions and even...

HOW can a hypnotist paralyze your hand just with words? By making a part of your brain butt in on the process that normally makes your hand move, a study says. So the brain region that's ready to move your hand ignores its usual inputs and listens to this interloper, which says, "Don't even bother," the research concluded. It's "a kind of reconnection between different brain regions", said Yann Cojan, a researcher at the University of Geneva. Cojan is an author of the study in Thursday's issue of the journal Neuron. It used brain scans to show what happened when 12 volunteers tried to move a hand that had been paralysed by hypnosis. Results showed the right motor cortex prepared itself as usual to tell the left hand to move. But the cortex appeared to be ignoring the parts of the brain it normally communicates with in controlling movement. Instead, it...