Hypnosis, Brain Hacking, & Mental Mastery - Dr David Spiegel

What do you think most people misunderstand about hypnosis, what it is, how it works?

Well, there are sort of offsetting misunderstandings. They either think it's really dangerous or it's useless or maybe it's both.

(laughs)

Uh, and the biggest fear and misunderstanding is that it's a- it's losing control, and I'm here to tell you that hypnosis is a way of teaching people how to enhance control of mind and body. And so the very thing that people see, you know, I- I don't like stage hypnosis very much. I don't like making fools out of people. But when you see the football coach dancing like a ballerina and you think, "What the hell's going on here?" You're watching somebody who's willing to let go of his old assumptions of who he is and what he is and should be and trying out being different. And one of the great things about hypnosis is you can try out being different, and sometimes it works in a hurry. And that's what I do with my patients and that's what we do with Reveri.

Is there a marked difference in what's going on in the brain of somebody who's dancing like a ballerina on stage at a Sandals Resort in, you know, Jamaica-

Right.

... uh, compared with... Is it the same mechanism?

Yes.

Right. Okay.

It- it is the same mechanism. It, it'd be hard to do an MRI scan of the football coach, but, um, we've done it with Stanford students and other volunteers who are high in hypnotizability. I can talk about that later, it makes a difference, um, and when they're going into a hypnotic state, and we see three things going on in their brain using functional MRI. And MRI is a great way to get precise anatomy but also activity in very specific regions of the brain. And what we see is that the more hypnotized they are, the more they turn down activity in a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's like, the cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the base of your brain, and the front part, the dorsal region, um, is a region that we call part of the salience network. It does pattern matching, and if something goes wrong, the salience network fires off. You hear a loud noise and you get hijacked, your attention gets hijacked.

Interrupt.

Right. And that's, that has survival value, you know, sometimes you really need to be interrupted by a sudden event. Um, in hypnosis, you allow yourself to sink more deeply into the focus of your attention because you're turning down the alarm system. You're turning down the part of your brain that would say, "Hey, maybe you ought to be doing something else."

Not dancing like a ballerina.

Exactly. And so, uh, that reduction in activity is, uh, also something that has to do with stress and anxiety, that, um, when you're more stressed and anxious, your salience network is hyperactive.