Know Thyself - E210 - Dr. David Spiegel: #1 Hypnotism Expert, “Wake Up From The Trance of Your Life”

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Dr. David Spiegel is the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, the co-founder of the hypnosis app Reveri, and one of the world's leading clinical researchers on hypnosis. He has worked with over 7,000 patients across 50 years, and in this conversation he opened with something I did not expect: he tested my hypnotizability live on camera. I scored a nine out of ten. What followed was one of the most genuinely surprising conversations about the mind I have had on this show.What We Dive Into:1. The self you walk around with is not a fixed structure. Dr. Spiegel calls it a convenient assumption, something the brain constructs to simplify experience. Hypnosis reveals this by demonstrating how quickly and completely a person can shift, often in a single session.2. Memories are not neutral recordings. They are laid down and retrieved from brain regions that manage affect, which means the emotion and the memory are inseparable. Working with a memory hypnotically allows you to enter it, update its emotional meaning, and change how it lives in you.3. The same capacity that lets a child survive abuse by mentally leaving their body can, in adulthood, become a habitual distance from experience. Understanding whether your detachment is a protective skill or an old survival pattern still running is one of the more honest questions this conversation surfaces.Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.https://www.knowthyselfcollective.com✨THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS:https://drinkLMNT.com/KnowThyselfTry LMNT & get a free sample pack https://www.timeline.com/KNOWTHYSELF Save 20% off your Mitopure® Gummies___________00:00 Intro01:52 What Hypnosis Actually Is05:34 The Malleability of Personality and Self07:01 How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body and Memory12:00 Hypnosis as the Oldest Western Psychotherapy15:13 What Happens in the Brain During Hypnosis18:36 The Default Mode Network and the "My Fault" Network22:29 How Hypnotizability Is Measured30:28 What High and Low Hypnotizability Looks Like in Life33:58 Live Demo: Testing André's Hypnotizability40:11 Dissociation: Adaptive Defense and Pathological Trap45:50 How to Use Hypnosis for Stress and Performance49:07 Hypnosis vs. Meditation: Being vs. Doing54:41 Flow State, Golf, and the Art of Process Over Outcome58:13 Believing Is Seeing: The Color Perception Experiment1:01:00 Perception as a Generative, Interpretive Act1:03:29 Emotions as Signals and Hypnosis as a Flashlight1:07:01 Smoking, Self-Respect, and Reframing Addiction1:09:08 Dr. Spiegel's Path: A Genetic Illness in the Family1:15:44 Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Many Selves1:19:54 If There's No Solid Self, Who Are We?1:22:04 Collective Trance and Societal Hypnosis1:26:50 Reverie and Empowering Innate Abilities1:27:12 Closing Message: Learn More About Your Innate Abilities___________✨MORE FROM DR. DAVID SPIEGEL↳Reveri: https://app.reveri.com/ Use code KNOWTHYSELF20 for 20% off membership📜MORE FROM KNOW THYSELF↳Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4bZMq9l↳Apple: https://apple.co/4iATICX↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/↳TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andreduqum↳Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/knowthyselfbyandreduqum/↳https://knowthyselfpodcast.com/👁️MORE FROM ANDRÉ↳Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/@andreduqum↳Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/know-thyself-podcast↳Book recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list

Your personality, it's just a convenient assumption. We are a lot more tangible than we imagine. You ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world? Yeah. Hypnosis is like that. I've done it with 7,000 people in the course of my career. It's a state that many people, not everyone, but many people can enter. Could you quickly tell how hypnotizable I am?

Sure. I'd be happy to do it. It feels like my left hand is kind of just doing it by itself. You're very hypnotizable. You scores nine out of ten. Great, I guess. Oh, it is. It can really help you do unusual things. For example, you can handle stress better.

You can reduce pain. You can stop smoking. Hypnosis can also help you get a new point of view about an old problem. One of my patients with sexually assaulted is a 12-year-old. She'd been in therapy for more than a decade, and I got her hypnotized, and I said, is that her fault? She said, no. She called me a week later.

She said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me. because I'm not depressed anymore. That's a tremendous ability in power that we have. I want to empower people to learn more about their innate abilities. So first look at me and then look up to the top of your head. And as you keep looking up, slowly close your eyes. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast.

Our guest today is the Wilson Professor, an associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. At Stanford, he's the co-founder of Reverie, a hypnosis app. He is an author of over 13 books and 400 papers. And over the past 50 years, he's seen thousands of clients in a clinical hypnosis context. Dr. Davis-Piegel, thank you for being here. Thank you, Andre. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

What is hypnosis and why should anyone care about it? Well, given the lovely name of your program, I like to think of hypnosis as knowing thyself that hypnosis helps you. become and explore things that allow you to try out being different. It's a state of highly focused attention. Like, do you ever get so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie

and enter the imagined world? Yeah. And called believed in imagination. And our brains have the capacity and we understand a good deal now about how our brains do these things to narrow the focus of attention, to dissociate,

put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness. and to have a hyper-connection between the brain and the body, to do things to your body and perceive things from your body that ordinarily you wouldn't think you could do. So it's a form of very rapidly both dividing and experiencing things in a way that is unique and novel and can be very helpful to people. You've shared many times,

and hopefully it's not beating a dead horse, course, but most people are familiar with hypnosis in the kind of carnival setting, you know, in the stage hypnosis. And as you so beautifully said, with the many selves and the know-thyselves and helping people navigate this complex dynamic inner realm is a completely different thing than what most people are familiar with in the stage hypnosis. What is the difference? Well, you know, stage hypnosis is, I don't like. You know, it's, but, you know, you know, then there are snake oil salesmen for drugs, too. I mean, you can find a bad example of a good thing.

And the fact that, you know, the football coach will dance like a ballerina, some football coaches. You know, the stage hypnotists don't just do what they do with anybody. They search the audience for those 5% of people who are extremely hypnotizable. So it doesn't work with everybody. But what they do is they get people to try out being different to see what it would be like if the football coach pretended he was a ballerina without thinking about what's going to happen in the locker room the next day when the team says, hey, coach, you know, you look pretty funny there. And so I don't like it to make fun of people, to embarrass them.

But I do think there's a point. And the point is that if you focus very intently, you can mobilize resources you might not have been able to do otherwise. You can put outside of conscious awareness things that might inhibit you or fear or failure or having tried doing something like skiing or playing tennis or something that you hadn't done before and allow yourself to see what it would be like if you could engage with it in an intense way. And hypnosis is like that.

It's a state that many people, not every one, but many people can enter that allows you to connect in interesting and strong ways with your body, to put outside of conscious awareness things that might haunt you or trouble you, and to try out what it would be like if you were that different person. And you've worked for decades now, seeing many instances where in a single session somebody releases an addiction, a personality trait changes. What does that suggest about the ephemeral and malays?

and nature of our personality and self? It suggests that we are a lot more changeable than we imagine, that you can really try out being different and see what it feels like. For example, I saw a woman who grew up in a country that was not particularly kind to women. She had suffered as a 12-year-old from having been sexually assaulted by the landlord. or the family was afraid to do anything about it. She lived with that. She said, as a girl walking on the streets,

people felt they could say anything they wanted to to me. And she got to the United States. She had got a job, was functioning pretty well, but was chronically depressed. And she tried all kinds of medication. She'd been in therapy for more than a decade. And she just didn't feel right. She didn't feel herself.

and she was very hypnotizable. And I said to her, I want you to go back and see yourself as that 12-year-old girl just after she had been raped. And she starts to cry. And you may think, oh, good duck. You know, you're making her feel more miserable.

She's depressed and you're making it feel worse. And I said, I want you to answer one question for me. Is that her fault? And she said, no, I'm stroking her head. I'm stroking her hair. And she cried some more, and then she left. And she called me a week later. And she said, Dr. Spiegel, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me

because I'm not depressed anymore. And she had lived with this feeling, you know, many people who were assaulted physically or sexually blame themselves for things they didn't control, and especially children who don't understand independent causation. And we would rather feel like that. We would rather feel guilty than helpless. And so if you think I could have done something, it gives you a fantasy that you could have controlled something that you couldn't.

Trauma is making a person into an object, a thing. And you lose agency, you lose control over your body. And the best thing to do is to get into a mode where you can see it for what it was. And that's what she did, and she stopped blaming yourself for it. And so with hypnosis can be a powerful, way of helping people get a new point of view about an old problem. Well said, I think we can all relate to the times throughout our days or weeks or months and we replay past old events or we fantasize about a potential future one.

And there's something paradoxical about living in the mind in these two states when we can only be here in this moment. And there's something liberating about that perspective that you gave, which I want to see if we can extrapolate and zoom in on to see how it pertains to everybody. When a traumatic or a past experience occurs, what is the neurological process of memory reconstruction? Because we have these events, and then we think we have an idea of what they actually look like and what actually happened. And I'm just personally kind of wrestling with this idea of maybe the past, the only place the past actually lives is in like the emotional residue in our body associated with that event.

And I'm curious your thought on that and how memory gets constructed. Well, it's an important question. And memory is stored, particularly recent memories in the hippocampal gyrus. It's deep in the brain. It's right near the amygdala and other parts of the brains that manage affect. And more routine kinds of memories like place, you know, London taxi drivers, had larger parietal lobes because they had to memorize all these strange streets in London. But a lot of memory and particularly memory that involves either negative experiences like being assaulted

or positive experiences like being in love, the memories are laid down, stored, and retrieved from parts of the brain that are very close to the parts that manage emotion, either anger or fear or joy, sadness, happiness. And so affect colors memory and memory colors affect. If you think about a time when you were humiliated or treated badly or assaulted, you'll tend to feel bad. If you think about a time where you achieve something or fell in love or did something positive, those memories will be also tagged with an emotion.

So they're not just stored and then you paint on the emotion later. they're constructed with an emotional loading. And that's an opportunity. It can be a problem, but it can be an opportunity. It's part of what makes life enjoyable, but it's part of what can make life terrible too. And hypnosis, because of the narrowness of focus, allows you to focus in on one part of experience,

to not just remember a thing that happened, but relive it. See what it felt like at the time. So you're not looking back and judging at your experience, and you're re-experiencing it the way my patient did. And that naturally comes with emotion. Hmm. To me, in that instance, it feels like you're going back into this invisible thing called the mind,

having this imaginal experience of encountering your younger self and embracing them in a way emotionally that somehow resolves depression in the present moment. It's... It's fascinating, and it rewrites how we can work with these difficulties in a largely pharmaceutical-centric approach for these mental elements. So what are your thoughts on, I mean, obviously, you're a big fan of hypnosis. You're the guy. And you've seen how it's really been able to help people for so long.

Most people haven't been able to experience that. Maybe they haven't just done hypnosis at large. but the fact that that's possible or potentially on offer, depending on someone's hypnotizability and what they have to work with, is quite astounding. Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. Hypnosis is the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's the first time a talking interaction between a doctor and a patient.

We thought to have therapeutic potential. It's more than 200 years old. Freud used it in his early work, his early writings on studies in hysteria. he was hypnotizing patients to help them recall things in their past that might be related to their current problems. That's not a novel idea. Freud gave it up because during one hypnotic session, a young woman threw her arms around his neck, and he said, I was modest enough not to attribute this to my own irresistible personal attractiveness. But I discovered the mysterious element beneath hypnosis. It was transference. So people transatlice.

for feelings onto the therapist that they had from early experiences in life. And that's why there's a couch in psychoanalysis, actually. But it was powerful. Viennese physician named Franz Anton Mesmer was using what he then called animal magnetism. He thought that there were magnetic fields in the brain that could be influenced by the therapist and you could change the way the brain function. We actually do that now with transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a very good treatment for depression and obsessive, compulsive, and traumatic experiences.

But it's also, it was at the time considered a kind of strange thing to do and was not what the rest of doctors were doing. They were mostly doing bloodletting for one problem after another. And it fell out of favor because he was so successful in competing against French physicians. His office was not drab and grim. It was bright and cheerful, and patients hung around there and talked to one another. And so he was investigated by a French panel of experts,

including our own Benjamin Franklin, who was having fun in Paris at the time, the great, brilliant chemist Levoisier, who discovered the principles of oxygen chemistry and invented the gross national product concept before he was beheaded in the French Revolution. and Dr. Guillae was on the panel, the inventor of the guillotine. You might say he created the mind-body problem.

And this group decided that hypnosis was nothing but heated imagination. Now, I've heard a worst definition. I think that's not bad, actually. And in a way, what you do and what you talk about and knowing thyself involves heating up your imagination and using it in different ways. So it's been around for a long time, but it's suffered one rejection after another, but it won't quite go away because it's just so interesting and so effective. And that's why my colleagues and I built reverie. We thought, you know, hypnosis is not dangerous.

It's helpful. It's interesting. And why not make it available to as many people as possible to use it, learn from it, and benefit from it? So what's happening neurochemically in induction? the hypnosis state? There are three things. We've done functional magnetic resonance imaging of high and low hypnotizable people in and out

of hypnotic states. And we notice three things going on in the brain. One is a reduction in activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex. Now the singular cortex is like a C on its ends right in the middle of the base of your brain, and it's part of the salience network. It's the part of the brain that fires off when you hear a level. noise or you're scared about something. And if you can turn down activity there, it allows you to be less distracted by other considerations,

by narrowing your focus. It's like getting lost in a good movie. You just don't judge it, you experience it. And if you've turned down the alarm system and the brain, it's easier to do that. The second thing is there's an increase in what we call functional connectivity between the left executive control network to prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

and the insula, which is an island of tissue, insula means island in Latin, in the middle of the frontal cortex that is a mind-body conduit. It's what transmits interoception, feelings from your body, and it's the way the brain controls

what's going on in your body. So you increase the ability of your thoughts to influence your body and to be exposed to what's going on in the body when you do it. The third thing that happens is reduced functional connectivity, so a kind of disconnection between the executive control network, and the posterior cingulate cortex. Now, that's an interesting part of the brain that's called the part of the default mode network, where people think about who they are or what they are. It kind of preserves your assumptions

and expectations about who you are and what you are. It's the kind of, thing that happens, it gets active. When you're not doing a task or you're not planning something, you're just sitting around and thinking and you start to wonder, who am I, what am I? Would my mother be proud of me now? All kinds of things like that. So it helps to maintain constancy in your view of yourself. And that can be a good thing, but I sometimes call it the my fault mode network, because it's also a place where if you have irrational beliefs about yourself, or, you know, feeling unconscious or conscious pressure from other people around you or from your family to do things that you don't want to do, it kind of keeps you on that track. And that can interfere with growth and change. It can just keep you thinking,

I should be doing this, I shouldn't be doing that. And if you can inhibit activity, disconnect what you're doing from what you think the expectation is you should be doing, that helps you to try out being different. So what we've seen in the brand, is this combination of reducing your sort of fears and arousal from other things that you might worry about, enhancing your connection with your body, and disconnecting from the part of your brain that is telling you who you ought to be and what you ought to be. So you get to try out being different. Is there anything that would be helpful to know about how these memories and these assumptions and a priori are formed, that would reveal like the nature of the structure of them? Well, part of it, just the fact that there's a whole circuit in the brain,

the default mode network that kind of guards your assumptions of who you are and what you are, provides a kind of self-constancy. And I know many of the people, you know, who have been on your show, Tim Ferriss and Sam and others have talked about, you know, the problems with having this sort of illusory self or just being governed by a conception of who you should be and what you should be. On the other hand, we need certain constancy in life

and our life experience will shape us in ways that sometimes are good things, not bad. But what is particularly, I think, exciting about hypnosis is that you can change in a hurry. You can just see what it would be like if you were different. and make it a system that you use, but not a system that uses you. It helps you to regulate who you want to be,

not just who you are. And that's a task that many people who are on a path like yours looking for ways to discover who we might be and not make assumptions that wind up limiting us. And hypnosis is a way to do that intensely and in a hurry. It makes me just inquire how much of our individual personality which we defend and say is ours.

And we have this kind of imperative to protect and defend because it's our identity. And in these meditative journeys, in these hypnotizable states, when there is a transformation of that identity that can occur in a relatively short of, amount of time. It just to me breathes a lot of insight into the nature of these things in and of themselves. We don't realize to the degree the perspectives we're looking through because we're just looking through them, you know? And it just, I keep getting this feeling when I look at your work and in this conversation that, like, freedom is on this, like, it's like on the other side of a coin, just, like, really not that far available to us,

which is a powerful and empowering perspective. And my friend Peter says, self-righteousness is a poor man's version of self-worth. That's a good line. I like that. Well, you know, I call what you do with hypnosis, transformation, T-R-A-N-C-E, because you can change, transform,

but you can do it by forming another way of being, a way of thinking about things differently. And hypnosis allows you to do that with intensity and do it in a hurry. And, you know, it's sort of like, you know, when you take a trip and you see a part of the world you've never seen before, it gives you a different perspective on the part of the world

you have seen before. And you realize that, you know, people don't have this beautiful view of the Topanga Canyon the way you do, but it puts into it. the perspective, the way we live, you know, surrounded by bricks and buildings and things, and you start to think, you know, there's another way to live, there's another way to be. And I think hypnosis is very helpful because it allows you to get an intense taste of that

and see if you really, it would be better for you to be different. How do you gauge someone's hypnotizeability? So hypnotizeability is, it's a very stable trait. It's, it's, most children are hypnotized, but most children are in trances most of the time, you know. They're out playing and you call them in and they don't hear you. They're doing their thing. And children, you know, all work and play are all the same thing for kids. So they inhabit, they don't just learn and do something because they're supposed to do it.

They inhabit it. They enjoy it. They play with it. They're interacting with it in that way. And that, in a way, it's kind of a shame that we make them into little adults. because the kind of life that you live when work and play are all the same thing is pretty nice, actually. And so that kind of intensity can be very helpful. By the time, in adolescence, some of us lose that hypnotizability.

And, you know, adolescence has been called a time when you favor formal operations, when you don't just make decisions on the way things appear or you think they might be, and you use logic and reason and say, is it really possible? So you begin to favor logic over experience. And by the time you're in your early 20s, your hypnotizability is as stable as your IQ.

So there have been studies at Stanford 25-year interval. They blindly retested former Psych-1 students who had their hypnotizability tested. And there was a 0.7 correlation between their hippoceneer. automatizability at age 20 and at age 50. So it's a very stable trait. How do we do it? We have a measure called the hypnotic conduction profile.

It's a brief hypnotic induction in which I have people, first of all, look up and slowly close their eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out, eyes relax body float, and then I give them an instruction about one of their hands. I say let it float up in the air like able. balloon. When I pull it down, it will flow right back up to the upright position. You'll find something pleasant amusing about it. But when I touch your left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. And we study how they react to that. And for some people, very quickly, you pull the hand down and they just look at it. There's a great YouTube with my friend

Andrew Huberman doing the test. And he's looking at this. And he says, what is my hand? doing. And he said it's sort of like it's not a part of me, you know, and for this brilliant tough guy to be sort of puzzled by the disobedience of his own hand is kind of fun. But it's that capacity to dissociate. So you can play with it. You can have fun with it. And then you're given instruction to end it. And most people are surprised that it stops. So we have a way of scoring this experience on a zero to ten scale. And it's a very stable. trade and I can do the assessment at five or six minutes and I've done it with every one of the 7,000 people I've used hypnosis within the course of my career and it helps me and and one reason

I like the concept is a it helps me to design the best approach to treatment because for the highs you just tell them what to do when they do it you know and you'll tell they they they have special problems you know it's a wonderful skill that they have, but their problem is that it's so easy for them to see things from another person's point of view that they often lose themselves, you know, and their problem is not maintaining that default mode constancy in who they are because what the other person said seems very reasonable, you know. One of my patients said, I'm a disciple in search of a teacher, you know, I'm always looking

for somebody. On the other extreme, the low hypnotizables, we call them Apollone, and you know, I'm always looking for a teacher. They value reason over experience, and they want a reason and a rationale and research and everything to accept anything. So they judge things and evaluate things. And with them, my approach is different, that I'm explaining why I'm doing what I'm doing and how they might help themselves if they choose to do it. Whereas in the highs, you just say, go for it. You know, you could do it. And most of us are in the mid-range where they get into that, but then they step back and they wonder, should I do this?

We call them Odysians. That movie Odysseus is out now. He was tied to the mast of the ship so he could hear the sirens but not go to them, you know. And so you have the experience, but then you think it over and see, is it the right thing to do? So it helps me structure my approach to people and how I help them. And it is a very stable trait. And in part, people get this way through life experience. There are people who are raised with what are called imaginative involvements.

So parents who tell, read them bedtime stories every night, tend to be more hypnotized. Well, they have positive associations to using their imagination in that way. And when my son was a kid, once, I used to have the kids. take an imaginary float down a river as they were going to sleep and they liked that. And I was out in the backyard doing something. And my son, who was then about seven or eight, came out and said, Dad, I can't sleep. I need a professional.

He said, you know. So with kids who have those experiences, they tend to be more hypnotizable. However, there's another not-so-pleasant reason, and that is people who have been physically or sexually abused, mistreated also tend to be hypnotizable because they would tell me when my father and his friends came and assaulted me, I would just go to a mountain meadow of wildflowers and they'd do whatever they did to my body and I would just do that. So that's a kind of bad way people get to be more hepatizable too. And there's a biological part. So dopamine is a major neurotransmitter in the brain and people

who have a particular genetic variant of the catechol-o-methyl transferase gene, which metabolizes dopamine, are more hypnotizable than those who either metabolize it too quickly or too slowly. So these are people who get about the right level. And the levels of the dopamine metabolite, homo-vanelic acid in the cerebro-spinal fluid, is correlated with hematizability. So it's partly neurochemical, it's partly experiential. Hey guys. So most days, especially after a sauna or workout, I'm usually not drinking just plain water. I'm putting element in it. It's a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, magnesium, and potassium with zero sugar. Once I started adding more electrolytes into my day, I actually felt more hydrated. And because it just tastes really good, you end up drinking more water because of it and you also end up absorbing it. My go-toes are the pink lemonade and grapefruit stinking. packs, pineapple or black cherry if you're into the sparkling cans, and a low-key gem that I love

is their chocolate salt. You just mix it into hot water and sounds interesting, I know, but it's basically like a salty electrolyte chocolatey hot drink with zero calories and it's just the best ever. It's totally risk-free if you want to order it and you don't like it, they'll give you a full refund with no questions asked. You don't even have to send it back. Just go to drinklm-n-t.com slash know thyself for your free eight-count sample pack of their most popular flavors with any purchase. I hope you enjoy. Back to the show. What is someone's suggestability suggest about them? Like what is someone who is very hypnotizable? You gave a couple examples there, but what is the quality or correlation, if you can pull any, the quality of their life different from somebody

who's very low? They tend to be imaginative. More creative types. Cooperative, more creative types. They just, they go with whatever takes them, you know, they don't judge it. They have the experience first. They do it, and later on they might think about they did it and why they did it. But they tend to be sociable. Other people tend to like them because they catch on, and they don't judge and evaluate people so much as sort of soak up what's going on in the social environment and do it. whereas the low hypnotizables are always judging and evaluating. And, you know, I had one, it happened.

I was treating two women at the same time for trichotillomania. You know, it's pathological hair pulling. And one was a high hypnotizable. It turned out. And she was very frustrated she was pulling out her hair. And she said, you know, my hair was so beautiful that the hairdresser in my town would do my hair for free if he could post, you know, pictures of my hair when it was done. But she said he was starting to come on to me, and I couldn't, I was having trouble resisting. So it's one of these things where she was feeling

too drawn, even though she knew she didn't want to get involved with this guy. She was also somebody who loved animals. And if she'd see an animal hurt by the side of the road, she'd pull the car over and do something to help them. And so I, she was very hypnotizable and I got her hypnotized and I said, so if you saw a wounded animal, you would go over and help them. Would you, would you ever just leave it lying there and pull its hair out in a little clump? She said, no, I would never do that. So I said, why don't you treat your body the same way you treat a wounded animal? And if you feel a move to do it, stroke it, stroke your hair, don't pull it, you know, if you're interested in it for some reason.

And she, and I said one other thing. Tell the hairdresser to go to hell. You know, you're not interested. And find another hairdresser, you know, which she, you know, when I said it, she said, yeah, you know, you're right. I should really do that.

But she didn't, within herself, she didn't want to hurt his feelings, you know. And so she stopped just like that. I had another patient about the same time who was also pulling out her hair, and she said, I'm getting at my naughty nerves. and she was an accountant, and she was, you know, did everything by the books and was very intense. And she came in a week later, and she had plotted out a map of the proportion of pre-treatment hair pulling that she had done since she saw me.

And the first part, it actually went up, and then it sort of went down. And eventually, and I was just telling her, isn't it, it's irrational to do something that deliberately harms your body. Why would you do that? And she stopped, but much more gradually, and only after arguing with me, she wouldn't even let me do the hypnotic conduction profile on the first session, which I always do. And then when I did it, she said, well, you just invented that to prove to me that there are differences in hypnotizability. She was arguing with me all the time.

So same problem, ultimately the same result, but a very different path to it. Could you quickly tell how hypnotizable I am? Sure, I could. I mean, I could do the test if you want, I'm just curious. Yeah, sure. I'd be happy to do it. Now, normally I get close enough to touch, so if you want, I can do that and we can...

You want me to come closer? Yes. That would be good. Okay. So, wrist arms on your legs, good. Now, first look at me and then look up to the top of your head, but keep your head the way it is. But look up toward your high breath. Oh, good.

all the way up and as you keep looking up slowly close your eyes closed good take a deep breath let the breath out slowly through your mouth let your eyes relax but keep them closed and let your body float imagine you're floating somewhere safe and comfortable like a bath a lake a hot tub or just floating in space and while you concentrate on your body floating i'm going to concentrate on your left hand and arm. In a moment, I'm going to stroke the middle finger of your left hand. When I do, you'll develop a sense of tingling and numbness and lightness, and you'll let it float up. Ready? Good. First, you may notice some restless movement sensations in your fingers, which will spread to your hand and arm, and you make it the sense of a magnetic pull as your elbow bends and your forearm

floats into the upright position, higher and higher. Good. all the way up. Now I'm going to position your arm like so and give you this instruction. Your hand will remain light and in this upright position even after I give you the signal for your eyes to open. Later, when I pull your hand back down to your leg, it will float right back up to the upright position.

You'll find something pleasant and amusing about this sensation. After that, when I touch your left elbow, your usual sensation and control will return. Each time you go into the state of concentration, you'll find it easier and easier to do, and you can use it to help you concentrate on what's important to you. Right now, we'll come out of this state of concentration together by counting backwards from three to one.

On three, you'll get ready. On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes and one, let your eyes open. Ready, three, two, one. Good. You can let your eyes relax now. and please describe what physical sensations you were aware of now in your left hand or on. Sort of lightness. Lightness?

Yeah. Is it comfortable? Yeah. Any tingling sensation? Yeah, a little tingling, the hand, finger. Does your left hand feel as if it's not as much a part of your body as your right hand? It does feel. It feels a bit.

Yeah. Disconnect. Yeah. Raise your right hand. your right arm down. Are you aware of a relative difference in your sense of control over one hand going up compared to the other?

Yeah, it feels like my left hand is kind of just doing it by itself. So you have more control over the right hand. Okay, now please note this. Definitely feel it wanting to go back up. It wants to go back up. Is that surprising? It's a bit surprising.

But I also am being hypnotized. You are. So it's not out of the question. Good. Raise your right hand. Put it down. Difference in your sense of control over the right hand and you have more control over which hand. All right. Where you're right. Okay, good. And that surprises you a little. All right, good. Now make a fist with his hand. Right fist. Open. Are you aware of a difference in sensation and control now in your left hand and arm compared to a moment before?

Yeah, it feels more back. More back. So the control is equal now in the two hands. Did I do or say anything that would indicate there'd be a change in sensation or control in your left hand and arm? I don't think so. Did you do or say anything? Did I say anything about your elbow or touching your elbow? I recalled you saying something earlier in the podcast about the elbow and yeah.

Okay. Did you have a sense of floating legness or buoyancy in your left? I did. I felt like it wanted to move up. It was just like kind of, yeah. Did you have that sense in any other part of your body, head, neck, thighs, abdomen, and chest all over, just your left hand and arm? Oh, just my left hand, yeah. Hand and arm.

Okay, well, you're very hypnotizable. Your score is 9 out of 10. Okay. And do you kind of lose yourself in things? Get so caught up in a good movie. You forget you're watching a movie. Yeah, I mean, I definitely can. Yeah.

So, yes, you're extremely hypnotizable. Okay. Great, I guess. Oh, it is. It's an asset. Cool. It can really help you do unusual things. Have you ever been able, for example, when you're hurt to kind of control your perception of pain? Can I, when I'm hurt, can I, yeah, I would say I can control my perception of pain?

Yeah, I'm generally a pretty non-reactive person. Yeah. And so how do you become non-reactive? What do you do? I don't know, I guess I just don't react to it. I just kind of like look at it as opposed to identify with it. Yeah? That's a great dissociative technique. I see it, I observed it, but it might not be me, you know, and that can be a very powerful thing.

We've done studies with somatosensory evoked responses, so EEG over the scalp, and we've had some bright standard for students who were very hypnotizable like you. and we would give them a shock to the forearm and asked them if it hurt and they would say yes and we got a normal semi-sensory evoked response P-100 P-200, P-300, really big. And then in another condition, we hypnotized them and said, your hands in circulating ice water, cool, tingling, and now filtered the hurt out of the pain.

And the amplitude of the evoked response, the sensory-evoked response was half as big. and within a tenth of a second, the first way the P-100 disappeared completely. So it wasn't like they felt it and then said, oh, I wonder what that is, you know, I don't want to pay attention to it.

They were literally able to modulate how much their brain reacted to the same stimuli. And that, I suspect, is what you're good at, too, that if you, you know, that you can modulate your brain's reaction to all kinds of experiences. Is there a unhealthy version

of that disassociative phenomena? Sure. Because I feel like that disassociation almost is used sometimes to point at when something unpleasant happens, usually earlier in childhood

we kind of leave, you know, we check out. That's right. I guess are those kind of two sides of the same coin then? Well, it's adaptive, but it can be problematic. At the time, it's a very useful defense. you know most combat soldiers who get congressional medals can barely remember what they did you know they got them the medal you know they just i just did i had to do it i don't know what i you know um so people and people who are being attacked and particularly children when their people are very hypnotizable well it's it's you know you basically you're saying to an abuser you got my body but you haven't got me and um they detached themselves from it but the problem is that they then sometimes continue doing that.

And, you know, so dissociative identity disorder, these people are very hypnotizable. And they will literally shift from one mental state to another. They'll have memory boundaries between. I had one such patient I worked with for many years who had been physically and sexually abused by her father and his friends. And I said one of her identities, and I use hypnosis to help get them into and out of different mental states

because it's controllable. They think it isn't, but you can teach them how to do it to shift from one to another. And one was talking about a kind of scary suicide plan. And I said, well, look, you know, I'm going to have to talk to the other parts of you because I don't want this to happen. And if I can't do that, you're going in the hospital. And she said, you can't tell them. And I said, oh, really, why?

And this is a particularly sort of tough, nasty, older personality. She said, you can't do that. I said, why? She said, doctor-patient confidentiality. So I was going to, you know, reveal information to another one of her identity. And we both kind of laughed. I said, I don't think that's going to work, you know. Some sort of inception, medic.

So, yes, it can be defensive and helpful. It can keep you sane at a time. when, you know, events would make you crazy. But it also can be a problem. And sometimes you can lose control over that ability to detach yourself. How long was that that we just did? How long do you think it was? Honestly, don't have a big reference.

Maybe a couple minutes. Yeah, it was probably a little more. It was probably like four or five minutes. Okay. Yeah. Not much. But the fact that you don't have a reference, you were focusing on other things than counting times.

Yeah, which is interesting. So like your awareness of time and space is altered? Yes. Do you know, like that kind of comes down? Yeah, because you're not, you know, I mean, when do you really think about time passing? You know, you think about when you're bored, you know, somebody's giving a dumb lecture or, you know, you have something to do you don't like doing. So conversely, when you're really immersed in something, time you don't notice, you're not counting, you know, you don't notice the time. I'm going by, because that takes a different kind of consciousness.

You had, by the way, a very interesting eye role. You know, my late father, Herbert Spiegel, who had sort of a genetic illness in my family, got me into this. Notice that people who seem to be more amitizable, we're able to do what you did. That is, when you looked up, your irises just disappeared. You were rolling your eyes all the way up to the top of your head, and they converged a bit. So, and that... Oh, God.

Watching this back is going to be strange. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, hypnosis will help you manage it, though. Yeah, yeah. And he, there is a correlation between the ability to disconnect lowering the lid from lowering the eye, from, you know, keeping the eye up at lowering the lid and hypnotizability. So people who can do that, like, you tend to be more hypnotizable. And so I was guessing from the very beginning that you would be quite amitizable and you are.

Okay. How can I use that to my advantage? Sure. Good question. Well, you can use it to manage stress, for example, because stress is often a kind of unpleasant interaction between what you're mentally thinking and feeling and how your body is feeling. And so what can happen when you start to get stressed, your body tenses up, it tightens up, your muscles tighten, you may start to sweat. you feel physically uncomfortable.

And then you notice that and you think, oh, this must be really bad. So you're mentally more stressed. And it's like a snowball rolling downhill. And so what you can do with hypnosis and what we do with the reverie up, for example, is teach people how to start out from the body up rather than the head down.

So if you have a problem confronting you, very often in psychiatry and psychology, we sort of try and help people figure it out first and then you'll feel better. What you can do with hypnosis is say, get a grip on your body's reaction to it, and you'll be able to think more clearly about it. So I have people look up, close their eyes,

take a deep breath, and imagine that you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. Get good at getting your body comfortable first. And now that your body is feeling better, and there are other techniques we use like breathwork, that slow exhale helps to reduce stress as well. and then picture on an imaginary screen

first a pleasant scene somewhere to reinforce your physical comfort divide the screen in half in hypnosis and on one side picture one thing one thing not 12 one that is causing you stress right now while you keep your body comfortable and on the other side of the screen picture one thing you can do about it might not be the best thing or the only thing but picture that so you can think more clearly about how to handle stress

and you do it by getting control over the aspect of the stress that you have the most control over which is your own body. So then you can think more clearly because you're not in this sort of cycle of mental and physical stress. So that's one example of how you could do that. You can just get yourself physically comfortable and deal with it mentally better. Hey fam, quick share. What you know about mitochondria? Maybe you recall from biology class that they're the power.

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Hope you enjoy. Is it, I mean, it feels very similar to a form of a guided meditation or like a yoga nidra is there any like really key difference there I guess you're giving really specific suggestions yeah I would say I mean there are reasons why there are you know

mental control practices around the world they're different but you know mindfulness from the east hypnosis from the west but I'd say the difference is that the emphasis of many of the meditative practices is on being,

and the emphasis on hypnosis is on doing. So you don't, I mean, a good meditator, as I understand it, and I know something about it, but I'm not an expert in it, but is not supposed to be about dealing with anything. In fact, it's open presence. You know, you do a body scan, and then you just try to be open to whatever feelings,

let them flow through you like a storm passing by, but not trying to fix anything. And you will discover after a while that things may be different. Hypnosis is much more purpose-driven and briefer, and that is you go into the state to see if you can make it different. You can handle stress better.

You can reduce pain. You can stop smoking. You know, we have people imagine, think of what you're doing to your body. You know, for my body smoking, is a poison, I need my body to live, I owe my body respect and protection, and one out of four people after one of those sessions stop smoking. So, you know, you don't use meditation to stop smoking. You use it to be different and just be open presence. And there's real value in that too.

But hypnosis can be much faster and more purpose-driven than meditation. It feels like you're opening up a window into the subconscious in a sense. Is that, would you, does that resonate? Yes, yes, it does. I think that's true. It was a famous psychiatrist Milton Erickson who lived in the middle part of the last century and was one of the few responsible physicians doing hypnosis then. And he used to say that the problem is you've got to silence the conscious mind

and let the unconscious solve the problem for you. And he was more indirect in how he did things. You know, he would have someone who was having family conflicts. He would say, Betty, his wife, you know, bring me that beautiful tie you gave me for Christmas. And he would have the guy concentrate on the weaving of the tie and the combination of colors and all that. And he said at the end that he was reminding this young man

of the importance of family ties. Well, you know, okay, I've, I, tend to be much more direct in using it. But it is, it is in a way allowing what is called the subconscious or the unconscious to emerge. And it's just, you know, I think of it

more in dissociation rather than the sort of psychodynamic, you know, conscious, pre-conscious, unconscious, I think of it more. All of those systems are running all the time in our brains. And I'm just saying, you know, use the parts that will help you solve the problem.

And I think if my unconscious could have solved my problem, I would have done it already. And it's not just that the conscious mind gets in the way. But it is, I think, that our preconceptions about ourselves, who we are, what we are, why we are what we are, sometimes our obstacles to getting better. And if you can just see it differently, I had a man, for example, a lovely, big tall guy

who came initially because he had back trouble. and he, you know, he had a disdise and to help with the pain. But he talked to me about a Christmas they'd had where his father, who was an alcoholic, would throw things at the fireplace and just make it hell. And he said, you know, next week I'm going to have to go

clean up his grave. His father had died. And there's a military cemetery on the way to San Francisco, and he would go there. and spend hours fixing it up. And I said to him, what the hell are you doing that for?

You don't know that guy, a thing, he made your childhood of misery, and he's gone now, and you've got better things to do with your time. Now, normally psychiatrists don't talk to patients like that, but I do. And he called me a couple weeks later, and he said, you know, doctor,

he was very reluctant at first. He said, but I should do this. I'm his son, you know. And he called me up, and he said, you know, I looked at a picture myself and for the first time I liked what I saw because he was just feeling

that there must be something wrong with him if his father would do that to him and his family not that there was something wrong with his father and so sometimes you can get people to shift their perspective draw on information that's there in their memory about what happened but see it from a different point of view is similar neurologically to a type of flow state?

Yeah, yeah, I knew Chick sent me high, and we talked about flow, and I do think that, you know, he calls it an autotelic experience, that it's, you would just, you're not getting, you're not doing it for a purpose, it's just it feels good to do it. You'd keep doing or experiencing it,

whatever it is, just because it feels good. And I do think when people get into flow, they're focusing on the process and the pleasure of, experience itself not the outcome. And I've used hypnosis a lot with golfers, for example, who freeze up and, you know, get all tense and tight. And, you know, Tiger Woods was trained with hypnosis, and every shot he takes, he does a little self-hypnosis exercise first. And there's a book called Zen and the Art of Archery in which a British sociologist observed that Zen art.

who are very good archers, would tell you that the problem with most archers is that they focus on the target, not the bow and arrow. And what he means by that is that if your relationship of the bow and arrow is correct, the arrow will go where you want it to go. And you're disconnecting yourself from that. So it's process rather than outcome. And that's, so they're helping to get into a kind of a flow state that I think is transatlantic. like in some ways, that you're just enjoying the experience. I was called by the head of the Stanford Women's Swimming Team, and we have a really good swimming team,

and a lot of them are in the Olympics all the time. But the coach said, you know what? The girls are telling me that they're swimming faster in practice than they are in meets. And you think, well, what the hell is that about? And so I met with them, and they said, well, what's happening is that in a meet, I'm focusing on the,

women swimming in the lanes next to me, and I get distracted. So they got disconnected from their bodies. So I said, that's your problem. What you're going to do every night is do some self-hypnosis, and you're going to do an imaginary race. You're only going to pay attention to your body and to help with you. You know, it's not a contact sport. It doesn't really matter what they do.

What matters is what you do. And they're swimming and got faster in meets. So it's a matter of allowing yourself to, focus on what matters and to enjoy that experience. Yeah, that certainly tracks in my experience where in particular things that I do, I drop more into flow where wherever there's more unconscious competence, for example, playing piano or something where it's like

there's a lack of self-awareness in a sense. There's something so pleasurable also about being in that state, similar to, I think, the state of hypnosis where, like, awareness is still there, but there's, like, a lack of a sense of a doer in it. Or, well, there's a doer, but not a judger, you know, it's his kind of more you're just having the experience. Well, to me, it felt like a lack of sense of, like, authorship and doing, you know, like... I see what you mean. Yeah. Which...

I'm doing it. I'm not sort of aware of planning and evaluating how I do it. Right. Yeah, which is fascinating. Why do you say believing is seeing? Well, you know, seeing is believing is a kind of evaluative statement where you say, I won't swallow this unless I see it. But if you're doing what we were just talking about, if you're just believing, for example,

that you can, in fact, control how you're bringing. brain processes pain signals, then you will discover that you actually can feel less pain. And so it's valuing the primacy of the experience itself and how you can alter the experience rather than evaluating it and then deciding what's really going on. You did this with the study with the colors. Is that right? Yes. That's right.

Thank you. He read some of our work. Yeah, could you recapitulate that for us? Yeah, sure. So I was working with a psychologist who, he was interested. We were part of a mind-body network that the MacArthur Foundation had. And he said, you know, you say that people can change what they're seeing and all that, but I'm wondering if that's really what's going on or they're just telling you that it seems different when it doesn't.

So I said, well, let's design an experiment that you can run and decide for yourself what happens. So we did pet imaging on people who were looking at black and white and color grids. So there were grids. They were like a Mondrian painting with squares of different shapes and sizes. Some were colors. Some were just black and white. And we would show them the color grids, and they would get a lot of activity in the lingual gyrus. in the left side of the occipital lobe,

which does visual processing. And if they were, it was black and white, they had less activity in the same region. So we had a baseline of what happens when the brain's looking at black and white or looking at color. And then we hypnotize them and said, we want you to drain the color out of the color grid.

And they would look at it, and they would say, yeah, it doesn't look so colorful now. And then in another condition, we'd had them add color to a black and white grid. and we found that when they did that, they reduced activity in those same color processing regions, when they drained the color. And they were looking at the same color grid,

but they're seeing it as black and white. And when they looked at the black and white grid and saw it as color, they increased activity in the processing region. So that's the believing and seeing idea that you believe that's what you're seeing, and that's what you see. It makes me think a bit of Andy Clark's work,

some others as well as like in exploring perception as like degenerative phenomenon, not as a simply receptive one. Like, we think we're just taking in the world as it is, as opposed to constructing it. Right, right. You know, I mean, think about it, you know, and it's with pain, too. The brain is this three-pound organ encased in a bony box, right? And it's getting all this information from, you know, neurons that, you know, sensors that provide

information to it. But the brain isn't touching anything, you know, and it isn't seeing anything. It's receiving electrical signals that get transmitted to the brain. And the brain has to decide what to make of it. And so it has a good deal of control over what it does with the information it gets. And so it makes sense, actually, that believing is seeing, that the brain has to, and sensing is, you know, the sensory experiences also are things that, the brain interprets, and generally it interprets in ways that keep us alive.

And if, you know, we see a saber-toothed tag over there, we know what to do. I mean, it's not random. But at the same time, it's an interpretive kind of processing that's going on. And there's no reason, you know, frankly, we don't know. I'm sitting here looking at you, you're looking at me. I know what you look like and you know what I look like. But do you know whether what you look like if you were me is actually anything? like what you think you look like, you know?

No, because also the way that mirrors work and the way that we like flip images and anybody who's taking their phone or they're like put it on selfie mode and you can like flip the image. Yeah. You know, and you see the asymmetry of your face and one side's, you know, it's like we, it's interesting to see, to think about what other people see us as opposed to what we see in the mirror and think we look like. That's exactly.

Right. And Neil Southey we just had on the podcast. He kind of explains this phenomena as a controlled hallucination, you know, that's happening. That's not bad. That's not a bad description. That's right. I think that's really true. There's so much interpretation, you know, and manipulation that goes on to process things.

That's right. In this process, as you've worked with a wide spectrum of patients and emotions within those patients, what have you learned about what emotions are signals for and what they're trying to tell us? And what it takes to integrate and heal them? Well, you know, emotions are... I mean, there's a wide variety of things. They clearly drive our behavior.

You know, they get us to do certain things and avoid other things. They remind us of unpleasant consequences of doing bad things and pleasant consequences of doing others. And that's also something where techniques like hypnosis, you can change people's moods. You know, you can help them either feel really good if they think about something pleasant or really bad if they think about something unpleasant. And to the extent that you focus, you know, the light of your attention on something that is either positive or negative, you know, you will feel differently. And I think because hypnosis, you know, with hypnosis, it's like a flashlight and a camera.

cave, you know, you see certain things and they'll make you feel comfortable or uncomfortable or happy or sad. And what's different is that now, you know, we're doing sort of back and forth processing where we're looking at one another, but there's an environment wherein it's a nice environment. You can look around the room and you're selecting what to attend to. And if you're interested in what I'm saying, you're not falling asleep, you're, you know, paying attention, thinking of the next question. If you're not, you know, you might. You might. You're not. You know, So I think where hypnosis comes in is that it helps you to sort of parcelate your perception, to decide what you're going to attend to and what you're going to ignore.

An example, Rory McElroy was on the verge of winning the Masters like seven times, but he had had one famous screw-up where on the 11th hole or something, he hit the ball, wound up in a tree. I mean, it was embarrassing. And for seven years after that, every time he got to that hole, he'd screw it up again, you know. And so he actually started with our app, the reverie app, and then he got a personal psychologist to work with him. And when he got to the seventh hole the next year, or the 11th hole, whatever it was, he learned to focus on other things, on his relationship with the club and the swing. And this was just another hole.

And what mattered was the way he connected with the ball. and he went right, he blew right through it, and he won the Masters, and he's won it now two years in a row. And so he changed, you know, it's changing the emotion, you know, from, oh God, here's another time for me to screw up my entire career and make a fool of myself to,

I can go through this, I can experience it differently. And so what hypnosis helped him to do is pay attention to what he needed to and wanted to rather than just running that old tape of what a fool he'd made of himself and it worked. Yeah, it makes me think what our version of that hole is, you know, in our own life. What are we placing emotional significance around that for another person would just be another day in the park, you know, another day on the course? Right, exactly. And so much of your work is helping reconstruct these past traumatic memories and experiences and reframing them in a powerful way.

Yes. Yes, that's right. Well, I had a woman who joined the Experiment of Arts who were studying whether a diagnosis could help people stop smoking. And, you know, most people have a lot of trouble doing that. But, you know, they tell themselves don't smoke or they see pictures of damaged lungs or something. And it's so unpleasant that they don't want to pay much attention to it, you know.

So they smoke. So we say, for my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. And one subject in the study was a mental health professional, intelligent woman. The first time she heard that she didn't like it, but she went home. And she said, you know, I looked at a cigarette in my hand. I lit it, looked at it, and I said, who needs this?

And she said, I put it out. I haven't smoked a cigarette since I didn't want to stop. I smoked 25 years. And she said, this is some kind of crazy-ass food who shit. And I mean that in a good way, she said. She's helping her friend stop smoking now. So, you know, the ability to narrow your focus into a different perspective and it gives you more control over your emotion, over your experience, because you're choosing which part of the vast array of choices you're going to attend to. Yeah, interesting enough, my pops, when I was younger, had a health clinic and he'd help people quit addiction.

And he'd use hypnosis as a tool. Oh, cool. So it's funny enough, you know, I have very light exposure to it, but have seen the efficacy of it loosely over time. How did, what was his work, what was his profession? Yeah, yeah, he's a health clinic mainly helping people lose weight or quit smoking. Cool. There's a couple main things.

Well, we have that in common, that is sort of a genetic illness in both of our I mean, my father was, you know, he fought in North Africa in World War II, and he was being analyzed. And the analyst finally said something at the end of the session. He said, do you want to learn something about hypnosis? And my father thought the analyst actually said something, you know, what did I say wrong or something? And he said there was a guy named Gustav Anasheffenberg, who was a Viennese physician, a Jew, who had been, barely escaped from the Nazis. And he was a forensic psychiatrist,

and he had a smallpox scar in the middle of his forehead. And he noticed that some of these prisoners he was interviewing would start staring at that scar and do what you did. They just sort of nod off and go into a hypnotic state. And so he started using hypnosis. And he wasn't allowed to serve in the military here, but he said, I'm going to train army doctors to use it. So he trained my father to do it.

and he used it for pain control and post-traumatic stress symptoms. He came back and went back to being an analyst, but he had a wonderful supervisor, Frieder Frem Reichman, who said he was going to stop doing it because another analyst said, Freud stopped using hypnosis, why should you do it, you can't, you know? And she said, what are you so precious about your reputation for? You're going to teach a course in our institute,

and I know you're going to do it because I'm going to take it. And so he continued doing hypnosis, and increasingly he would get in touch with patients and ask how they were doing. And most of his analytic patients would say, well, you know, are you having trouble finding patients? I'll talk to a few of my friends kind of thing. But with hypnosis, they'd stop smoking.

You know, their anxiety disorder symptoms got better and stuff. So he shifted more and more. So the dinner table conversations were interesting. And I got to watch him film film him treating people who had hysterical pseudo-seizures and, you know, they'd bring on the seizure and gradually diminish it and do better. And so when I got to medical school, I took a hypnosis course. And my first patient ever, that were from, I used to hypnosis, was a 16-year-old girl who was in status as it was in stanza asthmaticus, chronic asthma attacks. And they were thinking of,

They couldn't stop it. They'd given her steroids, it wasn't working. They were going to put her on more steroids. And they were going to give her general anesthesia to stop. And it was the third time of three months. She'd been hospitalized. It was a bad situation. I hear the sound of the wheezing down the hall.

The nurse said your patient is in there. And I didn't know what the hell else to do. She's standing there. Her mother standing there crying. She's in bed, bolt up right, knuckles white. And I just had taken this course. So I said, you want to try a breathing exercise? She nods.

So I get her hypnotized. And then I realized we hadn't studied asthma in the course. I didn't know what to say. So I said, each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. And within five minutes, she's lying back in bed and she isn't wheezing anymore. And the mother stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room. My intern came looking for me.

And I thought he was going to say, wow, good for you, Spiegel. He said, you need to understand that the nurse. has filed a complaint with the nursing supervisor that you violated Massachusetts law by hypnotizing a minor without parental consent. Now, Massachusetts has a lot of weird laws, but that's not one of them. And her mother was standing next to me when I did it. So he said, you're going to have to stop. And I said, well, take me off the case if you want, but as long as she's my patient, I'm not going to tell her something I know isn't true. So he stomped off. But, you know, it's interesting. With all the damage that we do to patients with all the drugs and all kinds of other things, you know.

Just the idea that my talking to her that way and she immediately responds is going to harm her was just ridiculous. So he came back on Monday after her counsel with the chief resident and the attending, and they came up with a radical idea. They said, let's ask the patient. And, you know, I thought that was a great idea. You know, I don't think they'd ever done that before a children's hospital. But they did.

And she said, oh, I like this. I want to keep doing it. And she had one subsequent hospitalization but went on to study to be a respiratory therapist. And this is one of those situations that changed me. Because right in front of my eyes, you know, in a couple of minutes, I could see her getting better. And I just thought, you know, I got to do more of this because it's helping people to help themselves. Do you feel like this path chose you in a way? It sounds like your mom was also a psychiatrist, right?

your dad was into this work. Yeah. My parents told me I was free to be any kind of psychiatrist I wanted to be. I used to tell that story around the family. And my son, we have two wonderful children. My son's an architect who would love your house. And he's built us a house that is similar to this in its huge windows where he brings the outside in.

And so you feel outdoors even though you're indoors. and he said, well, you know, my mother's a cell biologist, so I had a little more leeway than my father did, you know. So he said, you know, spaces give you feelings, just like this room gives you feelings. He said, I want to be a doctor of spaces, and he's a wonderful architect now. And, you know, so he absorbed it in a good way.

And so, and our daughter is an attorney who's helping make the world better and safer. She's started a group called Gov Act, which is governors getting together to help with reproductive rights and protect our rights. So, you know, I like to think that although neither of them wanted to be a doctor, they got the sort of helping bug, and that's what they're doing in their way. But I, you know, I have a neuropsychiatrist now who works in my lab, and he said, you know, when I use hypnibnogist, I know what surgeons feel like. You know, you feel like you just go in and you fix something, you know. And in psychiatry and psychology, we tend to, you know, it's more gradual and subtle.

But with hypnosis sometimes you feel a bit like a surgeon. I went in and fixed that, you know, help them be different. And that's a wonderful feeling. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know, the same way you can skip an ad. get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride.

Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. You mentioned multiple personality or disassociative identity disorder earlier. Right. I've always found it very fascinating how one human being can have these various up to over 10, 20 personalities. One's allergic to peanuts. The other one is left-handed. And it's like when they're inhabiting these perspectives and personalities, they have these allergies and these very real chemical reactions to things. And yeah, for some reason we lose that analogy when it's just one. one personality that we say we have.

But of course, we have our own stuff. My sister, she's allergic to nuts, you know? We all have our own, like, things. And when you look at this associated identity and multiple personality, and you bring that analogy back and the understanding back to one personality, it makes me question how personality is in and of itself a sort of hypnotic. rhythm. I'm curious your thoughts there. Well, I think it is in the sense that personality is an identity. You know, we talked about the default mode network and how it's one way we think about ourselves.

And you've had people here who talk about the problem of, you know, getting lost in a self and that you need to kind of shed some of that sense of that is really who you are because it isn't. It's just a convenient assumption. I think what hypnosis allows you to do is on the one hand create, but on the other hand manage dissociation. So you can see how you can be a different person. And, you know, we all are, you know, we're different on a vacation than we are when we're at work.

And that's one reason we go on vacations to try out being different. But you don't have to go on a vacation to do that. hypnosis helps people better understand and control these different roles that we play and try out being different see if you know you can really be different now and dissociative identity disorder people you know have been kind of driven into it by sexual and physical abuse usually not always for usually um and what you try to do i use hypnosis to teach them how to control that um and uh to not necessarily assume that the switch is just going to happen.

And there tend to be like a hierarchy of identities where some are more angry and controlling and others are more passive and pathetic kind of thing. But you teach them gradually that they can learn how to control these different identities. I had one patient who, a teenage boy who suddenly would say he was a werewolf, he'd sit down at dinner and start eating food,

from a plate just you know and the family was kind of freaked out by this and didn't know what to do and I found out that what was happening was he was like 14 or 15 at the time and his older sister was sneaking they shared a bedroom and she was sneaking her boyfriend into the bedroom and playing around with a boyfriend and so this kid didn't know what to do with that and got symptomatic so I could show that he could shift with hypnosis from one of these states to the other and teach him how to control it. And I said to the family, you know, don't freak out and don't buy it, that he's really a werewolf because he isn't. So the next time he did that at dinner, and his mother said to him, I don't care who you are,

sit down and eat your dinner like anyone else, you know, and she's just not playing into it. And it was a way of teaching him how to control it. So hypnosis can be very helpful in being part of what is a control mechanism, but one that you can learn to control, basically. If there's not, and share your thoughts if you don't think so, but if there's not a single solid enduring self, then who are we? Well, I think self-hood is a kind of a construct. some of what we take for granted as, you know, objective reality, you know, probably isn't.

It's an assumption that we assemble from our brains in this box trying to make sense of the world. But I think the notion of itself is at the least a way that we make sense of what we do and who we are. And it's never perfect and it should change and we shouldn't get too stuck in it. And I think that's where hypnosis can help, actually, because you can really see what it would be like to be different. If I weren't so scared every time I ran into something that reminds me of what happened 12 years ago or something like that, if I let go of the assumption that people like me can't do certain things that other people seem to be able to do, or that I came from the wrong side of the tracks, and that will limit me forever kind of thing. that you can see what it would feel like

if that wasn't your working assumption. So I think, you know, is the self a kind of a construct? Sure, it is, but it's a malleable construct, and it's one that I think we have more control over than we give ourselves credit for. And hypnosis can just be a visible case example. You know, you wouldn't have thought that your left arm could really want to go up

regardless of what you thought it ought to be doing. And so you were seeing that you have control systems between your brain and your body that maybe you hadn't consciously used before. And so it allows you to kind of, on the one hand, it kind of diminishes the notion of the self. But on the other hand, it allows you to expand the idea of how it's a work and process always.

And we make assumptions to sort of simplify things for ourselves, but, you know, the self is a very complex, ongoing process. How much time have you thought about how, of course, we have our own individual trances that we're in through our personality, a useful assumption, I think you use the verbiage of, you know, convenient one. When you extrapolate that to a societal level and you see the trances that we are in collectively, Do you not feel that there are many things we are as a sort of group hypnosis of?

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, what's going on right now in our country is heartbreaking, and people are falling for things that they shouldn't. And, you know, there's the sort of Jim Jones phenomenon of people in cults. There's a Leon Fessinger was a brilliant, Stanford. psychologist who wrote a book called The Theory of Cognitive Dissinence, and it was a book about a study that his lab conducted in which one of the grad students infiltrated an end-of-the-world cult, and these people believed that on a certain day, God was going to destroy the earth, but send

down a spaceship and take them away and rescue them, and a bunch of them believed it, and they sold their farms and everything, and showed up that night. and fortunately the world didn't end and so in the middle of the night and this grad student is recording all this you know what you want to happen he does automatic writing and he gets a message from God

that God is so pleased with what he's done that he's decided not to destroy the earth after all so the change in behavior was very interesting and these are people who had lost a lot I mean they'd sort of given up everything to come do this

they went from being a sort of secretive we know what's going on and you don't to going around convincing other people that they were right. And he called that cognitive dissonance, that when reality, when the facts conflict with your beliefs, you can do one or two things. You can change your beliefs. That's what we call the scientific method.

Or you can go around convincing other people that your beliefs are correct when they're obviously wrong. Now, you know, these days, that's not an uncommon experience. And a lot of true scientific beliefs are being dissed and, you know, people are not getting vaccinated and all kinds of terrible things are happening. People are dying because of this. But one way that we shape ourselves

is to gather a crowd with us who have the same belief, whether it happens to be correct or not. And so I think hypnosis is sort of an object lesson that you can change what seems real and true for a while, but you can control it and you can use it in sensible, productive, you know, proactive,

healthy ways, or you can come to believe things that are true. I mean, I was doing that in that vision experiment. I was getting people to report that a grid that was black and white actually was colorful and conversely. So we were demonstrating that people can use their capacity to manage their perception and experience in a way that can either be constructive and help them live better and get a different perspective on who they are and what they are. Or it could be damaging.

They can see and do things that don't make any sense, but if they get enough people to agree with them, it doesn't bother them. So, you know, one of the reasons that we built Reverie is to help share that knowledge of how to do this and to help people, on the one hand, see that they can change their personal reality. they can stop smoking or you know control their chronic pain

and get off of opioids they can eat better and lose weight they can stop smoking they can do a lot of things that you can use that ability if you're in charge of it and using it for the right reasons but there are some people who use that ability to distort their perception of reality and ignore things that are damaging

to themselves or to others it's a capacity we have that we can identify and use it. And here you're somebody who has studied the self and how it feels and whose father taught you some hypnosis, who discovered something about yourself and your ability now and how hypotizable you are. And that's a great thing. And we want more and more people to have the ability to do it. Fantastic. We'll leave links where people can find that in your work in the description. You have 13 books. You've seen over 7,000 patients. It's been 50 years in this work now.

What's one truth, if you had 60 seconds to share, that you're more sure about being a human being now than when you started? I would say that the more we learn how we process and change things, the better we can live. Rather than being afraid of things that seem strange or too powerful or something, if we take hold of it and drive the car better,

our lives will be better. Recognize, you know, be proud of the fact that you can modulate perception and manage your emotion and restructure your memories of the past and think carefully about how to live and get into a flow state when you're trying to do things. That's a tremendous ability and power that we have. And we tend to hand that off.

We tend to say, well, If I get the right drug, it'll be all right now. I use medications. I'm a doctor, but there are a lot of times when that's not the answer and people feel disempowered by saying I can't handle this anxiety if I don't have this drug that I should take, rather than saying maybe there's another way I can manage this. So I want to empower people to learn more about their innate abilities

and make better use of them. You mentioned your son as a doctor of external spaces and I think you're doing what you said, just that. You're a doctor of the internal spaces. And so thank you so much for the devotion and dedication to your work. I know it's helped countless individuals,

and I'm sure as a proxy through this conversation, thank you. Is there anything else on your mind or heart that you want to share before? You're welcome. Well, no, I appreciate the work that you're doing and helping people to get interested in things that we often don't take seriously,

you know, how we think about ourselves and what we do and how we manage our experience and our emotions. And so I think that you and your following are people who can and are benefiting from what you're doing, that we're learning to take more control of our own lives in a very intimate and personal way. And that's a great thing. Thank you, David. You're welcome. Thank you, Andre.

Everybody, until next time, be well.