StarTalk Radio - Getting Hypnotized with David Spiegel

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Hypnosis—stage act or science? Neil deGrasse Tyson, joined by co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly, dives into the mysterious world of hypnosis with clinical psychiatrist David Spiegel. What is hypnosis? Is it about losing control—or gaining it?NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/getting-hypnotized-with-david-spiegel/Thanks to our Patrons L, Brian Mckeighan, shpdds, Azure Rodriguez, Erel Ortacdag, Sean Bettencourt, Ashtyn Marcus, Kiril Nikolov, Andy Sist, mark howell, Shawn Ravenfire, Kim Barron, Brooke Bellamy, Devin Daley, Aubrey Fernandez, Jeff Mathewson, Lord_J.Capella, Alexander Langholm Skogvik, Carleigh Drakulic, Daniel Trimble, Kyle Francek, Kayla Hunter, Mathew, Diksha Thakur, east779ave, Chris Roskell, and Shyam Vekaria for supporting us this week.Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

About time we did a show on hypnosis. We're getting there. Lot of the body to cover, Neil. Okay. I mean, I only ever thought of hypnosis as a stage act. Yeah. And you got one of the world's experts on it. Yeah, we're gonna get into the real deal of hypnosis.

Okay. Ah! Exactly. We gotta get Chuck out of that somehow. Coming up, all about hypnosis, on Star Talk Special Edition. Welcome to Star Talk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Star Talk begins right now. This is Star Talk Special Edition. Yelda Gras Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, when you hear special edition, not far behind that is Gary O'Reilly. Gary? All right, former soccer pro, turned announcer, and we're borrowing you from the UK.

You all. And of course, Chuck Knight, Chuckie Baby. Hey, what's happening? All right, these special editions get inside the human condition in ways that I had never previously imagined we would. Yeah, which makes them very, very interesting. What is it to be human in the big picture?

It's busy in here. It's busy? Yeah. Psychologically, physiologically, emotionally. So Gary, set the stage here. What do you have? Well, in recent shows we have ventured inside the human mind to discuss consciousness, which was both enlightening and fascinating.

One takeaway from those shows is there is apparently no user manual for the human mind, which said mankind has found ways to navigate and maneuver through the matrix of neurons to facilitate change in our mental state. Psychotherapy is nothing new and neither is hypnosis. But odd is hypnosis and how the bloody hell does it work? Does it take away control or give control?

It's gotta be expert time. So join me in welcoming our special guest today. We've got Dr. David Spiegel. Dr. Spiegel, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you very much, I'm delighted to be here. Yeah, a clinical and research psychiatrist. So that makes you an MD in there. And also means that you have access to all the great drugs.

Is that? Well, let's just be honest here. Put that right up front. Put that right up front. That's the difference, kids, so that you know. When you see psychologists, you're like, ask somebody who's going to talk you to death. When you see psychiatrists, ask somebody

who's going to give you some good drugs. Okay, Chuck figured that all out. Interesting, you went straight to drugs, not food. Oh yeah, well, what can I say? You're the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, that would be Stanford University, right? And you're Director for the Center on Stress and Health.

Ooh. Long overdue. Yes. Think about, in the old days we just say, just suck it up. Yes. Just get over it. What's your problem, mister? What's your problem? You're also the director of the Center

for Integrative Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. You got all the right pedigree here, but what we're gonna focus on is a part of the mind that so many of us are intrigued by, and that is hypnosis. Oh, I left out, right, you're the author of 13 books? Yeah.

Yeah, but he hypnotized somebody to write them all. Is that, I will find out. Yeah, he only wrote one, the other 12, he was just like, you want to write a book. Oh, God. I'm actually hypnotizing people to read them. Nice, nice, nice. Good one.

So you're here because this entire episode will focus on and pivot with hypnosis. And I'm skeptical. And so you're gonna hear to undo my skepticism because I've seen hypnosis acts with magicians on stage, and there's pageantry to it, and there's, and I don't know, but that's why we have you here. So first tell us what is hypnosis,

so we're all on the same page, please. Well, I'm glad you're curious, Neil, and you're the expert on outer space, and I'm the expert on inner space, so. And for what I can tell, outer space is easier than inner space. Could well be. Have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world?

Does that happen to you? So that's a state of self-perfect place. No, because he's not saying that you lose touch with reality. It's just that you're so engrossed that you feel like you are an extension of the movie. Okay, so maybe the closest I can give you on that is, yes, I have felt emotions of characters that are well-acted for scripts, well-written,

in stories well told. But no time did I think I was in the movie. Yeah, but it's not about thinking you're in the movie. So it's not this matter of suspending disbelief where it's like, wow, I'm part of the Matrix, right? But while you're watching the Matrix, you can get so engrossed and so consumed with what's going on that when Morpheus is in a chair You can get so engrossed and so consumed

with what's going on that when Morpheus is in a chair and his head is hanging and Agent Smith is talking to him, you feel like all the tension. I agree, I'm just saying I credit good acting for that. So keep going. So hypnosis has been called believed in imagination. It's a state of highly focused attention. So it's like you're looking through the telephoto lens of a camera, which you see, you see with

great detail, but you dissociate. You're less aware of what's going on around you. You turn down this aliens network that warns you that something else might happen that's more important. This intensity of focus is a key part of hypnosis, and we do it all the time to some extent. Right now, you gentlemen have sensations in your bodies touching these very comfortable chairs you're sitting in.

Hopefully, you are not even aware of those sensations until I mentioned this, is that right? That's correct. I know, I have hemorrhoids. Thank you for sharing that. TMI. Full disclosure. Sorry. Sorry guys.

Well, I am a doctor, but I'm not going to help you. So you use the reference to a network. What network are you referring to? There's a neural network in your head. It's a neural network in your head called the salience network. And so it's, it's what fires off when you hear a loud noise and suddenly you think, is that a gunshot? What is it?

I'd better pay attention to it. You're easily distracted when that network is activated. So in hypnosis, you turn that down. You allow yourself to give yourself to whatever it is you are focusing on, put outside of conscious awareness things that might ordinarily be in consciousness. And you can try out being different. That's the third and most interesting part of hypnosis. So you had a producer who said she was on stage being hypnotized.

You do things, you know, the football coach will dance like a ballerina. It's what scares everybody about hypnosis. But it's actually a very important lesson that you can try out being different. You can suspend yourself. So it's highly focused attention, dissociation, and trying out being different. So David, if Neil doesn't think it's a real thing, what can you say to him to make him understand in your mind that it is a real thing? Why are you starting to fight between us? All I said was I was a little skeptical.

That's you don't believe in it, okay? It's not a matter of faith. It's not a matter of faith. It's not a matter of faith. Exactly. It's a matter of reality. Is the evidence there or not? The evidence is there. And I'm guessing you're probably not very hypnotizable, but whether you are or not,

the phenomenon exists. It's the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's been around for 250 years. And it is a very robust phenomenon. All eight-year-olds are in trances all the time. If you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you. We lose some hypnotizability as we get older, as we get into our adult years, but the majority of the population is hypnotizable.

How do you test? Is there a standard hypnotizability test? Yes, there is. We have one called the hypnotic induction profile. It takes about five minutes. We have it on our Reverie self-hypnosis app. You can try it for yourself. All I do is do a hypnotic induction. I ask you to look up, close your eyes, take a deep breath. Let the breath out, let your eyes relax, but keep them closed, let your body float. And then I give instructions about having one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon.

And many people are surprised that the hand starts to feel different, that it feels like it wants to be up in the air, it feels different from the other arm. You pull it down, it pops back up, they feel less control. And we score that on a zero to 10 scale, and that's how we measure hypnotizability. In essence, a test of being able to turn inward

and alter the way your body feels and reacts. All right, so- Now, if somebody's actively resisting all of this the entire way, would that negate their susceptibility to being hypnotized? Well, not resisting. There are some people that just aren't hypnotizable. You can try to fight it for a while, but like, you know, why bother?

And the funny thing is that there are people who think they're not hypnotizable and that hand is up there in the air and you pull it down and it just wants to go back up. And they'll look at it and say, what is going on here? You know, they're surprised. So sometimes you think you can put up resistance, but you don't, because you're just going along with it. It is futile.

You don't have a chance. Why are some people more hypnotizable than others? I know we're all different in a certain way, but there must be something in some part of the brain that is operating in a different way, at a different scale. That's right. And we know that one of the things that happens when you go into diagnosis is that you turn down activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex. The cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the center of your brain. And the front part, the dorsal part, is part of a network that fires off when there's a mismatch, when suddenly something's happening that shouldn't be happening. And you turn down activity in that part of the brain when you go into hypnosis.

We know now that there are some genetic differences that are related to hypnotizability. So people who have a variant of the gene, catecholomethyltransferase that metabolizes dopamine have a particular variant that has a moderate speed of metabolizing dopamine turn out to be more hypnotizable than those who are heterozygous for methionine or valine and who either metabolize too quickly or too slow. We know there are many drugs that influence dopamine in your brain. So, is it possible to take a drug and make you more susceptible to being hypnotized? Well, it's a good question. People have looked at that.

The trouble is it's a matter of control as well. And so, there are stimulants, for example, that may make you a little more hypnotizable at first, particularly if you're somewhat anxious or depressed, but will also inhibit your control systems. So you probably will not respond as consistently. So there's no reliable drug change that can alter hypnotizability.

However, we've just published a paper showing that you can use transcranial magnetic stimulation over a particular region of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and transiently increase hypnotizability a bit. And just so people understand, when you say transcranial magnetic stimulation, you're talking about placing magnets over a person's head and then what happens with those magnets in that process? You can either stimulate or inhibit depending on the frequency that you're administering, but you know that when electricity flows through a wire, there's a magnetic field circulating

around the electricity. Yes. Right. You guys knew that. That's good. It's like physics 101. Yeah. Yeah. There's very electric current, there's an associated magnetic field, and vice versa.

And that's how we make electricity, by the way. And that's why it's called electromagnetism. That's right. That's right, okay. All right, good, we're all agreed on that. So you can inhibit activity in that salience network, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

So you can slow down activity in that region, which is the same thing that happens when people go into hypnosis. So it is possible to inhibit activity in the salience network and enhance hypnotizability. So if I go back to the original hypno, Greek for sleep, you're not putting people to sleep. So are you then manipulating the subconscious? Manipulating is one word for it. I would say you're probably enhancing access to parts of people's thinking and experience that they don't ordinarily think about.

And so you're getting them in a frame of mind where they're less likely to be guarded, they're less likely to want to protect themselves, and they're more likely to suspend their usual expectations about themselves. That's another part of the brain in the back of the cingulate cortex called the default mode network. And it's a part of the brain where when you're not working or thinking or doing anything else and you're just reflecting on who you are, what am I, what do people think of me, what did my mother want me to be?

It kind of keeps us, I'm starting the psychotherapy now, but I know. Tell me about your mother. What it does is it, in a way, help imprisons you in the sense that you're going back to what your assumptions are about who you are, what you are, what you should be. And in hypnosis, you can inhibit activity in that region by activating the prefrontal cortex. And that inhibition is a kind of suspension of self. So when the football coach dances like a ballerina at one of those stage shows, I don't like making fun of people, I don't like making them look silly, but there is a message that he's able to let go

of his usual assumptions about himself. So we suppress activity in hypnosis in the default mode network, and it makes you open to thinking differently about yourself, and that has great therapeutic potential. Absolutely. We'll get into the therapeutic value of this towards the end. Let me just slip something else in here. therapeutic potential. Absolutely. We'll get into the therapeutic value

of this towards the end. Let me just slip something else in here. Very important, your community, your community of psychiatric professionals have been tapped in the legal circles to testify on behalf of or against someone's memory recovered in hypnosis. And this is a fraught industry because of what could be implanted memories and

there was no end of people in the 1970s who under hypnosis would recount being abducted by aliens and having anal probes. So. We went there again, didn't we? Sorry. So it's one thing to get inside my head and show me as a ballerina. It's another thing to get inside my head and say,

tell me what happened in that part of your life that you don't remember. And then we're gonna use that as testimony and put someone in jail because of it. Well, I mean, there's a very key part of that puzzle that is missing, and that is we now know from research that memory, no matter who you are, if you're a human being, your memory sucks.

Well, I can't get that. But I'm saying no matter who you are. I guess I'm going a little back in time. There were decades over which people's testimony that comes out of hypnotic trance where they're remembering something was counted as evidence in court. And so I'm just, where does that all stand right now?

There's a law in California that says that a witness or victim who's been hypnotized cannot testify except under certain circumstances. And the circumstances are that it's done by an independent psychiatrist like me, for example, and it's video recorded. So you can see whether people are implanting information. The idea of implanting information goes far beyond hypnosis. There are studies that show that if you show a movie of a car accident and you ask them,

did you see the stop sign, when it really in fact is a yield sign, about a third of people will say, yeah, I saw the stop sign, when it was not a stop sign. So people can have information suggested or the police can tell where were you when you did this. And there have been cases of people, forget hypnosis, who confessed to crimes

they actually did not. They actually did not. Yeah, but very bad part of the time. So, wait, wait, but, so apart from those, because we know that's the failure of memory, but it's not a failure of memory if under hypnosis someone says they were abducted by aliens. I think it is, because, well, I got a guy here.

Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead. I forgot, yeah, we have an actual psychiatrist who is a expert on this. We got the a guy here. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I forgot. Yeah, we have an actual Psychiatrist who is a expert on this. We got the real guy here. Exactly So are we suggesting that in those cases the alien abduction might have been implanted by the questioner and that would show itself in video Sure, it's possible. Now the alien abduction stuff is not closely tied to hypnosis I mean there were there are a lot of people reported this who were never hit the back That's why I said it's a failure memory Yeah, but the but the psychiatrist John Mack wrote a book with the cases of people who recounted this Under hypnosis so that's what I'm getting just bear with me here

If you are a person who is under the impression, for whatever reason you had an experience, it could have been a very vivid dream, okay? And that has become, in your mind, a true experience that you had. If someone places you under hypnosis, right, and puts you in a state of being very receptive to going back and recalling this memory, you will recall it without them implanting anything.

You'll just relive the very vivid dream that you had. But we have professionals asserting that this recalled memory is evidence of a true thing that happened. And that's, getting back to your court, I mean this is, and it ends up, I mean lives have been ruined by this. Okay, so. Let me finish. I want to make sure he's got everything

he's got to say about this. Well, you're the expert on outer space, so maybe there are aliens out there doing this. Yeah, I'm not authorized to comment further on that. Would you like me to hypnotize you? But I knew John Mack, he was one of my professors when I was training, and I had great regard for him, but I disagree with him completely about this alien abduction stuff.

Most of the people who did it were having light dreams as they woke up and in this transition period from waking up in REM sleep to waking up, they start thinking these things. I think I admired and respected John, but I think he was just flat out wrong about this. But let me give you a counter example. Do you remember the school bus kidnapping in Chowchilla, California? It was this terrible thing where two guys overtook a school bus full of kids, buried the bus in a ditch by some factory, and were trying to hold them for ransom and get money. And for two days, the kids were gone. People were totally scared. And when the school bus driver finally got out,

they got it, they found them, they got them out. And they said, well, who were these guys? He says, I don't know. He said, well, they overtook you in a car. You remember the license plate? And he couldn't remember it. And they hypnotized him. And they said, now you're looking at the car

overtaking the bus, you can see it in the rear view mirror. And he remembered all of the numbers and letters of the license plate for the first time in the wrong order, but he got them and that led to the arrest and conviction of these guys. So there are situations that are the exact opposite of what you talk about with alien abductions and John Mack.

Memory is associational. You know, it's like you go back to your elementary school and you start having memories of things that you hadn't thought about in 40 years, you know, and the lockers look a funny size and all that, and you remember some friend you'd forgotten about. So you can use hypnosis and you can use just interrogation to get people to recall things that otherwise they're not consciously aware of. Doesn't mean it's always right, it doesn't mean it's always wrong. I'm Oli Con Hemraj and I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. What makes people more receptive to a verbal suggestion? In hypnosis or just in general? Under hypnosis, yes. You're narrowing your focus of attention. The premise is simply, I'm going to guide you through an experience you can have, and I'm going to show you that I can do that by helping you feel that one hand is lighter than the other.

And if you pull it down, it wants to go back up. So what I'm asking you to do is narrow your focus and focus more on the experience than some evaluation of the experience and what it means and why you're asking me this and have I ever done this before. You're just immersing yourself in the experience and seeing what happens. And that allows people to accept unusual things sometimes. Interesting, so is it kind of like you're filtering out

the noise that surrounds, you know, suggestion? Yes, you are. You're sort of, you're accepting the premise that you're telling me something interesting and useful and I'm going to follow it and see what happens. Interesting. Now we do that all the time anyway, but we do it in a more complete way in hypnosis.

So what happens if you do not bring someone out of their hypnotic trance? Are they a chicken forever? Or ballerina forever. If people need eggs, they will remain being a chicken. It's, it's, uh, the worst thing that happened is they'd go to sleep and they'd wake up in the ordinary consciousness. But normally people after a few minutes, and I don't do that.

I don't just leave people that way, but they will just bring, they can bring themselves out. You don't, you, you don't lose control, you actually learn to gain control. You can put yourself in our hypnosis app, Reverie. We're teaching people to do this for themselves. You get to hear my mellifluous voice, I ask a question, you respond. But you're doing it for yourself.

And we've had tens of thousands of people doing self-hypnosis and we haven't lost anybody yet. They bring themselves out. Very good to hear. Tell me the name of the app again. Reverie, R-E-V-E-R-I. And just go to reverie.com or the app store, Google Play and download it.

And how does this differ from meditation with regard to how your app treats it, that's what it, specifically? Because they're meditation apps, and they each try to get you introspective, some peaceful introspective state on yourself. Well, hypnosis is, it's there to focus on a problem, change the way you and your body react to it and deal with the problem. So if you're stressed, for example, I'll tell you to first get

your body comfortable. When you get stressed your muscles tighten, your heart rate goes up, you start to sweat and then you notice that you think oh my god this is really bad and you'd feel worse and it's like a snowball effect. What you do in hypnosis is you can get your body floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub or floating in space. Notice that your body is more comfortable and then I help people use an imaginary screen to picture the problem on one side and a possible solution on the other. So you can deal with the part of the stressor that you can do something about, which is how your body reacts to it and then figure out what to do about it.

Meditation is different. Meditation is you're not trying to control or change anything. It's open presence. If you have thoughts or feelings you just let them flow through you like a storm passing by. You will do a body scan and see how different parts of your body are acting and you cultivate compassion. There are good things, there are changes in states of consciousness, but hypnosis is more like an antibiotic and meditation is more like a vitamin.

You just do it every day to be better and feel better. Whereas with hypnosis, you use it to deal with a problem. So if the entry and exit of a hypnotic state is important to, as it were under the Hippocratic Act, do no harm. Self-hypnosis in the hands of the untrained, is that possibly not the best thing or is this a benign situation and state? Let me put it this way. Hypnosis is, for example, highly effective in controlling pain. People, even during surgical procedures, can reduce substantially their pain. We've done randomized clinical trials demonstrating that. Eighty-eight thousand Americans died of opioid overdoses last year alone. And we are just awash in dangerous drugs, fentanyl-laced

pills, and people are dying. Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing a single person. The worst thing that happens with hypnosis is it doesn't work. And so I think it's a tragedy that we are not making better use of our own inner resources to deal with problems like stress, pain, insomnia, smoking, learning to eat better. Or addiction in general. You say smoking but addiction in general. Addiction in general, yes. Addiction in general, you can help with that too.

Are these benefits temporary or can they remain as a permanent mental state for patients? Or do they need ongoing maintenance? Many people, they make the change. We've had people, for example, who learn to stop smoking. I just tell them, for my body, smoking's a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. They think of your body as if it were your baby.

Would you ever put tar and nicotine laced hot air in your baby's lungs? Hell no. So learn to respect and protect your body. One out of four people who use it don't smoke. They stop for at least a year. You just brought to my recollection of a very good friend of mine who I asked him,

hey man, how did you, like you quit cold turkey and you just really quit. Like you're around people who are smoking, you go out and you have a cocktail and you still don't want a cigarette. And I said, what happened? And he said, I did self-hypnosis and it worked. And by the way, what you're talking about,

that was one of the exercises is, for him they were talking about, it was like fresh air. Like think about the air that you breathe and what you want it to be. And it was all about fresh air and his lungs. That was one exercise. Then think about your lungs as something pristine

and untouched and then polluting it. It was pretty involved, but really simple. And to this day, Greg, Greg Charles does not smoke. Shout out to Greg Charles. To this day, and that was like 14 years ago. You'd be a good hypnotist. That's you, you know, what we focus on with hypnotism,

you focus on what you're for, not what you're against. You don't tell people, don't think about purple elephants. That's what they'll think about. Instead, you have an exercise that makes you feel good from the moment you start it. Because you can be a better parent to your own body, just the way you're talking. I had one woman who, she said, I came into your study.

I did not, it didn't want to stop smoking. I've been smoking for 25 years. And she listened to our exercise the first time she said, I don't like it. She went home that night. She did it again. She lit up a cigarette. She looked at it and said, who needs this? She put it out.

She hasn't had a cigarette since her friends can't believe it. 25 years, she smoked. and she said to me, this is some kind of crazy ass voodoo shit and I mean that in a good way. Oh, awesome. Good. Best compliment ever. I got one really off the out there question, okay?

So I'm listening to your voice. Yes. And your voice is melodic, number one, and dulcid. It's low register and it has a very even quality to it. Does the person's, like would Fran Drescher be able to hypnotize us? Look at that woman's voice alone. She made a whole career on that voice.

You're getting very sleepy! Or Jerry Lewis, you know what I mean? Lady with the sleep and the wavin' flavin'. Please. I would say that people with some kinds of voices might be pushing you away instead of pulling you into it. I could see that. Okay. But in general, you know, I have lots of colleagues

and their voices are different, but I do try to speak to people in a way that puts them at ease, that makes them feel calmer and more open to accepting what it is I'm trying to do with them. So David, why doesn't hypnosis have a greater presence in general practice? Yeah.

Why did it just completely evaporate out of the landscape? Is that what your affiliation is attempting to the integrative medicine at Stanford? Well, that's part of it, and we're every, I've been doing this for 50 years now, and I thought at the beginning of my career that if we all just do enough research, we prove that it works, we show how it works

using functional magnetic resonance imaging. FMRI. Mm-hmm. FMRI that people would come around and you know what? That hasn't happened. And I think some people are scared of it, but the other thing is big pharma guys. You know, I don't have money to hire a bunch of ex cheerleaders to go around to doctor's offices and talk them into using hypnosis.

Interesting. Is that how they sell the drugs? of ex cheerleaders to go around to doctors' offices and talk them into using hypnosis. Interesting. Is that how they sell the drugs? I'm a physician, I use medication, there are time and a place for it, but we tend to undervalue any intervention that is not incision, injection, or ingestion. It's not real if you're not using a drug. And that's just wrong. It's just not true.

It is real. We can help people live their lives better and far more safely using hypnosis. And that's why I built Reverie. I thought it's never going to happen the way I've been doing it. And I want to go direct to consumer to have people try it for themselves. Try it. You'll like it. And we've had 850,000 downloads. Right now there are 27,000 people using the app. We're getting four out of five reduce their stress by 20% in the first 10

minutes. We get a 35% reduction in pain over a three month period just using the self-hypnosis. One out of four people stopped smoking and the rest of them reduced their cigarette consumption by half. And it makes sense for the pain. I just, it just dawned on me that as much as pain is a nerve stimulation firing a synapse, it is also happening in your brain, because people will lose a limb, and then still feel excruciating pain in a phantom limb, something that is not there. So at that point-

It's all in the brain. It's all in the brain, yeah. Right, right. But what I'm saying is that's pain that's not even connected to a nerve. So that is 100% in the brain, so clearly you could be able to do something to your brain to manage your pain without even taking a pill.

You're from England, if I may take from my fair lady, the strain and pain lies mainly in the brain. Oh! You're exactly right. Oh, well, Joe and Nick, he's got it! I do believe he's got it! I believe he's got it! Splendid!

Splendid! And now, and now you say it. You got it. Splendid. Splendid. And now, and now you say it. The strain in brain, the strain in the brain. All right. I love it. Okay, don't forget to get tickets for our Broadway show. Yeah. Forgive us.

Fuck. So you mentioned FMRI, you mentioned the FMRI scans. Yeah. How much, because part of it. Let's remind people, so there's MRI where you just lay yourself in there, but the fMRI, the person is actively interacting with you, the professional, and you are seeing

how their thoughts manifest in whatever are your measuring devices. Right, you can see blood circulates throughout the brain, but where the brain is more metabolically active there's a bold signal, blood oxygen level dependent signal, that changes. And so you can see where the most activity is in the brain. So what we see is reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of the pain network too.

And there's another thing that happens. The prefrontal cortex controls activity in the insula, which is a little island of tissue, it means island, in the middle of the front part of the brain. And it's a mind-body conduit. So the brain can control pain perception by regulating activity in the insula and can more accurately perceive pain signals. And so hypnosis actively controls regions of the brain activity in the insula and can more accurately perceive pain signals.

And so hypnosis actively controls regions of the brain that have to do with pain and fear. I got one issue. I got an important issue. Okay? I have you. If I step on a nail, I don't want to hypnotize myself so I don't feel the pain. I want to remove the nail from my foot. I mean, at what point does this distract you from solutions to what's causing the pain,

rather than neurological pathways so that you don't notice the pain anymore? I would say that kind of problem is far less common than the converse problem, which is that you feel every pain, even if you've had it for five years, as if it's something that just happened, as if you just stepped on a nail again. And it's because from an evolutionary point of view, we're pretty pathetic creatures, we're not that big, we're not that strong. If we weren't very sensitive, hypersensitive to being injured, we

probably wouldn't have survived. So we need to protect ourselves from injury. But then there comes a point where you got the message, you've got the nail out. It's not crushing sub-sternal chest pain. You're not having a heart attack. And so that's the much more typical problem. And that's where hypnosis can help. And I'll tell you with the, with the example of the phantom limb pain,

there's a hypnotic treatment for it. And what you do is you hypnotize people and you have them imagine that they're moving the limb they no longer have. And just feeling that they're controlling it, using those nerve roots which are still connected to the brain, actually can help relieve the pain that the people with phantom limb pain have. We took a group of Stanford students, gave them a series of electric shocks to the wrist and measured evoked potential.

What we did was we hypnotized them and told them their hand was in circulating ice water, cool, tingling, and numb. And two of the three components of the evoked response to the shocks were substantially reduced. The first, the P100, just disappeared. So this was within a tenth of a second of the shocks being administered. The recognition there was gone. And the P300, which is a signal that you get

when you're supposed to do something in response to what you're feeling, was half as big. So it wasn't just that they were getting the pain signal and changing it later, they were changing the way the brain received and processed the signal from the beginning. In real time? In real time, just like that instantly. So tenth of a second later, their brain response is different.

So pain, if you think about it, there's input coming in from the body, from the periphery, but then there's the evaluation of the pain and what it means. And so like you were saying, get that nail out of my foot. And if that's what's going on, you want to pay attention to it. But afterwards, as it's healing and you've gotten the nail out, you don't need to pay as much attention to it as our brains often do. And hypnosis can into the salience network? Are there other executive networks within the brain that you could possibly be able

to start to play with? I don't want to say manipulate again because you seem to sort of rail up against that term. The literature suggests, sorry, it can be playful, but the three major networks that are involved in hypnosis are the salience network, turning down activity there, which also involves turning down pain perception. The executive control network, that's mostly the prefrontal cortex that tells the body what to do. And so some of your activity that involves controlling pain also involves activity in the prefrontal cortex that stimulates activity in the insula. We talked about that with brain body thing.

The third is the default mode network that I mentioned, where you reflect on who you are. I sometimes call it the my fault mode network, where you're just thinking about yourself. The more active the prefrontal cortex is, the less active the default mode network is. And that's how you suspend your usual presumptions of who you are and what you are when you're active in hypnosis

So those three networks executive control salience and default mode are the three that are affected by hypnosis So we've got stress pain There's a nice list here of the successes of hypnosis What about phobias and other kind of of clearly irrational behavior that's exhibited among people? And is that just neurodiversity that we accept or should that be fixed in some way? And what has hypnosis done about those? Like I have an irrational fear of being hypnotized.

Okay. How do you treat Chuck? Look up slowly, close your eyes, you're gonna love it. Wait, wait, Chuck, I got a better one than that. It was Steven Wright. He says, I'm getting an MRI to see if I am claustrophobic. That's pretty good, pretty good. Yeah, that was good.

I've treated people. I had a woman who was afraid to have an MRI. You get in that tube There's a clicking of the right the magnet and she had Possibly a tumor in her spinal cord and her neck and was very frightened about it Just couldn't do it and it turned out that she liked the water ski So I had her imagine that what she would she go into the tube She'd look up close her eyes and the the noise of the magnet clicking on and off

was the motorboat. And I just want you to imagine that you're water skiing. And she got through it fine. So you just focus on something else. I'd be afraid to hang out with you. Because I don't know. Yeah. This guy sounds dangerous.

Let me cast that in the positive. We're all pleased to learn that you have these powers and you're using them for the greater good. Because if you were the nemesis to a superhero, you would be completely dangerous. Oh yeah. Right. I mean, what if you had the ability to hypnotize more than one person and you get a mass hypnosis?

That's what I'm saying. Throwing down the villain road. Guys, I'm doing that right now through the app. Oh! Got me. Look at that transparency. Got me. We have transparency.

Through Reverie. People are using Reverie now. Hopefully they're listening to the program for the moment rather than using Reverie, but absolutely. However, all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. But tell me more about, about phobias now. So, uh, flying phobias, for example, um, there are, you know, in the airline industry figures they lose 15% of their business to people who are afraid of flying.

If you want to have a rational phobia, don't get in a car because the, the, the number of deaths per mile traveled is far greater in automobiles than it is in airplanes. Even, even if it's a Boeing airplane. Nicely done. We like that. See what you did there. Yeah. What I tell them is to do three things.

I say, I want you to practice this as you prepare for your trip. Look up, close your eyes, get your body comfortable. When you get in the plane, buckle your seatbelt and then concentrate on number one, floating with the plane. Most people get tense, they fight the chair, they don't like being buckled in. And I just said, imagine you're in a roller coaster ride

and at a fair, you're having a good time, you're floating with the plane. Don't fight the plane float. Secondly, think of the plane as an extension of your body. If you want to get from one place to another, you can walk. If you want to get there faster, you can ride a bicycle. The bicycle is an extension of your body. If you want to get there even faster, you can get in the car. That's an extension of your body. So you're not trapped in a tin can at 35,000 feet. You're using an extension of your

body to do what you want to do. And one of the things you did was you chose an airline that has responsible and trained pilots and he's an extension of your brain. So it's not Southwest. Which one of us is going to get sued first? And the third thing is to think about the difference between a possibility and a probability.

It's always possible the plane's going to crash, but it isn't probable. We tend to confound the probability of something with how vividly we can picture it. So you can picture a plane crash, it freaks you out. That doesn't mean it's likely to happen. All right, real quick, because we're running out of time, which I can't believe. Oh yeah, we just started talking. This is crazy. What?

Okay, so we talked about fears and so forth. Let's go in the opposite direction. Performance. Can you enhance performance through hypnosis? Ooh, good one. Yeah. You bet. You bet. And there are very good athletes who do it.

So the best known one, because what you can do is calm your body, use your muscles only for what they're supposed to be used for excess tension can be a problem that Stanford women's swimming team coach, there's fabulous team. Use your muscles only for what they're supposed to be used for. Excess tension can be a problem. The Stanford women's swimming team coach, their fabulous team. A lot of these young women go to the Olympics. After he electrically shocked them. In the pool. In the pool.

Drop the toaster in. Y'all at Stanford, you know, I don't know what you guys do. Oh. Okay. You guys are terrible. No, they, what the coach discovered that they were swimming faster in practice than they were in meets.

And you would think it would be the opposite. And it turned out when we talked to them, in practice, they were just concentrating on relating to their body, on making their muscles work in coordination as well as they could. When they're in the meet, they're thinking about the girls on either side and sort of competing with them.

Now swimming isn't a contact sport. It doesn't matter what the other swimmers are doing. What matters is what you're doing. I used to wrestle. It really matters what your opponent is doing. Well, in wrestling, yes. Yes, indeed. But not in swimming and not in golf, for example.

Tiger Woods has used hypnosis since he was 14. He hypnotized himself every day when he was playing. He became the ball. Good reference. Be the ball. Be the ball. Be the ball. Yeah.

No, it's got to be a smooth swing. You don't want to think about anything except what you need to do, connect with the ball. So these girls swam faster in meets once they disciplined themselves to practice self-hypnosis and just focus on their relationship with their own body. So there are a number, Michael Jordan used hypnosis to train. He was fairly good at basketball. Is he any good? He's not bad. All right.

Good job. Just to be clear, there's a statistical element here that we should not lose sight of, okay? The good doctor here is not listing all the crappy athletes who also hypnotize themselves and it didn't make a damn bit of difference. I just want to make that clear. No, they were crappy because they didn't learn to use self-harm.

Oh! Gotcha. Gotcha. Hehehehehehe. Wow. So tell us, do you have a social media presence other than your app? On Instagram and Facebook. And the name of the app is the handle?

It's Reverie, R-E-V-E-R-I, yeah, and it's at Reverie. We will totally look and find you online. I hope so, and I hope people will benefit from it. It's, that's my legacy project. I hope so, and I hope people will benefit from it. That's my legacy project. I want that to happen. Yeah, this has been a delight. Just to know that you exist out there, that you're using your powers for good.

For good, right. For the moment. Not being a Marvel villain who takes the masses and turns them against Gotham. Wait, that's DC, I'm sorry. I'm mixing my. No, don't mix. I mixed up. I mixed up.

Gotham, DC. We're in New York, so yeah. Uh-oh. We're in New York, so everything is Gotham to me. Send the mail to Chuck. Don't do it, guys, you know I know better. All right, excellent. Well, thank you, Zer, for joining us.

You're most welcome. And I want to thank you for one other thing, Neil, and that is some of the best hours of my teenage years were in the Hayden Planetarium. Oh my gosh. I loved it. I loved learning about the stars. I bought myself a little lamp

that could project the stars out on the walls and stuff. I'm guessing I wasn't director at the time you were describing here. But I'm pleased to know that I'm carrying forth a legacy that has granted you such fond memories. Yes, indeed, thank you. Hayden Planetarium right here in New York City. We're in my office.

We're here. We're actually here. This is where we are. It's in the office, my office here at the Hayden Planetarium. Stars all over the place. All right, Chuck, Gary. Always a pleasure. We're good here.

Pleasure, we're good. All right, that's another wrap. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson for Star Talk Special Edition. And you're out of the room. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.