Essentials: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Mental & Physical Health & Performance | Dr. David Spiegel

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Spiegel. David, thank you so much for being here.

**David Spiegel** (0:22)
Andrew, my pleasure.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:24)
Can you tell us what is hypnosis?

**David Spiegel** (0:27)
Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. It's something like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera in consciousness, which you see, you see with great detail, but devoid of context. If you've had the experience of getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and enter the imagined world, you're part of the movie, not part of the audience, you're experiencing it, you're not evaluating it, that's a hypnotic-like experience that many people have in their everyday lives.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:53)
If I'm watching a sports game and I'm really wrapped up in the game, but I'm also in touch with how it makes me feel in my body, kind of registering the excitement or the anticipation, is that a state of hypnosis also?

**David Spiegel** (1:07)
To the extent that your somatic, your body experience is a part of the sport event that you're engaged with, I'd say that is a self-altering hypnotic experience. If your physical reactions are distracting you or make you think about something else, that's when it's less hypnotic-like and more just one of a series of experiences.

**Andrew Huberman** (1:30)
I think for most people, when they hear hypnosis or they think about hypnosis, they think of stage hypnosis. They think of somebody with a pendant going back and forth. Could you contrast the sort of hypnosis that you do in the clinical setting with the sort of hypnosis that a stage hypnotist does?

**David Spiegel** (1:46)
I don't like stage hypnosis. You're making fools out of people.
And you're using the fact, and that's what scares people about hypnosis. They think you're losing control. You're gaining control. Self-hypnosis is a way of enhancing your control over your mind and your body. It can work very well. But because it gives you a kind of cognitive flexibility, you're able to shift sets very easily. To give up judging and evaluating the way you usually do and see something from a different point of view, that's a great therapeutic opportunity. But if misused, it could be a danger, too. And that's what scares people about it. It is that very ability to suspend critical judgment and just have an experience and see what happens. It's an ability that, if people learn to recognize and understand it, can be a tremendous therapeutic tool.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:33)
Do we know what sorts of brain areas are active during the induction, the, let's call it the deep hypnosis, and then what's shutting off or changing as people exit hypnosis?

**David Spiegel** (2:45)
The first is turning down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. So the DACC is in the central front middle part of the brain, as you well know. And it's part of what we call the salience network. It's a conflict detector. So if you're engaged in work and you hear a loud noise that you think might be a gunshot, that's your anterior cingulate cortex saying, hey, wait a minute, there's a potential danger over there, you better pay attention to it. So it compares what you're doing with what else is going on and helps you decide what to do. And as you can imagine, turning down activity in that region make it less likely that you'll be distracted and pulled out of whatever you're in. So two other things happen when people are hypnotized. One is that that DLPFC has higher functional connectivity with the insula. Another part of the salience network, it's a part of the mind-body control system, sensitive to what's happening in the body, it's part of the pain network as well. But it's also a region of the brain where you can control things in your body that you wouldn't think you could. For example, we did a study years ago where we took people who were highly hypnotizable, hypnotized them, and told them to imagine, we went on an imaginary culinary tour.
So they would eat their favorite foods. And we found that they increased their gastric acid secretion like by 87%. So their stomach was acting as though it was about to get, I mean, there was one woman, it was so vivid for her that halfway through she said, let's stop, I'm full, you know, eating these imaginary. They never eat any actual food. No.