Hypnosis, Brain Hacking, & Mental Mastery - Dr David Spiegel - #985

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What do you think most people misunderstand about hypnosis, what it is, how it works?

**David Spiegel** (0:08)
Well, there are sort of offsetting misunderstandings. They either think it's really dangerous, or it's useless, or maybe it's both.
And the biggest fear and misunderstanding is that it's losing control. And I'm here to tell you that hypnosis is a way of teaching people how to enhance control of mind and body. And so the very thing that people see, you know, I don't like stage hypnosis very much. I don't like making fools out of people. But when you see the football coach dancing like a ballerina and you think, what the hell is going on here? You're watching somebody who's willing to let go of his old assumptions of who he is and what he is and should be, and trying out being different. And one of the great things about hypnosis is you can try out being different. And sometimes it works in a hurry. And that's what I do with my patients and that's what we do with Reveri.

**Chris Williamson** (1:02)
Is there a marked difference in what's going on in the brain of somebody who's dancing like a ballerina on stage at a Sandals Resort in Jamaica compared with, is it the same mechanism?

**David Spiegel** (1:19)
Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (1:19)
Right.

**David Spiegel** (1:19)
Okay. It is the same mechanism. It'd be hard to do an MRI scan of the football coach, but we've done it with Stanford students and other volunteers who are high in hypnotizability. I can talk about that later. It makes a difference. When they're going into a hypnotic state, and we see three things going on in their brain using functional MRI. MRI is a great way to get precise anatomy, but also activity in very specific regions of the brain. What we see is that the more hypnotized they are, the more they turn down activity in a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. That's like the cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends, in the middle of the base of your brain, and the front part, the dorsal region, is a region that we call part of the salience network. It does pattern matching, and if something goes wrong, the salience network fires off. You hear a loud noise and you get hijacked, your attention gets hijacked.

**Chris Williamson** (2:17)
Interrupts.

**David Spiegel** (2:18)
Right. That has survival value. Sometimes you really need to be interrupted by a sudden event. In hypnosis, you allow yourself to sink more deeply into the focus of your attention because you're turning down the alarm system. You're turning down the part of your brain that would say, hey, maybe you ought to be doing something else.

**Chris Williamson** (2:37)
Not dancing like a ballerina.

**David Spiegel** (2:38)
Exactly. That reduction in activity is also something that has to do with stress and anxiety. That when you're more stressed and anxious, your salience network is hyperactive. So hypnosis is an automatic reduction in stress that you can see in people's brains. The second thing that happens in the brain is you get higher functional connectivity. That means when one brain region is active, the other one is active when the other one isn't. Between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that's the part of my brain I'm hopefully using right now, talking to you, where you plan and execute activities that you have planned, and a part of the brain called the insula. Insula is Latin for island. It's a little island of tissue in the middle of the front part of the brain. It's the mind-body conduit. And so it allows the brain to have more precise control over things that are going on in the body, and it increases interoception, the capacity to feel what's going on in your body. So that's the second thing. So less anxiety, less interruption of your concentration, better control over your body. And the third part is inverse functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the back of the cingulate cortex, the posterior cingulate. That's part of what we call the default mode network. It's what your brain is doing when it isn't doing much else. When you're just sitting around, don't have any work to do, and just pondering things like, who am I, what am I, am I as good as my mother hoped I would be, am I letting people down, or am I pleasing them? I call it the my fault mode network. But it's the part of the brain that sort of enforces expectations of who you are and what you are. And to the extent that you're engaged in a hypnotic experience, you're turning down activity there. So that's how the football coach can do that. He's just not thinking about the fact that his team would laugh at him if they saw him, that kind of thing. And so that combination, better mind-body control, reduced salience activation, and suppression of the part of your brain that decides who you should be and what you should be, is what helps you do so much in hypnosis. Because you're connecting better with your body, you're controlling it better, you're not worried about what the implication might be, and in fact, you're interrupting that circuit that makes somatic arousal, body arousal, increase when you're emotionally aroused. So you can cool off your body and then handle stress better.