Learn How to HACK Your Mind with Hypnosis: The Ultimate Cognitive Upgrade : 1218

There's something sort of surgical about hypnosis. It's a state of highly focused attention. You can make a big difference even in the first session.

You're twice as fast at responding to reality than you are when you're not hypnotized.

And he said, you'll have to stop doing this. It's dangerous.

Can you hypnotize me on the podcast real quick?

Sure.

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. When you hear about hypnotherapy, what's the first thing that comes to mind for you? Do you have that, oh, man, this seems like a stage magician trick. Or do you think maybe this is something that can work or maybe you've tried it? Well, I think there's a huge amount going on inside your mind, inside your body that you're not supposed to see. And hypnotherapy is a well studied science that can give you techniques and give you access to things that otherwise just wouldn't be available. But you don't have to believe me. And if you do, thank you. How about we learn from Dr. David Spiegel, who's a world leading expert in hypnotherapy who's going to teach us what works now. He is a world renowned psychiatrist and a professor at a little school you might have heard of called Stanford University, where he leads groundbreaking research in mind body medicine and hypnosis. And I love psychiatry because it has one foot in the emotional world and one foot in the hard medical world. So it's the one medical profession that really moves seamlessly between the two in a way that's unusual. David has spent decades studying how hypnosis and mental states can directly influence your health, including how you manage pain, how you manage stress, even big stuff like cancer. And we're talking decades of research about what the mind can do and what you can do to change things in your life. Dr. David Spiegel, it is an honor to have you on the show.

Thank you, Dave. It's an honor to be here with you. I'm delighted.

What made you interested in hypnotherapy when you first decided to do something relatively dangerous academically?

Well, that's a good point. It was, but it's something of a genetic illness in my family, Dave. Both of my parents were psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and my father was getting his analytic training at the beginning of World War II. And at the end of one analytics session, his analyst said, herb, would you like to learn hypnosis and My father wondered what he had said wrong during the session because analysts said very little. And it turned out that there was a Viennese refugee named Gustav von Aschaffenburg who had been chased out of Vienna by the Nazis, wanted to serve in the US Military but couldn't. He was a forensic psychiatrist, and he'd had smallpox as a kid, and he had a smallpox scar right in the middle of his forehead. And he noticed as he was interviewing these prisoners, he was doing forensic work, that some of them would just sort of close their eyes and nod off. And he began to explore what that was. And he realized that some of them, in the stress of the interview and watching him, we're going into a state of hypnosis. So he learned about it, he started to use it, and he taught my father and a number of young army doctors how to use it. My father used it for combat stress reactions, for pain control. And he helped soldier who had lost the ability to walk, even though he had not been wounded in the back or in the neck. And it turned out as they used hypnosis to relive what had happened, they were ordered to evacuate by their commanding officer. They were trapped. He saw a soldier who is this soldier, saw another soldier who was just lying and not moving and thought, I should stop and try and save him. But he was ordered to leave. He left. He felt terribly guilty about that. And my father had him relive this. And he said. My father said to him, I want you to notice something. I understand that you feel terrible about what happened to your buddy, but notice which way his feet are pointing. And he looked at it, and the feet were pointing down. And my father said he was likely dead anyway, so all you would have done is gotten yourself killed and you would not have saved your buddy. And after that, he came out of hypnosis and he started walking again. And so my father was impressed by the power of hypnosis. Well, he went back to his analytic training, and Freud started using hypnosis when he first began working. His studies in history are all involving hypnosis. And he wrote in his autobiography why he gave it up. He said, I was tracing a patient, her attacks of pain back to their traumatic origins. He. He said, and suddenly the patient opened her eyes and threw her arms around my neck. And he wrote, I was modest enough not to attribute this event to my own irresistible personal attractiveness. I discovered the mysterious element beneath hypnosis. It was transference. And so he. He decided to give up hypnosis. And so my father was Advised at first, you know, you shouldn't. Freud gave it up, why should you use it? But he had an interesting habit of calling up patients after he was done treating them to see how they were doing. And he found out that many of the patients he'd used hypnosis with were doing better than the ones he had done much longer weekly psychoanalysis with. And he decided to keep doing it. And so the dinner table conversation was interesting. I got to watch him his movies of patients undergoing hypnosis. And so when I got to medical school, I thought, well, the least I can do is take a hypnosis course. So I did. And I still was undecided. I was thinking about being a surgeon for a while. I enjoyed doing things that fix people right away. And you know, Dave, there is something sort of surgical about hypnosis. You know, either you fix it or you don't. But you get a story in a hurry. And my first lesson in this was on my pediatrics rotation when the nurse said, spiegel, your next patient's in room 341. She's in status asthmaticus. So I walk in, I hear the wheezing down the hall. I walk in, pretty 15 year old, knuckles white, bolt upright in bed, struggling for breath. Her mother standing there crying. Subcutaneous epinephrine had been tried twice, didn't work. The next step was general anesthesia and starting her on steroids. But I had just taken this hypnosis course, so I said, well, would you like to learn a breathing exercise? And she nods. So I get her hypnotized. And then I start to sweat because I realize we haven't gotten to asthma in the course. I didn't know what to say, so I said to her something very subtle and clever. I said, each breath you take will be a little deeper and a little easier. And within 15 minutes she's lying back in bed, she isn't wheezing anymore, and her mother had stopped crying. The nurse ran out of the room and my intern came looking for me. And I thought he was going to say, good for you, Spiegel. What did you do? And he said, I want you to know 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 is not one of them. And her mother was standing right next to me when I did it. And he said, you'll have to stop doing this, it's dangerous. And I said, you're Going to give her general anesthesia and put her on steroids. And you think my talking to her is dangerous? It turns out that in fact there is no such law in Massachusetts. And he said, you better stop because. And I said, well, tell you what, 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 is not true. And so he stopped off. And over the weekend there was a council of war with the attending and the chief resident. And they came back and said to me they had an idea they never tried before. They said, let's ask the patient.

How dare they?

Yeah. And she said, oh, I like this. So I kept doing it with her. And I thought that anything that can help a patient that much, that fast, with no risk and violate a non existent law in Massachusetts has to be worth looking into. And that was the first of about 7,000 people I've used hypnosis with in my career. I just decided that if you can help someone that intensively, that quickly, that safely, it is worth looking into. And hypnosis, Dave, is actually the oldest western conception of a psychotherapy. It's the first time that a talking interaction between a doctor and a patient was thought to have therapeutic potential. And I thought, I've got to look into this further. And I have been ever since.

Did you ever think about hypnotizing that chief doctor to see.

Good idea. I wish I had thought of it. Maybe I did, actually, because they came around.

And I'm thinking back to Freud too. If he was using hypnosis, which I didn't realize, I would have wanted him to hypnotize someone and say, it's just a cigar, and see what that would have. I think the universe would have imploded.

Right, right. Might have worked.

Is it possible to hypnotize a person without their knowledge or consent?

Yes, it probably is. In fact, one of the interesting things is that I. Some of the ways I help people with hypnosis is to teach very hypnotizable people how sometimes their problem is not getting into hypnotic states, but getting out of them. I had a highly hypnotizable graduate student who said, you know, I think I'm a disciple in search of a teacher. I'm always taking in other people's viewpoints and suspending my own. And so I actually think one way hypnosis can help people is recognizing it's a state of highly focused attention, like getting so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching the movie, you enter the imagined world. The movie starts to seem real. And highly hypnotizable people are often very empathic people who can see things very easily from the other person's point of view. And if it's a good other person, that's a good thing. But it isn't always so. We're social creatures, we're susceptible of social influence. And many highly hypnotizable people have to maintain their own sense of perspective and recognize that they may be tuning into someone. But that doesn't mean they should always keep that channel open.

I went to a neuromarketing symposium at, at the Stanford campus. This has to be like eight or 10 years ago. And the chief marketing officer for Monsanto was there and a lot of other big executives from giant companies, and they were all looking at, well, what are the brainwaves of people when they look at advertising? And how can we manipulate the advertising to change the brain waves when someone's hypnotized, what happens inside their brain?

Well, there are three things that we find going on in the brain. We've taken high and low hypnotizable people, put them into the MRI scanner while they're in hypnosis, and then in comparison conditions, and we find three things happen. They turn down activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate gyrus. It's like a C on its side in the middle of the brain. And the dorsal region is part of what we call the Salience Network. It's a part of the brain that's our alarm system. You hear something or you see something, you hear a loud noise and you think, what is that? That's your pattern matching Salience Network saying, hey, that could be a threat. Better pay attention. You turn down activity there, so you basically reduce the threshold. That would distract you from what you're paying attention to. And that allows you to more fully absorb yourself in whatever it is you are paying attention to. You're less likely to get derailed from it. The second thing that goes on is that you have increased functional connectivity between the executive control network, the prefrontal cortex, and a little island of tissue insula in the middle of the frontal cortex. That is a mind body conduit. So it helps the brain control the body and helps the brain read what's going on in the body. We call that interoception, and that's variable. So right now, Dave, you've got sensations in your body touching the chair you're sitting in. But I hope you were not aware of those sensations until I mentioned it to you. Is that. Am I right about that?

It would be overwhelming to be constantly aware of signals that aren't very useful without your focus attention.

Exactly. And the more focused your central attention is, the more likely these other signals are to be dissociated, put outside of conscious awareness. And that's another thing that happens within the brain. The third is inverse connectivity between the executive control network, the prefrontal cortex and. And the posterior cingulate cortex. We call that the default mode network. That's a part of the brain that is active when you're not doing much else. And what you do with that is think about yourself, who you are, what people expect of you, what people think of you, what your mother told you to do when you were a kid. So I sometimes call it the my fault mode network. Oh my gosh.

There's a chapter in. I have a book that's coming out in Q1 where I talk about the default mode network.

And I wish I would have been.

Able to quote you in it.

So good.

The microphone network. Okay.

And so what you can do is suppress activity there. And it's interesting that that's a part of the brain where activity is also suppressed by psychedelic drugs that they use, sort of dissolution of self. Well, in hypnosis it's suspension of self. And so the part of hypnosis that scares people the most is, is the awful stage show where, you know, they, they made the football coach dance like a ballerina. And that's. I don't like making fun of people, but it does underscore a point. It's a basis for change. You can try out being different and see what it feels like. And as a, as a psychotherapist, I find that a wonderful opportunity to help people see the same situation from a very different point of view. And hypnosis helps you to do that. So we understand a lot about what's going on in the brain that explains how hypnosis works.

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Yeah, I think it does. I think it vaguely hypnotizing it may be. I mean, people feel themselves kind of caught up in something and a lot of the algorithms that are set up are designed to keep dragging you along and give you something to focus your attention on and stop reflecting on who you are and what you are or change who you think you are. Not always for the better in the way a lot of social media works.

Unfortunately, I've spent about six months of my life with electrodes glued to my head doing advanced state Neurofeedback well, and learned how to consciously summon different big brain states throughout the whole brain. Things like alpha brainwaves or theta brainwaves. And I'm curious which brain waves are dominant when someone's hypnotized.

Left frontal theta tends to be the most, the best signature of what's going on in hypnosis, it's a sign of active brain activity. You're not going to sleep, you get a lot of alpha, then it's more higher frequency theta.

Okay, so left frontal theta in combination with alpha or beta and the rest of the brain. So you're still awake?

Yeah. You're still awake for sure. Yeah.

How would you approach it? Let's say that someone has a PTSD like response, like they're just chronically activated and they don't necessarily know what the trauma is that's causing this. How does hypnosis work in something like that?

Well, what you do with hypnosis, you know, if you think about it, one of the symptoms of PTSD is flashbacks. You know, you relive it. You don't just remember it, you relive it as if it were happening again. It has that sense of reality. So you dissociate your awareness of your current status and situation. And that's why, you know, since the major psychotherapies for PTSD are exposure based therapies, you know, you relive under controlled circumstances, aspects of the trauma and try and alter your perspective on them. So you might wonder, why don't flashbacks cure ptsd? Well, they don't because people feel re. Traumatized, reattached by the traumatic situations. Whereas the situation in hypnosis is one where you help people to, in a controlled way relive aspects of the traumatic experience, but see it from a different point of view. And that can help people experience their trauma differently. So I had a woman who had been raped by an adult, not in her family and as a child, and she just was chronically depressed in her life and just couldn't carry on. She did carry on, but was always depressed. I had her in hypnosis picture herself right after the assault had occurred. She starts to cry. And I said, I want you to imagine you're your own mother. And what would you say to yourself then? And I said, is this her fault? And she starts to cry harder. And she says, I'm stroking her hair, I'm stroking her hair. And she came out of it sort of shaken and it was the first time she had thought of it from that point of view. She'd lived her life as children will do. They don't understand independent causation. And this is true for adults too. They find a way to blame themselves for an event they didn't control because most people would rather feel guilty than helpless. And so it's like that's some big wisdom right there. And you know, you think you could replay the tape and it would turn out differently and all that being made into an object, that's what trauma is about. You're made into an object and it feels awful. And she called me a week later and she said, my psychiatrist wants to know what you did to me because I'm not depressed anymore. Wow. And my friends don't recognize me. So there are times when you can use it suspending that default mode network to reconceptualize what happened. See the same events from a different point of view. And that's where trying out being different can have tremendous power.

I've had several episodes of the show where we talk about EMDR and for listeners, the eye movement with desensitization response reprogramming.

Right, Reprogramming.

And this feels kind of like hypnosis. You move your eyes back and forth so then you can go back and re experience a trauma from a different perspective. And it can really help people just not be triggered by something. What's the difference between EMDR and hypnosis?

Well, I'm not entirely sure. You know, if you think about the oldest conception of how you hypnotize someone, it was the dangling watch, right? And emdr, I think in some people who are hypnotizable, and that's not everyone, may induce a kind of hypnotic state. Although studies of EMDR show that it can be effective, but it's not necessarily related to the eye movements. There have been studies which disentangle those two and you can remove the eye movement part of it and still get a therapeutic response. So I think it may induce hypnotic like states in some people who are hypnotizable.

If you weren't dealing with a specific trauma and you wanted to hypnotize someone so that they could overcome the self limiting belief or live longer, you know, do something special. How would you induce the state of hypnosis?

It's very simple. It's easy to do. There's no magic about it. It doesn't take a long time. You don't have to count upstairs and downstairs. I just ask people to look up slowly, close your eyes, take a deep breath, let the breath out, let your eyes relax. But keep them closed and let your body float. Imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. And then I often ask them to touch one hand with the other and let that hand feel light and buoyant and float up in the air. And it becomes a way of showing to yourself that you're changing how your body feels. And that's it. It's no big deal.

So when you close your eyes and look up like that, you're doubling or tripling alpha, especially in the front half of the brain, which creates that relaxed state. A lot of people think alpha is this amazing state. I'm like, just close your eyes and look up. You got alpha and you got it right. But that's a nice way to elevate that. But you did something different there, too. It kind of reminds me of some of the things that Stephen Porges talks about, or even one of the voice coaches I've had on the show. Your voice changed and you got more resonant, and you went into sort of hypnosis mode. And I could actually feel a change in my biology when you did that. Are you consciously modulating your voice when you do that, or is that just years of practice?

Well, I would say it's by. At this point, it's more just years of practice. I do want to convey with my tone, you know, I'm not yelling at you. Go into this state because that will arise, you know, that will arouse sympathy. Right. Get relaxed. So I want my words and tone of voice to be consistent with focusing and relaxing and getting your body more comfortable. So I want it to be soothing rather than arousing. Yes, but I don't think it's necessary, but I think it helps.

I've also talked about Dr. Sarno's work on pain perception in the body and how sometimes just a conversation without hypnosis can radically change the amount of pain someone feels. What do you do in hypnosis that changes the body's perception of pain? And how does it work?

We've studied this quite a bit, and, you know, if you think about it, pain is a combination. This. The strain in pain lies mainly in the brain. And so there are signals coming in through the lateral spinothalamic tract, through the thalamus to somatosensory cortex that convey tissue damage or pain signals coming from your body. But the way you process those signals has a lot to do with how much pain you feel and what it feels like. And so pain is a perfect example of the combination of sensory input with brain processing of those signals. And so we did a study with a bunch of Stanford undergrads. We had them hypnotized and not hypnotized. We administered electric shocks to their wrist and we measured the somata, the sensory event related potential coming from those shocks. And there are three wave points. There's the P100, which is within a tenth of a second P, and then the P200, and then the P300 which is usually bigger. And it's the reaction to the signal. So it's task relevance or surprise. And we found that when we hypnotized them, the P100 disappeared. Same shock, same signals coming in. The brain was not reacting at all within a tenth of a second of the signals being administered.

Wow.

The P300, which usually is a response to surprise or task relevance, was only half as big. So the brain could literally modulate the same signals and make them partially disappear within a tenth of a second.

I'm going to translate P300D for just a second. As if you read Smarter, not harder. My last book, I talk about your meat operating system and we talk about that third of a second, roughly 350 milliseconds. That's our normal response time on reality. And how when you're a teenager, it might be a quarter second. If you're a cat, it's 30 milliseconds. They're 10 times faster than us. And that, how that gets longer as you age and as your brain gets healthier, it gets smaller. But what we're hearing here is that when you're hypnotized, you're twice as responsive to, or at least twice as fast at responding to reality than you are when you're not hypnotized. That's kind of crazy.

Well, it is. But you know, there are a lot of things this machine, this three pound organ on the top of our shoulders can do that we're not fully aware of. And hypnosis is one naturally occurring state and variant in how the brain functions functions. You know, the brain doesn't come with a user's manual. So there are a lot of things it can do that we not be, we may not be fully aware of. And you have beautifully explained one aspect of that, that brain processing has a lot more range and variation than we usually give it credit for.

When you look at someone like Bruce Lee, he's playing ping pong with nunchucks. Clearly his P300 was really ridiculously fast. And you look at Danica Patrick, who's been on the show, these race car drivers have a very, very fast response time. Is it possible to use hypnosis to permanently make someone's P300D lower?

Well, I think it's certainly possible for people to learn how to do that. And whether it becomes habitual, I think it probably does. I've done studies with metastatic breast cancer patients in which we give them weekly group psychotherapy to help them face their illness and deal with it. And we teach them self hypnosis. At the end of each session. They learn how to filter their hurt out of the pain, to react to the pain as something that they can manage and that the pain in their chest doesn't necessarily mean that the cancer is spreading and make them feel more anxious and hurt more. And we found that by the end of the year, the women randomized to that condition had half the pain the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication. So yes, after a while, I think it becomes a habit and you just learn. You either learn to do it or consciously, or you just, you naturally learn to manage the pain differently, to see it not as something that makes you suffer and feel anxious, but something that you can control.

This is really fascinating. For me, my P300D last time I measured it was around a quarter second, so substantially faster than most people my age. But I also, I do all the brain stuff you could do. I'm into longevity and do all the gene therapy and everything else, so who knows what all did it. But I'm. I'm very interested in what happens with pain perception. I used to be in a lot of pain just because of arthritis and chronic fatigue syndrome and all the stuff like that I used to have. And I have noticed that how the body responds to pain before I can think about it is trainable where like, oh, it's just a signal versus it's a signal with doom associated with it. When it just becomes a signal, it becomes okay, it's just not a big deal.

That's right.

How many hypnosis sessions does it take to help people who are in chronic pain feel better?

Well, they can start out learning in session one how to handle it and then go into a state of self hypnosis to reinforce that. And, and we've developed a self hypnosis app called Reverie that teaches people to do self hypnosis, to learn to filter their hurt out of the pain, to imagine they're in a warm bath or in an icy lake, whatever actually physically gives them relief and to reinforce that and do it anytime they want. They get to hear my mellifluous voice and. And practice it. So it's something that you can make a big difference. Even in the first session. I had a woman who was seven months pregnant, had terrible lower back disease. So as the baby grew, the pain got worse. She couldn't take opioids or other painkillers. And I had her imagine in hypnosis that she was in her warm bath at home, which did give her pain relief, and the pain went from seven out of 10 to three in a couple of minutes.

Wow.

And she opened her eyes and told me that, but she looked angry. And I said, what are you angry about? She said, why in the hell are you the last doctor I got sent to instead of the first? And so, you know, they had tried implants, you know, stimulators and all that just didn't work, but this did. So it can make a big difference in a hurry. And people use reverie to control pain.

When I'm working with larger groups of people or even in neurofeedback sessions, I oftentimes say, you have the ability to play back in your body any sensation you've ever experienced, a good or a bad one, sort of. If you just know you can do that. You can play back gratitude, you can play back love or awe or something like that. Is that part of what's happening inside hypnosis? You're saying, go back to this feeling and play it back. Do you have to be. Is it doing?

Yeah, I think the thing about it is because of the intensity of focus and the dissociation, you can not just remember, but relive experiences. And they can be good experiences, bad experiences, but it just enhances the intensity and specificity of what it is you're thinking or feeling about. And so it comes. Not just. It's not a matter. Oh, yeah, I was there and he said that, but I was there. I felt this way. I remember what it felt like. It feels good to me to relive that experience so it becomes a more intense and focused kind of remembering.

Do psychedelics help with hypnosis or harm hypnosis?

Well, I. I don't know that it's been studied in any formal way. I don't know of any studies of that. I would say the CIA did.

I mean.

Oh, well. Oh, that was horrible. They, you know. Yeah, I. The. The father of a colleague of mine was in one of those CIA experiments. Oh, no. And they were slipping him psychedelics without telling him they were doing it. So he thought he was going crazy and he jumped out a window and killed himself.

Wow.

So, yeah, there were some pretty awful things done. But I think psychedelics, what they tend to do, they're. They're really interesting. They do seem to shut down activity in the default mode network. And that's how you have these kind of rediscovery experiences or just give up your old assumptions and just feel things. There was some very interesting work done with psychedelics with cancer patients. And I would have thought, having led groups of women who were dying of cancer, it's a tough time and you want to be in control. But there are many patients who said, you know, for the first time, I really feel like I'm facing my death. I'm facing non being, what it means not to be. But I'm also recognizing what a miracle it is that I ever got to be in the first place. And so when I'm gone, I'll be gone. But I'm very grateful for the life I've had. So they often came out of psychedelic experiences feeling transformed and they didn't need it. Every week, you know, maybe one or two of those experiences, and they felt different. And that's the way women in my support groups used to feel. They'd said, you know, the way I feel about death now is that it's like looking into the Grand Canyon when you're afraid of heights. You know, if you fell, it would be a disaster. But you feel better about yourself because you're able to look. I can't say I feel serene, but I can look at it. And so I think there is something profound that happens that overlaps to some extent. But psychedelics sufficiently disorganize your prefrontal cortex. You know, the part that says do this and then do that, that I think it's harder to control. And whether you could combine the two, I'm not sure.

I've seen a couple of studies of people facing death doing, in particular, psychedelic mushrooms in a single dose. Just a profound sense of peace. And if we're talking about compassionate use, hospice is a great time for mushrooms to be available when you know the end is coming, because they'll just bring you more peace. And having a peaceful death is a lot better than having a scary death. You know.

I think it can be. It's a profound time and a time when people need help. It's not for everyone, but for some people it might help. And certainly in preparation, it can be very helpful.

I recently launched, as far as I can tell, the world's first psychedelic Assisted neurofeedback offering where people come up to my clinic in Seattle and we're using ketamine because it's legal and all. And you could say it's not really a psychedelic, it's a dissociative. But it has psychedelic like effects and similar default mode network things. And looking at brainwaves of people there, what we see is they usually have these profound spikes of gamma and they have a sense of awe and gratitude that's just so big that it tends to help them both with neuroplasticity and with just reprogramming things that were triggers, whereas I couldn't experience that and that trigger be that big of a deal. And so seeing more brain waves is interesting. I just wish that they would make mushrooms legal so that I could do that as well. Because that would be interesting.

Yeah, it would be. Certainly people do, yeah, do seem to get a different take on the things that they've been struggling with, for sure.

So that's like the electrical activity. I'm also on Dr. Daniel Amen's board of directors who's done a lot of neuroimaging. And for listeners, neuroimaging is a picture of what's going on in there. And electrical activity is more a picture of what is firing, but not what's it look like. And what do we know about FMRI or SPECT scans and what happens in the brain during hypnosis? So this is metabolic activity versus electrical activity.

Well, the data I was talking about earlier involving turning down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate and inverse connectivity between the prefrontal cortex. That's FMRI data.

It is. Okay.

And so it's showing changes in the blood oxygen level dependent activity in different regions of the brain. And it is clearly related to the electrical activity. But the FMRI data is much more specific to specific parts of the brain. EEG is more throughout the brain. And so the two are related, but they're not the same thing.

And so the changes you talked about were primarily around FMRI imaging. And then when we're looking at electrical activity, we're talking about shifts in certain parts of the brain from alpha to theta and things like that.

That's correct. That's correct, yes.

When I look at the strategies for cognitive enhancement, which was a topic of one of my, my big books, I tend to focus on mitochondrial function and on bdnf, which for listeners, this is brain derived nootropic factor which causes neuroplasticity. Does hypnosis raise BDNF or mitochondrial activity?

It's a good question and I don't know the answer to that. It might, well, I'd say more generally there, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together. And it is the case that using the brain in different ways can lead to pathways that more reliably do that. So I think you can train your brain to make better use of its resources. So I don't know of any evidence of that. But there, you know, clearly there is neuroplasticity. We understand a good deal about how the brain triggers synaptic growth or removes synapses and replaces them with others. And that's a way in which the way you use the brain can change how it works. So it's long term potentiation, long term depression are ways in which synapses are built or removed. And that if we use the brain consistently in certain ways that those pathways are more likely to, to be activated and built.

I do, just hypothetically, it seems like increasing BDNF levels. And you can do this with supplements or some pharmaceuticals or even just with electricize before hypnosis would make the hypnosis work better. But it sounds like we don't really have any studies of that.

I don't know of any studies of that. And we know that hypnotizability itself is a very stable trait. It's surprisingly stable. Most children, most 8 year olds are in trances most of the time. You know, you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you. They play and work are the same thing for kids. It's a shame we make them into adults. But as you go through adolescence, you learn to value reason more and experience less. And by the time you're 21, your hypnotizability is pretty well set. And about 20% of the adult population is very hypnotizable. They just go into spontaneous, hypnotic like states all the time. 20% are not at all hypnotizable. They're, we call them the researchers. They're critical and judged and evaluate everything. And about 60% are somewhere in the middle where they'll have the experiences and then judge them. And that is as stable a trait as IQ.

In my 20s I was one of those impossible to hypnotize people. And as I learned to relax and to change my states, I can be hypnotized. Now I just have to relax. And it probably the, the trait is relatively sad, but I think it's a skill that people who are hard to hypnotize, they probably can learn how to do it, it just, it was an absurd amount of time watching what's going on in there and seeing what I can do to shift it around.

Yeah, well, it can depend. And you may have been someone who was sort of low hypnotizable, but yeah, were able to get into it and learn to enjoy it, which is great.

Yeah, I was probably someone who lived a lot in my head and had a lot of defenses which meant I couldn't hit it. But perhaps it's in there. Just learned how to access that. If you're using a protein powder, you need to hear this. The Clean Label project recently tested 160 top selling protein powders in the US and they found that nearly half exceeded the Prop 65 threshold for lead. Oops. That's why I love Puree's PW1 whey protein. The clean label project does third party testing on every single batch against over 200 contaminants. Puree is the only clean protein brand in the US with a Clean Label Project transparency certification. And every bag has a QR code so you can scan it and see what's in it. And of course it comes from pasture raised cow's milk with no hormones, GMOs, no pesticides, and it doesn't have the metals, pesticides and harmful toxins that are in a lot of common protein powders. So switch to PW1 right now. Listeners can get 20% off the already discounted subscriptions. You'll get almost a third off the price. Go to puri.com Dave and use code Dave. That's P-U-O-R-I.com Dave the latest research in quantum physics proves, using math and hard science, that the world around us is actually made up out of quantum energy. We just can't see it because we're in human bodies that aren't supposed to see it. But it does make up all of life force. And that's something that can be interrupted by EMFs. Stress, even toxins disrupt your body's ability to interact with the quantum reality all around us. Leela is a company that infuses quantum energy and frequencies into physical products. And I was a little skeptical when I first heard this. But then I looked at their 48 plus placebo controlled studies and this is very real. One study found that their technology increases ATP by 29% and, and it neutralizes the negative effects of EMFs on our biology, improves heart rate variability, which is a hard measure of resilience, and it improves blood flow in minutes. They make clothing, they make the Heel capsule, which is a pendant that you see me wearing. And they make the quantum block, which I have in my living room. You don't have to believe in quantum energy to feel it or to measure the results in 48 studies. So go to Leela Q.com Dave and get 10% off your first purchase. That's L E-E-L-A Q.com Dave what do we know about hypnotherapy and sleep quality?

Well, hypnosis can be very helpful in getting people to sleep, because to get to sleep, hypnosis is not sleep. But to get to sleep, you have to turn down activity in your sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight system, and turn up activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest system, right? Sleep occurs under parasympathetic, not sympathetic, dominance. And that's why your alarm goes off. You awake, your heart rate's gone up. And so hypnosis can be a very effective way of learning to control what's going on in your body first. It's a good stress management tool. When you're stressed or if you're trying to go to sleep and you can, you think, oh, my God, I gotta get up in five hours and I have so much to do tomorrow. And. And the more you think that, the harder it is to get to sleep. So what you want to do is use hypnosis to help your body affiliate with situations that give you rest, that give you comfort. So you imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. And then if you're having thoughts, you try to disconnect the thoughts or memories from physiological arousal so you're still floating in the bathtub. Picture that task you have to do tomorrow, but don't think about actually doing it. Just think about what you're gonna get done tomorrow. Don't judge it, don't fight it, don't evaluate it. Pretend you're watching your own movie, but focus on keeping your body floating and comfortable. And we had a reporter for the London Times who was doing a story on hypnosis, and she had terrible insomnia. And she was sort of skeptically trying this out. And she said, the first time I tried reverie didn't work, didn't do anything. So I tried it again, and I woke up, you know, I thought, oh, God, it's the middle of the night and, you know, another night without sleep. And she said it was 7:19. I had gotten a full night's sleep for the first time. In a year. And so people surprise themselves with how. Just learning to take charge of how your body is reacting to stress can help you get your body calm enough that it allows you to get to sleep.

I taught my kids a body scan meditation when they were very young. Pay attention to your toes. What do they feel like? Thin your ankles, thin your calves, your knees. Just sort of go up and relax the entire body in order. Which is a technique that works in adults as well. Is that something that's helpful or necessary with hypnosis, or is it entirely independent?

It could be one form of hypnotic induction. You're just getting them to focus intently on one thing. Explore it, feel it. So it could be a kind of hypnotic experience. It's not necessary, but it could be a part of it.

Asma. It sure helps them learn how to go to sleep, which is.

There you go. That's it.

If your kids go to sleep, you go to sleep.

Yeah. Oh, yes. I learned that lesson. Yes. When my father was a little. My son, rather, was a little kid. He used to. I would try to hypnotize him at night. And one night I was out in the back doing something, and he comes out and says, dad, I need a professional. So I got him to sleep.

Did your dad hypnotize you?

I don't think so.

What a great answer.

We tried once or twice, but it was more a professional than a personal exchange.

That's super cool.

You bet.

Is the Manchurian Candidate possible?

Well, look, we're social creatures. We're susceptible of social influence. You know, there are cults and other things where people really give up their autonomy. And it wouldn't surprise me if some people who go along with things that really, they'd rather they'd best not go along with may. There may be some hypnotic component to it. I think it's a matter of intensity of focus, suspending peripheral awareness, giving up the idea of what you thought you were or what you thought you should do. And so, yes, I think there can be components like that. When I hear these terrible stories of these teenage girls, you know, hanging themselves, you know, because there's some stupid, you know, algorithm that's getting them in that direction, I fear that there are hypnotic, like, experiences that keep them suspending critical judgment and focusing on what they're hearing and who they must be and how bad they must be and how ugly they must be. So I think hypnosis is a state that allows you to focus intently. And if you're focusing on the right things, that's a very Good thing. But if you're focusing on the wrong things, it's a vulnerability.

I asked Daniel P. Brown from Harvard about the Mediterranean candidate, and he looked at me and he said, I know I spent 100 hours with Sirhan Sirhan after he shot someone. And I said, as a professional, I'm 100% certain that he was hypnotized because I could tap him on the arm and he'd drop into a crouch, and I was just blown away. Wow. So it sounds like it can be used for harm. How would someone know if they're being dropped into a hypnotic trance without being informed?

Yeah, well, there was. There was evidence. There was some woman in a polka dot dress who was intervening with Sirhan before he killed Robert Kennedy. And. Well, and so I think it's possible. How would someone know if you're suddenly. If there are events that happened that you don't consciously remember, if you're feeling some sudden change in yourself that you can't understand, if other people tell you you're suddenly acting strange or different and what's going on, it's good to ask yourself a question of whether you're experiencing some kind of undue influence. You know, if your life has changed, you're suddenly giving away things to a particular person who's come into your orbit and you don't understand why or you don't remember doing it. Things like that can, can and probably do happen.

How would you spot it when they're trying to do it for the first time?

Well, I think it's sort of somebody who is trying to not just interact, but direct. Somebody who is trying to get them to do something rather than simply discuss a problem or give them advice about what to do. So it's when. If you see a sudden change and somebody is being intrusive and pushy and controlling, whether or not there's hypnosis involved, it looks like it's not a good situation and those things happen. So, you know, it's good to be aware and to advise friends or family if they seem to have this sudden kind of change to get some help in dealing with it.

So it's more having a strong community who's willing to tell you when something seems off because.

Yeah, exactly.

By design, you're not supposed to know if someone. Something's working like that. If I wanted to use hypnosis to make myself have more mental clarity or to increase my IQ or be more focused, is that possible?

Sure. Sure. We find that. We find you use the intense focus of attention in a deliberate way in hypnosis. So you, you have someone focus on the right aspects of the situation, but very intently. So I was asked to help the. The women's swimming team at Stanford. They're fantastic. They have a lot of gold medal winner or swimmers among them. And the coach noticed that they were swimming faster in practice than they were in meets. And he thought, that's strange. You know, you would think, you're all aroused, you're going for it. And it turned out that they were distracting themselves, that they were focusing more on the woman in the next lane than they were on their own swim. And, you know, competitive swimming is not a contact sport. It doesn't matter what the other person is doing. So I had them go into a state of self hypnosis, feel themselves floating in the pool, and then concentrate on how they were relating to their body, how they could make their body work as well as it could, how they could coordinate activity in arms and legs and their breathing and swim. Imagine swimming your best race, just practice swimming it. And their. Their swim times and meets got better because they were focusing on what mattered, which was the way they related to their body and controlled it, rather than what the people in the other lanes were doing. So that's an example where that narrowing of focus, if you focus on the right thing, can help you do better.

It makes a lot of sense. So you can do it. One of the people I never got to interview on the show, but I would have loved to, is Candice Pert. And this is very well known because she discovered the opiate receptor and I think had a personal awakening when you read her biography. And she talks about how she believes that the immune system kind of has its own consciousness at a certain point. Can you hypnotize someone to have less autoimmune disorders? Can you hypnotize their immune system apart from them? Like, how do you work with immunity and hypnosis?

Well, there have been some studies that suggest that hypnosis, I don't know that the immune system, you know, has its own brain, but I think it can be influenced by what the brain does. So we know, for example, that arousal, norepinephrine and norepinephrine can change the stickiness of natural killer cells in the arteries. And so you can immobilize higher stress levels, can immobilize to some extent the activity of components of the immune system. And clearly the brain and the immune system do have ways of communicating with one another and responding to your level of stress. There was a study, Ron Glaser and Jan Kiko Glaser published a study with medical students. Measures of their immune function got worse during exam periods, you know, when they were under exam stress. And so, yes, I think there is a psychoneuroimmune interaction that can have an effect on your wellbeing and your health.

Have you seen autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's or something resolve or get better with hypnosis?

I haven't seen that. It wouldn't surprise me, but I haven't personally observed that.

Okay. And there's, there's such a mess in there of mind, body that I don't think we have that all sorted out.

Yeah. But I think certainly it's a matter of, you know, there are real diseases. I had a, a guy with, with Parkinson's disease who, who interrupted the surgery. They couldn't give him general anesthesia to implanting an electrode. And he couldn't stand there. He's lying there anymore. And he stopped the procedure. And the neurosurgeon said, send him to me and said, fix him so I can operate on him. So I had him lying there, his hand shaking. And I said, well, let's. I want you to imagine being somewhere you feel safe and comfortable. So it was on the beach in Hawaii with this little girl's playing. And, and I noticed that when he, the minute he did that, his hand stopped shaking.

Wow.

And he said, and you know, I'm getting salt water in my eyes. It was so vivid for him that his eyes were starting to water and he was yelling at his girls to stay away from the water. And you know, he said, the sun's pretty hot. I'm worried I'm going to get a sunburn. Or it was that vivid for him. And so here you have somebody who had Parkinson's disease who needed and ultimately got an electrode implant for it, but who could to some degree control the extent of his tremor using self hypnosis. So again, it's this sort of. There's a physical component, but there's the reactive component to the physical problem that can either make it better or worse.

What is the connection between hypnosis and the placebo effect?

It's a part of it, but hypnosis is stronger. There was a very good study done some years ago where they used the cold presser task where you see how long you can keep your hand in circulating ice water. And the longer you can keep your hand there, the better your pain control is. And they found that for low hypnotizables, placebo and hypnosis were about the same. So telling them it'll feel better than you think worked a little bit. For high hypnotizables, hypnotic analgesia was much stronger than placebo analgesia. So there's something about hypnosis. It's not simply the expectation of a better outcome, which is placebo, but also the instructions on how to change your perception of what's going on and literally alter how much discomfort you have. So if you're moderately high, hypnotizable, hypnotic analgesia is a whole lot better than placebo analgesia.

This is so fascinating, and I want to call out one more time. You have an app that does some of this stuff, and it's called Reverie. R E V E R I without.

That's correct.

And hypnosis is interesting to you. You might as well try it with one of the absolute leaders in the field.

It'd be great. I built it because, you know, so few people use hypnosis compared to the number of people who could benefit from it. It's my legacy project. I want as many people to get access to it as possible. And, you know, when you think that 88,000Americans died of opioid overdoses last year alone, hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing a single person. So it's safe, and for many people, it's highly effective. Reverie is interactive. So I give an instruction. I ask for your response, and depending on the answer you give, you'll get a different instruction. So we built Reverie to be as much like the experience of being in my office as possible. And you can download it from the App Store or Google Play or From our website, Reverie.com and I hope as many people as can will give it a try.

R E v e r I.com can you hypnotize me on the podcast real quick?

Sure.

All right.

Get as comfortable as you can. Anything in particular you want to work on or you want to Just try the experience.

Let's see what would be a good one. I've had great results in resetting my sleep timing, so I just go to bed at 10:30 instead of 2:00am, which was my entire life. But I'm sure that I can do a better job of going to bed at 10pm okay, so just to naturally feel tired at 10pm okay, let's try that.

So get as comfortable as you can on one to one thing. Look up, all the way up high as you can. Two. Two things. Slowly close your eyes and take a deep breath. 3. Do three things. Let the breath out. Let your eyes relax, but keep them closed and let your body float. And then let one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And that'll be your signal to yourself and to me that you're ready to concentrate. Let your hand float up in the air. Higher and higher. Good. Now notice how quickly and easily you were able to alter sensation and motor control in your right hand and arm. And please imagine you're floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or just floating in space. And I want you to breathe in a special way. I want you to inhale. Starting with your abdomen. Abdominal, breathing, diaphragmatic. Now hold. Inhale through your nose. Starting with your abdomen. Now hold. Now expand your chest all the way. Inhale through your nose. And now slowly exhale through your mouth. And again, inhale. Starting with your abdomen through your nose, hold. Expand your chest completely. Slow. Exhale through your mouth. One more time. Inhale through your nose. Hold. Expand your chest completely slow. Exhale through your mouth. And I want you to picture yourself now preparing to go to sleep. I want you to think of your body as if it were yourself as a little boy. And picture getting ready for bed, putting on your PJs, snuggling under the covers, maybe clutching a teddy bear or something, and being soothed and comforted so that you're looking forward to a nice long period of now with your eyes closed and remaining in this state of concentration. Please describe how your body is feeling right now.

It's feeling really relaxed.

Good. And are you able to picture yourself as a little boy?

Yes.

Good. So I want you to notice how comfortable and pleasant this feeling is and make it something you look forward to every night. So around the time, just before 10 o', clock, you think about the opportunity you have to revisit this pleasant feeling. Make it happen. Revisit the comfort and pleasure as a child of tucking into bed and going to sleep. And you can practice this, if you like, during the day, if you're feeling anxious or tense, or as you're getting ready to go to sleep. And make it something you look forward to. Now. Take a few moments to reflect on what this means to you in a private sense. And then we'll come out of the state of self hypnosis by counting backwards from three to one. On three, you'll get ready. On two, with your eyelids closed, roll up your eyes. 1. Let your eyes open. Ready? 3. 2, 1.

Definitely in an altered state. Yeah, that's for sure.

Good.

Yeah, very cool. And it seems so simple, but I think a part of, at least for me, being able to do that is being able is to learn how to sort of surrender my focus, to let someone else guide it versus feeling like I have to always guide it myself so I can be safe kind of a thing.

Right? Right.

Yeah, that was really nice. We'll see if I immediately drop into a warm, snuggly sleep. I'll let you know later.

Please do. Please do let me know. And, you know, you can guide it yourself, but you can still feel that even that sense of surrender and enjoyment of fitting into this altered state. Or you can listen to Reverie and do it that way. So you. You'll still have me around if you need me to help you do it.

All right, well, I will be downloading Reverie. I do want to do it before the show, just so I can refresh.

Great.

Dr. David Spiegel, thank you for spending so much of your career in medicine doing stuff that works. Even though I think you had an uphill battle some of that time. It's been worth it.

I hope it has. It warms my heart when I see people respond the way you do that. It's a way of touching people in a helpful and intense way, in a hurry. And I love doing it. So I'm happy. I feel fortunate that I've been able to do that throughout my career.

Well, keep doing it for as long as you want. And thank you for being here.

Thank you. You're most welcome. Thank you for having me, Dave.

Guys, if you like the episode, I'm serious, give Reverie a try because, well, it's a lot cheaper than Ambien and Ambien is not good for your brain. So you're looking for low cost biohacks.

You got it.

Hypnosis is a low cost biohack and it works. There you go.

That's great. All right, thanks again. You're most welcome, Dave. Take care.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast. A Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider, carefully read all labels and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem, or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.