Dr. Amir Raz | The Suggestible Brain | Talks at Google

Welcome to this Talks at Google event. My name is Andrew Domgren and I'm a program manager on the photos and G1 team here at Google. I'm thrilled to introduce you to today's guest, Dr. Amir Raz, an accomplished neuroscientist whose life experience as an accomplished magician has helped bring a unique perspective to the power of suggestion. Dr. Roz has many prominent and prolific roles. Amongst them a TED Talk speaker, Chief Medical Research Officer in industry, professor at Cornell Columbia McGill and founding director of the Brain Institute at Chapman University and most recently author of a new book, the Suggestible the Science and Magic of of How We make up our minds. Dr. Raz, it is my sincerest pleasure to welcome you to Talksoogle.

Nice to meet you. Andrew, nice to see you. Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, and this is tremendous to be here and I'm delighted for the opportunity. Thank you.

No, excited to have you here. Now, I spent the last week reading your book and it honestly surprised me how engaging and page turning it is. And I say that respectfully as I was anticipating someone with your scientific stature and academic background who's responsible for nearly 200 peer reviewed scientific publications, six peer reviewed books for this book to be heavy, right? And maybe difficult to digest for a layperson like myself, but it really was a pleasant blend of conversation, data application and vulnerability. And I learned so much about the power of suggestion and influence from you and from this book. So I'd love to kick off things today with just opening up the floor to you and just kind of starting us off there and where you want to lead us.

Yeah, great. Well, thank you Andrew. This is a terrific kickoff. And I think the first thing to note is exactly what you said about this marriage between being a neuroscientist or a scientist and a magician. This is an unusual type of marriage because there are very few scientists or serious scientists who are also very accomplished magicians and there are very, very few magicians who are also accomplished scientists. So this marriage of or yoking of these two worlds is very interesting. Now when it comes to suggestion specifically, we are looking at something slightly unusual in suggestion. In the world of suggestion, what we have is basically a little bit of an iceberg metaphor. People sort of think that they know something about suggestion then they do because suggestion is very intuitive. In our world we think that we know something about suggestion because our mothers suggest things to us, our spouses, our doctors, our lawyers, our accountants, and so on and so forth. But actually scientists look at and study suggestion very differently than for example, magicians. Magicians utilize suggestion a very deceptive, cunning kind of way. And they do what they do in order to entertain their audiences. But they could, if they wanted to, take it in a very sinister direction. Whereas scientists usually do things very, you know, openly. They publish their papers, they. They make sure that their results are disseminated. Everybody knows about it, and it's open to the public, it's open to the world. Now, why do we use the iceberg is because we, in a way, the iceberg has a top and a bottom, and we're usually unaware of the bottom. We're only aware of the top. But if we take off the bottom and we only focus on the top, that's what the scientists do. Scientists rarely use deception. They rarely use applications that are making the subjects uncomfortable or they're doing something that is not truthful, Whereas scientists actually do only decent, straightforward things. So when it comes to doing scientific things, I want to share with you a particular demonstration, for example, from my lab, because many people tell me, how do you study suggestion in the lab? Like, what do you do in order to study suggestion in the lab? What we do in order to study suggestion in the lab is actually quite complicated. It's very different from going outside and studying suggestion ecologically. And what we do is because we know that everyone is highly susceptible to some form of suggestion, often without realizing it. And these suggestions shape our perceptions, our behaviors, even our physiological experience in profound ways. We're looking way. We're looking for scientific, experimental ways to demonstrate it. So I have a video here from a recent experiment that I did in my lab just to give you a feel for how a scientist would go about experimenting with suggestion. And I'm going to play it now. And in this video, you see basically four lines dancing. Two lines dance with each other, and another two dot lines dance with each other. And when you look at it, you basically get a very fuzzy feeling of some machine or piston or something. It's not clear what the form is. As soon as I put occluders on the corners, you can see that it's a diamond dancing in a counter or in a clockwise direction. Again, I take the occluders out, everything falls apart. I put the occluders back in again, it's very clear that this is an occluded diamond task where the diamond is hiding behind the occluders and is dancing in a clockwise direction. We know quite a bit about our brain, and we know how we perceive information visually. And that's why a Lot of scientists are interested in understanding how come we don't understand the motion in one dimension, but we do understand it in another. We can also show it in a triangle or form. And we can see that even with a triangle, it works really, really well when it moves in a clockwise direction. When we put the occluders, the question is, and that's really the main question when it comes to these kind of applications, what happens when you have a situation, when you have occluders and when you don't have occluders? And what we tried to do in my lab is to take the occluders, throw them out, and instead of that, give people a suggestion that the occluders are there. So we are basically creating a situation when there are no visual occluders on the screen, but we are convincing people, or we're giving people a suggestion that they are there. And our question was, can we see the same brain activation, can we see the same kind of behavior when you give people a suggestion that something like that happens? As it turns out, the answer is yes. And the answer is yes, especially for people who are highly suggestible. And this is really the key, key to what I'm trying to say here. Not only that everyone is susceptible to some form of suggestion, but some people are highly suggestible or highly hypnotizable. They're very vulnerable to a very specific kind of suggestion that is called a hypnotic suggestion. This is just one type of many suggestions that exist in our world. Now, a scientist will take this specific idea of a suggestion and apply it to a hypnotic suggestion and write a paper about it, and then it goes into the scientific body of work. But most people will not know about it. That's why I came and I stepped in and I wanted to sort of bring information not just from science and not just from the academic ivory tower, but also from the trenches, from what people do when they are trying to entertain people with suggestion, when we're trying to sell things to people, and, you know, even when we're trying to change voting behavior, something that is very relevant for us. If you want to change voting behavior, if you want to influence people in their decision making, if you want to create some control, if you want to have some control or inject some control into somebody's decision making vis a vis salary, vis a vis who to marry, vis a vis where to live, these are big decision, almost existential questions in people's lives. Now, the reason I mentioned this is because most people know we call the book the suggestible brain. Most people know something about the brain. It's between our ears. It has to do with electricity and electrochemistry. It has to do with structures, anatomy, functional connectivity. People know that. People also know that we have technology today that allows us to image the living brain. We can actually use techniques, very advanced technological ways to look at the functioning brain, the live, functioning brain. In this image here, you see somebody not so much with an inverted toilet on her head, but this is an imaging device, magnetocephalogram. And magnetoencephalography is a very powerful technique that allows you to actually see your brain changing or activating in real time, if you wanted to. So all these things are really exciting and it sort of gives us an opportunity to see how suggestion affects us in real time, if we wanted to, from a scientific perspective, from a non scientific perspective, or from a layperson's perspective, which is really the important perspective to have, because most people experience suggestion not in the lab, but in the world, in ecological settings. If we go back to even people like Sigmund Freud, and we can go back much earlier to that, to even the ancient Greeks, but in a way we know that suggestion is really just a communication that allows you to accept something. It allows you to accept a belief or maybe an idea, and to change your behavior accordingly. I mean, you accept some information and as a result you change. This is quite a remarkable thing in human behavior. And. And it allows us to do all kinds of demonstrations that either involve hypnosis, if we're doing hypnotic suggestion, but we can also do it without necessarily hypnotic suggestion. We can do it with just regular suggestion. And for that I want to move from the top part, which is the iceberg that is more scientific, to the bottom part, the more sinister magic thing. So for that I'll put on my magic hat. And Andrew, if you would allow me, I would sort of use you for that. In my book, I talk a little bit about placebo effects, which are basically expectations effect. You give people pills that are. I mean, people like to use them as sugar pills, they like to refer to them as sugar pills, but actually they are inactive biochemically. So they have some components in them that are not active chemically for the specific issue that you're taking them for. And we know from the scientific literature that placebos work in certain ways and they work in certain situations and for certain people. And what we have discovered more recently is that placebos work even when we know that we're taking placebos. Previously we thought that placebos only work when you are deceived, just like a magician would do. I would give you a placebo. What? I would tell you that you're getting a medication. But today we're beginning to understand that placebos also work when you give them openly. We call this open label placebos. I can give you a placebo and tell you this is a placebo, but it's going to help you, and it does help you. And people have shown this for migraines, for lower back pain and for other things. The question is, what would happen if I give you an imaginary pill? It's not even a placebo. I'm not even giving you anything. It's an imaginary pill that I give you. And I say to you, hey, here, Andrew, here's an imaginary pill. Take that. And it turns out that even imaginary pills help people, for example, with anxiety before exams and things like that. Then the question is, if these expectations effects are so strong and so real, what is changing in the brain? What is happening? How does that work? Now scientists again take it to the top part of the iceberg and try to illuminate with experiments. Magicians do it very differently. Let's do it the way a magician would do it, just so that. To give you. To give you a feel for it. So let's say I happen to have with me two invisible dice, Andrew. Okay. And I'm going to give them to you over the screen. There you go. You can take them. Yeah. So you have two invisible dice there. I know that it sounds a little bit peculiar, but as a magician, I'm allowed to do that. So you take these two invisible dice and what I want you to do is cup them in your hand, you know, shake them out, Shake them out really well and roll. Okay. And tell me what you got. Just look at it and tell me what you got. What did you get over there?

I am very curious about my level of suggestibility. So I'm interested here. All right, I've just rolled. Lucky day.

So the first time I want you to tell me exactly what you roll. So we're going to do three, you know, we're going to do three rolls. So first time you rolled. So what did you get?

I've got two sixes.

Two sixes. Okay, so six, six. So that's pretty good. Do you feel that the dice are good? Do you feel that they're loaded? Because I happen to have another set here. If you want to change them for a different set or you want to stick with your set, I mean.

No, I like I like.

You like your set. Okay, so. So you roll the six. Six. And you felt that it came from you, right? I mean, it was. It was a genuine roll. Okay. Yeah. All right, so let's roll again. Take it again. Cup it up, you know, in your hand. Yeah. And. And. Oh, I can see you're right handed just from the way that you. Okay, that's good. These are good observations of my part. And roll. Okay, look at it. What did you. What did you get this time?

With snake eyes. So one and one.

One and one snake eye. Okay. Very slithery of you. Very slithery. Okay, so. So you got one. One. Let's try to do it with just one die. So grab one die. Just grab one die out of the two. Okay, Roll it in your hand and throw. What'd you get?

Five.

Five. Okay, so you got six, six, one, one and a five. Now I want you to roll again. Don't tell me. Whatever's gonna happen, don't tell me until I tell you to tell me. Don't tell me. So, you know, palm it in your hand. Yeah, take the die, you know, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake. And roll. Don't tell me.

Okay, look at them.

You can see them. Look at them carefully. Look at them carefully. Okay, you can see them. Okay, I can see that one is bigger than the other. Take the big one first. Take the bigger number first in your hand. Take it in your hand. Put it in your hand. Okay, and take the second one. Yeah, I see a four. Three. I see a four. Three. You roll the four and a three. Am I correct?

You are. You are correct.

Okay. So you see, now, one thing that happens here that is a little bit tricky, Andrew, and I apologize for that is midway through, as I was doing this trick for you, I suddenly realized that you read my book because you said in the introduction, you said that you read my book. And in my book, I describe one of these things. I describe how to do a similar effect. And I realized suddenly that you might be able to circumvent what I'm doing. So midway, I changed to a different technique.

I was trying to.

Very good.

I was preemptively trying to gauge where this was going, but clearly that didn't work. Yeah.

So now, one of the things that I do in this book is I basically demonstrate how perspectives and information from the role, from the world, from the sphere of science, when you couple it, when you are using it in concert with information from the coterie, the secret coterie of magicians, know people who are Practicing the magical arts, you can get very interesting and very deep, penetrating, comprehensive insights into suggestion and, and you can learn a great deal about suggestion, not just in the clinical realm, not just in the everyday realm, but really when it comes to how to influence people, how to make them tick. And this is a very deep and I would say even philosophical question about human nature. You know, do we do things? Are we, do we have free will? Are we the agents of what we do? Or can people influence us and make us think that we're doing things on our own of our own will, but actually it's premeditated or manipulated or if you would like to think about it, orchestrated by somebody else?

Now, it's interesting because you talked a lot about the suggestibility and different levels of suggestibility amongst different people. And I like to think that I have a pretty good stance and structure in terms of who I am, in terms of being influenced or being guided. But having now just talked to you for the first time and displaying this demo and you somehow understanding exactly what I rolled from wherever you are in the world in the last five, 10 minutes, I am completely mind blown. I. Before I kind of dive into some of the deeper context of some of the questions I want to ask you, because there's a lot here. Can you share anything, taking a step back to that demo about the process of just discovering my dice, because I think our viewers will kind of want to know like one, this wasn't played out already, like we had no idea about what was going on. I had no idea what was happening before this. What secret can you share? Obviously, being a magician too, in this role, like, you want some of that to yourself.

That's right. So magicians, as you point out very well, magicians, are very guarded about their knowledge, about their secrets. They are not very fond of sharing, you know, their knowledge with others. This is what, this is not just a question of livelihood. It's. It's also a question of philosophical disposition. You know, I have a very good colleague who's a magician and a very thoughtful magician who in a book that he published, he had two essays. One, I mean, he had many essays, but one essay was in, in favor of revealing the secrets that, you know, that the magicians actually use in order to bring about their entertaining fe. And another essay by the same person who are, that argues against. So even within the community of magicians, it's not always clear, you know, if people are in favor or against revealing the secrets. But I think that there is, in general, there's a Tendency not to, to, to reveal what I do in the book, fair enough, Is I give some leads. I give some leads to how at least I performed, you know, some of my tricks when I was doing magic as a professional magician. I was talking about the concepts and I gave enough information for the intelligent reader, if they wanted to, they can pursue it and find more information. This specific trick, the specific trick that I did to you is a combination of several techniques. And as I mentioned to you, I changed midway to a different technique just because I realized lately, I mean, a little bit late than I should have, that you actually read by book and that you know about this demonstration. I could see it also from, I could see it also from the way, that, you know, that you chose your numbers. So it caused me to think very quickly on my feet. But thank you for doing that. You're keeping me young.

Yeah, no, I'm still kind of mind blown at the whole situation, especially knowing the examples you provided in the book. So I was already preemptively thinking this is probably what he's going to do, what he's going to ask me. And now that clearly didn't even influence or help my situation because you still got it.

Right.

But now that, now that we've kind of seen this power of influence and suggestion in real time, right, and with me, with me being a real, real participant, thankfully in this setting, you did it in a super fun, engaging way. But being in society now, especially like you mentioned, with the elections coming up and all that and more, more serious engagements where information and data kind of just is moving super fast. Right. And super quickly, it's just flying around and people are just trying to process everything super quickly. Are there tools or practices that you can recommend now or from your book that can help us in our daily lives remain positive influence takers or suggestion receivers as opposed to being manipulated or taking in bad information?

Yeah. So first of all, the answer is yes, there are, there's some very practical takeaways that, you know, if you read the book, you can, you can, can walk away with and we can touch a little bit about some of them. The most important thing here is that really everyone is suggestible. And this is something that most people don't understand. Now what I try to do in the book is provide different strategies and different clues as to when you know that suggestion is at play. Yes, we are very much interested in voting behavior right now. This would change, you know, after November 5th, and we will wait until the next time, but it's going to recur it's going to happen again and again and again. We live at a time when we have a lot of misinformation around us. It comes from AI deepfakes. It comes from, you know, a bombardment of people consume information from different websites. We have echo chambers. We know all these things. I mean people live on social media, they get information that is not reliable. We know all these things. What I'm going to say in the book is not just the need for critical thinking and things like that, but I give very specific tips on. For example, if you're trying to evaluate whether a medication works, what do you need to do? The difference between statistical significance and clinical significance? How do you work against social bias? If you have a particular social bias against a particular minority group or against a particular, particular idea, are you aware of it? Are you not aware of it? How do you go about these things? These suggestions are very subtle and they require a little bit more, I would say, fine tuning approach in order to get to it. There's a limit to what I can say in a short podcast, but I can definitely say, and you've read the book so you know that I'm not, you know, saying it vacuously. There are very specific take home applied methods in the book that allow you to, to deal with these kind of situations per situation.

Sure. Yeah. No, you, you mentioned there's. There's actually quite a few practical ways. One of them that I love. I won't go into too much detail so we can have the, your audience read the book. The three Cs were fantastic. It's a total, totally great practical way and I'm very curious as to my own application to it and just being more aware. So it's great. I do want to touch a little bit on. There's some, there's so many topics here. I want to talk to you about the book, but specifically you mention a good amount of time in your book advocating the use of obviously the power of suggestion as a very effective means in parallel or even in sometimes in cases in place of antidepressants, which is what you talked about moments moments ago. Now that push for change against a pharmaceutical drug business is such a huge disruption from historical medical practice. Now I guess being a disruptor in any level of space is a very difficult role to take on and obviously comes with its own unique sense of challenges and roadblocks. But how do you feel about being an advocate of the power suggestion, an advocate of this space being such a disruptor to such a profitable legacy kind of Medical system and business that's kind of just second nature to the general public.

Yeah, I mean, there's no question that antidepressants are, are, you know, millions of people, millions and millions of people in the United States and the world, you know, worldwide, are taking antidepressants, a backbone drug of psychiatry, of modern psychiatry. It's something that we know is effective to some extent. What most people don't know is that when you compare these antidepressants to placebos, they are actually on par clinically for most cases. And this is big news. I mean, this is very, very important because placebos come cheaper and placebos come without side effects and without things that have to do with withdrawal symptoms when you try to stop. And there's all kinds of things that are, you know, coming into play here. Now. Big pharma is big pharma and they have their own agenda and they have their own financial powers and, and so on. And there's politics involved and insurance companies and regulation. But scientifically speaking, and we're talking about from the perspective of a scientist, magicians now have less to do with this. From a perspective of a scientist, antidepressants are not as effective as we were promised initially. Antidepressants are really, when we do meta analytical studies, are on par with placebos. And when we show that they're on par with placebos clinically, not necessarily from a very weird statistical angle, but clinically in the trenches, then we have to start asking ourselves what other options exist. And when we look at the data, we can demonstrate that other options exist. And sometimes they're better if, you know, if, if not better, they're as good and they often involve suggestion. So that's hence the science of suggestion. And that's why, for example, this is a very good demonstration of how suggestion can help depression and can help people who suffer from depression. And this is a very serious biological illness that millions of people suffer from and sometimes, you know, leads to suicidality and other, you know, difficult episodes. So it's very, very important that people take this information in stride, understand it and do something about it.

Wow. Wow, what an incredible game changing and industry changing platform this could be. And especially now with your book coming out, being able to share and bring more awareness to the power of suggestion, more awareness to the power of influence and manifestation that'll definitely change not only the industry, but people's lives entirely. So that's amazing. Now I'm paraphrasing a specific section in kind of the latter part of your book that I pulled out specifically for this conversation because it just, I think it really resonates with me and I think does a wonderful job of encapsulating your book's intention, like the purpose. And I kind of wanted to share that. And I'll quote you just kind of weird quoting yourself or you, but you being right there. But the power of words, suggestions and expectations show that mindset holds far greater medical weight than one imagined. Now, hope is the magical ingredient that our suggestible brain so desperately desires. And suggestion is a potent conduit to fuel and realize this kind of magic. So on that Note, do you, Dr. Amir Raz, with your brand new book, this Suggestible Brain, do you have any parting or closing thoughts or takeaways for our audience about the power of suggestibility or even specifically from your new book coming out?

Sure, yeah. And thank you for the opportunity to do that. So, yeah, I would say that the key takeaway is that suggestion is not just a tool for magicians or hypnotists, but a fundamental aspect of human neuropsychology that operates in all areas of life. It really does. And understanding how suggestion works allows us to harness its power to improve well being, to resist manipulation, to better navigate our personal realities. Ultimately, suggestibility is not a sign of weakness, but a complex and deeply rooted aspect of the human mind that we can leverage to our advantage from. From a mental health and performance sports all the way to self regulation and resilience training. I think that people need to understand that our mindsets and the functionality of our brain states is as trainable and as pliable as aspects of our anatomy and physical characteristics. We should take advantage of the science and research findings that unravel how we can better tap this mind body domain. And magicians can definitely help us with that.

Amazing. Fantastic. Well, Dr. Amir Raz, thank you so much. And now before, before we kind of part here, where can we find your book? It is out now. Please, please let everyone know all the different locations that we can get a hold of it.

Yeah. So the book is out. I think you can get it on the Hachette website, on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble. All the regular suspects are at play here. I think that there's also an audio version of the book that is available. I am narrating the introduction. I did not have the energy to go through the whole book, but I did the introduction and then a voice actor did the rest. And listening to you, Andrew, it could have been you. You have a great voice.

Should have been next time, maybe the next suggestible brain.

Sounds good.

Thank you so much. Now everyone, the suggestible brain, the science and magic of how we make up our minds out now at all of your local locations and where you normally buy your books and audiobooks. Dr. Ras, thank you for joining us at Toxic Google. It was such a pleasure being able to not only be influenced by you live with the Dice demo, which I'm still blown away about, but also to learn more about the power of suggestion. Thank you to our viewers for joining today's event and thanks again for tuning in and we will see you at the next talks at Google Session.

Pleasure.