Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Your Brain Is Suggestible. Here's How To Turn That to Your Advantage. | Dr. Amir Raz About this episode Harness the power of suggestion for well-being, pain management, and mental health.
Dr. Amir Raz https://www.amirraz.com/ is a world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion with recent positions as Canada Research Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery, and Psychology at McGill University, and as Founding Director of The Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. His most recent book is The Suggestible Brain: The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds https://www.amazon.com/Suggestible-Brain-Science-Magic-Minds/dp/0306833433.
In this episode we talk about:
How Dr. Raz transitioned from a career in magic to neuroscience The science of suggestibility, how it's defined, and its relation to hypnosis Stage hypnosis vs medical hypnosis How the power of suggestion could be therapeutically harnessed to impact our physiology, behavior, and well-being Practical exercises for increasing thought control The "magical ingredient" when it comes to dealing with life's challenges Why placebos may work even when you know you're taking them How we protect ourselves against mis–and–disinformation And much more
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Transcript 13,819 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? One of the most fascinating aspects of the human brain is that it is suggestible, which is not to be confused with weak-minded. There are actually some quite solid reasons why we evolved for this suggestibility. Moreover, there are some great ways to hack your own suggestibility, both to the benefit of your inner life and to the benefit of your relationships with other people. Obviously, there are also ways to misuse this stuff, and we'll talk about that, too. Anyway, my guest is Dr. Amir Raz, who's a world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion. He's had positions as the Canada Research Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neurosurgery and Psychology at McGill University,
1:02 Dan Harris? and as the founding director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences at Chapman University. His most recent book is The Suggestible Brain: The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds. And in this conversation, we talk about how Dr. Raz transitioned from her career in magic, he was a magician, to neuroscience, he's now a neuroscientist. We talk about the science of suggestibility, how it's defined, and its relation to hypnosis. We talk about the difference between stage hypnosis and actual medical hypnosis, how the power of suggestion could be therapeutically harnessed to impact your physiology, your behavior, and your well-being, practical exercises for increasing thought control, the magical ingredient when it comes to dealing with
1:46 Dan Harris? life's challenges, why placebos may work even when you know that what you're taking is a placebo, how you can protect yourself against miss and disinformation, and much more.
1:59 Dan Harris? Just to say before we dive in, the meditation teacher and friend of the pod, Don Mauricio, has crafted a guided meditation specifically to accompany this episode. It's about a practice called mental noting. Don is crafting meditations for all of our Monday, Wednesday, episodes this month. And if you want to access them, you can head on over to danharris.com to become a paid subscriber. These meditations are now the norm here at 10% and we will be releasing an entirely new batch in August with a new teacher of the month. More to come on that later. Also, one last thing to say here, today is the last day of our big summer merch sale with up to 40% off select items, including the Dump It Here journal, the Inner Peace trucker hat, and the 10% happier crew neck.
2:43 Dan Harris? You don't need a code, the prices are already marked down, so go grab them while supplies last over at shop.danharris.com. Okay, we'll get started with Dr. Amir Raz right after this.
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3:16 Speaker 02 Get started at safeguardveterans.net. Click on Community Organizations. Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
3:27 Speaker 03 How do I recover from a friendship breakup? How come there's nowhere to hang out anymore? Why do I feel lonely when I can communicate with anyone and everyone through my phone? These are the questions that you're not alone in asking, and that's where our new podcast, Cornerpiece, comes in to start small on life's biggest questions. I'm Taha and with my friends Sabrina and Melissa, we're going to explore life's ungooglable questions on this new podcast with TED. Come hang out with us on Cornerpiece with new episodes every other Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
4:02 Dan Harris? Dr. Amir Raz, welcome to the show.
4:03 Speaker 04 Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
4:05 Dan Harris? So you've got a cool backstory. Can you tell me a little bit about how you went from magic to science?
4:10 Speaker 04 I have many cool backstories. Magic to science is just one of them. Yeah, magic was always something that was interesting to me. I started out as a kid going to the public local library and reading about handkerchiefs and the coin vanishes. Slowly, like sometimes it happens, I got to associate with professional magicians and I started going to conferences and I started reading books that are not in the public library. And I started apprenticing and it got to be a more serious hobby. And at some point, it became a serious part of my life.
4:42 Dan Harris? How did that lead to science?
4:44 Speaker 04 I can put my finger on a few instances. One of them I describe in the book. I was involved as a spectator in seeing some hypnosis shows that were completely conducted by magicians. They were friends, they were colleagues. I knew that those magicians knew absolutely nothing about hypnosis. I knew it for a fact because I spoke to them before and after and I knew them very well offstage. And we used to go out together and hang out together. And it was amazing to me that somebody with absolutely no knowledge of hypnosis can put together a hypnosis show and as an entertainer or as a stage persona, be very successful and very effective with hypnotic shenanigans.
5:24 Dan Harris? So they knew how to hypnotize people, but they didn't know what hypnosis really was?
5:29 Speaker 04 Not only that they didn't know what hypnosis really was, even their show was completely scripted. So they could not deviate one sentence to the left or to the right. They knew exactly what to say. They had a pre-prepared pattern that they would follow to the dot. They knew that they are going to be safe as long as they stayed on that particular track. And that's how it worked. And I was fascinated by that. I said to myself, you know, it's really strange that people who know nothing about what they do are just echoing some words or some sounds. And as a result of that, people do all kinds of strange acts. That, to me, was a very important starting point in my thinking about what is happening behind it, what are the mechanisms, what is the brain structures, what is the psychology and so on.
6:10 Dan Harris? You've now become a true and leading expert on this subject of human suggestibility. Before I ask a lot of ensuing questions, let me ask a baseline question, which is, how are we defining suggestibility?
6:23 Speaker 04 You know, it's one of those things that are like art and love and many other things. It's very difficult to define it in a way that would do justice within a sentence. But suggestibility is basically the ability to follow a particular communication in a way that would change your thinking or your actions.
6:40 Dan Harris? And what's the link to hypnosis?
6:43 Speaker 04 Hypnosis is one way or one form of a powerful suggestion that you can deliver in a particular context that seems to be very effective for some people. The idea is that hypnosis is a certain context, a particular therapeutic context, a particular psychological context, medical context, depending on how you frame it, where suggestions for certain people can be very strong and very helpful therapeutically.
7:11 Dan Harris? So it sounds like a subset of suggestibility?
7:16 Speaker 04 Yes, hypnotic suggestion is a particular kind of suggestion.
7:20 Dan Harris? So describe a little bit your research. What have you learned? That's a fairly unfairly broad question.
7:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, when I started out and I came to this as a curious teenager who was very much exposed to the world of entertainment and magic and deception and anything from stage illusions to mentalism and so on. My questions were mostly focused on how is it possible to take somebody, a random person from the audience, to bring this person on stage, give them some kind of a patter, some kind of a, I would say, communication. And as a result, they will do things that would sometimes humiliate them to the entertainment of the audience, of course, but why would they do that? Are they just role enactment? Are they just acting? Or is it real? Are they really doing it? Now, what I started doing back then is I would go to these participants.
8:11 Speaker 04 I would go to them after the show and I would ask them, you know, when you did it, what were you thinking? How did you end up going on stage? Did you know in advance that you are going to participate? Have you ever done this before? I would do all this interrogations, informal interrogations, and I learned that many of these people were very comfortable on stage and they were sometimes frustrated. Actors and they were sometimes, you know, people who really wanted to be on stage in some capacity. Some of them had previous experience, some of them, it was very clear when you spoke to them. It was not something that made them super anxious. It was something that they actually wanted to do in some weird, twisted, warped, or otherwise direct, explicit way. So that was the first clue that I got.
8:55 Speaker 04 And I started from there to ask more questions and to do studies. Now, the studies are tricky because we know today that you can classify people into on a, on a particular spectrum. You can put people on whether they're low or high. There's a whole psychometrics to it where you can define or you can assess, you can evaluate if people are low or high on a hypnotic scale. And that would correlate very well with their ability to follow hypnotic suggestions.
9:22 Dan Harris? So these people who were volunteering for these stage hypnotists were high on the hypnotizability scale.
9:33 Speaker 04 So yeah, being highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion is not something that you plan for. It's something that you're sort of born with. Some people are just very good with that and a good hypnotist knows how to identify, how to sniff out who's going to be a good participant. That's a stage skill that you can learn very quickly.
9:52 Dan Harris? Just as a quick digression, what are the signs?
9:55 Speaker 04 So you invite a whole bunch of people to stage and even when you invite them to stage, you say, if you ever wanted to be, or you know, if you have like a a hidden actor in you, or if you like, you can coach it in such terms that it would entice some people to come on stage. You can actually select them based on looks. You can say, why don't you come, sir? Why don't you come, you know, young lady and so on. Once they're on stage, you can run them through a whole bunch of sort of warm up exercises and see who is taking to them and who's not. And you can also create a rapport, some kind of a chemistry with these individuals. And sometimes if you're more clever about it, you can actually do some pre-show. You can get there early and you can chat with some of the people before and you can have some drinks or you can have some
10:37 Speaker 04 chat and informal chat and sort of explain what's going to happen and why it would be cool if somebody would assist you or could assist you. And these things sometimes make a huge difference in the outcome that you see on stage.
10:48 Dan Harris? Rapport, meaning that if the hypnotizer gains the trust of the hypnotizee, the hypnosis is more likely to be successful?
10:58 Speaker 04 Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the person is more prepared. So they have an expectation as to what's going to happen. It's not going to catch them by surprise, but it's not necessarily that the stage hypnotist is going to tell them exactly what's going to happen. Cause that's going to sort of take the cake a little bit. It's more about making the person comfortable with the idea of being on stage and following some instructions or doing a show and tell kind of thing. By creating this expectation and by putting them at ease and by saying it's going to be cool. I'm going to give you a, you know, a video of this as a memento. I'm going to give you a certificate at the end. This is going to be cool to show to your grandchildren and other things that you can say to placate and pacify the person.
11:37 Speaker 04 If it's the right person, you can very quickly get them to the mindset, to the wavelength that would be conducive to a show like that.
11:44 Dan Harris? Meaning open to suggestion.
11:46 Speaker 04 Meaning more open to suggestion, going along more, playing along the lines that you want them to. Mind you, stage hypnosis is very different from medical hypnosis. It's not the same. It uses the same word, hypnosis, but they're not at all the same. They're not the same in terms of the inductions. They're not the same in terms of what's going on. And a lot of people are sort of confused about that. They think that stage hypnosis or what you see in Vegas is what happens when you see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or a dentist for that matter, but that's not the case at all. The first difference is that in stage hypnosis, there's an audience. And whatever you do, you actually do it for the audience. You don't do it for yourself. It's sort of an entertaining show and you know it. And when you buy the ticket, there's an unwritten contract that this is a show for entertainment.
12:30 Speaker 04 People are coming to have a laugh and they're coming to have a good time. When you're going to see a, let's say a psychiatrist for hypnosis, you are not going for entertainment and there is no audience. And you're not doing this in order to have a laugh or for the psychiatrist to humor you. You're going because there is usually a problem that is sufficiently of concern to you that you want to address it. And maybe you've already tried to address it in other ways and it wasn't very well received or wasn't very effective. So these contexts and these kinds of things create very different interactions. They use the same word, hypnosis in both cases, but stage hypnosis and medical hypnosis are very different animals.
13:08 Dan Harris? I was recently treated by a medical hypnotist, an actual doctor, on this show for claustrophobia. And this was quite recently. Well, first of all, I was surprised because there was no like swinging a pocket watch back and forth, which is what I thought it was going to be. But it seemed to be tapping the power of the imagination and the power of suggestion to plant the idea of safety in these situations that my brain has hitherto been scanning as dangerous.
13:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, you know, I'm glad that you bring up the point of pendulums and watches swinging and spirals and stuff like that. Some of the accoutrement of hypnosis come to us from the movies, from Woody Allen movies, from other depictions, from The Manchurian Candidate, from all kinds of things that are communicated to us through cultural instruments such as, you know, Hollywood and and other things, movies and books. Many of these things are not correct in the sense that they do not describe medical hypnosis or psychological hypnosis. They are sort of describing some kind of, I would say, something that has a tendency to be more close to the occult or to some underworldly spiritual state of consciousness that is tapping your unconscious in some kind of a dark, sinister, or even
14:23 Speaker 04 undefined way. That's not at all the case. I think that thinking about it in terms of imagination, thinking about it in terms of disinhibition, thinking about it in terms of regulation and self-regulation, or losing control, under control, is a much better framework to understanding these experiences.
14:40 Dan Harris? We did take a bit of a digression. You were in the process of describing your research and you said that you started by studying people who had undergone stage hypnosis. And that's when we kind of went off into hypnosis for a second. So please pick up the story.
14:55 Speaker 04 Right. So when I started interviewing informally people after they participated in stage hypnosis shows, I was a kid. I was a teenager. Most of my studies were not studies in the formal sense of the word. I was not a scientist. I was not a university graduate. I was, you know, in high school at best. But I learned a great deal about what people think and how they go about it. The interesting bit was this. When I started studying psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, things like that, I had this in the back of my mind, I still had in the back of my mind, this idea that people can take a suggestion and change their physiology, they can change their behavior, they can change the way that they act, they can change the way that they think. And I started getting more and more into it.
15:40 Speaker 04 And one of the first things that I decided to do as a young PhD, somebody who earned a doctorate in neuroscience, computational neuroscience and neuropsychology, was to create a set of experiments that would be accepted by the scientific community because of their rigor and because of the scientific methods that I would be using and would demonstrate unequivocally that hypnosis can do things that are not possible to do without hypnosis in a particular context. So I basically took a very well-known phenomenon in psychology, it's called the Stroup effect, something that we've known about since the 1930s and thousands of papers have been written on it, something that is considered to be a very automatic ballistic phenomenon
16:25 Speaker 04 in psychology and cognitive psychology. And I demonstrated that with a hypnotic suggestion, you can completely eliminate it. Something that is supposed to be so ballistic, so automatic, so robust, that nobody would be able to eliminate it or even reduce it because it's so strong. I was able to eliminate it with a hypnotic suggestion, a specific hypnotic suggestion to highly hypnotizable people. When I did that and I was able to publish it and replicate it and do it in several places with several conditions and other people started doing this around the world, this created a buzz, a scientific buzz, around hypnosis that was never there before in the sense that here is a researcher who's taking hypnosis as the medium
17:09 Speaker 04 or taking hypnosis as the subject of study, demonstrating with scientific tools, state-of-the-art tools, including brain imaging and other things, that something strange is happening and trying to understand what is it that is changing as a result of hypnotic suggestion. That was the point that I was able to get not just scientists interested in it and people from the health sciences, but also people from the hypnosis community who were understanding that what we're doing now, we're beginning to unravel the scientific basis, the underlying mechanisms of what's going on.
17:40 Dan Harris? The Stroop effect, just so I know, what is that?
17:43 Speaker 04 The Stroop effect is one of many effects in psychology or in cognitive psychology where when I show you a color, doesn't matter what the color is, it's very easy for you to say what it is. If it's red, or if it's purple, or if it's green, or if it's yellow, I can show you a color and you'll say, this is red, this is green. But if I show you this color in a word that is printed in this color, and the word itself means something else. So if the word is blue and the color is red, it just gives you a tiny bit of a delay because your brain reads blue and wants to say blue, but it's supposed to say red. Or vice versa, if I tell you respond to what you see, if I respond to what the letter is, the semantic meaning of the letter, but not to the color that you see. So it just creates a tiny bit
18:25 Speaker 04 of a delay. And that delay is resolved, we know exactly the mechanism, we know exactly the areas of the brain that are involved in it. So we know a great deal, or we think that we know, a little bit about what is participating, what are the brain mechanisms that are participating in this particular resolution and this particular cognitive control. When you give people a suggestion that what they're about to see, these are all English speaking people, you know, native English speakers, if you show them words in English that are inked in, some of them are congruent colors and some of them incongruent colors and some of them are neutral, you will notice that people who are getting a suggestion, a hypnotic suggestion, that what they're seeing is in a foreign language that they don't understand, the Stroop effect disappears. So in a way, I was able to take
19:10 Speaker 04 a whole bunch of people and turn them temporarily, of course, turn them into a lexics, people who cannot read, because they're under the impression that what they're reading is in Greek, or in Russian, or in some different alphabet that they don't recognize. And as a result of that, they were able to report the color without flaws, without errors, or very few errors. And it had nothing to do with their behavior when they were not getting this hypnotic suggestion, or when they were getting a suggestion that is not hypnotic. So these things showed us, together with brain imaging, together with controls, for example, we would monitor their ciliary muscles of the eye, we would do all kinds of scientific control to make sure that they're not blurring their vision, that they're not crossing their eyes, that they're not looking away. We did all kinds of controls
19:54 Speaker 04 to demonstrate that this is actually happening at the brain level, and what is changing at the brain level.
19:59 Dan Harris? So it sounds like you started with hypnosis and did you broaden from there to suggestibility more generally?
20:05 Speaker 04 Yes, it became very clear to me very quickly, early in the game, that some people are more suggestible than others and that even some psychopathologies and some human conditions render this, lend themselves to more suggestible people. This is very interesting because people who are more suggestible, I see it as a gift. Suggestibility is the ability to basically take information and shape reality from it. You can take this information and create an alternative reality if you wanted to that would interface with the existing reality, but you can filter things out and you can create all kinds of conditions, you can create all kinds of relationships that are not necessarily there. That could be good and bad.
20:47 Speaker 04 You can take it to a pathological condition and be delusional about the world. You can be in a situation where you think that you can fly and you can do bad things when you go to a rooftop, but it can also create a situation where you control your pain better, where you can control your phobias like you alluded to before. So it's basically a tool that allows you to tap some of the cognitive armamentarium that you have as a human being and create something from these tools. You can create a filter that you can put on the world that would help you to enhance or to reduce particular elements that are giving you trouble or that you would like to get better at.
21:28 Dan Harris? That's really interesting because we think of suggestible people as feeble minded.
21:33 Speaker 04 That's right, and that's a common misconception. A lot of people translate or interpret the word suggestible or suggestibility as not just feeble minded, but somebody who's easy to influence, somebody who doesn't have a spine, somebody who's very influenceable and somebody who cannot hold his or her own. This is a mistake. To be suggestible, it's almost like a biological fingerprint of a particular set of cognitive skills that some people have and their ability to take information, internalize it and do something about it. That something could be just changing their thinking, it could be changing their emotions, which is a form of changing your thinking, and it could translate into actions.
22:14 Dan Harris? So if I'm hearing you correctly, there's a kind of healthy suggestibility, which would be, yeah, let me reframe my fear of enclosed spaces in some way that allows me to tolerate it, or let me reframe failure, for example, as just a learning. There's a kind of healthy susceptibility that would allow for a benevolent warping of reality. And then there's an unhealthy suggestibility that blots out reality in ways that could be harmful to you or others.
22:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, I don't think that suggestibility is either positive or negative, or healthy or unhealthy. I think that the use of it is. So when people are suggestible, you can just take that suggestibility and harness it, either to something that would be helpful and beneficial to them, or you can do it in a way that would distress them and work against them. It's basically almost like a personality profile. Some people are very suggestible, and that itself could turn into a gift, or it could turn into an Achilles heel, depending on who's using it and what they're doing with them. I want to also explain, just as part of this conversation, suggestibility is not a panacea. It's not like if I come to somebody like me, for example, and I say, oh, I can
23:30 Speaker 04 give you a suggestion that would make you grow hair on your head. That's not likely to work. It's like if you say to someone, you're going to grow a supernumerary arm. Nobody's going to grow a third arm just because of a suggestion. But there are certain things that suggestion can help with. You can change your dimension of, you know, hopefulness. You can change your ability to deal with pain. You can change the way that you circulate blood. You can change your core temperature. You can change even your sugar level in the blood. I mean, these are things that people have studied and have demonstrated in different contexts and in different studies, that for some people, and in certain experimental studies, work very well. And that brings us to a point where we say, well, how can
24:15 Speaker 04 we take suggestion? How can we take people who we can screen to be suggestible, and reliably so, and help them in a way that will use mechanisms, that will use brain structures and brain states that are not necessarily available or not necessarily studied in mainstream medicine?
24:33 Dan Harris? All right, you said a lot there.
24:36 Dan Harris? I get how we could use the power of suggestion to change our levels of hopefulness or optimism. But how can it change your core temperature or even the sugar levels in your blood?
24:48 Speaker 04 These are excellent questions. We go about this very carefully and it's still, these are judicious studies that are still very controversial and they should be controversial because they need to be replicated and they need to be done by multiple researchers all over the world and using different conditions and so on. Some people, particularly in psychology departments, but this is true also for neuroscience, this is true also for medicine and psychiatry and so on. Some people have demonstrated, if you take individuals, for example, who are very sensitive to sugar fluctuations in their bloodstream because, for example, they're diabetic or other conditions, you can influence the sugar level, the actual measurement, in other words,
25:30 Speaker 04 the actual level of sugar in their blood is a function of what you tell them about what they ate. You can change the nutritional labels of what they think that they ate and the nutritional labels become more important to them and influence their sugar blood level more than the actual food that they consumed. This is very interesting because it shows that our semantic understanding or the way that we process information intellectually sometimes override the actual food that we just ingested. So if somebody thinks that they just took something that is very sugary, their blood sugar level might go up more than it should based on the food that they ate and vice versa.
26:12 Speaker 04 These things show us that there is an element of top-down control. It's not just driven by the stimulus, it's not just driven by the food, which is something that we usually think about. I mean, when we say sugar blood level, we say, okay, it depends on what you ate and so on. Same thing is true for situations like asthma. You can take individuals who have asthma and you can tell them for all kinds of reasons, and I can get into why, we are going to give them a very small dose of an irritant, an airway irritant, in order to see how strong their asthma is or to see how twitchy their airway is. Ways are and we begin to give them something that actually is nothing. It's just a placebo. It's just vapor. It's just, you know, water vapor or something else that does is not supposed to do much.
26:55 Speaker 04 And you can see that even after a few seconds or very small dose, they will go into a full asthma attack. Not because you gave them something that is an actual irritant, but because they're under the impression that they got an irritant. So there's something about our expectations. There's something about what we think is going to happen that sometimes changes our physiology in a big way. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes that change can be therapeutically harnessed.
27:23 Dan Harris? I want to hear more about how this can be therapeutically harnessed. But first, just a overarching question. Is this harnessability only applicable to people who are highly suggestible or for everybody?
27:36 Speaker 04 So this is applicable to everybody, basically. And this is something that I also asked myself for many, many years now. The dichotomy into who's highly suggestible and who's less suggestible works in very, very specific contexts. It works in very super specific contexts where science has given us instruments or tools that we've been able to validate, reliable tools in order to be able to distinguish between highly suggestible people and less suggestible people. But even when we do studies and we look very carefully at low suggestibles, people who are allegedly not very susceptible to suggestibility, we can see changes in them as well.
28:15 Speaker 04 They will usually not be as remarkable, as dramatic, as exponentially noticeable or salient as we would see in highly suggestibles. In highly suggestibles, it's low hanging fruit. We see it very, very dramatically. And sometimes what we see with high suggestibles, I mean, we call them sometimes hypnotic virtuosos. If we do it in the context of hypnosis, because it doesn't take much to get them to go with the suggestion. People who are lower suggestible, when we do lab experiments and we look at effects at the millisecond level or effects that have to do with the conduction of nerve signals and so on, we can see these changes. They're very small, but we can probably build on them. It's just harder and the effects are smaller.
29:01 Dan Harris? Coming up, Dr. Amir Raz talks about the evolutionary advantages of being suggestible, the role of suggestion in your mental health, and practical exercises for increasing thought control.
29:20 Speaker 01 We work with veterans every day. Caring about people isn't the same as knowing how to help. Safeguard Veterans gave our team free online on-demand training to better understand military culture, recognize when someone may be struggling, and connect veterans to support and resources. It's practical, flexible, and our staff actually use what they learned.
29:40 Speaker 02 Get started at SafeguardVeterans.net. Click on "Community Organizations." Safeguard Veterans is a 2026 pilot research program funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
29:53 Dan Harris? I do want to just say again that we are going to get super practical in a second, but just staying on a high level for a moment, let's talk about evolution. Why do we have this feature or bug or whatever in our operating system? Why do we evolve for suggestibility?
30:08 Speaker 04 I have spent quite a bit of thought on this question. What is the evolutionary advantage of being suggestible? So, some of the advantages should be obvious because they have to do with learning. They have to do with our ability to navigate our environment. We live in very complex environments. Having a suggestion, suggestions don't have to be verbal. They don't have to be written. Suggestions can be based on gestures. Suggestions can be based on hums, on whistles. Suggestions can also be sometimes just a gaze, an eye gaze. And to be suggestible basically meant that you could learn a lot more effectively from people around you in social situations, from your ancestors, if it's your parents,
30:53 Speaker 04 if it's your uncles, if it's your grandparents. From an evolutionary standpoint, earlier versions of who we are today were less developed in their ability to communicate language, less developed in their ability to communicate in writing, or even by pictures, or by building certain things. And suggestion is a great way to communicate from an early developmental stage point on what to do in certain situations, what not to do, how to think, how to approach certain things. And in that regard, suggestibility plays a major role in human evolution, because a lot of what we do, we do in social situations, and we do in social contexts, and suggestion
31:38 Speaker 04 is a great way to help people realize or figure out what to do, what not to do.
31:43 Dan Harris? So on the savanna in evolutionary times, a family is approaching, or a child is approaching a bush filled with poisonous berries, and the cock of an eyebrow of his mother might plant the suggestion, avoid berries that look like this?
32:00 Speaker 04 I don't know about that. I mean, I don't know if I can reduce it to a situation like that, but I can definitely see a situation that there would be an intimation, for example, from a mother to a child, or from a parent, or a caregiver to a child, to avoid a particular stimulus, signaling that a particular stimulus is dangerous without explaining what it is, without getting into the whole story, oh, be careful, this is dangerous because it's going to ooze poison because it's going to be absorbed through your hands. Just some kind of a signal that says, you know, I think that this is dangerous, it's not advisable, or something like that. And sometimes a suggestion would be more effective than actually a whole communication about something, particularly when you are limited in time, limited in resources.
32:44 Dan Harris? So from an evolutionary standpoint, the reason why we are suggestible is that it allows you to learn in a way that's more efficient?
32:55 Speaker 04 Not only it allows you to learn in ways that are more efficient, it also allows you to thrive. Don't forget that years ago, and not that many years ago, most of our medicine was a shamanistic, basically, and a lot of it, a lot of the interventions were faith-based. They were based on symbols. They were based on getting in touch with our ancestors through rituals, through fires, through sometimes psychedelic drugs, through all kinds of situations where the spirit played a huge role in what you're doing in order to heal, in order to cure. Today, in modern medicine, we have reduced that part of spirituality. We are mostly focused on drugs and mechanisms of action and so on.
33:38 Speaker 04 But not that long ago, the role of a shaman was to do things by summoning particular ideas or using symbolism and so on. And people are very sensitive to that. People are extremely sensitive to cognitive symbols, to connecting ideas, sometimes that are not connected, not connecting ideas that are connected. Religion is part of these things and so on. It's a way to bring people together. It's a way to heal them. It's a way to deal with a collective of people and it's a way to educate people and have them conform to a particular set of behaviors.
34:12 Dan Harris? And again, can be used for good or ill.
34:15 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
34:16 Dan Harris? Let's talk about the using it for good. Let's get pretty practical about, given that all of our brains have a degree of suggestibility, how can we harness this to our own benefit?
34:29 Speaker 04 So suggestibility is something that you can play with even if you have like no particular health concerns. All of us do. If we just live long enough, we will have some health concerns. I mean, it could be from achy knees to migraines, you know, whatever, lower back pain. But you don't need to have a particular health reason in order to play around with suggestion and to go into this fold, to go into this domain. One of the examples that I like to use in dealing with suggestion is the role of pain. We all feel pain and pain is a very important component in our life. Lives because this idea of no deception tells us that something is going wrong.
35:09 Speaker 04 It tells us to be careful. It, I mean, it warns us that we are getting into dangerous territory. We can demonstrate very well that we can change pain thresholds with suggestion. And that shows us that even pain, something that we usually think is so subjective, elementary, visceral, something that other people don't have access to and so on, even something like pain is malleable. We can go in and we can find ways to dull the pain, to reframe the pain, to deal with the pain. Now, you can do it even if you don't suffer from pain, if you, just as a sort of a cognitive exercise or some kind of a self-development tool, if you're interested in trying to see how much control you can get over your pain.
35:54 Speaker 04 But if you are, for example, going through chemotherapy, or if you're going through some painful procedure, whatever that might be, you can actually learn how to have better control over your pain, how to be less anxious about your pain, how to control it better, how to befriend it, sort of, how to expect it, when it comes, how to deal with it, how to sort of roll it around and so on. These are things that are learned and they're learnable. It's not something that, you know, people have training in. You don't go to school learning these things. This is not something that you learn in university. It's something that you need to sort of come into grips with throughout your life, and some people do, some people don't.
36:33 Speaker 04 But we are seeing that physiologically, there are ways that we can get more control over something as weird as pain. And we can help people deal better with pain, not just by dulling it or reducing it, but also by reframing it and reconstructing it and dealing with it in a way that makes it more tolerable. So it does have health benefits and we can take it there, especially when we're dealing with pediatric populations that have to go through certain procedures, but also oncological reasons. And in general, we have a lot of mental health anguish. We can use suggestions for, particularly when the drugs that we use are not as effective as we would like for them to be.
37:15 Dan Harris? Well, let's stay with pain. We'll get to mental health. Can you describe how would I use the suggestibility of my brain to change my relationship to pain?
37:26 Speaker 04 Well, I mean, some people, I think most people would have the realization or the experience or the knowledge that when you are more stressed, when you are more anxious, pain has a tendency to be more acute or to be amplified. Let's say that we're going to the dentist. Most people, when they go to the dentist, are anxious somewhat. They might be a little bit anxious, they might be a lot anxious. I don't know if they're going for a root canal or for a checkup. I don't know if they're going for a cleaning or for a cavity. Whatever it is, if you measure what the person anxiety level is before or at baseline, and when they're sitting on the chair, when they're entering and sitting on the chair, you know, I bet you that you're gonna see that the person is more anxious when they're there. You can actually prep people, and some dentists are very good with that,
38:11 Speaker 04 mentally for what they should be doing beforehand in order to have less of a painful experience. They don't need to be highly hypnotizable, but they do need to do some mental prep work for it. Most dentists will tell you, I can give you an analgesic. I will give you a little shot, you'll feel a pinch, and after that, you're not gonna feel anything. But what do you do when you do feel? What happens when they give you a shot and you still feel? And they tell you, it's not possible, you cannot, I put a nerve block on it, it's not possible. Are you arguing with my pain? Are you telling me what I can feel and what I cannot feel? This is when suggestion becomes very relevant. You can control what you feel, not through an external agent,
38:54 Speaker 04 not by relying on what somebody else is doing, if it's a nerve block or something like that, but something that you are doing, something that you are exercising, something that you can exercise some control over. The fact that you are the agent, the fact that you are participating in this particular dynamic makes it different. Different brain areas are participating. Different brain areas are regulating the signals that you're getting. This creates a different dynamic, a different neural dynamic, a different psychological dynamic. For some people, it's very effective, for other people, it's less effective. There are certain hospitals in Spain, for example, where they used to do surgeries under hypnosis. I mean, I wouldn't do open-heart surgery.
39:36 Speaker 04 Under hypnosis, but they would do, for example, you know, uh, surgery such as an invasive nail or things that have to do with minor surgery that would inflict pain. But they would teach people how to deal with the pain in a way that would make them comfortable enough to go through the procedure without the use or without the need for narcotics. This requires a certain participation and willing to participate from the patient. Some patients are well against it. They'll say, I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to do anything. I just want to show up and take care. I don't want to hear about anything that you give me everything that you need to do to get rid of the pain. Some people are not like that. Some people say, I want to have as much involvement as I want. And some people, unfortunately, are allergic to some of the anesthetic agents.
40:20 Speaker 04 Or they cannot have, for other reasons, they cannot have the anesthetic agents. And then this particular skill, this particular cognitive skill, this particular, I would say, technique of trying to control your pain and how to do it becomes very valuable.
40:35 Dan Harris? All of that is very alluring. And as somebody who has a dentist appointment coming up, I'm just curious, like, how can I do this for myself going into a painful, potentially painful?
40:45 Speaker 04 You will need, you will need some guidance. I mean, you will need a mentor. You will need to work with someone who can teach you and give you some exercises before you go in. And they will give you ways to demonstrate to yourself that you're able to lower your pain threshold. It's just like learning how to crawl and how to walk and how to run. There are certain exercises that you can do, that you can demonstrate to yourself and you can teach yourself how you can control certain things. For example, how to lower your blood pressure. It's the same thing. I mean, you can do some breathing exercises. You can do certain things that would show you and you can measure your blood pressure before and after. And you can demonstrate that your blood pressure is going down. You can do the same thing with your pain threshold. You can do it also in combination with other things.
41:28 Speaker 04 So for example, you can demonstrate when people strike you in a certain way with a feather on your arm, that helps you to reduce the pain even more. And for each person, it's a slightly different thing. But you learn a little bit about how you specifically, with a set of techniques, can use the best way to control your pain level to a level that can be convenient or comfortable or acceptable to you. If you can, some people cannot, or some people would not, and some people are not interested. The whole premise makes them uncomfortable. They don't want to be involved in this at all. They just want to show up and they want other people to take care of the thing. These are all legitimate approaches.
42:05 Dan Harris? So in order to do this for myself, I would need to actually work with a mentor. It's not something you could teach now that I would be able to take it into the dentist.
42:14 Speaker 04 I mean, I could teach you now. It'd be a little bit surface and irresponsible, but it would have to do with creating exercises for you where I would give you measured pain and I would show you ways that you can control this pain. And we will do this in sort of a build up way and we will do this in a way that would build up to the situation. And the pain that I would give you would be pain that sort of simulates or mimics or in some way emulates the kind of pain that you would expect to feel over there. And I will show you ways that you can bring that pain down, expect it, dull it and so on. And we will do a few of these exercises before so that by the time you get there, not only you know what to expect, but you have some tools as to how to go about
42:57 Speaker 04 doing something that would allow you to get control over the pain that you're likely going to experience.
43:02 Dan Harris? But I could imagine, just on a very simple level, this idea of expectation could be useful. And I don't know if this is suggestibility or a cognitive reframe or if those are the same things, but going into the dentist, I could say to myself, you should expect a slight amount of pain or discomfort, but you've been to the dentist a million times before. You can handle it.
43:25 Speaker 04 That's right. I mean, that would be one approach and that approach might work really well for you, but not for others. Other people might need a very elaborate induction. Other people might need like a very elaborate story with a lot of imagery and imagining that they are, you know, on a beach somewhere, drinking a pina colada and feeling the warmth of the sun. Some people might need like a whole elaborate setup for that to happen. Some people, you know, what you just said might be enough for them. It might be just as simple as, I've done this a million times or I've done this seven times and I know that it's going to be painful a little bit, but you know, I can do it. I can hack it. I'll plow through it and it's going to be fine. That is enough for some people. For some people, it's not enough. Some people actually need a very long and fuzzy kind of induction with a lot of experience.
44:10 Speaker 04 And this is what I mean when I say suggestibility. It's tailored to the individual. Different people need different things in different contexts.
44:18 Dan Harris? So let's switch context for a second and talk about mental health. How can suggestibility be harnessed vis a vis our mental health?
44:26 Speaker 04 Mental health is a very interesting field. We don't have physical markers for many of the things that we deal with. So if we take depression, for example, there's no blood test that you can do for depression. There is no clinical brain scan that you can do. And then you look at the brain and say, this person is depressed. So a lot depends on symptoms that are sometimes subjectively assessed by the clinician. Sometimes it relies on the patient report and so on. What we see is that in today's world, we have delegated a great deal of what we do with our mental health to drugs that basically influence brain function. And it doesn't matter if they're antipsychotics or antidepressants or anti-anxiety. We see that this is what's happening.
45:11 Speaker 04 This is something that was not the case 100 years ago, and it is the case today. When we look very carefully at some of these drugs, for example, if we look at depression, depression is a good example. If we look at antidepressants, when we started out with antidepressants, we thought that they were so great and so effective, we wanted to, or some people wanted to add them to the drinking water. I mean, it was so good. Of course, that's a very extreme view. Today, we know that a lot of these antidepressants, when you compare them against placebos, are actually performing on par clinically. And the statistical difference that we see is sometimes very small. Now, I'm not suggesting even by a small stretch of the imagination that people should stop taking their antidepressants, God forbid.
45:52 Speaker 04 But I am suggesting that there is a big component of other things that are not just the ingredients in the antidepressant that can be very helpful to helping people who are dealing with, let's say, depression. Also, depression is not a monolithic thing. There's no one thing that is called depression, there are different kinds of depression. When you see that, when you realize that the drugs are not so effective or as effective as we would like for them to be, it gives more room to things like placebo and hope, motivation and cognitive reframing, imaginative visualization and so on and so forth. And we see that when You are working with individuals by giving them hope, by working with them,
46:33 Speaker 04 by telling them things that have to do with appealing to their agency and things that they should do. Not just sleeping well and eating well and exercising and so on, but doing things with their thoughts. The kind of CBT that we sometimes cognitive behavioral therapy that we sometimes refer to. In other words, we are telling them how to think about their condition. We're telling them what to think, what not to think, how to reframe certain things. We see that these things are very, very effective or as effective as many of the other techniques. In that regard, having an approach that uses suggestibility, providing certain suggestions to people about their health and how they should go about their health
47:15 Speaker 04 and what they should do and what they shouldn't do, in some cases can be very effective, particularly if the person is highly suggestible.
47:23 Dan Harris? For somebody listening to this and wants to, you know, just play with it in their own lives, what could we do in the spirit of CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy or hacking our own suggestibility to have an impact on any aspect of our mental health?
47:38 Speaker 04 First of all, I wouldn't recommend playing with it as sort of a video game or something like that. Experimenting is good, but I would always recommend that, you know, when people deal with mental health, they see a mental health professional and work hand in hand with a mental health professional. What I have discovered through being in for many years in some of the leading psychiatry departments in North America, you know, be it Cornell, Columbia, McGill in Canada and back to the States now. I recognize certain mental conditions have a strong component of a top down control. In other words, it's not just about the medication that you take. It's not just about the drug that you're taking.
48:21 Speaker 04 A lot of it depends on your participation in fighting the disease. A lot of it depends on your participation in fighting the symptoms and doing the right things in order to reduce the symptoms, eliminate them, push them out. Now, sometimes it's possible to do and sometimes it's not possible to do. As I mentioned before. You do not give people a suggestion that they can fly and as a result they can fly. That just doesn't work. It doesn't work and it's very dangerous to do something like that. But to give people suggestions or to instill them with hope or to give people motivation or to create situations where they are thinking more correctly about their mental situation is sometimes key to making them better.
49:04 Dan Harris? I guess what I'm trying to get at is one of our producers has described this show as relentlessly practical. I completely understand your very wise and careful injunction not to do bootleg mental health care on yourself. I guess what I'm trying to get at is and maybe where you and I are getting hung up a little bit is on this area of mental health. I'm a little less focused on somebody who's got a clinical diagnosis for depression and more like what can I do on a day to day basis that would make my life better? That would make me happier? That is in the vein of what you and I are discussing of using hope or cognitive reframing to make life less stressful.
49:49 Speaker 04 So for example, if people would know clinically speaking, the difference between antidepressants and placebos is very, very small clinically. It's actually on par for many of the conditions that we're talking about in the literature. But it's a very, very small difference statistically. Most people don't understand what it means to have a statistical difference, but that's a separate story. It's not because they're stupid. It's just because nobody's ever explained this to them. The fact is that people also get better on placebos. Now, I'm not saying that people should throw away their antidepressants and switch over to placebos. That would be irresponsible and I want to do the judicious and the responsible thing. And the judicious and the responsible thing would be consult with your physician because there are plenty of things that you can do
50:34 Speaker 04 having to do with your own cognitive profile that can help you battle depression. I'm not saying throw away your antidepressants. I'm just saying there's many things that you can do from exercising to meditation, to sleeping well, to eating well, to having the right kind of support about your depression. In other words, thinking about your thoughts and thinking about what not to think and guiding your thoughts in a certain way and understanding that people can get better even when they're getting. Ingredients that are not containing the antidepressant material in their system. So people can get better just because they think that they're taking care of themselves.
51:19 Speaker 04 That's a very important realization. That's a very important insight. The second you start taking care of yourself, things begin to change. In other words, doing nothing is the kiss of death, sort of in quotes. It just means that you're not going to get better. By not doing anything, you're not going to get better. By doing something, you are going to get better. And even if that thing is doing shiatsu, even if that thing is doing something completely different, because you're doing it, you're being the agent, because you're taking initiative, because you're getting involved, because you're getting off the chair and you're doing something about your condition, about your depression. And we can show, from the medical literature, we can show that this involvement
52:03 Speaker 04 has to do with the idea, with a suggestion, that you are taking control, you're taking some action about your condition, as opposed to delegating everything to a particular drug that you're taking and waiting for it to work. This is the distinction that I'm trying to make.
52:19 Dan Harris? This seems broadly applicable throughout life. I have a friend who has been dealing with many deleterious physiological ramifications from having a mild concussion. And he went to a physician who's a leading expert in this, and this physician really, literally just changed his whole attitude about the condition and said, "All the things you've been avoiding because they're uncomfortable, I want you to approach those things. And I want you to believe that running into what you've been running away from is actually the way out here." And that cognitive shift, where my friend Glenn went kind of on the offense
53:01 Dan Harris? with this condition, had an immediate and significant effect. Does that rhyme with what you were talking about?
53:08 Speaker 04 Yes, I mean, this is an unusual approach and a good one. This approach would be exactly in line with what I'm saying. So in this particular case, the suggestion that the physician made was, I want you to go and confront the things that you are afraid of. Don't shy away from them. Don't try to hide. And I'll give you tools and I'll be here to support you and to back you up with the symptoms of your concussion. But this is what you actually need to do in order to thrive, in order to conquer this particular thing. That's a suggestion. That's not medical treatment that is relegated to drugs. That's sort of, it's something that changes the motivation and the outlook of the patient about what they should be doing in order to deal with their condition, with their situation.
53:50 Dan Harris? But it seems to me like that's the kind of mindset shift we can make on our own vis a vis many of life's challenges. I'm unemployed, I'm looking for a job.
53:59 Speaker 04 You can definitely do it in many domains, some better than others. But for example, let's say that you have, you know, a bacterial infection. I wouldn't recommend using suggestion for that. You know, I don't think it's responsible and I think that the right thing to do is to get the right medication. And the right medication is so effective in most people that, you know, you don't need to even come back. I mean, you just take it for a few days and they don't need to re-swab you because we know clinically that, you know, after doing that, that's the case. What I'm saying here about suggestion is true for particular domains where our medicine today is effective, but not as effective as treating a bacterial infection of the sort that I just described to you. That's where suggestion can play a major role and sometimes more major than the drug
54:43 Speaker 04 itself, believe it or not.
54:45 Dan Harris? Yeah, I'm trying to broaden it a little bit beyond medicine. I'm just thinking about life's problems generally. This is such an interesting area because I have a real problem with manifestation and the power of positive thinking. Like, you know, if you just tell yourself you're going to get that diamond necklace, it's going to happen inexorably. I don't think that's true. But there is a certain kind of psychological topspin that you can put on a challenge that you're facing, like I've lost my job, I now have to look for a new job. If you go into it with a sense of, yeah, I've been through this before, I've succeeded in the past, I will likely succeed this time. I'm also telling myself the story that I'm taking action here, so I have a sense of agency.
55:27 Dan Harris? This all feels potentially very powerful and in a way that doesn't seem irresponsible.
55:34 Speaker 04 Yes, and I'm glad that you bring these things up because I'm not advocating for manifestation. As a matter of fact, I'm not, you know, a manifestation kind of guy. This is not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that suggestion is a very important component of our psyche. It's a very important component of our well-being. It can well help us navigate not just decisions, but it can help us conquer crises. When I talk about suggestion, we are more open to suggestion during particular times in our lives. So for example, somebody who's went through a divorce is going to be more open to suggestions
56:13 Speaker 04 about relationships, more open to suggestions about even, I would say, you know, a form of bereavement and so on, because it's a function of where we are. It's a function of what we are experiencing. Our ability to take suggestions also depends on the source. The credibility of the source is very, very important. Today, we live in a world where we are bombarded with information, most of it completely out of the blue with very little to support it. And people are confused about what they should do, what they should believe, what they should read, what they should listen to. And that's normal, I guess, in a situation where, you know, all these things are happening. What I'm advocating for is evidence-based science.
56:54 Speaker 04 We are showing with studies, with scientific studies, that have been peer-reviewed and replicated and published in some of the best, you know, leading journals in science, that this top-down effect of your mindset and your brain states, you can actually change your brain states as a function of what you're thinking. I'm not talking about positive thinking as a way of life to conquer all of the ills and all of the difficult things that are thrown at us, but I'm talking about our ability to use our mind and to use mindful techniques that have to do with your psychological profile, that have to do with your expectations, in order to deal with situations by giving yourself more control than you normally have over those situations.
57:38 Dan Harris? So very practically, for a listener who wants to operationalize this in their lives, what are some examples of how to do that?
57:44 Speaker 04 So for example, here's a game that I recommend that people would do. Imagine that you have on your forehead a display device, some kind of a small screen that tells people what you're thinking. So right now, when I'm speaking to you, I can see exactly what you're thinking because there's a small display on your forehead and I know exactly what you're thinking about. Now, if this is true, you're going to be very careful about what you're thinking now. Because everybody can see what you're thinking. And if you think, oh, you know, this guy is full of, you know, whatever, everybody will see that. And that's going to be very embarrassing, maybe for me, maybe for you, maybe for both of us. So you're going to be in a situation where when you begin to think that, you will push that thought out and you'll say, oh, but it's going to show on the display, so I better do something about it.
58:27 Speaker 04 And the same is true when you see an attractive person on the street, or when you see a stupid person on the street, or a very smart person on the street, whatever. You have to be very careful with what you think, because everybody can see, or so you create this game where everybody can see what you think. This is enough to create a brain state that most people don't experience. This kind of a game, a mental game, is enough to demonstrate to people that you can actually control and you will control your thoughts a lot more. Now, you won't be able to play it more than two minutes at the beginning, or more than 30 seconds at the beginning, but as you practice it more and more, you'll get better at it. You'll get better at it and you'll get better at controlling your thoughts and believe it or not, you're not going to think these thoughts. I mean, you're going to be able to control these thoughts and compartmentalize them
59:09 Speaker 04 or push them away, or you'll be able to think about them when you are in a dark room with nobody is around you. This is very important because these are not just fun exercises to do, they actually change the way that we behave and act in the world. I hope you understand the practicality, because you know, this is what I'm trying to demonstrate here.
59:32 Dan Harris? Coming up, Amir talks about the crucial magical ingredient when it comes to life's challenges, why placebos work even when you know you're taking one, how to protect yourself against misinformation and disinformation, and much more.
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1:00:24 Dan Harris? Speaking of practical, let's talk about hope. You call hope a magical ingredient. How can we harness hope as it pertains to the issues we're facing in our lives?
1:00:34 Speaker 04 We see time and again that for individuals, things like loneliness and hope and other factors of this magnitude are crucial. Loneliness kills. It's a fact. I mean, you can dance around it and you can try to hide it and so on. But loneliness, being lonely for a long period of time, is very difficult. It's difficult on the physiology and so on. Hope is one of these things. And some people are born more optimistic than others. It's almost like a personality trait. Some people are just very optimistic, and this helps them. It helps them with pain thresholds. It helps them with difficult periods in life. It helps them with crises. It helps them with all kinds of dire outlooks that we sometimes face. Some people are pessimistic.
1:01:18 Speaker 04 I regret to say that I belong to that group more than the optimistic one. And I try very hard to change my outlook. You know, I try very hard to be more optimistic and to do these things. But I found a great solution. You know, I married an optimistic person. There are many ways to go about what you're doing, but the first thing is to recognize who you are, to recognize your strengths and your weaknesses, and to understand that there is something that you can do with your outlook, with your mind, with your cognitive toolbox. You can actually change not just thoughts, but actual neurophysiology. You can change brain states and you can change connections in your brain. It doesn't happen immediately. It might require some practice.
1:02:03 Speaker 04 But this is a form of brain training, mental brain training, that you can do, very similar to going to the gym. And this can be the same. The same would apply for having hope. A good clinician... Would know how to instigate hope and how to give people hopeful outlooks and hopeful trajectories and they would know how to chart out hopeful trajectories for their patients so that the patients can follow in these garden paths and get to a destination in a way that is more wholesome and more conducive to their health. And this is something that we sometimes forget. We forget that in many ways, we need suggestions. The suggestions that we get are not always clear to us.
1:02:45 Speaker 04 We get suggestions from our spouses, we get suggestions from our parents, we get suggestions from our doctors, we get suggestions from our car mechanics. But it's very important to sort of understand that suggestions are not just empty words. They can actually color, they can actually envelop our thinking in such a way that they would actually influence the neurophysiology of what we're experiencing.
1:03:09 Dan Harris? I would imagine we could give ourselves a kind of reasonable grounded level of hope when we're dealing with a problem, based even, it could be for somebody like me who's a pessimist, the hope that I could train in myself would be, you've had many ups and downs in your life, you've managed all of them, you'll be able to manage this one.
1:03:27 Speaker 04 So the only problem with that is that it's not specific enough. We like to, usually we are addressing a specific problem, we're dealing with a specific concern. The concern could be lower back pain. Let's say that you say to me, oh, I've dealt with a lot of adversity in my life, so now I have lower back pain and I can deal with that because I've dealt with a lot of adversity in my life. That could be true, but it's not specific enough. It's not, it's like, it doesn't address the issue of back pain specifically and lower back pain.
1:03:53 Dan Harris? So my belief could be, in that case, the hope could be, there's evidence that back pain is treatable, therefore if I do follow the right protocols, my back pain could be mitigated.
1:04:06 Speaker 04 And I'll tell you more than that. I'll tell you that there is evidence documented and published in the scientific literature that when you give people a placebo and you tell them, here is a placebo, an inactive pill that does not have any active chemical ingredients that would do anything, really. But if you tell them, here's a pill and I want you to take it three times a day, because that's going to remind you, when you take the pill, every time you take the pill, it would remind you that you are actually taking care of your lower back pain, because we have studies to demonstrate that every time you are reminded of your lower back pain and you change your position and you do a little bit of a stretch and you do a little bit of a bend and you do this particular exercise that I showed you. So every time you take the placebo pill,
1:04:50 Speaker 04 I want you to remember that you are taking care of yourself, you're taking care of your lower back pain. People have demonstrated that that, which is called an open-label placebo, in other words, you're not misleading anyone, you're telling them a placebo and you're telling them this is an open-label placebo, people feel better. People get better, their lower back pain gets better. Now, is it better because of the placebo pill? Is it better because of the stretch? Is it better because we are addressing it? Is it better because it's out in the open? I don't know. And some people will say, I'm not one of them, but some people will say, I don't care. Because all I care about is that my lower back pain goes away. Now, we have demonstrated, for example, that if you look at 3,000 years of acupuncture, acupuncture is as effective as most of the drugs and most of the medical interventions
1:05:33 Speaker 04 that we have today for lower back pain, just based on numbers. Like, as a meta-analytic approach, we can show it that that's the case. Does that mean that people should refer more to acupuncturists? Yes, but they don't do it. So if, you know, we are today at a place where we demonstrate that even taking an open-label placebo can help lower back pain, why are we not doing that? And that creates another layer of discussion that has nothing to do with science or with evidence. It has to do with insurance and with bureaucracy and with, uh, what would people think about physicians? And what would people think about modern medicine? And can we treat people with placebos? And is it ethical? And is there no deception here? And mind you, I'm talking about an open-label placebo.
1:06:16 Speaker 04 I'm talking about a situation where I'm telling you here's a placebo. I'm asking you to take it three times because every time you take a placebo, we know that your body throughout your life, you have taken pills every time you were sick and your body knows that when you take a pill, it's supposed to get better. So it's already sort of muscle memory, sort of speak. And when you take the placebo, it's going to help you just by virtue of taking it. It's going to remind you that you're addressing your lower back pain and so on and so forth. So you see, it's becoming this kind of tower that you're building on top of virtually nothing. But we have evidence to show that these kinds of dramatizations, these kinds of interventions are effective, as effective as what we have when you take real medication. What does that tell you?
1:07:00 Dan Harris? Tells you that the brain is suggestible and that's very powerful. Let me ask you about the flip side of this. We've been talking about how we can harness our own suggestibility. How can we protect ourselves with these suggestible brains in the face of a tsunami of miss and disinformation abroad and in the land?
1:07:21 Speaker 04 Protecting ourselves against disinformation is a very difficult thing to do and this is a very difficult time to do it. The onslaught of false information, misinformation, disinformation is so huge, really it's penetrating everywhere. It's penetrating even science. It's not enough to say, oh, I'm going to only read the New York Times and it's not enough to say, I'm going to only read the Washington Post or whatever it is that you want to read. It just doesn't work that way because you can show all kinds of examples of things that are incorrect that are published here and there. The true way to go about this, which is the only way that I know, is to advocate for critical thinking and to be very careful with your sources and to triangulate your
1:08:04 Speaker 04 sources, to make sure that you're hearing it from multiple independent sources, to make sure that whatever information that you are getting is information that has been vetted by multiple sources, by multiple people whom you appreciate, whom you trust professionally. If they're, you know, journalists, if they're scientists, if they are. Other professionals, the fact of the matter is that it's very difficult to know what we should believe. It's just a difficult thing to do. And the fact of the matter is that we are always biased towards party lines. Whatever we have a tendency to believe, we will find information that will either confirm or solidify or otherwise support certain things that we believe in.
1:08:48 Speaker 04 And it's very similar to the exercise that I asked you to think about before with a display device on your forehead. Always ask yourself, how can I poke a hole? How can I criticize? How can I challenge this information and who is challenging this information and what are they saying and who are they? And when they challenge this information, what sources are they bringing to challenge the information and who are they and what is their professional credentials and and why should I listen to them? At the end of the day, the world is very complex and we have to make decisions. Sometimes we will make the wrong decisions. It's just part of the cost of living. Sometimes we will make the wrong decisions, but in a decision for vaccination versus anti-vaccinations,
1:09:31 Speaker 04 that's something that is builds on knowledge or on mountains of knowledge that are either coming from science or coming from non-science. So if some people believe or think that science should be dismissed, it's not really a conversation anymore. It's more about where you want to put your eggs and what basket you want to put your eggs. So I choose to put my eggs in the science basket because I think that that's one of the really crown jewels of our species as individuals who have evolved on this planet. We have a lot of knowledge in science that we never had before and we can apply it very well. And one of the things that I'm saying as a scientist, not just as a magician, is that we have incipient knowledge, we have the beginning. I would say not just the beginning, it's almost like an embryo
1:10:17 Speaker 04 of knowledge that we have about suggestion and about how mental states, brain states that have to do with your thinking can actually change your physiology in a way that is more remarkable than we ever appreciated. And we're beginning to understand that this has implications for our immune system and it has to do with our Thresholds and it has to do with our sugar level and has to do with our energy expenditure and it has to do with all kinds of things like that and we can harness it to all kinds of domains. We are at the beginning stages of trying to understand how to do it judiciously and ethically. And that's why I try not to weasel out of what you when you tell me, give me a practical example, give me a practical. So I tried to give you a practical example with the display device on your forehead, just in order for you to
1:11:01 Speaker 04 see how you can control your thoughts in a practical way. But to harness it to a specific domain really depends on the individual. We're so early in this field scientifically. I mean, from a spiritual standpoint, this has been like that for many years, thousands of years. People have been doing this. They don't need me for that. The only thing that I'm doing is I'm bringing some scientific metrics and scientific methods in order to convince the skeptical scientific community that there is something really interesting here that is sort of a gold nugget.
1:11:29 Dan Harris? Yeah, well, it's fascinating and really promising and interesting. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and also any other resources you're putting out into the world that we should know about?
1:11:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the book that just came out that talks about these topics called the suggestible brain. In this book, I sort of talk about the dual worlds that I hold both as a magician, as a scientist, and how I use suggestion as an entertainment or in order to deceive individuals and create all kinds of feats of magic. And then the other one, I, as a scientist, I take off my wizardly hat and I just put everything out there as a scientist should about all the information that we have, all the knowledge that we have about how powerful suggestion can be in anything from health to personal growth. The website that you can visit for these things is amirraz.org. That's my personal website. That's A M I R and R A Z,
1:12:25 Speaker 04 my first name and my last name, concatenatedtogether.org. And I do think that some of my academic work previously, I mean, I've written a book on hypnosis and meditation, the differences between them and, you know, the brain states that go with that. But those books were mostly academic. I find, or I found, that when I write academic books, other than my My mother, who buys every book that I write, most people don't read them, or if they read them, they don't understand them. And I learned something about academia that, you know, it's very important to actually write popular science books. It's very important to reach for the for the novice, for people who are very smart and clever, but they don't necessarily have the jargon or they don't necessarily have the background knowledge. And that's what I did with The Suggestible Brain. I mean, if you can read and you have two neurons
1:13:10 Speaker 04 that are connected to one another, and everybody does, we should be able to learn a great deal from it. And I hope that people would have fun with it because it was a fun book to write and I think it's a fun book to read.
1:13:20 Dan Harris? Dr. Ramir Raz, thank you very much for your time.
1:13:23 Speaker 04 My pleasure. Thank you so much, Dan.
1:13:29 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Dr. Raz. Don't forget, you can get a guided meditation tailored to this episode from Dan Mauricio over at danharris.com. And remember, today is the last day of our summer merch sale, so go to shop.danharris.com to get 40% off select items while supplies last. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of Van Islands wrote our theme.
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