Getting Hypnotized with David Spiegel

Hypnosis—stage act or science? Neil deGrasse Tyson, joined by co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly, dives into the mysterious world of hypnosis with clinical psychiatrist David Spiegel. What is hypnosis? Is it about losing control—or gaining it?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About time we did a show on hypnosis. We're getting there. A lot of the body to cover, Neil. Okay.

• 0:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, I, I, I'd only ever thought of hypnosis as a stage act. Yeah. And here we got one of the world's experts on it. Yeah, we're gonna get into the real deal of hypnosis. Okay.

• 0:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. And we gotta get Chuck out of that somehow. Coming up, all about hypnosis on StarTalk Special Edition.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Special Edition. Yodogras Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, when you hear special edition, not far behind that is Gary O'Reilly. Gary? Neil. All right, former soccer pro. Mm-hmm. Turned announcer. Yes. And we're borrowing you from the UK. You are.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course Chuck Knight, Chuck E. Baby. Hey, what's happening? All right, these special editions get inside the human condition. Yeah. In ways that I had never previously imagined we would. Yeah, which makes them very, very interesting. What is it to be human in the big picture? It's, it's busy in here. It's busy. Yeah. Psychologically, physiologically. Right. Emotionally. Mm-hmm. You know, so Gary, set the stage here. What do you have?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Well, in recent shows, we have ventured inside the human mind to discuss consciousness, which was both enlightening and fascinating. One takeaway from those shows is there is apparently no user manual for the human mind, which said mankind has found ways to navigate and maneuver through the matrix of neurons to facilitate change in our mental state. Psychoscopy, it's nothing new, and neither is hypnosis. But odd is hypnosis and how the bloody hell does it work? Does it take away control or give control? It's gotta be expert time.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, join me in welcoming our special guest today. We've got Dr. David Spiegel. Nice. Dr. Spiegel, welcome to StarTalk.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a clinical and research psychiatrist. Hmm. So that makes you an MD. Right. In there. And also means that you have access to all the great drugs.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, let's just be honest here.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put that right up front.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Put that right up front. Okay, that's the difference, kids, so that you know. When you see psychologist, you're like, that's somebody who's gonna talk you to depth. When you see psychiatrist, that's somebody who's gonna give you some good drugs.

• 2:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck figured that all out. Interesting, you went straight to drugs, not food.

• 2:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, well, what can I say?

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, that would be Stanford University, right?

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  That's correct.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're Director for the Center on Stress and Health.

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Long overdue.

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Think about, in the old days, we'd just say, "Just suck it up."

• 3:04Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Just get over it."

• 3:06Chuck Nice?

  Right. "What's your problem, mister?"

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "What's your problem?"

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're also the Director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. You've got all the right pedigree here, but what we're gonna focus on is a part of the mind that so many of us are intrigued by, and that is hypnosis. Ooh, oh, I left that, wait, you're the author of 13 books?

• 3:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Yeah, but he hypnotized somebody to write them all.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will find out.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he only wrote one, the other 12, he was just like, "You want to write a book."

• 3:43Speaker 02

  I'm actually hypnotizing people to read them.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one.

• 3:48Chuck Nice?

  Nice, nice.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good one, so you're here because this entire episode will focus on and pivot with hypnosis, and I'm skeptical, and so you're gonna hear to undo my skepticism, because I've seen hypnosis acts with magicians on stage, and there's pageantry to it, and there's, I don't know, but that's why we have you here. So first, tell us, what is hypnosis, so we're all on the same page, please?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Well, I'm glad you're curious, Neil, and you're the expert on outer space, and I'm the expert on inner space, so.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From what I can tell, outer space is easier than inner space.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Could well be.

• 4:30Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Um, have you ever gotten so caught up in a good movie that you forget you're watching a movie and you enter the imagined world? Does that happen to you?

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't.

• 4:40Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's a state of self.

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  It's like, no, because he's not saying that you lose touch with reality. It's just that you're so engrossed that you feel like you are an extension of the movie like.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Well put.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So maybe, maybe the closest I can give you on that is, yes, I have felt emotions of characters that are well acted for scripts well written in stories well told. But no time did I think I was in the movie.

• 5:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but it's not about thinking you're in the movie. So it's not this matter of suspending disbelief where it's like, wow, I'm part of the matrix, right? But while you're watching the matrix, you can get so engrossed and so consumed with what's going on. That when Morpheus is in a chair and his head is hanging and Agent Smith is talking to him. You feel like all the tension.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I agree. I'm just saying I credit good acting for that.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So keep going.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  So hypnosis is, uh, has been called believed in imagination. It's a state of highly focused attention. So it's like you're, you're looking through the telephoto lens of a camera, which you see, you see with great detail. But you dissociate, you're less aware of what's going on around you. You turn down the salience network that warns you that something else might happen that's more important. This intensity of focus is a key part of hypnosis and we do it all the time to some extent. Right now, you gentlemen have sensations in your bodies touching these very comfortable chairs you're sitting in. Hopefully. You are not even aware of those sensations until I mention this. Is that, is that right?

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 6:19Chuck Nice?

  Uh, no, I have hemorrhoids.

• 6:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you for sharing.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  TMI.

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  Full disclosure, sorry. Sorry, guys.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  So, well, I am a doctor, but I'm not gonna help you.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you you use the reference a a network? What network are you referring to? There's a a neural network in your head?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  It's a neural network in your head called the salience network. And so it's the it's what fires off when you hear a loud noise. And suddenly you think, is that a gunshot? What is it? I'd better pay attention to it. You're easily distracted when that network is activated. So in hypnosis, you turn that down. You allow yourself to give yourself to whatever it is you are focusing on. Put outside of conscious awareness, things that might ordinarily be in consciousness. And you can try out being different. That's the third and most interesting part of hypnosis. So you had a producer who said she was on stage being hypnotized. You do things, you know, the football coach will dance like a ballerina. It's what scares everybody about hypnosis. But it's actually a very important lesson that you can try out being different. You can suspend yourself.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  So it's highly focused attention, dissociation, and trying out being different.

• 7:29Gary O'Reilly?

  So David, if Neil doesn't think it's a real thing, what can you say to him to make him understand in your mind that it is a real thing?

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why are you starting a fight between us? All I said was I was a little skeptical.

• 7:40Gary O'Reilly?

  That's you don't believe in it.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  It's not a matter of faith. It's not a matter of faith.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. Is the evidence is there or not?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  And the evidence is there. And I'm guessing you're probably not very hypnotizable. Uh, but uh, whether you are or not, the phenomenon exists. Uh, it's the oldest Western conception of a psychotherapy. It's been around for 250 years. And it is a very robust phenomenon. And the majority, all all eight year olds are in trances all the time. You know, if you call them in for dinner, they don't hear you. We lose some hypnotizability as we get uh, older, as we get into our adult years. But the majority of the population is hypnotizable.

• 8:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, how do you test? Is there a there's a standard hypnotizability test?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yes, there is. Yeah, I use, we have one called the hypnotic induction profile. I it takes about five minutes. Uh, we have it on our Reverie self hypnosis app. You can try it for yourself. All I do is do a hypnotic induction. So I ask you to look up, close your eyes, take a deep breath. Let the breaths out, let your eyes relax, but keep them closed, let your body float. And then I give instructions about having one hand or the other float up in the air like a balloon. And many people are surprised that the hand starts to feel different, that it feels like it wants to be up in the air. It feels different from the other arm. You pull it down, it pops back up, they feel less control. And we score that on a zero to 10 scale, and that's how we measure hypnotizability.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  In essence, a test of being able to turn inward and alter the way your body feels and reacts.

• 9:11Chuck Nice?

  Now, if somebody's actively resisting all of this the entire way, would that negate their susceptibility to being hypnotized?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Well, not resisting. There are some people that just aren't hypnotizable. You can try to fight it for a while, but like, you know, why bother? And the funny thing is that there are people who think they're not hypnotizable, and that hand is up there in the air, and you pull it down, and it just wants to go back up. And they'll look at it and say, what is going on here? You know, they're surprised. So sometimes you think you can put up resistance, but you don't, because you're just going along. Resistance is futile.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  It is futile. You don't have a chance.

• 9:53Gary O'Reilly?

  David, why are some people more hypnotizable than others? Because I know we're all different in a certain way, but there must be something in some part of the brain that is operating in a different way, at a different scale.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  That's right. And we know that one of the things that happens when you go into hypnosis is that you turn down activity in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex. The cingulate cortex is like a C on its ends in the middle of the center of your brain. And the front part, the dorsal part, is a part of a network that fires off when there's a mismatch, when suddenly something's happening that shouldn't be happening. And you turn down activity in that part of the brain when you go into hypnosis. We know now that there are some genetic differences that are related to hypnotizability. So people who have a variant of the gene catecholomethyltransferase that metabolizes dopamine

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Particular variant that has a moderate speed of metabolizing dopamine turn out to be more hypnotizable than those who are heterozygous for methionine or valine and who either metabolize too quickly or too slow.

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We know there are many drugs that influence dopamine in your brain. So is it possible to take a drug and make you more susceptible to being hypnotized?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's a good question. People have looked at that. The trouble is it's a matter of control as well. And so there are stimulants, for example, that may make you a little more hypnotizable at first, particularly if you're somewhat anxious or depressed, but will also inhibit your control systems. So you probably will not respond as consistently. So there's no reliable drug change that can alter hypnotizability. However, we've just published a paper showing that you can use transcranial magnetic stimulation over a particular region of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and transiently increase hypnotizability of that.

• 11:57Chuck Nice?

  And just so people understand, when you say transcranial magnetic stimulation, you're talking about placing magnets over a person's head? And then what happens with those magnets in that process?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  You can either stimulate or inhibit, depending on the frequency that you're administering. But you know that when electricity flows through a wire, there's a magnetic field circulating around the electricity.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys knew that. That's good. That's like physics 101. Yeah, yeah, there's for every electric current, there's an associated magnetic field and vice versa.

• 12:29Chuck Nice?

  And that's how we make electricity, by the way.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why it's called electromagnetism.

• 12:33Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, okay.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  All right, good. We're all agreed on that. So you can inhibit activity in that salience network, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex via the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. So you can slow down activity in that region, which is the same thing that happens when people go into hypnosis. So it is possible to inhibit activity in the salience network and enhance hypnotizability.

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  See, if I go back to the original.

• 13:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Hypno, Greek for sleep.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 13:04Gary O'Reilly?

  You're not putting people to sleep. So are you then manipulating the subconscious?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Manipulating is one word for it. I would say you're probably enhancing access to parts of people's thinking and experience that they don't ordinarily think about. And so you're getting them in a, in a frame of mind where they're less likely to be guarded. They're less likely to want to protect themselves and they're more likely to suspend their usual expectations about themselves. That's another part of the brain in the back of the cingulate cortex called the default mode network. And it's a part of the brain where when you're not working or thinking or doing anything else and you're just reflecting on who you are, what am I, what do people think of me, what did my mother want me to be? It kind of keeps us, I'm starting the psychotherapy now, but.

• 13:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about your mother.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  What it does is, uh, it, it in a way help imprisons you in the sense that you're going back to what your assumptions are about who you are, what you are, what you should be. And in hypnosis, you can inhibit activity in that region by activating the prefrontal cortex. And that inhibition is a kind of suspension of self. So when the football coach dances like a ballerina at one of those stage shows, I don't like making fun of people. I don't like making them look silly, but there is a message that he's able to let go of his usual assumptions about himself. So we, we suppress activity in hypnosis in the default mode network and it makes you open to thinking differently about yourself. And that has great therapeutic potential.

• 14:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we'll get into the therapy, the therapeutic value.

• 14:45Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Towards the end. Let me just slip something else here. Very important. Your community, your community of psychiatric professionals have been tapped in the legal circles to testify on behalf of or against someone's memory recovered in hypnosis.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is a fraught industry because of what could be implanted memories. And there was no end of people in the 1970s who, under hypnosis, would recount being abducted by aliens and having anal probes. So.

• 15:25Chuck Nice?

  We went there again.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry. So it's one thing to get inside my head and show me as a ballerina. It's another thing to get inside my head and say, tell me what happened in that part of your life that you don't remember. And then that's, we're gonna, we're gonna use that as testimony and put someone in jail because of it.

• 15:44Chuck Nice?

  Well, I mean, there's a very key part of that puzzle that is missing, and that is, we now know from research that memory, no matter who you are, if you're a human being, your memory sucks.

• 15:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, I can't get that.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  But I'm saying. No matter who you are.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going a little back in time. There were decades.

• 16:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over which people's testimony that comes out of hypnotic trance where they're remembering something was counted as evidence in court. And so just where does that all stand right now?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  There's a law in California that, that says that a witness or victim who's been hypnotized cannot testify, except under certain circumstances.

• 16:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  And the circumstances are that it's done by an independent psychiatrist like me, for example, and it's video recorded. So you can see whether people are implanting information. The idea of implanting information goes far beyond hypnosis. There are studies that show that if you show a movie of a car accident and you, and you ask them, did you see the stop sign? When it really, in fact, is a yield sign, about a third of people will say, yeah, I saw the stop sign, when it was not a stop sign.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  So people can have information suggested, or, you know, you know, the police can tell how, where were you when you did this? And there have been cases of people, forget hypnosis, who confessed to crimes they actually did not.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very, very bad part of the. So, no, wait, but, so apart from those, because we know that's the failure of memory.

• 17:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not a failure of memory if, under hypnosis, someone says they were abducted by aliens.

• 17:18Chuck Nice?

  I think it is.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Because.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I got a guy here.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I forgot. Yeah, we have an actual like psychiatrist who is a expert on this.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got the real guy here.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are we suggesting that in those cases, the alien abduction might have been implanted by the questioner? And that would show itself in video?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Sure, it's possible. Now, the alien abduction stuff is not closely tied to hypnosis. I mean, there were, there are a lot of people reported this who were never hypnotized.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why I said it's a failure of memory. Yeah, but the, but the psychiatrist, John Mack, wrote a book with the cases of people who recounted this under hypnosis. That's what I'm getting at here.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  So just bear with me here. If you are a person who was under the impression, for whatever reason, you had an experience, it could have been a very vivid dream.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Okay? And that has become in your mind, a true experience that you had. If someone places you under hypnosis, right, and puts you in a state of, of being very receptive to going back and recalling this memory, you will recall it without them implanting anything. You'll just relive the very vivid dream that you had.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have professionals asserting that this recalled memory is evidence of a true thing that happened. And that's, getting back to your court, I mean, this is, and it ends up, I mean, lives have been ruined by this.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  Okay, so.

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me finish. I'm gonna make sure he's got everything he's got to say about this.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Well, I, you know, you're the expert on outer space, so maybe there are aliens out there doing this.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not, I'm not authorized to comment further on that.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Would you like me to hypnotize you? But I knew John Mack. He was one of my professors when I was training, and I had great regard for him, but I disagree with him completely about this alien abduction stuff. Most of the people who did it were having like dreams as they woke up and they were in this transition period from waking up in REM sleep to waking up, they start thinking these things. I think I admired and respected John, but I think he was just flat out wrong about this. But let me give you a counter example. Do you remember the school bus kidnapping? in Chaochilla, California. It was this terrible thing where two guys overtook a school bus full of kids, buried the bus in a ditch by some factory and were trying to hold them for ransom and get money.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  And for two days, the kids were gone. People were totally scared. And when the school, the school bus driver finally got out, they got it. They found them. They got them out. And they said, well, who were these guys? He says, I don't know. He said, well, they overtook you in a car. Do you remember the license plate? And he couldn't remember it. And they hypnotized him and they said, now you're looking at the car overtaking the bus. You can see it in the rearview mirror. And he remembered all of the numbers and letters of the license plate for the first time in the wrong order, but you got them. And that led to the arresting conviction of these guys. So there are situations that are the exact opposite of what you talk about with alien abductions and John Mack. Memory is associational.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  You know, it's like you go back to your elementary school and you start having memories of things that you hadn't thought about in 40 years, you know, and the lockers look a funny size and all that. And you remember some friend you'd forgotten about. So you can use hypnosis and you can use just interrogation to get people to recall things that otherwise they're not consciously aware of. Doesn't mean it's always right. It doesn't mean it's always wrong.

• 20:59Speaker 05

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 21:14Gary O'Reilly?

  What makes people more receptive to a verbal suggestion?

• 21:17Speaker 02

  In hypnosis or just in general?

• 21:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Under hypnosis, yes.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  You're narrowing your focus of attention. The premise is simply, I'm going to guide you through an experience you can have and I'm going to show you that I can do that by helping you feel that one hand is lighter than the other. And if you pull it down, it wants to go back up. So what I'm asking you to do is narrow your focus and focus more on the experience than some evaluation of the experience and what it means and why you're asking me this. And have I ever done this before? You're just immersing yourself in the experience and seeing what happens. And that allows people to accept unusual things sometimes.

• 21:55Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, so is it kind of like you're filtering out the noise that surrounds, you know, suggestion?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yes, you are. You're sort of, you're accepting the premise that you're telling me something interesting and useful and I'm gonna follow it and see what happens.

• 22:11Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Now, we do that all the time anyway, but we do it in a more complete way in hypnosis.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what happens if you do not bring someone out of their hypnotic trance?

• 22:23Chuck Nice?

  Are they a chicken forever?

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or ballet, ballerina forever?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  If people need eggs, they will remain being a chicken. It's, uh, the worst thing that happens is they go to sleep and they wake up in their ordinary consciousness. But normally, people after a few minutes, and I don't do that, I don't just leave people that way, but they will just bring, they can bring themselves out. You don't, you don't lose control, you actually learn to gain control. You can put yourself in, in our hypnosis app, Revery, we're teaching people to do this for themselves. You get to hear my mellifluous voice, I ask a question, you respond, but you're doing it for yourself. And we've had tens of thousands of people doing self-hypnosis, and we haven't lost anybody yet. They bring themselves out.

• 23:06Chuck Nice?

  Very good to hear. Tell me the name of the app again?

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Revery, R-E-V-E-R-I. And you just go to Revery dot, Revery dot com or the App Store, Google Play and download it.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how does this differ from meditation? With regard to how your app treats it, that's what, specifically? Because they're meditation apps, and they each try to get you introspective, some peaceful introspective state on yourself.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Well, hypnosis is, um, it's there to focus on a problem, change the way you and your body react to it, and deal with the problem. So if you're stressed, for example, um, I'll tell you to first get your body comfortable. When you get stressed, your muscles tighten, your heart rate goes up, you start to sweat, and then you notice that and you think, oh my god, this is really bad, and you feel worse. And it's like a snowball effect. What you do in hypnosis is you can get your body floating in a bath, a lake, a hot tub, or floating in space. Notice that your body's more comfortable, and then... I help people use an imaginary screen to picture the problem on one side and a possible solution on the other. So you can

• 24:13Speaker 02

  deal with the part of the stressor that you can do something about, which is how your body reacts to it. And then figure out what to do about it. Meditation is different. Meditation is you're not trying to control or change anything. It's open presence. If you have thoughts or feelings, you just let them flow through you like a storm passing by. You will do a body scan and see how different parts of your body are acting and you cultivate compassion. There are good things, there are changes in states of consciousness. But hypnosis is more like an antibiotic. And meditation is more like a vitamin. You just do it every day to be better and feel better. Whereas with hypnosis, you use it to deal with a problem. Got it.

• 24:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So if if the entry and exit of a hypnotic state is important to, as it were, under the Hippocratic, do no harm.

• 25:04Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, self-hypnosis in the hands of the untrained. Is that possibly not the best thing? Or is this a benign situation and state?

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Uh, let me, let me put it this way.

• 25:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Um, hypnosis is, for example, highly effective in controlling pain. People, even during surgical procedures, can reduce substantially their pain. We've done randomized clinical trials demonstrating that. Eighty-eight thousand Americans died of opioid overdoses last year alone. And we are just awash in in dangerous drugs, fentanyl-laced uh, pills, and people are dying. Hypnosis has not yet succeeded in killing a single person. The worst thing that happens with hypnosis is it doesn't work. And so I think it's a tragedy that we are not making better use of our own inner resources to deal with problems like stress, pain, insomnia, smoking, learning to eat better. Or addiction in general. But we're

• 26:01Speaker 02

  You say smoking, but addiction in general. Yes, addiction in general, you can help with that too.

• 26:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Are these benefits temporary or can they remain as a permanent? Mental state for patients.

• 26:11Chuck Nice?

  Or do they need ongoing maintenance?

• 26:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Many people, they make the change. We've had people, for example, who learned to stop smoking. They, they, uh, I, I just tell them, for my body, smoking is a poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection. They think of your body as if it were your baby. Would you ever put tar and nicotine laced hot air in your baby's lungs? Hell no. So learn to respect and protect your body. One out of four people who use it don't smoke. They stop for at least a year.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  You just brought to my, my recollection of, of very good friend of mine, who, uh, I asked him, hey, man, how did you, like, you quit cold turkey and you just really quit? Like, you're around people who are smoking. You go out and you have a cocktail and you still don't want a cigarette? And I said, what happened? And I, he said, I did self-hypnosis and it worked. So, and by the way, what you're talking about, that was one of the exercises is, uh, for him, they were talking about, uh, it was like fresh air. Like, think about the air that you breathe and what you want it to be. And it was all about fresh air and his lungs. That was one exercise. Then

• 27:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  Think about your lungs as, you know, something pristine and untouched and then polluting it. It was like pretty, you know, involved, but really simple.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  And to this day, Greg, Greg Charles does not smoke. Shout out to Greg Charles. To this day, and that was like 14 years ago.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  Hmm. You'd be a good hypnotist. That's you, you know, what we focus on with hypnotism, you focus on what you're for and not what you're against. You don't tell people, don't think about purple elephants. That's what they'll think about. Instead, you have an exercise that makes you feel good from the moment you start it. Because you can be a, a better parent to your own body, just the way you're talking. I had one woman who, she said, I came into your study. I did not, he didn't even want to stop smoking. I've been smoking for 25 years. And she listened to our exercise. The first time she said, I don't like it. She went home that night. She did it again. She lit up a cigarette. She looked at it and said, fah, who needs this? She put it out. She hasn't had a cigarette since. Her friends can't believe it. 25 years she smoked.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  And she said to me, this is some kind of crazy ass voodoo shit. And I mean that in a good way.

• 28:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 28:32Chuck Nice?

  Best compliment ever. Exactly. I, I got one, one really out, off the, out there question. Okay, so I'm listening to your voice.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:42Chuck Nice?

  And your voice is melodic, number one, and dulcied. It's low register and it has a very even quality to it. Does the person's, like, would Fran Drescher be able to hypnotize?

• 28:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leave that woman's voice alone. She made a whole career on that voice.

• 29:02Chuck Nice?

  You're getting very sleepy. Or Jerry Lewis, you know what I mean? Lady with the sleep and the flaven, flaven.

• 29:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, please.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  I would say that people with some kinds of voices might be pushing you away instead of pulling you into it. I could see that.

• 29:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  But in general, you know, I have lots of colleagues and their voices are different. But I do try to speak to people in a way that puts them at ease, that makes them feel calmer and more open to accepting what it is I'm trying to do with them.

• 29:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So David, why doesn't hypnosis have a greater presence in general practice?

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Gary O'Reilly?

  Why did it just completely evaporate out of the landscape?

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what your affiliation is attempting to, the Integrative Medicine at Stanford?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Well, that's part of it. And I've been doing this for 50 years now. And I thought at the beginning of my career that if we all just do enough research, we prove that it works, we show how it works using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  FMRI?

• 30:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-mm.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  FMRI, that people would come around. And you know what? That hasn't happened. And I think some people are scared of it. But the other thing is Big Pharma guys, you know, I don't have money to hire a bunch of ex-cheerleaders to go around to doctors' offices and talk them into using hypnosis.

• 30:24Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the drugs?

• 30:26Speaker 02

  And, you know, and I'm a physician, I use medication, there are time and a place for it. But we tend to undervalue any intervention that is not incision, injection, or ingestion, you know? If it's not real, if you're not using a drug. And that's just wrong. It's just not true. It is real. We can- Help people live their lives better and far more safely using hypnosis. And that's why I built Reverie. I thought it's never going to happen the way I've been doing it. And I want to go direct to consumer, to have people try it for themselves. Try it, you'll like it. And we've had eight hundred fifty thousand downloads. Right now, there are twenty seven thousand people using the app.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  We're getting four out of five, reduce their stress by twenty percent in the first ten minutes. We get a thirty five percent reduction in pain over a three month period, just using the self hypnosis. One out of four people stop smoking and the rest of them reduce their cigarette consumption by half.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  And it makes sense for the pain. I just, it just dawned on me that as much as pain is a nerve stimulation firing a synapse, it is also happening in your brain. Because people will lose a limb and then still feel excruciating pain in a phantom limb, something that is not there. So at that point.

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all in the brain.

• 31:54Chuck Nice?

  It's all in the brain, yeah.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  But, but what I'm saying is that's pain that's not even connected to a nerve. So that's a hundred percent in, in the brain. So clearly you could be able to do something to your brain to manage your pain without even taking a pill.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  You're from England, if I may take from my fair lady, the strain in pain lies mainly in the brain.

• 32:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh. Oh. Well, I think he's got it.

• 32:18Gary O'Reilly?

  I do believe he's got it.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  He's got it.

• 32:21Gary O'Reilly?

  Splendid, splendid.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  And now, and now you say it.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The strain in brain. The strain in. The brain.

• 32:31Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, okay, don't forget to get tickets for our Broadway show.

• 32:38Gary O'Reilly?

  So you mentioned FM, you mentioned the F MRI scans.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:42Gary O'Reilly?

  How much, because.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's remind people, so there's MRI where you just lay yourself in there. But the FMRI, you are, the person is actively interacting with you, the, the professional, and you are seeing. How their thoughts manifest in whatever are your measuring devices? Yeah.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Right. You can see blood circulates throughout the brain, but where the brain is more metabolically active, there's a bold signal, blood oxygen level dependent signal that changes. And so you can see where the most activity is in the brain. So what we see is reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, which is part of the pain network too. And there's another thing that happens. The prefrontal cortex controls activity in the insula, which is a little island of tissue, it means island, in the middle of the front part of the brain. And it's a mind-body conduit. So the brain can control pain perception by regulating

• 33:40Speaker 02

  activity in the insula and can more accurately perceive pain signals. And so hypnosis actively controls regions of the brain that have to do with pain and fear.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got one issue. I got an important issue. Okay? Have you? If, if I step on a nail, I don't want to hypnotize myself so I don't feel the pain. I want to remove the nail from my foot. I mean, at what point does this distract you from solutions to what's causing the pain, rather than neurological pathways so that you don't notice the pain anymore?

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Hmm. I would say that kind of problem is far less common than the converse problem, which is that you feel every pain, even if you've had it for five years, as if it's something that just happened, as if you just stepped on a nail again. And it's because from an evolutionary point of view, we're pretty pathetic creatures. We're not that big, we're not that strong.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about it.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  If we weren't very sensitive, hypersensitive to being injured, we probably wouldn't have survived. So we need to protect ourselves from injury. But then there comes a point where you got the message, you got the nail out, it's not crushing substernal chest pain, you're not having a heart attack. And so that's the much more typical problem, and that's where hypnosis can help. And I'll tell you, with the, with the example of the phantom limb pain, there's a hypnotic treatment for it. And what you do is you hypnotize people and you have them imagine that they're moving the limb they no longer have. And just feeling that they're controlling it, using those nerve roots, which are still connected to the brain, actually can help relieve the pain that the people with phantom limb pain have.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  We took a group of Stanford students, gave them a series of electric shocks to the wrist and measured evoke potential. What we did was we hypnotized them and told them their hand was in circulating ice water, cool, tingling and numb. And two of the three components of the evoked response to the shocks were substantially reduced. The first, the P100, just disappeared. So this was within a tenth of a second of the shocks being administered. The recognition there was gone. And the P300, which is a signal that you get when you're supposed to do something in response to what you're feeling, was half as big. So they were, it wasn't just that they were getting the pain signal and changing it later.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  They were changing the way the brain received and processed the signal from the beginning. In real time? In real time, in real time, just like that instantly. So tenth of a second later, their brain response is different. So pain, if you think about it, there's input coming in from the body, from the periphery. But then there's the evaluation of the pain and what it means. And so like you were saying, get that nail out of my foot. And if that's what's going on, you want to pay attention to it. But afterwards, as it's healing and you've gotten the nail out, you don't need to pay as much attention to it as our brains often do. And hypnosis can help you change that.

• 36:55Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, you said about the hypnosis moving into the salience network.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 37:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Are there other executive networks within the brain that you could possibly be able to start to play with? I don't want to say manipulate again, because you seem to sort of rail up against that term.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Uh, the literature suggests, uh, it's all right, it can be playful. But the three major networks that are involved in hypnosis are the salience network, turning down activity there, which also involves turning down pain perception. The executive control network, that's mostly the prefrontal cortex that tells the body what to do. And so some of your activity that involves controlling pain also involves activity in the prefrontal cortex that stimulates activity in the insula. We talked about that with brain-body thing. The third is the default mode network that I mentioned, where you reflect on who you are. I sometimes call it the my fault mode network, where you're just thinking about yourself. The more active the prefrontal cortex is, the less active the default mode network is.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Interesting. And that's how you suspend your usual presumptions of who you are and what you are when you're active in hypnosis. So those three networks, executive control, salience, and default mode are the three that are affected by hypnosis.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we've got stress, pain, there's a nice list here of the successes of hypnosis. What about phobias and other kind of highly, clearly irrational behavior that's exhibited among people? And is that just neurodiversity that we accept? Or should that be fixed in some way? And what has hypnosis done about those?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Like, I have an irrational fear of being hypnotized.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  How do you treat Chuck?

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Look up slowly, close your eyes, you're gonna love it.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Chuck, I got a better one than that. It was Stephen Wright. He says, "I'm getting an MRI to see if I am claustrophobic."

• 38:57Speaker 02

  That's pretty good, pretty good.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was good.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  I've treated people. I had a woman who was afraid to have an MRI. You get in that tube, there's the clicking of the magnet. And she had possibly a tumor in her spinal cord in her neck and was very frightened about it, just couldn't do it. And it turned out that she liked to water ski. So I had her imagine that what she would, she'd go into the tube, she'd look up, close her eyes, and the noise of the, the magnet clicking on and off was the motorboat. And I just want you to imagine that you're water skiing. And she got through it fine. She, so you just focus on something else.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I'd be afraid to hang out with you. Cause I don't know.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This guy sounds dangerous. Let me cast that in the positive. I, we all pleased to learn that you have these powers and you're using them for the greater good. Because if you were the nemesis to a superhero, you would be completely dangerous.

• 39:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 40:01Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, what if you had the ability to hypnotize more than one person and you get a mass hypnosis?

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 40:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Throwing down the villain road.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Guys, I'm, I'm doing that right now through the app.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 40:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Got me.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at that transparency. We have transparency.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Through Reverie, people are using Reverie. Now hopefully they're listening to the program for the moment rather than using Reverie. But absolutely, however, all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But tell me more about, about phobias now.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  So, uh, flying phobias, for example, um, there, you know, in the airline industry figures they lose 15% of their business to people who are afraid of flying. If you want to have a rational phobia, don't get in a car because the, the, the number of deaths per mile traveled is far greater in automobiles than it is in airplanes, even, even if it's a Boeing airplane.

• 40:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nicely done. We like that. See what you did there?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Uh, what I tell them is to do three things. Um, I say, I want you to practice this as you prepare for your trip. Uh, look up, close your eyes, get your body comfortable. When you get in the plane, buckle your seatbelt and then concentrate on number one, floating with the plane. Most people get tense, they fight the chair, they don't like being buckled in. And I just said, imagine you're in a, a roller coaster ride in a, at a, at a fair. You're having a good time, you're floating with the plane. Don't fight the plane float. Secondly, think of the plane as an extension of your body. If you want to get from one place to another, you can walk. If you want to get there faster, you can ride a bicycle. The bicycle is an extension of your body. If you want to get there even faster, you can get in a car. That's an extension of your body.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  So you're not trapped in a tin can at 35,000 feet. You're using an extension of your body to do what you want to do. And one of the things you did was you chose an airline that has responsible and trained pilots. And he's an extension of your brain.

• 41:53Chuck Nice?

  So it's not Southwest.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Which one of us is going to get sued first? And the third thing is to think about the difference between a possibility and a probability. It's always possible the plane's going to crash, but it isn't probable. We tend to confound the probability of something with how vividly we can picture it. So you can picture a plane crash. It freaks you out.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean it's likely to happen.

• 42:16Chuck Nice?

  All right, real quick, because we're running out of time, which I can't believe.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, we just started talking.

• 42:20Chuck Nice?

  We just, this is crazy.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 42:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so we talked about, you know, fears and so forth. Let's go in the opposite direction. Performance.

• 42:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 42:27Chuck Nice?

  Can you enhance performance through hypnosis?

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good one.

• 42:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  You bet, you bet. And there are very good athletes who do it. So the best known one, because what you can do is calm your body. Use your muscles only for what they're supposed to be used for. Excess tension can be a problem. The Stanford women's swimming team coach, they're a fabulous team. A lot of these young women go to the Olympics.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After he electrically shocked them.

• 42:53Gary O'Reilly?

  In the pool.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the pool. Drop the toaster in.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Y'all at Stanford, you know, I don't know what you guys do.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  You guys are terrible. No, they, what the coach discovered that they were swimming faster in, in practice than they were in meets. And you would think it would be the opposite. And it turned out when we talked to them, in practice, they were just concentrating on relating to their body, on making their muscles work in coordination as well as they could. When they're in the meet, they're thinking about the girls on either side and sort of competing with them. Now, swimming isn't a contact sport. It doesn't matter what the other swimmers are doing. What matters is what you're doing.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I used to wrestle. It really matters what your opponent is doing.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Well, in wrestling, yes, yes, indeed.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  But not in swimming and not, not in golf, for example. Tiger Woods has used hypnosis since he was 14. He hypnotized himself every day when he, when he was playing.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He became the ball.

• 43:51Chuck Nice?

  Good reference.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be the ball. Be the ball.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yes, no, you just, it's got to be a smooth swing. You don't want to think about anything except what you need to do, connect with the ball. So these girls slam faster in meets. Once they discipline themselves to practice self hypnosis and just focus on their relationship with their own body. Um, so there are a number of, Michael Jordan used hypnosis to train. He was fairly good at basketball. Uh, he's not bad.

• 44:20Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, there's a statistical element here that we should not lose sight of.

• 44:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The good doctor here is not listing all the crappy athletes who also hypnotize themselves.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it didn't make a damn bit of difference. I just wanted to make that clear.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  No, they were crappy because they didn't learn to use self.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So tell us, do you have a social media presence other than your app?

• 44:50Speaker 02

  On Instagram and Facebook.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the name of the app is the, is the handle?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Is Reverie, R E V E R I. Yeah, and it's at Reverie.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will totally look and find you.

• 44:59Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Find you online.

• 45:01Chuck Nice?

  For sure.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  I hope so, and I hope people will benefit from it. It's, uh, that's my, my legacy project. I, I want that to happen.

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, this has been a delight.

• 45:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, to, just to know that you exist out there, that you're using your powers.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  For good.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For good.

• 45:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  Not, not, not being.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  For the moment.

• 45:19Chuck Nice?

  Not being a Marvel villain who takes the masses and turns them against Gotham. Wait, that's DC. I'm sorry. I'm, I'm mixing my.

• 45:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, don't mix.

• 45:28Chuck Nice?

  I mixed up.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotham?

• 45:30Chuck Nice?

  Well, we're in New York, so yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Uh oh.

• 45:34Chuck Nice?

  We're in New York, so everything is Gotham to me.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, send, send the mail to Chuck.

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  Don't do it, guys. You know I know better. Okay.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, excellent. Well, thank you, sir, for joining us.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  You're most welcome. And I want to thank you for one other thing, Neil, and that is some of the best hours of my teenage years were in the Hayden Planetarium.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  I, I, I loved it. I love learning about the stars. I bought myself a little lamp that could project the stars out on the walls and stuff.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wasn't director at the time you were describing here, but I'm pleased to know that I'm carrying forth a legacy that has granted you such fond memories.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed. Thank you.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hayden Planetarium, right here in New York City. We're in my, we're here.

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  We're actually here. This is where we are.

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the office, my office here at the Hayden Planetarium.

• 46:18Chuck Nice?

  Stars all over the place.

• 46:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right Chuck, Gary. Always a pleasure. We're good here.

• 46:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, that's another wrap. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson for StarTalk Special Edition.

• 46:29Gary O'Reilly?

  And you're out of the room.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.