Dr. Baland Jalal
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Baland Jalal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It's like a virus, right?
It's a meme, right? But at this point, what's interesting is that we've shown that people who have this episode, they will have more anxiety and more PTSD-like symptoms from this, right? So at this point, she might have these... small tease of trauma of the monster coming and attacking you and then creating an overall trauma. So it becomes almost a traumatic experience.
That's what I'm saying, right? So she goes around and tells her friends about it. And it turns out then that if you live in a culture like Egypt, it's twice as common versus Denmark. So we said that for an individual person, you will have it three times more than the person who has sleep paralysis. But beyond this... It's generally twice as common in cultures like Egypt and Italy and so forth.
So there's this element to it that's very, very interesting. And I want to take you to an experiment that your colleague Rich did, Rich McNally, that sort of encapsulates all this. So he showed that people who think that sleep paralysis is a space alien abduction, So these guys will say, well, I was sleeping in my bed and this gray came down in a spaceship. It attacked me. It choked me.
It took out my semen. It was a lot of sexuality going on. And obviously we know from REM sleep, the hypothalamus and these parts of the brain are hyperactive. The sexual parts of the brain are hyperactive. So you have sexual arousal doing sleep paralysis. Right, right, right. So you have the monster coming down, taking their semen and all that.
Then they will have- Like a succubus from the Middle Ages. Like a succubus, right?
But then at this point, what's interesting is that these guys, when they listen to the audio script of their encounters of themselves narrating, so they'll listen to themselves saying, oh, I had this experience and this happened and that happened.
their physiological reactions to that, their GSR, their sweating and their heart rate and blood pressure will be as profound as somebody who went to war. So somebody with actual PTSD who went to a war situation, the physiological reactions they have is comparable to somebody who was sleeping in their beds and having sleep paralysis.
So for me, this shows me this might be one of the most interesting phenomenon in the time of science.
Right. Well, so I developed a therapy for sleep paralysis. I don't know. Maybe you're interested in that. I can tell you about that. All right. So it's a four-step solution that I came up with. So from my work around the world, I thought I got to have some method to help these people, right? So... How could I help them? This was my thought. How can I help these guys, right?
And so one thing is that I noticed that, for example, prayer and meditation and prayer and thinking about positive things was helpful. In a lot of instances, people would lay down and think about, you know, whatever God they believe in. And that would actually help them.
So that got me thinking about the attention system and the emotional parts of the brain and how I can bring that into the experience, given that you have limited attentional capacities. And so if you're lying there and thinking about ghosts, because your emotional part of your brain, the amygdala is hyperactive and you know the amygdala,
has a lot of projections to the visual parts of the brain so it can tell you what to see in the world. So we know this, so it can spill over and penetrate the visual scene. So we don't want that. So I thought, how can I bring in the positive affect to the experience and make it more, you know, more benign? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So it has four components. The first component is cognitive reappraisal.
You know these terms. Meaning simply you say, look, this is not a monster. This is just the brain. It's not terrifying. Let me change my thoughts about it. So that's the first point. You do that when the experience strikes. And you close your eyes just to filter any visual inputs out.
When they have the sleep paralysis episode. So these are the four steps you apply directly during sleep paralysis. Obviously, you learn them when you're awake and I train you. And you practice. You practice, right? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. So this is, yeah, great, you made that point.
So you have that first thing, you do the cognitive reappraisal, saying, well, this is just your mind and brain playing tricks on you. Next step is emotional and psychological distancing. You go, since it's just a brain, simply given that it's common all around the world, there's no reason for me to be scared of this. So you kind of distance yourself from the event.
So that's the second part, right? Thirdly, this is where prayer and meditation and affect comes in. You put all your attention on a positive emotional object in your mind. So you bring to mind, could be God, somebody who believes in God. It could be your mother's face. It could be anything emotionally salient.
And you focus hyper-attentively on that because then- That's why Mary is an antidote to the demonic.
Good point. And then, fourthly, you meditate. And meditate meaning you do a mindfulness kind of detachment. You say, I feel spasmy and pain in my legs and I feel heavy, but I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just going to let it fly. I'm just going to just leave it alone.
And this turns out, these four steps, if you apply it during sleep paralysis, we did a pilot study, a small study that it showed it reduced sleep paralysis about 50%. So that's a significant amount, but obviously we have to do more studies. It's a very small study, but it's a first step. It's the first empirical study on this as a treatment for sleep paralysis.
Showing 141–160 of 177 · page 8 of 9
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