Dr. David Spiegel

You can hypnotize large groups at once?

The metastatic breast cancer, there was a group of like 10 women who would meet once a week and we would all go into hypnosis together.

Yes, yes, right.

Fascinating.

And that, you know, if anything, I think it brings out the best in people's abilities because it's a shared social experience and they would talk about it afterwards.

And so, yes, that's absolutely doable.

breathing itself is um you've described as a bridge between conscious and unconscious states right what is the role of respiration in shifting the brain's state during a hypnotic protocol there are breathing patterns that may increase sympathetic arousal um or may decrease it may have been you know cyclic sighing seems to actually where you have more time spent exhaling than inhaling

And there's reason to believe that it induces parasympathetic activity because you're increasing pressure in the chest and therefore allowing the heart to slow down because blood is being returned to the atrium more easily.

I do use it.

I ask people to take a deep breath as part of the induction and then slowly exhale.

And partly as a result of our research together, I'm emphasizing the slow exhale more because

to enhance the idea in the induction that this is a period of relaxation, because I think they are inducing that and perhaps perceiving it as well.

So you're absolutely right that breathing is very interesting because it's right at the edge of conscious and unconscious control, that it will go on automatically, but we can control it.

And so it's a kind of way for us to demonstrate to ourselves

greater ways of modulating our internal state.

So you can either do it thinking about it the way we do with pain control and hypnosis, or you can do it to some extent by taking charge of your breathing and doing things that will produce a change that you want to see happen in your body.

Great.

Typically, you're in a physically relaxed state, but frankly, there are people at the peak of performance, including physical athletic performance or musical performance, when they're in hypnotic states too.

I've talked to classical pianists who say, if I start thinking about what my fingers are doing now, I screw up.

I'm floating above the piano thinking about the tone that I want to feel exuding from the instrument.