Dr. David Spiegel

It is that very ability.

to suspend critical judgment and just have an experience and see what happens it's an ability that if people learn to recognize and understand it can be a tremendous therapeutic tool do we know what sorts of brain areas are active during the induction the let's call it the deep hypnosis and then what's shutting off or changing as people exit hypnosis the first is turning down activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex so the dacc is in the central front middle part of the brain as you you well know

And it's part of what we call the salience network.

It's a conflict detector.

So if you're engaged in work and you hear a loud noise that you think might be a gunshot, that's your anterior cingulate cortex saying, hey, wait a minute, there's a potential danger over there.

You better pay attention to it.

So it compares what you're doing with what else is going on and helps you decide what to do.

And as you can imagine, turning down activity in that region make it less likely that you'll be distracted and pulled out of whatever you're in.

So two other things happen when people are hypnotized.

One is that that DLPFC has higher functional connectivity with the insula.

Another part of the salience network, it's a part of the mind-body control system, sensitive to what's happening in the body.

It's part of the pain network as well.

But it's also a region of the brain where you can control things in your body that you wouldn't think you could.

For example, we did a study years ago where we took people who were highly hypnotizable, hypnotized them, and told them to imagine.

We went on an imaginary culinary tour.

So they would eat their favorite foods.

And we found that they increased their gastric acid secretion by 87%.

So their stomach was acting as though it was about to get... I mean, there was one woman, it was so vivid for her that halfway through, she said, let's stop, I'm full.

You know, eating these imaginary... Having never eaten any actual food.

No.