Dr. David Spiegel

You don't judge it.

You don't evaluate it.

You just experience it.

Right now, for example, you're sitting in a chair.

You have sensations in parts of your body touching the chair, but I'm hoping that you weren't even aware of that until I mentioned it to you.

Am I right about that?

Yeah, you're right.

If I was wrong, we could just stop the interview now.

You'd be already bored.

So we naturally do it.

We dissociate.

That's the second part.

So there's absorption in the focus of attention.

To do that, you dissociate.

You put outside of conscious awareness things that would ordinarily be in consciousness to allow yourself to fully immerse yourself in the focus of your attention.

And the third thing is that you tend to disconnect from your usual way of thinking about things.

And we've seen this in the functional neuroimaging that we do.

where three things happen in the brain when you go into a hypnotic state.

The first is you reduce activity in the salience network.

So you're just turning off the alarm and allowing yourself to experience things.