What exactly is hypnosis? We've all heard about the circusy versions of it, but is there something about hypnosis that is real and that can be studied and leveraged by psychiatrists and neuroscientists?

Can attention and expectation change what we feel like pain or anxiety?

And how does that work? What do suggestible states reveal about the brain's typical pathways?

And what happens when we're knocked off of those? And how does hypnosis compare to meditation or flow states or psychedelic drugs?

Today, join me as we talk with Dr. David Spiegel, Stanford Psychiatrist and one of the world's

experts in hypnosis.

Welcome to Intercosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand how we see the world,

the outside world and also the inside world.

This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

Okay, so first I'm going to point out one of my central sources of amazement that surfaces and all these episodes the fact that inside each of us there's an entire universe of 86 billion

neurons, never seeing the light of day, pulsing in the dark, and these are somehow weaving

together your world.

And in ways we don't yet fully understand, we get all this

private, subjective experience out of this, like color, which doesn't actually exist in the

outside world, or pain, which is just signaling along nerves, just like all the rest of the

signaling running around in your nerves, but somehow you have the impression that it hurts. And somehow all the activities zooming around on all these little

cables equals your mind. Your thoughts are nothing but this electrochemical activity. And we know

this because if you ingest particular molecules, that changes your thoughts, like if you consume alcohol or drugs.

Or if you bonk your head on the cabinet, you might lose consciousness and not have any thoughts for some minutes.

And when someone gets a neurodegenerative disorder, many of their neurons die, and that changes their thoughts, same with tumors or strokes,

...