Modern Wisdom

Dr. David Spiegel is a psychiatrist, Stanford professor, and leading authority on hypnosis and stress-related health. What exactly is hypnosis? Most of us picture it as a magician’s trick, when someone dangles a watch, your eyes get heavy, and suddenly you’re suggestible. But that barely scratches the surface. The real question is, what’s the true purpose of hypnosis? And what if we aren’t just hypnotized during those sessions, but in some sense all the time, walking through life under subtle trances we don’t even notice? Expect to learn what Dr. Speigel thinks most people misunderstand about what hypnosis is or how it works, what’s actually happening in the brain when we enter a hypnotic state, if anyone can be hypnotized or is there a specific “profile” of someone more likely to respond, the neurobiological difference between someone pretending to be hypnotized vs. someone actually in a trance state, how effective hypnosis is for improving sleep, the role hypnosis could play in reducing our reliance on ph