E210 - Dr. David Spiegel: #1 Hypnotism Expert, “Wake Up From The Trance of Your Life”

Dr. David Spiegel is the Wilson Professor and Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, the co-founder of the hypnosis app Reveri, and one of the world's leading clinical researchers on hypnosis. He has worked with over 7,000 patients across 50 years, and in this conversation he opened with something I did not expect: he tested my hypnotizability live on camera. I scored a nine out of ten. What followed was one of the most genuinely surprising conversations about the mind I have had on this show.

What We Dive Into:
1. The self you walk around with is not a fixed structure. Dr. Spiegel calls it a convenient assumption, something the brain constructs to simplify experience. Hypnosis reveals this by demonstrating how quickly and completely a person can shift, often in a single session.
2. Memories are not neutral recordings. They are laid down and retrieved from brain regions that manage affect, which means the emotion and the memory are inseparable. Working with a memory hypnotically allows you to enter it, update its emotional meaning, and change how it lives in you.
3. The same capacity that lets a child survive abuse by mentally leaving their body can, in adulthood, become a habitual distance from experience. Understanding whether your detachment is a protective skill or an old survival pattern still running is one of the more honest questions this conversation surfaces.

Know Thyself, but not by yourself. A guided space to return home to yourself.
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00:00 Intro
01:52 What Hypnosis Actually Is
05:34 The Malleability of Personality and Self
07:01 How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body and Memory
12:00 Hypnosis as the Oldest Western Psychotherapy
15:13 What Happens in the Brain During Hypnosis
18:36 The Default Mode Network and the "My Fault" Network
22:29 How Hypnotizability Is Measured
30:28 What High and Low Hypnotizability Looks Like in Life
33:58 Live Demo: Testing André's Hypnotizability
40:11 Dissociation: Adaptive Defense and Pathological Trap
45:50 How to Use Hypnosis for Stress and Performance
49:07 Hypnosis vs. Meditation: Being vs. Doing
54:41 Flow State, Golf, and the Art of Process Over Outcome
58:13 Believing Is Seeing: The Color Perception Experiment
1:01:00 Perception as a Generative, Interpretive Act
1:03:29 Emotions as Signals and Hypnosis as a Flashlight
1:07:01 Smoking, Self-Respect, and Reframing Addiction
1:09:08 Dr. Spiegel's Path: A Genetic Illness in the Family
1:15:44 Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Many Selves
1:19:54 If There's No Solid Self, Who Are We?
1:22:04 Collective Trance and Societal Hypnosis
1:26:50 Reverie and Empowering Innate Abilities
1:27:12 Closing Message: Learn More About Your Innate Abilities
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