Michelle Walters 1:29

Welcome to Mind Power Meets Mystic. I'm Michelle Walters, and in this solo episode, I'm going to explore an interesting question, paranormal placebo or psychology, the fascinating truth about hypnosis. I'm going to talk about hypnosis because a lot of people don't understand what it is and how it works. Even though it's been around in one form or another for 1000s of years, many people don't know what to think about it. We have lots of movies and stories about hypnosis that give people the wrong impression and lead people to question whether it's effective or authentic.

So I want to share a little bit more about hypnosis, what it is and what it isn't, and why it might be an effective process for you or someone you care about to shift thinking and behavior. I'm going to go through each of these potential explanations, paranormal placebo and psychology. So the first question is, is hypnosis paranormal

Well, let's start with what is paranormal? What is paranormal mean? Exactly. Paranormal just means scientifically inexplicable. Lots of things are scientifically inexplicable or inexplicable until we come up with enough science or evidence to be able to explain them. Take meteorites, how can rocks fall from the sky? Well, we didn't have an explanation for it for a long time. But now we do. Meteorites do fall into this scientifically explained. believing in something that's not scientifically proven is hardly uncommon. I did some research and according to surveys, as many as three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal in some form. While nearly one in five Americans claimed to have actually seen a ghost. A Gallup poll in 2021 showed that some 41% of Americans believed that some fraction of UFO sightings were alien spacecraft. Some examples of paranormal phenomenon include UFOs, astrology, ghosts and telepathy

So here's the question, is hypnosis a form of paranormal activity? No. While we lacked the tools to understand much about the science of hypnosis for a long time, modern tools have been shown to so that there's a scientific basis for hypnosis, moving hypnosis, clearly out of the paranormal category. A scientific study I'll talk more about later from 2016 showed that there is neurobiological evidence for hypnosis. Despite this finding, hypnosis is frequently mis categorized as being paranormal. For example, a study by the website u.gov in December 2022 included hypnosis as one form of a paranormal belief. So in that study, you.gov found that 41 percent of hypnosis said they believed hypnosis was real, even though we have scientific evidence that the effect of hypnosis is real, from brain studies that came out six years before. So does hypnosis belong with ghosts and UFOs? And telepathy? I would say yes and no. I think hypnosis is a good example of something like meteorites. There is a science to it that we only recently observed, due largely to the invention of a new technology, in this case, a brain scanner called a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. Just because we don't have evidence for our observations does not mean things aren't real. A good scientist keeps an open mind and recognizes that our knowledge base is always growing and changing.

So the next question, can hypnosis be explained by the placebo effect? Well, what's a placebo? Here's the definition. A harmless pill, medicine or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect. It's also defined as a measure designed merely to calm or please someone. An important element of the definition of placebo is the word more. The word more makes the definition of a placebo include that there is an element of deception included. Like placebos, hypnosis produces therapeutic effects by changing the client's expectancies. But unlike placebos, hypnosis does not require deception in order to be effective. Clients who experience hypnotherapy know at the level of their conscious mind that they are using the technique of hypnosis to delve into their subconscious and to make changes in their thinking and behavior patterns. There's no deception involved

An interesting example of this is a popular method for weight management that uses hypnosis. Hypnotic gastric band is a technique where a hypnotherapist guides a client through a weight loss surgery in hypnosis. The result of this surgery in real life or in hypnosis is that the client either has or believes he or she has had eye surgery so that there is a smaller stomach pouch, and the client can no longer eat large amounts of food. While clients who undergo this process and hypnosis, no, they didn't have a real physical surgery. They act like they did. At one level, they know they didn't have the surgery, and yet at another level, they behave as if it's so there's no deception in this procedure, as there would be with a placebo

Several studies suggest that hypnosis and placebo are separate. There's a key conceptual difference. Placebo responses are based on a simple expectation. But hypnosis involves learning to focus on and deliberately alter perception and a physiological response. Does that make hypnosis a psychological effect? Yes, hypnosis affects the mind. And the study I alluded to earlier shows that hypnosis is actually a physiological process having certain impacts on the brain. A study at Stanford in 2016, conducted by Dr. David Spiegel, one of the foremost authorities on hypnosis, image the brains of 57 people in an FMRI machine. After comparing the participants who were highly hypnotizable to the participants who were not hypnotizable the study team found three notable differences in brain activity between the two groups. This study showed that people who were hypnotizable had one less activity in an area of the brain associated with worry and judgment, to activity in parts of the brain associated with being able to separate feelings and thoughts and three less concern with self consciousness.

The combination addition of these three factors, or physiological evidence for the effect of hypnosis. It's also worth mentioning that while meditation and hypnosis feel very similar evidence from the brain scanners has shown that they are different. Meditation and hypnosis work on different parts of the brain. So for an individual, both might be effective one or the other might be effective or neither might be effective. Meditation and hypnosis are physiological experiences, and they are distinct

So is there evidence of science behind hypnosis? Yes. While the media hasn't exactly cut up on the science headlines, we have showed that hypnosis makes changes in the way one's brain and therefore one's mind operate.

I hope this has gone a little further to persuade you that there is scientific evidence for hypnosis, which makes sense to me because I'm really a science geek at the end of the day, and I love that now we have repeatable scientific evidence that hypnosis has a real way of working in the brain

What I know is that when I work with my clients, I can see their changes, I can see how the suggestions help them to do whatever it is that they're looking to do, whether that's weight loss, or stop a bad habit, or understand maybe why they're stuck or repeating a certain process over and over again in their lives. The power of suggestion in hypnosis, because of this physiological changes in the way the brain is working, during hypnosis, is so effective and very, very helpful for my clients. I would love to talk with you about how hypnosis might help you. And so if you would like to get in touch with me, you can use the link in the show notes to go to my website and book a 30 minute consult. Thanks so much. Bye bye.