BI 238 James Harrison: Hypnosis as Mental Foraging

[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hypnosis is mental foraging. That's how hypnosis works. We take people into an ideal learning state, into a parasympathetic state, typically where they're relaxed, and then they get to make a choice and mentally rehearse, like simulation. They get to simulate what would the new outcome be? Okay, let's move the demarcation line, as he calls it, that line between science and pseudoscience. Do we have more information? Can we update it? That's a conjecture that I make in the book that, yeah, actually, hypnosis is involved with predictive processing, with state change, with interoception, with exteroception, and those become like bedrock principles that clinicians can work with with real humans in real time. I mean, I fell victim when I started writing the book. I wanted it to be impressive and smart, and after a while, I'm like, it'd be better if I accepted where I'm at, which is, I'm a clinician, and maybe ask for help from the neuroscience community in terms of getting it right or even better. So I'm super appreciative that the folks I did reach out to didn't just say, he's a crank, he's wackadoodle. They took my questions seriously. [00:01:37] Speaker B: This is brain inspired. James Harrison is a clinical hypnotist and author of a new book, Mental Foraging and the Evolution of An Updated Model of Clinical Hypnosis. As you probably know, hypnosis carries some historical baggage, for example, in terms of how it could be used to manipulate people into having false memories, which could be damaging for themselves and those around them, and has been damaging historically, which you'll hear us discuss during the episode. That baggage carries over into modern medical and clinical practice, with many people giving the side eye, the side glance, the side eye, the glare. [00:02:20] Speaker A: I don't. [00:02:22] Speaker B: With many people being skeptical, to say the least, about hypnosis and disregarding it as a useful tool in the toolkit of treating patients with mental disorders or psychological distress. As a clinician and as someone who has seen clinical hypnosis work for people, James set about a few years ago exploring how it might be explained in modern neuroscience terms and concepts and models and theories. What he ended up with is an account of hypnosis grounded in the neuroscience of state changes, interoception, exteroception, and predictive processing, which he calls the four domains of the mental foraging model. His hope is that if we get the scientific explanation right of how it works, hypnosis might become more accepted as an effective tool. Among other psychological treatments that are currently accepted. So we discuss all that and more, like the nature of memory, how brains are embodied, and some other supporting concepts in neuroscience. I realize I did not ask James if he's ever tried to hypnotize an AI chatbot. You know, since AI is conscious now. Oh, I hope that sounds ridiculous to you. AI not conscious, James conscious. I think I will let you make that call, but I believe he's conscious. I do link to his book in the show notes at BrainInspired Co Podcast 238. Support the show on Patreon. If you want all the full versions of all the episodes, access to all of our complexity group discussions and more, go to BrainInspired Co to learn how to do that. Thank you to my Patreon supporters and thanks as always to the transmitter for supporting the show. Here's James. James, welcome to Brain Inspired. This is a bit of a different episode for sure. I've never had a clinical hypnotist on, for example, but you have written this book and there are multiple things to say. So the book is Mental Foraging. Let me get the title right. Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory. An Updated Model of Clinical Hypnosis. And where do I want to start with this one? Just congratulations on. You've done something unique in that you've actually written a synthesis, which most things that are called synthesis or syntheses are actually unifications, but a synthesis is where you bring lots of different things together and create something new out of it and, and that's what the whole idea is. And I'll let you tell me more about what the actual idea is in a moment here. So you've synthesized concepts from neuroscience and applied them all together as, as an sort of explanation or a model of clinical hypnosis. The other cool thing, because I don't want to forget to say it, is that it's what's really cool. I wish more people would do this and I want to ask you why you did this in a moment. But it's like taking some ideas, some modern ideas that have histories but are pretty modern and some of them are cutting edge in neuroscience, some theoretical models, et cetera, and sort of test driving them in how they would apply to something slightly outside the field, like something like clinical hypnosis. So it's kind of cool to just see those ideas reflected and applied to the clinical hypnosis world. So why'd you write this book? [00:06:11] Speaker A: Thank you very much, Paul. A lot of reasons. And I do want to say, before we get into it, I'm super grateful that the book landed with you. Um, I got a huge education just by listening to your show for so long. But I came into medical through the side door later in life. And ironically, I was looking back over things. I. I was going to do doctoral work in architecture of all fields back in the 90s, and that didn't pan out, and I was a relatively young man then, so I said, you know what? I'm going to have life experience. I'll write the book when I'm older. And lo and behold, this kind of turned into that, and a whole bunch of life happened in between. Never could have seen myself on this path. But suffice to say, I ended up working in dementia care pretty recently. And so I started on a. On a medical team for elders with dementia six years ago. And I had become a clinical hypnotist. And I was working with folks in midlife. And I was like, my training left me unsatisfied about what the model of hypnosis was. And it gets a lot of brick bats from all directions. Like, is this some ridiculous woo thing that's antiquated and needs to, you know, is already dead and, you know, am I diluting myself all that? So I went to my medical director and said, well, I'm a clinical hypnotist. Can we use that for pain relief for our folks? And she claimed agnosticism. [00:07:55] Speaker B: This is why you're working with the dementia folks. Like, after. Oh, go ahead. [00:07:59] Speaker A: It was parallel. [00:08:01] Speaker B: Okay, parallel. [00:08:01] Speaker A: I was a life Enrichment coordinator on paper on the medical team. So our. And the book goes into all the allied professions that work in dementia care, like occupational therapy and things where we're helping people with where they're at. And I realized those models, like OT occupational therapy, has this great concept called functional cognition. And they have measurement scales for measuring what level of functional cognition somebody is at. And I'm like, well, this all rhymes with things we do in clinical hypnosis. Let me see if my medical director is game, because depending on the place in the psychiatrist you work under, some of them are pro hypnosis, Some of them are like, it's bullshit. Fair enough. She hit the ball right down the middle and said, show me the research. So the book was born out of that. Um, that. That was the germ for it. Plus, on a practical level, I'm walking around a facility, I'm working with doctors and nurses doing assessments on people, trying to help them live their fullest life with at whatever level they're capable of. And I'm seeing like, oh, there's acupuncturists in the building. What the hell? Like, we're allowing that. Like, I know there's more data for hypnosis than acupuncture, so what gives? So that was kind of the burr that under my hide to really start to dive in. And the story gets really fun for whatever. However it happened. I started reaching out, believe it or not, on Twitter, which might be the first place I ran into you. And I started asking the neuroscience community questions on Twitter. And Johan, John was. [00:10:06] Speaker B: Okay, so I'll say, like, you're going to get very particular people. The loud people on Twitter. [00:10:12] Speaker A: Yes. [00:10:13] Speaker B: Johan being one of those, if I remember correctly. But yeah, I don't remember. But there are 12 people, 12 neuroscientists [00:10:19] Speaker A: on Twitter who tweet all the time in between research. [00:10:25] Speaker B: So there, there are pros and cons to that. [00:10:27] Speaker A: But yeah, of course, like anything. And so like you said, I mean, it's important to say, I'm a clinician. I sit downstream of. We all sit downstream of the research. Right there. We should. We. We need to think of it that way. So I wanted to either take hypnosis behind the barn and kill it or find out if there's something. If there's a. There, there's. [00:10:51] Speaker B: So you. Okay, but. But you already would. I mean, you had already bought in, right? You were practicing at that already, right? Yes. [00:11:00] Speaker A: So why would you want to kill. [00:11:01] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, you're like surrounded by like. So you're, you're in the medical field. You meet a doctor for the first time, some, I don't know, whatever physician or something, and you have no idea. Was it 50, 50, whether they think that hypnosis is a viable thing or bunk or whatever. Like you're living in that world. [00:11:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Yes. I knew enough to know that there was a history with psychiatry that was deep in that one point. Mom and dad fought, you know, Mommy and daddy had an argument and a split up occurred of some. Like, I'd heard those rumors. Right. And so chapter two of the book goes deep into that. And so there was this, you know, it led to what are the formulations of the unconscious? And so my bible for the, for the next part of my life was. Was this beautiful Henry Ellenberger, the Discovery of the Unconscious. It's a fantastic paperweight, but you can tell he. He wrote this with Joy. It's like 900 pages. Right. But I only needed to dive into the first part for what my task was, which is, you know, what Are the origin. What's the origin story for psychiatry? It's like, oh, my God, he's talking about shamanism and he's talking about Mesmer horror. Right? So even psychiatry has this metaphysical origin story that maybe it doesn't want to own at times. Fair enough. But. But that was my entry, so I'm going to skip into this part, and I hope this comes across as funny as I think it is. But I put hypnosis on the couch and said, what are you exactly? Are you a real thing or are you a figment of. Are you a vestige of 18th century thinking? [00:13:05] Speaker B: Right. [00:13:06] Speaker A: And in fairness, like, why would I. I mean, we. We can talk about why I chose to and all that, but once I was in the field, and I see, like, it does work. It doesn't work all the time. Nothing does. But it's got a decent batting average. It's certainly above placebo. So all those questions formulated it. But I put, you know, I asked hypnosis what it was, and it told me, look at foraging. [00:13:34] Speaker B: Well, I had it in my mind that maybe. And maybe I. I don't think this was actually in the book. I mean, you. You talk about, you know, playing about your. Your care of the elder and playing bingo sort of after having done like, the. The hypnosis thing and then. And then having that enlighten you in multiple ways. But first, the way that I read the book is almost like a defense of, like, someone who. Okay, here's. Here's a possible author of this book. You're the author. But here's. The author I had in my mind is someone who knew that this is an effective method and, And. And sort of felt like not out. [00:14:13] Speaker A: I'm on the team, believe me. [00:14:15] Speaker B: Well, I know you're. Yeah, you're on the team. But, like, almost like, because they're. Because it can be sort of. You write about the wooness, the woo factor, right. And you visit that in the. In the book multiple times. And so I was picturing kind of in the back of your head, maybe, or the author's head, which is you. Like, all right, I'm gonna prove to these people, like, this is, like, really well grounded, actually. And there are ways to explain why it's effective, which is what the book does. [00:14:45] Speaker A: Hopefully, that's what the book does. But I'd like to have, you know, I want it to be an enjoyable read and for it to be fun. And I don't take myself too seriously. Have a lot of discipline. It took me six years to do this. There's 200 plus research papers in it and I really aim to get it right. And so my invite is, if I get anything wrong, let me know, I'll update. And you know, I want the, the, the best science and the best ideas to win. They're going to win anyway. But, but getting, getting back to right. I mean getting back to the, the foraging idea and, and the bingo, that was, you know, for a while. I don't do it anymore. I was calling bingo for a living and I'm like, what is it about this game? It was really doing games, activities, everything, chair yoga, you name it. But bingo. [00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, you, but you, you were like the entertainment and the way it reads is like you're like the entertainment and [00:15:43] Speaker A: I was the entertaining to be the entertainer. [00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:15:46] Speaker A: I'm like. [00:15:47] Speaker B: And apparently got derived great joy from it as well. [00:15:51] Speaker A: So fun, you know, do disc. I still have the disco ball. So for disco emergencies, you know. [00:15:56] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. [00:15:57] Speaker A: So I had a portable party card. I'd go up and down the halls with it and turn the lights on and bringing joy to people is great medicine, right? I mean we. And that's like if I go in as a clinician and say, well, you're this or that. That's. That's a terrible way to approach a human being who's suffering. When I could go in and bring a smile. Right. And make them laugh. [00:16:25] Speaker B: But you found yourself wondering, right? Or at least the way it's written in the book is like, why do they enjoy bingo so much? [00:16:33] Speaker A: We've all wondered what is it about that damn game? [00:16:36] Speaker B: That's right. [00:16:37] Speaker A: They have other choices. So I tried games like Hangman. Well, it's too much of a cognitive load. Or Wheel of Fortune. Way, way too much. Bingo takes zero talent. Sorry to say. Spoiler alert. But what it does, you know, you call out the number and there's saccades and eye movements going. And they're hunting and there's that foraging again and they get the little dopamine release when a number gets called and you get five in a row and it's. And it's a group excitement kind of thing. It. And you know, if you're a good bingo caller in an elder care facility, you know how to make sure Dolores gets a win. [00:17:21] Speaker B: Well, you bet. [00:17:22] Speaker A: Dolores needs a win. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Everyone, they. All right. Dolores really needs that win. [00:17:25] Speaker A: That's right. Absolutely. You know, I started realizing there is something deep about it. If you follow emotion back valence, it's positive or negative, it's going towards or away from it's seeking a resource or hiding from danger. And like that's the oldest story of all that goes, you know, that's bacteria, that's even electrons. It's such an old story. So the book, I thought I want to build it from the most grounded place I can come to. And emotions come from valence, comes from this or that comes from foraging. It's very metabolically expensive to die each time you have to make a decision, right? Yeah, that's what I heard. And so you have a billion years and however many trillion iterations of single cell life until one thing eats another thing and ends up cooperating and becomes multicellular and starts scaling and, and all of that. But there's valence all along, that whole process. And, and you know, like a lot of times with evolution, we, Philip Ball put it a great way. He said, you know, evolution doesn't have an agenda. But individual creatures, you're damn right they do. You know, they, they want to live. And so if they accidentally get that stair step evolution of advantage and they're lucky enough to pass it on to the offspring and the branching, the branching, the branching and phylogenetic refinement, which is Paul Cisek's beautiful term for when something happens that becomes useful downline downstream, we, we get to keep that refinement. And what I started to see and then wrote the, you know, the, filled the book out on the idea of, was that hypnosis is mental foraging, that it rhymes with foraging itself, that once upon a time, in any circumstance that we go through in life as subjective individual humans, things happen, right? Trauma, regular life and all that salience comes into our body and we mark it. And a lot of times we don't have to make that decision again. So we were in an environment where chilies were great to eat. We were in an environment where it was horrible pain. We were in an environment where red meant one thing or red meant another. And if it's close enough to being good enough, you don't have to revisit that. And so most of us don't revisit things if we don't have to because it's again, free energy principle. It's metabolically expensive. And it kept like, that's how hypnosis works. We take people into an ideal learning state, into a parasympathetic state, typically where they're relaxed, where they're not attached or upregulated, into a sympathetic state, like when a bad thing happened. And then they get to make a choice and mentally rehearse like simulation. They get to simulate. What would the new outcome be? [00:20:59] Speaker B: I'm like all this, that's the mental foraging part, right? Is this mental simulation? [00:21:04] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of a super fast overview of the shape of the book. And then it, you know, drops the first third also goes into why we ended up here. The history with, you know, and I, I pick on Freud because, you know, who doesn't like to do that? [00:21:24] Speaker B: Sure. [00:21:25] Speaker A: He's. He's a good straw man. Thank you. [00:21:27] Speaker B: He doesn't. Freud does not need to win. Win bingo if he's in the old folks home. [00:21:31] Speaker A: You did. [00:21:32] Speaker B: You wouldn't have to call Freud's number. [00:21:33] Speaker A: He stormed out of the room angrily. [00:21:35] Speaker B: I think he did. [00:21:36] Speaker A: Yeah. But it resurrects Cajal. Santiago Ramoni Cajal. Not that I need to resurrect him. He's on the money in Spain. He's the Darwin of Spain. But he actually, towards the end of his life started keeping a dream journal and he wrote. And he was really at odds with the Freudian approach. He smelled a rat with the whole thing. And so that's another suffering. [00:22:05] Speaker B: The Freudian approach being [00:22:09] Speaker A: that the unconscious or subconscious and newsflash, they're interchangeable terms that are kind of meaningless at this point. They're useful. Newtonian physics is still useful, but it's anecdotal. [00:22:22] Speaker B: It's a point in a direction. [00:22:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You know, I still use it in practice, but the unconscious as a vault of suppression where anything suppressed goes to rot and it's where the demons live. And my God, what a, what a terrible model. Right? But it was, it was very sexy. Dr. And Jekyll, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came out of that, you know, ton. It spread like wildfire through the popular imagination. Karl Popper at the time was absolutely railing against it, which is so fun to read now because he was not having it back in the day. And so I pose, I'm like, okay, let's move the demarcation line, as he calls it, that line between science and pseudoscience. Do we have more information? Can we update it? That's a conjecture that I make in the book that, yeah, actually hypnosis is involved with predictive processing with state change, with interoception, with exteroception. And those become like bedrock principles that clinicians can work with with real humans in real time. I thought that's a much better, more nuanced model that fits with contemporary neuroscience. Let's work from there. [00:23:50] Speaker B: So it's almost A. It's not a how to manual, obviously, but it is a. It is a book that frames the practice of clinical hypnosis in modern neuroscience terms and makes it like, feasible that these are the neuroscience principles from which you could implement a clinical hypnosis practice. Like when you're. Yeah, you could like focus on the interoception aspect of it. And you got to get that part kind of right. And you got to get the extra reception part kind of right. And the state change part kind of right. And so you have all these little modules that you're kind of working with. And it would allow a clinical hypnotist to, to think, okay, it seems like we're honing in on the right area here. Now I think I can tweak it over here. And we have to get the right level of relaxation so that state change can occur and there's the right stimulus, et cetera, et cetera. [00:24:48] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. So take state change, for instance. So how many modalities of practice out there, like yoga or breath work, you know, if you look at them under the rubric of state change, they're helping somebody down regulate. Right. Well, that's not, that's not far out. Neuroscience, that's really basic. Like, does anybody dispute parasympathetic sympathetic, maybe at the edges of the field, you know, is like his memory or is there anything like a localized memory downstream in parasympathetic that only like I love the show with David Klansman because I'm like, I think. Not that he's hinting at that, but he was saying like, in the neural nucleus there's memory going on and we've just been looking at the synapse. So. But irrespective of that, in the hypnosis world, there's been long debates about state versus non state theories of hypnosis. I go into the weeds on that in the book. But a big part of my argument is it's really about the delta. It's about the change in state. And usually it's better to go from the wound up to the wound down. They both work. [00:26:18] Speaker B: What does that mean? Can you elaborate on that? [00:26:23] Speaker A: If somebody is in a. So think of state dependent memory and that whole, I guess, movement of exploration and research, it was, it's. I don't, you know, and I don't know, all due respect to the current researchers in that arena, I don't know the full totality of that landscape or really any of these. There's. So I touched on a lot of them. I tried to get it as correct as I could. But you know, I would say it's all state dependent. Like all learning is state dependent. Which, you know, Damasio talks about the somatic marker hypothesis, where whatever state you're in when you're learning, there's all the other stuff that's coming along with. So, you know, you think you're learning at the chalkboard or with the two plus two equals four, but what you're really learning is, you know, I think the person next to me is scary, the person behind me is cute and the teacher is weird, or you know, like the body's taking all of that in. You're being told this is what's important, but your body's going, all the rest of this environmental stuff is important. So I think to any clinical hypnotist worth their salt, they'll, they'll say, well, practically speaking, it's all state dependent memory. So what is that? [00:27:52] Speaker B: But you said sometimes it helps to wind up and sometimes to wind down. What did that mean? [00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's shorthand for just saying, are you in a, is the person in a sympathetic or a parasympathetic state? So the classic example throughout therapeutic intervention would be ptsd, Right. So typically somebody experiencing trauma is going to be in an aroused state, right? Not, not always. There's always exceptions to everything. So you're learning in that aroused state that all of these things are danger signals. And because I'm overloaded, I can't necessarily tease out what's the, what's more salient than the other signal. You know, they're all coming in and so next time I'm walking down the road and I see a green Jeep, I'm activated. Right, Right. [00:28:51] Speaker B: So that's true. In that case you have a patient who has that condition. Right. Or something, and then they seek your help, they would like to undergo some hypnosis. Then, then you would actually need to take them a little bit closer to that state, that aroused state, in order to rehearse the mental foraging, the simulations to address. [00:29:12] Speaker A: Not necessarily. There's a. So there's a. And we don't have to get into. But imagine that there's a menu of techniques that have been developed in the field. And you know, some of them, like if I mention the word regression, some people are going to go, oh my God, regression. But under the right circumstances, that's just going back to the memory. But if you've got the person unbelievably relaxed and you've what we call, you've resourced Them. So, you know what's. So you give somebody all kinds of positive things to connect to, and then, you know, you might not have to have them do a direct. We do a lot of indirect work as well. So you don't. Sometimes it's. You do want to light up that neurology. Like, that's useful. You don't always want to do it in an extreme case. So let's take the ext. You know, let's take trauma off the table and say otherwise. Yeah, we want to light up some of the neurology because then you've. While you've lit it up, it's plastic. Right. So one of the. And that's a beautiful thing, like hypnosis got dinged with the false memory implantation crisis of the 90s. You remember that fun stuff? [00:30:36] Speaker B: I do. And I want to come back to this. Like what? Like why hypnosis has gotten such a bad name just in the zeitgeist of common thinking or something. But. But that's one of them. Yeah. The false memory. Yeah. Yeah. Describe that for people who have not heard about it. I guess so. [00:30:57] Speaker A: I think it happened through. I think it was a legal kind of thing, like cases got brought forward. I will get the details of it wrong, but the upshot. Do you. Do you remember the details? [00:31:08] Speaker B: I don't remember the specifics, but people went to jail from like these memories being quote, unquote, implanted. [00:31:16] Speaker A: Right? [00:31:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And the culprit was hypnotists. Right. In the, in the end, I think it was. [00:31:21] Speaker A: Or it was. It might have been a psychologist, but let's just say it was hypnotist. Right. [00:31:26] Speaker B: Because, you know, those psychologists are one. One cliff away from the. The bane that is that are hypnotists. Right? [00:31:33] Speaker A: That's right. [00:31:33] Speaker B: Just one step away. [00:31:35] Speaker A: And since we've, you know, we've got that label anyway, it's like, okay, another day, you know, all right, that's why, [00:31:42] Speaker B: that's why you wrote this book. You're like, well, there's nowhere to go but up. [00:31:45] Speaker A: So I guess there's absolutely, you know, it's either kill us now, you know. Absolutely. [00:31:51] Speaker B: That's what you said, actually. That's what you said to begin this conversation. You're like, I want to kill it if I can, and this is a good day to die. [00:31:58] Speaker A: Right? [00:31:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:59] Speaker A: Okay. I like that. You know, I love people. I have a big heart. And I see like, oh, there's something in the belief leverage that we do that gives people a way to update and we can do it without story. So that's a whole other thing. And that's. It's so powerful. But what came out of the memory, the falsified memory crisis, if you will, was all the research into memory plasticity, memory reactivation, memory reconsolidation. Right. And all of a sudden the research said, oh, when memory's reactivated, it's plastic for a bit. It's like, oh, isn't that interesting? So it's, you know, a corollary would be the person that talks themselves into something, they take it on at the level of identity. So, you know, like the. The classic one that. Like being hypochondriac. Right. Or this person is sick. Oh, I think I have that. And then you act as if. And you behave in such a way and pretty soon, you know, that miming, like, be careful what you wish for. Right. So in the hypnosis field, we're very comfortable and familiar that that can be people's reality. On the neuroscience end, they call it phenomenological control. And Anil Seth's group at Sussex University of Sussex, they research that. So I'm like, oh, that's another foothold for us. That's another thing that hypnotists do that. There are a group of neuroscientists and they seem to be at the top of their game. I don't think they're risking their reputation to dip a toe into this world. And in the hypnosis world, we've always called it hypnotizability, which is a dumbass sounding word, but whatever. Hypno. Are. Are you hypnotizable? Well, it turns out people are on a spectrum. Like some people know middle third. Yes. Final third. Gangbusters. Well, that kind of corresponds just to, I think, the lay sense we all have that some people are imaginative thinkers, some people are literal thinkers, and everybody else has a bit of each. Right? So the memory reconsolidation crisis turned out to be a bit of a blessing because if somebody is stuck at the level of their subjective identity, like a classic one being I am a smoke or I am somebody who. I am a grumpy Gus. I am a this, I'm a. There are ways to work with them that give them that. It's like a localized updating treatment for them that they get to call into focus, like. And that's getting into the kind of the details of clinical practice and how we do it, which is, you know, that's the next time or some other time. I don't know that we need to dive In. But hypnotists have worked this kind of landscape for whatever hundred something years. And you know, we've got stuff that seems on balance to be pretty good that's very different than cognitive, behavioral or the talk therapies. And I would go so far to say, in a lot of ways it's kind of. If you took ecological psychology and applied it, that has a lot of overlap with how hypnotists think. So I didn't know a thing about ecological psychology. I still know, you know, a tiny bit, but enough to go, oh, affordances in the environment. Wow, that's a really useful, you know, we can do hypnosis with a representational model, but to do it with the. Giving the person affordances in their life, that's really strikingly powerful. So, you know, thank you. Ecological psychology. I think those guys are. Yeah, the Gibsons. I think that approach, if folks could. And I don't know, maybe there are people thinking about how to apply it in a clinical setting. You know, that's why. [00:36:39] Speaker B: Again, that's why I think the. One of the reasons the book is cool is because you're test running like you could take any theory, right. And say, well, does this make sense from a clinical hypnotist or clinical. Any kind of therapy? And that's what you do. And so it's really nice to be able to see that test driven in that way. So can we go back though to. I mean, you mentioned Freud and I don't know is Freud. What I want to ask is like, what. We were just Talking about the 90s fiasco with the false memory thing, but I feel like hypnosis was sort of demeaned or discredited or whatever. Like before then also, like there was this. [00:37:21] Speaker A: Oh yeah, Was it. Oh yeah. [00:37:22] Speaker B: Is it Freud's fault? Because like the idea that the cartoon version is like, you're going to get into this state, you're gonna. I'm gonna make you cluck like a chicken is the, you know, common thing or whatever and. Or you're gonna unlock this like the demons. Mr. Doctor, Mr. Hyde would be the. Yeah, the demons. Right, right. And so that sort of like. Is that Freud's fault? Is that, did that come from Freud's? [00:37:46] Speaker A: I think it's a lot of fun to blame him. But the history under. So if you look at Jean Martin Charcot, he was. He's considered the French father of neuroscience. And he worked in the old gunpowder factory in Paris, France, I kid you not. Right. And that became the insane asylum in Paris, the Sal Petrier, pardon if I'm butchering the pronunciation, but it's a saltpeter factory, which is gunpowder, Right. And you end up with this derelict leftover building. And he was, he was such a good lecturer that he was attracting folks from all over, including Freud and William James. They studied under him and they would bring in women and hypnotize them, whatever the hell that means, because I haven't seen them do it. Right, right, right, right. [00:38:44] Speaker B: You don't, they didn't, they didn't document, like, their procedures and stuff? [00:38:47] Speaker A: Well, I, I, that's a good question. Maybe, you know, there may be plenty of that in, in French, you know, like, there's a research thing right there. The, the famous painting in the book of him hypnotizing a hysterical woman. Like, if that doesn't tell you a lot. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Hysterical? [00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, like, unbelievable. [00:39:10] Speaker B: Wow. Have fun. Tell your wife she's being hysterical. Like, let that slip out. That's a fun evening. Let me, I can say that we're [00:39:19] Speaker A: wrapped up in that nonsense. But what it show. And there was a really clever thinker in that era named Pierre Janet, and he talked about, they called it dip psychism. So two psyches in one person. When we can demonstrate it by putting this big air quotes. Hysterical woman into a hypnotic state. Well, you know, look at the, like, talk about a terrible ecological psychology experiment that they're, you know, they're basically taking someone out of a cage, more or less, and giving her lots of attention, and all she has to do is follow along, et cetera. So pretty terrible from a research perspective. But at the time, this notion that you could use hypnosis to create state change in somebody, you know, that, that was a real thought and a real thing. And so Freud took really Janet's ideas of the unconscious and ran with them and popularized them or just, you know, like it was a cohort, right? We've all been in cohorts or symposiums or whatever. And you're kicking around, I think the unconscious is this or that. And, you know, there's formulations from antiquity. I do get into some of them in the book with Aristotle's Common Sense being the most fun, you know, oh, my God, that one is a good time. So, but Freud, okay, here's, you know, and I'm sure people that are scholars on this can update me on this. But, so Freud had been a doctor, a histologist. He had drawn just like Cajal, you know, sat at the microscope and done his drawings of what's going on. And he Realized that we were, you know, decades, if not hundreds of years away from understanding what's going on. Let's call it neurocorrelates. They didn't have the term at the time. Neural correlates of Consciousness in the late 1800s. So he said, I'll come up with my best top down thinking of what's going on. [00:41:37] Speaker B: That's my understanding of it as well. But I've heard I might, we might have heard the same source. Right. So. But yeah, that's what I. [00:41:43] Speaker A: But, you know, so he came up with a purely top down model. And Cajal's over here drawing the, you know, the neural architecture going into the body. And so what I like, my general thinking around this is very Tony Chimero. It's, it's, you know, this isn't the brain. All of your body is the brain. Or what do we get when we think of it that way? [00:42:09] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I know Tony's like a radical embodied cognition. [00:42:15] Speaker A: Radical. [00:42:16] Speaker B: But you do talk about the four E's a lot throughout the book. Right. And you keep coming back to those. And a lot of ecological psychology also is. Is along the same line. But sorry to. [00:42:27] Speaker A: It has, it has a lot of explanatory power to go down into the body and say, okay, if current psychology, or let's just say talk therapy to be very narrow or cognitive behavioral therapy to be even more narrow. It's kind of concerned with this part of the brain, right? So, well, guess what? You've got the shortest possible myelinated nerves. They're all right there, right? So it's little loops. And people talk about anxiety as little loops. It's like, well, gee, they're right there. So your interoceptive sense reporting activation, all that longer nerves, some are myelinated, some are not. Some of what's happening is hormonal. So you have a combination of chemical and electrical signalization. And every body system talks to every other body system. And our conscious mind doesn't really need to know that. Right. I mean, your lungs do talk to your heart. They, they are coordinating things all the time. Right. So if you, when like a classic way to work with somebody is they say, well, you know, I know you have all these signals and they're telling your story, and that's great. I want to hear your story. But before that, I invite you to pay attention to the slower signals. Like what is your stomach? What is your gut telling you what [00:44:00] Speaker B: is, you know, this is what a cbd, CBT person. [00:44:03] Speaker A: CBT is all up here. Yeah. And it's all based on, you know, it's cognitive behavioral therapy. [00:44:11] Speaker B: I thought, okay, that's what I thought. But then. So you're saying the hypnotist in this case would say, I want you to pay attention to your gut and your, your interception. [00:44:20] Speaker A: Yeah, let's pay attention to the slow signals. [00:44:23] Speaker B: Unbinding the guts is what Guts. [00:44:26] Speaker A: Right. You know, because the philosophers talk about the binding problem. So in the hypno world, we, you know, we, we never use that term, but it's, it really applies. Like that untangling of physiology and affect that goes back to William James, that posture and emotion get braided together and it's so deftly done that we really don't notice it. We don't need to. To walk through life. And when something's not working for somebody, it's a great place to start to help them realize. Like, oh, I've attached this emotional state to this body state. So that's super straight down the middle. Foundational hypnosis style of working with somebody is untangling their physiology from their affect and updating one side or the other. You can do it in any order. Kind of. Doesn't matter if you're. If you stay with the person and you help them talk to their own body through all their systems. Like it sounds it. If you frame it one way, it sounds wackadoodle or woo, but in other way. Like we all know what grief feels like to us, right? And that it feels super different from joy or needing to use the bathroom or being hungry or wanting to have sex or loving a child or, you know, like these have bioenergetic signatures. And effective neuroscience is really giving us tools for talking about these things. You know, I love. So we talked a bit about Somatic Marker by, you know, Antonio Damasio's approach and then Lisa Barrett's approach is kind of that it's a construct that emotions are constructed out of network and that allows for subjectivity. It's like there's a collective aspect because we all know what we mean when we talk about grief, but everybody feels it a different way way and describes it slightly different. And how the heck do you get your head around that from a neuroscience perspective? And that's chapter four is all about building that building towards subjectivity in the human from a neuron and up to the engram and the memory trace and on up through experience and even into culture that I think what I read is there are enough. There's enough good science at each level, like lateral inhibition. It doesn't seem like it's disputed that neurons play catch, right? So an incoming signal, like, I got this. That's my shade of pink. And it pushes off the, you know, it tells the neurons to the side to stand down. Well, there's your beginning of categorization and your beginning of preference and likes and dislikes and ultimately subjectivity. So Freud didn't have access to that level of granularity, so he came from the top down. And, you know, news flash, he was wrong, you know, and some of it kind of useful, like, whatever, But now we have a much in, like in Skinner's day, you know, he was the behaviorist from bottom up. But they didn't quite have enough at the time either. And now I would argue, like, oh, we, we can kind of connect the dots enough in a clinical setting to have you guys who are doing the hardcore frontline research inform what we're doing clinically in a much better, more useful, practical way now. [00:48:42] Speaker B: Yeah, one of the. Let me just read this quick quote. This is from when you're talking about interoception to then segue into, like, what. What's, you know, different? Well, I'll read the quote. Hypnotists recognized the connection between bodily sensation and memory long before neuroscience could explain the mechanism. So it's it. So hypnotists, some. Some with, well, let's say most with good intentions. [00:49:10] Speaker A: Right. [00:49:11] Speaker B: Like clinical hypnotists trying to help people have been doing this work and seeing what positive results, but haven't necessarily been able to say why or how. And what you're describing about the intertwining at all of these different levels, right? So you've got your brain, right? But the brain reaches out to the body. It's connected to the gut and the heart, and there. And these are all dynamic systems. They're all intertwined. And so what you call, like unbinding the guts is starting with what you could say, what you can say now as a hypnotist to say, oh, now I can kind of explain how I sort of relaxed the gut or, you know, whatever, while I brought up some intention or some circular thinking pattern. And then you can serve as a guide while they are less, less intertwined, while they're a little bit looser, right? And you're in a state of plasticity to be able to then explore different states and then learn through those different states and then let them come back together and voila, you're whole again, et cetera. [00:50:18] Speaker A: And then you just practice, you know, I mean, Stanislavski Figured this out with, you know, it's, it's method acting, right. It's simulation theory. Somebody turned me on to German Heslow's simulation theory. And it's like, oh, that's not to do with computer simul, you know, living in a simulation. It's another term for. It would be practice. Yeah, I do a lot of practice with folks like have like now that you're this, in this new state, how do you show up in your environment with. In this new way of being, you know. Right, right. [00:50:58] Speaker B: It's not a one and done sort of thing. [00:51:00] Speaker A: You need to practice sometimes. But you know, our neurology responds to practice. So I was talking to Johan John about it and I said in the, in the hypnosis world we call this self directed neuroplasticity. And he goes, James, we just call that learning. So learning, it's a thing. And he goes, yeah, it's a thing. You're fine. [00:51:26] Speaker B: But this is a different, you know, a delicate kind of learning. [00:51:29] Speaker A: Right. [00:51:29] Speaker B: Because I mean, just going back to why hip hop hypnosis, among many has a bad rap or historically had a bad rap, because you could put some bad learning in there. [00:51:40] Speaker A: You could absolutely. [00:51:41] Speaker B: Someone, hey, you're not worth humanity. Right. [00:51:45] Speaker A: You can use it for evil. Yeah. You know, I mean like any tool, you know, this is something that we [00:51:53] Speaker B: should have not said and we should say is that the. A patient that comes in has to. So first of all, it's up to them, right? They, you're entirely trying to affect them. You're like a helping guide. [00:52:08] Speaker A: Like a guide, absolutely. Yeah. We have strong ethics on that, you know, as we should. You know, it means, I mean, you [00:52:16] Speaker B: know, psychiatrists, psychologists, they're supposed to also be guides. But you talk about in the book how it's more talk. Relational in those sort of talk therapy kinds of settings where it's, it's much more, um, there's just a lot more going on. In the hypnotist. In a hypnotist, absolutely. [00:52:32] Speaker A: I mean, you know, medicine's in that realm of prescription. And so I, you know, not to get off onto this, but I, you know, one of the folk, one of the arenas I work in is chronic pain. And I work with a lot of doctors and they send me chronic pain folks because they're often not really trained in it other than to medicate. And if somebody has had time for their body to heal and there's still pain, it's kind of like an on signal, like, you know, like a fire alarm or A, a guard dog. So there's often an emotional component that's buried in it. And so it's a teasing out of of those things, quieting the signal. Like it sounds mystical if there's no explanation for it, but as soon as there's an explanation it's like, oh, well that makes sense. Well that's like the histamine response. It's a hair trigger cascade. You trigger an allergy and the body goes into overdrive. Whether it needs to or not is often like, oh, it didn't need to. Something in the environment was just enough for all your alarms to go off. And let's reset that situation now, you know. [00:53:55] Speaker B: Well, that's what I think this is. The other thing I was going to say just a moment ago is that it gives you an advantage like this framing the book gives clinical hypnotists the advantage now of being able to, when a patient comes in and might be a little bit wary of the idea now you can like sort of point to these fundamental frameworks in neuroscience and say this is actually what's happening. This is like a way to explain it. So it's, it ain't scary at all. In fact, it's very benign. It's very benign. [00:54:25] Speaker A: It's way more benign than taking medication. [00:54:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I know. Whereas like a doctor, Chronic pain, here's your pill. [00:54:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And then you're, then you're thinking, you know how many folks think like they either over identify with the pain. I am now a this which we see happening a lot, or I have ADHD or I have fibromyalgia or what? That's the identification, the identification piece. But then the other piece is now I have to take this the rest of my life. Boy, did I really sign up for that. And yeah, it's. Hypnosis is very benign for a lot of folks. It doesn't feel like anything. It's not mind control other than it's you controlling your mind with my or a hypnotist help. Right. So you like if you know and I mentioned amnesia. So I'll ground that. It's like that's the stability plasticity problem that Steven Grossberg talked about. If we remembered everything, like then all of a sudden everything's equally important and then nothing's important. So you know, for, forget the pain, keep the lesson. Does that sound like a good deal? Heck yeah. So in, in often that happens naturally, but sometimes, you know, to me the analogy is a lot of these. There's plenty of bodily systems that are slow and there's plenty that are super fast and sometimes the super fast ones are there because long time ago your ancestors got eaten and let's not take a chance. And healing is bedfellows with relaxation. Right. I mean, I don't think that's surprising or controversial. [00:56:36] Speaker B: No, I don't think so either. It might be useful to talk just about the range of conditions, ailments, situations that like a clinical hypnosis approach would be good for. Because you mentioned schizophrenia earlier. Like, you probably wouldn't treat schizophrenia with, with hypnosis, right? I mean, that's like, that's a pretty severe. Well, I know that there's a range and everything, but schizophrenia can be pretty severe. And it's not like, oh, well, I'll hypnotize them and they won't be schizophrenic anymore. Right. So, so what is like kind of the range of what is true? Like you mentioned chronic pain. [00:57:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very important to say I'm not a doctor. Clinical hypnotists are not doctors. And also we're not therapists. Right. We're clinical hypnotists. It's its own weird little narrow niche that happened. [00:57:29] Speaker B: Don't say weird. Don't say weird. You're going to perpetuate the weirdness factor. [00:57:33] Speaker A: Thank you. Well, it, it, it's history needs to be updated, which is why the book was written, you know, so it's very. I very much grounded it in biological naturalism as best as I could so that it's, you know, like that somehow consciousness happened. And while that's being debated, we can, we can utilize that. The research papers say that it's more effective than placebo, say that certain things like fibro and IBS are indicated, like [00:58:16] Speaker B: hypnosis, irritable bowel syndrome. [00:58:19] Speaker A: Irritable bowel. [00:58:21] Speaker B: Well, can we. Let me. Because you write, you mentioned that in the book. So what is it about? What is irritable bowel syndrome in that, like, it can be treatable, like in terms of, you know, predictive processing, interoception, extraoception, state change or whatever. Like, I didn't, because I'm not that familiar with it. [00:58:38] Speaker A: I am far from. I don't specialize in it. So anything I say is my best guess. [00:58:44] Speaker B: Okay, sure about it? [00:58:45] Speaker A: I don't specialize in it. I'm not an expert in it. I pay attention. [00:58:48] Speaker B: We can use a different example. We could use a different example, if you prefer. [00:58:52] Speaker A: But okay, if, if folks will give me an indulgence of a broad brush and, and it's a, it's actually a good one to talk about because, you know, everyone's going to want to say, what about polyvagal theory? And that's controversial. And the neuroscience community just put a big old smackdown on it. And the what is polyvagal theory? [00:59:15] Speaker B: And now you have to unpack that. [00:59:17] Speaker A: Let's see if I can get it. Well, so ner. Cranial nerve number 10 is the vagal or vagus nerve, and it means wandering in Latin. And, you know, my kind of lay explanation for it is it wanders through the body and it does a systems check on the way down with every organ, and it reports back to the brain on how's the heart doing, how's the liver doing, how are the lungs doing, what's going on with the kidneys? You know, is the person breathing or not breathing? You know, it's, it's like a systems check. I'm sure it's more is going on than that. So I have not done a deep study on it because I've paid attention to the neuroscientists saying, you know, we're, we're, we're not buying it yet, but we're not buying polyvagal theory as a whole yet. And the author of polyvagal theory, Stephen Porges, has his pushback on it and he keeps up with that in real time. So to give credit, it's a very lively debate, if nothing else. [01:00:26] Speaker B: Well, but the theory is that this nerve checks in on the organs. That's what the polyvagal. [01:00:32] Speaker A: That's my characterization. So I really don't want to do a disservice to the folks who agree with it or disagree with it. But if we do have a long nerve going deep into our body, and we're not, if we're paying attention to the feelings of it, there's something in there. There's a co. Regulation like, you know, think of all the looping feedback aspect that happens throughout the body. So there's something in there. I feel like I'm getting out, out of my depth. So I don't want to just, you know, I don't know that I have much to offer to that. I think there might be some there, there. But I think my guess is that in a parasympathetic world that there's more localized outbound memory at the sight of organs than science fully understands yet. But I don't know that that's my hunch from working with people like, you know, it's the classic thing. Listen to your Heart, you know. Well, some, you know, you do that with somebody, they start crying and getting in touch with that emotion, and revelations come in that. Oh, is that the unconscious speaking to them? Well, that's their interoception, communicating. Because all these things do talk. Transduction between systems is a thing. So how much, like, how many steps down can we go in? In clinical hypnosis, it kind of feels like you can talk to any body part. Like, okay, you know, we talked to a woman's feet the other day, and that was informative. She was, she told me she was digging in her heels. Right. Well, what's that mean? So let's talk to your heels. And her heels told her, oh, I'm trying to keep you from doing something stupid like when you were ba boom. Well, she had anchored an interoceptive memory to the time when she was 12 or 16, whenever it was. And as the wise woman she is now, you know, what do you want for yourself now? I want to be able to stand tall. Okay, so it, you know that. So I think somewhere in all of the debates around interoception, because it's squishy, because it's the guts, and because it's, you know, not as quantifiable as light vibrations or sound vibrations, we don't quite have the great metrics yet, but we're really getting there. There's a lot of, there's incredible research going on in interoception. So that's how I would try to elegantly sidestep, is to back away from it as polyvagal theory and say interoception is paying attention from a hypnotist perspective to, to what the body signals are trying to say. And if it's controversial to think that they have a voice, well, like we, you know, there, there's, you know, I'm guilty of that. So, you know, I'll take that if that's, if that makes me woo, you know, sure, yeah, that's okay. [01:04:01] Speaker B: Talking to feet. [01:04:03] Speaker A: But, but so I, I asked like, [01:04:05] Speaker B: for the irritable bowel syndrome, because you brought that up. And I said, well, let's use that as an example. But, but so what is an example of like, let's say I came to you and I have. What would be a good. I get headaches all the time. No, I. What would be a reason to go see you? [01:04:20] Speaker A: You know, we can go like, you know, in the abstract, if somebody had ibs, you know, we would go into a deeply relaxed state and then I would have them tell me what's true. Like, and you know, what is your gut really telling you? And have them get really slow and they'll have something and it, you know, it sometimes is tied to an event. It could be tied to their identity. How, you know, it could be unprocessed grief, all, all those things like, you know, it's same as the body, keeps the score. Also controversial. Love them or hate them, you know, problematic, all that. Fine. There's some there there, I think, and we haven't figured it out and we get to move the demarcation line. And when we do, you know, I'm, I'm on team science, right? Science will figure this out. We'll have better explanation right now. What's strong. So having somebody listen to this part of themselves that's not up in the brain often will give them insight. And the work really is about setting people up for their own epiphanies. And a brilliant paper on this just dropped out. Just dropped about a week or so ago, Reuben Laconin's folks at Oxford just put out a paper. I don't remember the name of it, but I. It's the last paper that I got in the book because the final chapter of the book is called the Structure of Epiphanies. And that's a nod and homage to William James. And I don't want to give any spoiler alerts, but, you know, there it is. He wrote his team rather put together a paper where they're not looking at the veracity of epiphanies and insight as people have them. They're looking at how epiphanies in insight have that neural cascade where it updates somebody's neural traces. So if phenomenology has come this far, I think it's fantastic. So it took. That's my quick read of it is, you know, phenomenology didn't come till after Freud. How do we explain subjective experience? How do we explain sense making in a way that neuroscience can measure and use? And we've had a lot of really brilliant people working on that. So to me, that's what's so fun about this is however the chips fall with either polyvagal or the body keeps the score or interoception where going to know more and then we get to, we get to do better. We get to update our models for helping people heal. Right? [01:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I mean you mentioned in the book, so we've been talking about like how it's grounded in modern neuroscience, but you talk about how you basically you're doing the best you can in that. And you're not like, married to any of these ideas fundamentally. But it's like the best of what we have that explains what. What could be happening. Because I can imagine it being. It could be frustrating to be doing work with people knowing that it's working, but not being able to explain why. And then people won't take the medical community or whatever won't take it very seriously because where's the mechanism? So. [01:08:07] Speaker A: Right. [01:08:07] Speaker B: Kind of pointing to is. Well, these are considered with. We have a mechanism. We have multiple mechanisms, and in fact, lots of different ways to. [01:08:17] Speaker A: It doesn't work all the time. It doesn't help everybody. And all the caveats apply. But one of the nice things that I realized being on a medical team was doctors aren't looking for that. If something bats like Ted Williams, they're ecstatic. Right. [01:08:38] Speaker B: Right. [01:08:40] Speaker A: Think of all the, like, you know, like sham back surgeries or surgeries that, you know, don't fix the problem. Well, it's not always physiological to be, you know, there's. The effective component is deeply in humans and, you know, my. My beef, as it were, with the talk therapy, you know, and I. I work with therapists all the time. Love it. It's great. We're. We're all doing our. We're showing up for other humans talk. [01:09:12] Speaker B: Therapists are idiots. You can say it. No, I'm just kidding. [01:09:15] Speaker A: It's just. Yeah, I'm coming with a big hatchet. You know, we want to. If. If you take somebody. So think of the neural trace going through this person's body, and every time they tell that story, you're. You're. You're what? You know, you're getting all heavy in on it. You're wiring it even more. You're helping, you know, you're helping the person identify with their pain story instead of their next story instead of the next chapter. And Absolutely comes from a place of wanting to help people heal. You know, that's why. So the book has kind of heroes and villains to it to tell that story in a way. I mean, I fell victim when I started writing the book. I wanted it to be impressive and smart. And after a while, I'm like, I can't keep up with you guys. This is breaking my brain. It'd be better if I accepted where I'm at, which is I'm a clinician, and maybe ask for help from the neuroscience community in terms of getting it right or even better. So I'm super appreciative that the folks I Did reach out to. Didn't just say, he's a crank, he's whack a doodle. They took my questions seriously. Really can't say that enough. That's been a huge part of it. So, yeah, things need updating. Absolutely. I like that ethos and the water cooler that you've created and that I've seen in other arenas where, because the field's so big and it's so intense, yes, there's competition, but way more than that. There's a lot of cooperation. [01:11:10] Speaker B: There is. And people are rooting for each other. And actually, people in my field actually respect and encourage their. The people that they are vying against for publications, et cetera. Like, it's. So in some sense, rising tide for [01:11:31] Speaker A: sure raises old boats. [01:11:32] Speaker B: What? I don't. [01:11:33] Speaker A: But yeah, yeah, historically, that's true. [01:11:37] Speaker B: That's true. [01:11:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:11:39] Speaker B: And in physics it's true, apparently. But okay, one that. So I'm going to use a word here, and I'm. I'm really hesitant to use it because it's a woo word and the word is holistic. Okay. And so you. You can come out. I don't think you don't use the word in the book. Or maybe you do. I don't know. [01:11:56] Speaker A: I don't think it. [01:11:58] Speaker B: But. Because whole is holistic. Medicine is its own thing. But I actually mean it in the whole, as in like the whole body, brain, mind, environment, et cetera. So brain is a complex organ, complex system, apparently. And then it's also in a body, which it's even more complex. Right. And so you're talking about all these intertwined systems. The reason I'm saying this is because you come out of it and you think, oh, okay, like, hypnosis is like, maybe the best way to. It's gotta be better than talk therapy. Unless it's like some simple problem you're trying to get over. There's gotta be better than just taking a pill where you're hitting some node, and in a complex system, you don't know how that node is actually longitudinally going to be affecting. Absolutely those sorts of things. So there's almost greater care in the practice that you describe of hypnosis and trying to sort of unwind, let the patient do their own work and like, you're just helping guide them and then let it gently. It seems like a very gentle, great practice. And it seems more correct for a complex system with all of these dynamical systems at different temporal scales, different spatial scales, all intertwining and working together. [01:13:18] Speaker A: So I'm so relieved that it comes across that way. You know, I've been in a, you know, in a garret for six years writing this thing, hoping that that would come through. So I'm super grateful. Well, so I mean that is coming through. [01:13:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, at least it came through for me. I'm sure it's going to come through that way for other like minded people. But so one of the things, you know, I was going to ask you, you've talked about talk therapy. Some, you know, like psychedelics are popular for various reasons but in the medical community I guess they're getting more, more popular these days. But so psychedelics are something, a treatment that has worked for, for example, depression and in sort of a one shot way at least for. [01:14:07] Speaker A: Right. [01:14:07] Speaker B: From what I understand for like a long time. And the way, I don't know how the other neuroscientists explain how this might work, but the way that we sort of, I've talked about it with other neuroscientists is all right, you take a psychedelic, you can think of your brain processes as a bunch of landscapes and some of. And so there are deep wells and landscapes and you get caught in these de wells and you call those like the short little circuits. Right. Little loops. So I keep telling myself I'm no good at croquet or something. Right. And so. And then you take this bam. This psychedelic that like flattens all those landscapes and allows it, you know, and then you have some ego dissolution or whatever the hell for. [01:14:53] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:14:54] Speaker B: For Super 8 hours or whatever and then, but then allow those landscapes to settle back in and if you're, I guess maybe guided in the right way, they settle back in, in the right place. So that's one explanation of how that sort of therapy could be effective. [01:15:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:15:08] Speaker B: How do you think about those, that kind of treatment? Well, I guess just psychedelics first of all in general. [01:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:14] Speaker B: Relative to something that like hypnosis, which is like a slow, caring, gentle process. Very different than here. Boom. [01:15:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the, it's like champion slugger state change. Right, right, right. [01:15:29] Speaker B: Like psychedelics like electroshock therapy, you know, like just taking a baseball bat, like [01:15:36] Speaker A: they're starting to do. What do they call, is it transcranial magnetic stimulation? [01:15:42] Speaker B: Transcranial magnetic stimulation. [01:15:43] Speaker A: Did I get that right? [01:15:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I know someone, there's little magnet with you. You can get a very particular stimulate at a very particular location in the brain. [01:15:51] Speaker A: Yeah. I know someone who has had fantastic results with that. And, and that has hard to imagine But I. I know a guy who had eyelid surgery, and it changed how he shows. [01:16:08] Speaker B: He's like. [01:16:09] Speaker A: I feel like a different person. Like, it totally Florida, you know, he thought he was getting cosmetic surgery. It changed his identity and how he shows up, like, wow. So, you know, like, what's the mechanism? Beats me. I'm not an expert. You know, I do think, like, I might do psychedelics when I turn 70. That's kind of my. Yeah, I'm gonna wait. I'm 59. I think I'm gonna wait. But that big ego dissolution and something that unbinds your senses and your ego and sense of identity and does a big stage. And so it's doing it all at once. [01:16:57] Speaker B: All at once. Kind of God. Seems like a wild west. [01:17:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Because it reconsolidates there. There's some. You know, there's some power. Like, I'm a little careful about those things. Right. You know, you. You do that. I judge if you do that a lot. Yeah. [01:17:19] Speaker B: But if I'm. If I'm depressed or I have some PTSD or something, and I'm considering either hypnosis or a really good trip in the desert, like, what would you advise me to do and why. [01:17:30] Speaker A: So I. I worked with a client last week, and I have a backward clock on my wall because I'm like, okay, any. Any good hypnotist, I'm going to, you know, have. Have fun with it. And he came out of trance and he looked up and he saw the back. The clock running backwards. [01:17:49] Speaker B: No. [01:17:50] Speaker A: And he just goes, whoa. Oh, my God. And he said he felt like he was tripping harder than on psychedelics. So it's like, wow. All right. [01:18:01] Speaker B: See, that's the thing is, like, maybe there's a similarity because you are flattening the landscapes. In this case, you're putting it in a more plastic. Plastic state. [01:18:09] Speaker A: Yeah. We call it elicitation. You know, you're like. I will say, imagine you're on a psych having a psychedelic experience. Now, what's different? Who are you? And that can be enough to evoke it for people. Oh, I have this campfire brain, and I'm open to new things, and I'm willing to let go of an old pattern that no longer serves me. [01:18:35] Speaker B: That. [01:18:36] Speaker A: So we are. You know, that's how we work. [01:18:39] Speaker B: Well, no, but that. That. That's. You're. Then you're eliciting, like, they're in a. Let's say a trance or whatever. And then you're saying, imagine you're on lsd, but What I'm wondering or some sort of psychedelic. Yeah. But what I'm wondering is if I had to choose, if I could either go treat my PTSD through hypnosis or through taking like a powerful psychedelic drug or whatever. [01:19:02] Speaker A: Like I think with everybody, it, if you have a curious, if you have a curiosity and a desire to explore yourself and update yourself, follow that and see where it takes you, you know. So, you know, I, I'm in a, I'm in a group. I, I got into this really through the side door because I started doing Jungian shadow work in my mid-40s. Like, well, that's pretty woo, you know, But I'm like, well, what, what do they mean by shadow work? Oh, that's the parts of self that we hide or repress or deny. So how can we make that something to safely look at? Oh, like, oh, I'm carrying shame because of this and doing that kind of work for myself to, you know, I was, I was actually a sculptor, I was an artist, I did public art, I did commissions for Paul Allen back in the day. You know, love to do something at the Allen Brain Institute. If anyone's listening. Right there we go up in the, up the road in Seattle. But everybody's path is unique. So for some folks that, you know, the route of psychedelics is going to make sense, you know, but you know, there's the cautionary aspect, I think, to any kind of drug use. So I want to offer what can you do that does not involve any kind of meds? And for some people, psychiatric meds work wonders. Right. I mean, when I was in our, the facility I worked in had a lot of complex mental health situations. Folks who were bipolar, schizophrenic, etc, and you know, the medication in that facility allowed people to live their best lives because they had so much other care. So, you know, will we, you know, let's just keep making things better, you know, really? Like I reached out to Phil Corlett a few times at Yale and he was super helpful and that informed my thinking a lot around hallucination and, you know, all that because that is something we get trained to work in, typically in hypnosis and that goes to perceptual reality monitoring and reality monitoring, reality monitoring in general. And you know, the old version of that was about memory. But what Nadine Dykstra is working on is on the sense making end and I don't want to get her research wrong. So again, take this one with a grain of salt. But it seems like almost a two to One kind of thing, like reality is weighted roughly twice as strong as recalled since. And, you know, that's that, okay. That being fungible is phenomenological control. So, you know, let's go back because we didn't get to talk about Aristotle and common sense. And that's kind of a grandfather of consciousness. Studies in philosophy of mind would be. Go back to one of the OGs, right? So he described common sense as being made up of the special senses. And the special senses are smell and hearing, taste and touch and sight. So those are the special senses. And they enter the front chamber of the brain where they mix, and then they go to the next chamber where I think it's fancifulness and imagination. Come in in that chamber, and then another chamber back is judgment, and then behind that is memory. And that's the origin story for the common sense being made from the special senses. Like, how cool is that? You know, it's a lovely. There's a beautiful drawing in the book from the 1500s. Incredible drawing. And I got it from Larry Swanson's book. So he wrote a great book called Brain Architecture, which I highly recommend to any clinical hypnotist. Read Larry Swanson's book Brain Architecture. It will give you a fantastic grounding and roadmap that you can build a practice from that is based in something serious and with real evolutionary roots to it. And that drawing of the special senses as drawn by a 15th century dude putting an encyclopedia together or 16th century, I think. And it's lovely. Like, what a cool thought. Your senses go through fancifulness and then they go through judgment. [01:24:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Mine actually just goes straight to judgment sometimes. [01:24:19] Speaker A: Straight to judgment, yeah. Terrible. Yeah. [01:24:23] Speaker B: So who. I mean, I should have asked you this way, way beforehand, but you mentioned other, like, clinical hypnotists who would enjoy that Larry Swanson Brain Architecture book. But. [01:24:33] Speaker A: So who did you. [01:24:34] Speaker B: Who's this book for? Who should read this book? [01:24:36] Speaker A: So it kind of has three audiences, which my editors are like, that's ridiculous. Too many. [01:24:42] Speaker B: Is that too too many or two too many? It's too too many. [01:24:45] Speaker A: It's two too many. So the first audience is. And that's why I'm on your show before any other shows. You know, calling it a show is silly. But you. You know why I'm. Why I'm with you? Because it's got to pass muster with neuroscience in general, with all the caveats we've talked about first. Like, it's. It's got. There's gotta be a there there. Because all of us sit downstream from you guys, and that's how it should be. And, you know, you probably never get to hear, like, oh, there's clinicians that sit downstream of us trying to figure out how to apply our work. [01:25:25] Speaker B: So first I feel sorry for those clinicians because all we do is bitch and moan to each other about, like, you're wrong. [01:25:31] Speaker A: We all bet you're wrong. Every field does that. Sure, you can't get away from it and, you know, but, you know, we can love on each other too. So first field is the neuroscientist. And, you know, it's collegial, and it's like, thank God there's other weirdos that are geeked out about, you know, what. What we like to talk about. The next field would be medicine and medicine. You know, so the. If. If I'm using the term epistemology correctly, the epistemology of medicine kicked hypnosis to the curb because it thought it explained things down this other. And I judge that's why psychology and neuroscience have been uneasy bedfellows for. [01:26:14] Speaker B: Right. [01:26:14] Speaker A: 100 years. Like, you're stealing the covers, man. You know, like, do we have to sleep in the same bed? I don't really. [01:26:20] Speaker B: Like, you're, like, making words up to describe something we don't even think exists, etc. [01:26:25] Speaker A: Right, right. So I hope it's got better explanatory power. And, you know, I'm. I'm painting psychology with a very broad brush. And sure, I'm not an expert, and I love ecological and environmental psychology, and there's plenty of it. That's. That's great. But for whatever reason, like, in 20, 26, in tons of medical domains, CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy is the gold standard. Yeah, that. [01:27:03] Speaker B: That's only recently, though, right? [01:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah, depending on what you mean by recent. But yes, decade. Somewhere in there. [01:27:11] Speaker B: 15 years. [01:27:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:27:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [01:27:13] Speaker A: Not super long. Like, I don't know, does it go back 20 years? [01:27:16] Speaker B: I don't know. You're gonna say, like, it's been happening since the 60s or something, but. No, it's. [01:27:20] Speaker A: No, you're right. Yeah, it does. It wouldn't go back to the 80s or. I don't. I don't know how old it is. It's not like maybe it had its formulative time, and then it's. Right now it's the best practice in medicine. [01:27:36] Speaker B: Wait, so who considers it that? It's. It's all the rage right now? Is that. Is what you just said the same thing as what I just said or what's The. What do you mean, the best practice in medicine or. [01:27:46] Speaker A: It's the mo. It's. It's the go to. Like, it's what they're going to do at the VA and in medical facilities. They think it's the most effective and what any mental health practitioner is going to utilize when they work with patients. [01:28:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:28:03] Speaker A: Okay, so. And then you got acupuncture roaming the hallways, and I'm like, how did that happen? Son of a bitch. [01:28:11] Speaker B: What is that? What about the leech sucking? What is it bleeding? [01:28:14] Speaker A: Like, can we do leeches in our facility? Well, maybe. You know, we did do a dunk tank one time, and then I said, never again. We brought a dunk tank to the facility for a carnival. And guess what? [01:28:27] Speaker B: Why are you dunking poor Dolores when she all. [01:28:29] Speaker A: She's. Dolores was having too much fun dunking me. Me. And I went to my boss and I said, I've been traumatized. I can't do that again. But, you know, it's. It's safe enough and it kind of is effective enough. You know, like, it's. What is cb? Cbt. Cbt. [01:28:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:28:53] Speaker A: You know, and here I am. I'm like, unfairly pooing on it, and they're not here to defend themselves. So, you know, apologies, and let's have a real conversation. All true, but. [01:29:05] Speaker B: But, I mean, I have a friend who's. Who likes. He tried CBT real hard and it didn't work. You know, so different things work for different people. [01:29:13] Speaker A: That's the larger point. Absolutely. Yeah. Like, if something doesn't work, like, you're not stuck at trying psychedelics or hypnosis or CBT or. Or sound bath, Qigong. Astral. You know, I don't. [01:29:30] Speaker B: Whatever. Astral projection, man. [01:29:33] Speaker A: You know, I remember about that when [01:29:35] Speaker B: I was in my teens. The real stuff. [01:29:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I wanted to take my little field and go, we can do better. I think it can be grounded. I think the neuroscience, like, you know, so, like, memory alone is a huge chapter in the book. And predictive processing, that's like. That's. That's the ball game, baby. Allostasis and updates from that perspective, like, the medicine side of things will get that. Because in the medical world, we think in terms of baseline. What's the patient's baseline? And their baseline is. Well, that's homeostasis. Right? That's the old thermostat model. They're at this baseline. And so look up on Allen's cognitive. Cognitive level, they're at a 4.2. And so they can't do goal directed activities on their own, but they can with help. Okay. So that means on Tuesdays and Thursdays they get assistance with taking a shower. You know, like that stuff gets measurable. But allostasis, Peter Sterling's been great. Like, like, what a cool dude, man. Like just as a human, like, aside from coming up with this cool model and you know, I'm presuming folks get allostasis. [01:31:02] Speaker B: No, say you have to say what allostasis is. [01:31:05] Speaker A: So it's your body predicting what you need next. [01:31:09] Speaker B: So. [01:31:10] Speaker A: Oh, Paul's about to stand up, so we're going to constrict his blood vessels a little bit so his blood pressure doesn't leave his head and he passes out. [01:31:20] Speaker B: So it's like predictive homeostasis. A close cousin of homeostasis. [01:31:24] Speaker A: It's a close cousin of homeostasis, but it's, you know, goes along with free energy principle, with Carl Friston's idea that, you know, it's. The body gets to save a little wattage because you know, the last time you stood in front of this particular mirror, you brushed your teeth and you spit in the sink. And so I'm priming all of those activities and you don't have to think about. So do you remember brushing your teeth 17 Tuesdays ago? You know, I do not. Yeah, but you know, for like everyone listening knows they did. [01:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah, hopefully I do. I can't even. Like, I see these interrogations when people are in interrogation rooms. And what did take me through your day two days ago? And I don't know how people do that. Like I can't, I could barely go through my day yesterday, you know. [01:32:17] Speaker A: Right. And thank God, right? Like that, that ability, that stability and plasticity, that, that memory and forgetting, that amnesia, all these fancy names we have, you know, saves us from the hell of remembering everything, doesn't it? But your physiology remembers perfectly fine how to brush your teeth. And so there's allostasis and prediction happening when you do that. And so if you unbind that, that becomes a learning opportunity. So we use allostasis and prediction all the time. Like part of the book I, you know, is jokingly I titled a sub heading of the book. What kind of psychic are you? Well, there's a great neuroscience paper on exactly what kind of psychic you are. You know, are you a ruminating psychic? Are you predicting a bad outcome, a good outcome? I think there was nine of them. And any one of us falls into some that are maladaptive, some that are adaptive. And positive and some in the middle. And we can do that in different ways depending on our experience. Oh, I can't hit a baseball. I've never been able to bake brownies. I'm a great swimmer because I love to be in the water, you know, whatever. So you predict that and it primes who you are when the opportunity in the moment arises. And it's the same thing as the placebo effect. It's a. The dimensions for placebo are conditioning. Right? Well, that's kind of back of brain, you know, typically thought of as cerebellar type stuff meeting expectation or response expectancy, which is top down, you know. So in a way it's like if, if you are expecting an outcome, you're wanting an outcome, you're primed for it. But it's a good. You got. You've increased your odds, at least let's [01:34:26] Speaker B: put it that way. [01:34:27] Speaker A: Will you always get it? You know, nothing's a guarantee, baby. Right. But there's something in the showing up for life. That placebo research around response expectancy and conditioning all points to that. And hypnosis is test, you know, it tests above placebo. Last time I checked, placebo is the gold standard of medicine. Right. That's the most tested, maybe least understood. But there, you know, there's. We're on our at least second, if not third generation of placebo researchers downstream from Ted Kapchuk and Irving Kirsch at [01:35:11] Speaker B: Harvard who are talking about placebos as being effective. [01:35:15] Speaker A: Yes. And using non deceptive placebo in medical. Like what's the. There's another term for non deceptive placebo. But telling the patient that you are going to take a placebo. Here it is. This has no medicinal value. Go ahead and take it twice a day with a meal. And they come. I'm feeling great. You know, for some folks it works, right. Even if you tell them so there, you know, if we prime the right things. I mean, if we didn't prime the right things, we'd all be dead. Right. Like life is on that teeter totter of wanting to kill itself off. And we have just enough, you know, desire to reproduce and to live. Like compassion wins. Just enough that we're all here. And that's a really cool thing. [01:36:15] Speaker B: A couple things. And then I want to ask you maybe just for a brief extra patreon part of the conversation, if you have time. So you mentioned the book might be you consider it also for the medical field. But I would imagine like other clinical hypnotists, this should Be like required reading. [01:36:33] Speaker A: Yes, thank you. The third group would be clinical hypnotists. [01:36:37] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:36:38] Speaker A: And I'm also. I figure I will do an applied mental foraging. I'll write that next. So, you know, this one is more geared towards you guys and the medical community. Like the why we should be allowed. [01:36:53] Speaker B: You need us to sign off on it and say that seems like a good model or something. Is that the idea? [01:36:57] Speaker A: That's exactly what I need. And thank you. So if you can, like, seriously, that that is my hope or want that it's you. That it's accurate enough and I'll update anything that needs it, but that it's accurate enough to be clinically useful because then the medical community can go to the medical community and say, look, guys, like, come on. Like, you know what? Like, let's. Let's do this thing right. [01:37:28] Speaker B: So it's a. [01:37:29] Speaker A: It. It's a big ask, but I came in the side door later in life. But I'm. I'm trying to give it discipline and, you know, I'm a fun, jokey guy and as my personality naturally. But I'm. I have a sense of discipline about this. I don't know where that came from. [01:37:53] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no. I mean, it looks like. I can't imagine. You know, people write books for different reasons and this must have taken you a long time to really put all these things together and hash it out. I mean, so just kudos to you for taking. Thank. You know, Such effort to do it. I know it took you a couple of years and it should have. I think if you. [01:38:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it was six years. And it was six years. Definite grind. And it will be for like, clinical hypnotists will get it. And it's actionable in an indirect way. It's pretty advanced and there's a learning curve to it. But at the back of the book, I did a combined glossary and index. So any of the allostasis or reality monitoring or predictive. They all have definitions to them and where they appear. So I'm trying to give folks a win, which is why. And I didn't have to write it the way you would write a dissertation. I wasn't held to that standard, thank God. You know, I. [01:38:56] Speaker B: No, it's an easy read. No, it's a. I can vouch for this. It's an easy, enjoyable read. Yeah. [01:39:00] Speaker A: Good, good. [01:39:01] Speaker B: Thank. [01:39:01] Speaker A: I really worked hard to, like, how do I make a term like allostasis make sense so that when folks in the field read it, they go, okay, that makes sense. [01:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'm a neuroscientist, but I think it's written. I think it's written well enough for the layman interested. Good. I think. [01:39:19] Speaker A: Well, that would be the fourth audience. Right. [01:39:22] Speaker B: Okay. [01:39:22] Speaker A: You know, I am working with an author who's put out a bunch of books, and she was like, she's loving reading it. And I'm like, well, good. If it translates, you know, down. Absolutely. Like, I do want to do an applied version of it that's more, you know, in the specifics of how hypnotists see people and do our craft, you know, the craft side of it. But the field needed an update, you know, and I came into it late enough and I had enough, you know, I. I used to do large scale public art projects that took many years and were arduous. And I'm you. And I came out of the world of architecture. It's very rigorous. So. And I, I just appreciate, like, what comes with, like, good things come from rigor. Right? [01:40:13] Speaker B: Yes. Hear, hear. [01:40:15] Speaker A: You know, so. And I recognize that in you guys. [01:40:19] Speaker B: Oh, well. So, okay. And us guys like us, I'm assuming you the community neuroscientist people and the [01:40:27] Speaker A: philosophers of mind and, you know, philosophy of memory, like Sarah Robbins. Holy smokes, man, she's awesome. Yeah, that episode. [01:40:37] Speaker B: See, that's the thing. It's like I'm reading. I'm reading your book and I'm like, oh, that person has been on. That person's been. Oh, someone who has not been on. [01:40:42] Speaker A: So you did a lot of homework for, you know, I think. Yes, I wrot on. On your podcast. That's true. You know, I looked at a lot of other things too. [01:40:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [01:40:54] Speaker A: But it very much felt like you were getting, you know, my estimation, the best and brightest in the field. And it's not, you know, there's maybe a couple other podcasts like this, but not many and that, you know, at this level. [01:41:12] Speaker B: Well, yeah, well, that's the thing is it's. It's pretty high level, so it'll never be like, pop, psy, whatever, podcast. But. But I was. [01:41:20] Speaker A: Thank God for that. [01:41:22] Speaker B: Well, thanks for saying that. [01:41:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't want to sell this. It's not a. That's the, you know, like, and try to get on, Like, I will work to get on other shows for sure. But yeah. [01:41:34] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's the thing about this. My, My little podcast here is like, if I got really popular, it would guarantee I would be doing it wrong. Like, it's a weird thing to Think like, if I, you know, I could work to like, make it super clickbaity and exactly all, you know, I. I know how to do that and I fundamentally hate it, and I would not want to do it that way. [01:41:57] Speaker A: Listen to that right there. There's your interception talking. [01:42:01] Speaker B: There you go. But, so, but I would caution you. You know that when you said like, oh, you of all places, you got on Twitter and stuff, you know, people get information from that. Get people that get there. I'm not saying you did this. I'm saying people that get their information just from podcasts are not doing enough rigorous work, like, for facts. And I would say people who go onto Twitter, and I'm not saying that this is all you did too, because I know people are. But there, you know, it is 12 neuroscientists on Twitter who are screaming all the time. [01:42:33] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:42:33] Speaker B: And they scream at each other and it's the same 12 people and there are thousands and thousands of awesome neuroscientists. Right. So it's just out caution on people, like the loud person on Twitter. Proceed with caution is all I would say. [01:42:46] Speaker A: I really appreciate that. Yeah. And as broad as I could go, it's still. [01:42:51] Speaker B: This is not a referendum on you. This is just my. [01:42:55] Speaker A: Me being also appreciate that you know that. Oh, here's. Here's another guy with another theory, you know. Yep. Yeah, I tried to leaven that with being disciplined and serious about the work and open to influence and changing it and updating and all that, you know, [01:43:18] Speaker B: especially as someone coming from the outside, I should have said this earlier. It's super impressive what, what you've done, like weaving these things together and making a coherent, cohesive, compelling. I'll say story, but it's framework or model, I guess, is what you would say. [01:43:33] Speaker A: Well, thank you. [01:43:34] Speaker B: Fits within the clinical hypnotist, I think. [01:43:37] Speaker A: I appreciate that hugely. And I'm guessing it's because I can't. It's because I came in through the side door. [01:43:44] Speaker B: Maybe so. Yeah, maybe so. [01:43:46] Speaker A: You know, like, okay, they're talking about these ink. You know, like, okay, like, I'm. I'm relieved to report that I think hypnosis comes out of my book really well. But of course I'm biased. I wrote the book. I. I practice this for a living. Like, you know, like, hello, blinders and projection. I get it. And, and that's okay. I'll, you know, I'll take my lumps if they're to be had. But in the name of updating the field, I think I found ways to do it that have some explanatory power. [01:44:24] Speaker B: I think so too. And like I said, it's, it's impressive that it's, it's. It actually is a synthesis of the ideas into something new and useful and that, that modeling framework. Okay, well, James, thanks for taking the time with me. Congrats on the book and I hope it does reach the audience that you're trying to reach there. So six years in the making, a, a passion project for sure. And, but, but man, it really could educate a lot of people in the medical field and bring clinical hypnosis more into. Away from less. I don't know, away from where people think it is. [01:45:03] Speaker A: Woo. [01:45:04] Speaker B: Or where people think it is somehow this mystical sort of practice, which it is completely not. And that comes across in the book clear as day. So I hope that it works in that regard. [01:45:15] Speaker A: Just, just another compliment to medicine, another adjunct that can be on the team that can offer help for a large variety of things. [01:45:25] Speaker B: All right, well, thanks for taking the time. [01:45:27] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Paul. This was a lot of fun. [01:45:36] Speaker B: Brain Inspired is powered by the Transmitter, an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advanced research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives written by journalists and scientists. If you value Brain Inspired, support it through Patreon. To access full length episodes, join our Discord community and even influence who I invite to the podcast. Go to BrainInspired Co to learn more. The music you hear is a little slow jazzy blues performed by my friend Kyle Donovan. Thank you for your support. See you next time, Sam.