Dr. David Spiegel — Stanford psychiatrist, hypnosis researcher, forensic psychiatrist, and co-creator of the Reveri self-hypnosis app; son of two psychiatrists and co-author of the textbook Trance and Treatment.
The gist
Dr. David Spiegel defines hypnosis as a heightened, self-induced focus of attention with three components: absorption, dissociation, and cognitive flexibility (formerly called suggestibility). He traces his lifelong involvement through his psychiatrist father, explains how hypnotizability is a stable, measurable, partly genetic trait, and shows the brain mechanisms behind hypnotic pain control. Spiegel demonstrates the technique live on Ferriss, reducing his lower back pain from 2/10 to roughly 0.5-1/10 in minutes. He covers applications in pain, trauma/PTSD, addiction, phobias, and stress, draws parallels to psychedelic-assisted therapy and accelerated TMS, and argues hypnosis is a safe, underutilized 'first recourse' delivered at scale through his Reveri app.
Big reveals
- Spiegel defines hypnosis as just a heightened focus of attention, like looking through a telephoto lens, with three components: absorption, dissociation, and cognitive flexibility.
- He states that all hypnosis is essentially self-hypnosis; you don't need a swinging watch because people can shift into the highly focused state themselves.
- Hypnotizability is as stable a trait as IQ by age 21, with a 0.7 test-retest correlation over 25 years in a Stanford follow-up study.
- He demonstrates live pain relief on Ferriss, who rates his back pain dropping from 2/10 to about 0.5-1/10 after the induction.
- EEG, fMRI, and PET studies show hypnosis can completely stop the brain's P100 pain response and halve the P200 and P300 within a fraction of a second.
- A Nature Mental Health paper with Nolan Williams showed a single session of accelerated TMS to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex transiently increased hypnotizability versus sham.
- For addiction, Spiegel teaches focusing on what you're FOR (respect and protect your body) rather than against, getting one in five smokers to quit, comparable to varenicline or bupropion.
- He calls Reveri a legacy project, noting that while talking during the interview he helped more people than he used to in months of in-person clinical work.
Things worth remembering
- Spiegel's father learned hypnosis in the Army during WWII from Viennese refugee forensic psychiatrist Gustav von Aschaffenburg, who had a smallpox scar on his forehead that prisoners would fixate on.
- Highly hypnotizable people show functional connectivity between the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (executive control) and the dorsal anterior cingulate (salience network) on fMRI.
- A polymorphism of the COMT gene (methionine-valine version), which regulates dopamine metabolism, is associated with higher hypnotizability.
- Graduate student Dana Cortade developed a point-of-care genetic blood test that predicts hypnotizability in a couple of minutes.
- Last year 88,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, almost all inadvertent, while Spiegel notes hypnosis has never killed anyone.
- British surgeon Esdaile reported 80 percent surgical anesthesia using hypnosis in India before ether; he withdrew his paper after ether reached 90 percent.
- The anterior cingulate is rich in inhibitory GABA receptors, and highly hypnotizable people show more GABA binding there, acting as their own drug dispensary.
- Hypnosis-like trance healing in Bali has been practiced for thousands of years, with patients watching the healer enter a trance.
- Western hypnosis began with Franz Anton Mesmer's 18th-century 'animal magnetism'; a royal panel including Benjamin Franklin, Lavoisier, and Dr. Guillotin debunked it as 'heated imagination.'
- The anticipation of a drug ('the chase') releases more mesolimbic dopamine than actually taking it, making anticipation the real hook in addiction.
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Reveri
David Spiegel (inferred)
“people can find Reveri at Reveri.com — great name, by the way — R-E-V-E-R-I.com and on all the socials” — Dr. David Spiegel 01:31:27Find it on Amazon
Trance and Treatment
David Spiegel and Herbert Spiegel
“There are good textbooks on hypnosis. We've written one of them called Trance and Treatment, my late father and I wrote” — Dr. David Spiegel 01:33:04Find it on Amazon
Oneleaf
“There's Oneleaf, which is a French app that the French government has invested in that has excellent recordings to help people use hypnosis” — Dr. David Spiegel 01:33:04Find it on Amazon