 There's been a prejudice in modern medicine that the only real interventions are the physical ones ingestion Injection or incision but this doctor is pointing toward a powerful therapeutic tool that has underutilized the human brain using a technique called self Hypnosis we can teach people how to powerfully use their brains to control the way their bodies feel and function What is hypnosis? Well an example comes from the Sochi Olympics where unlike here in Davos there was barely enough snow for them to ski on They were only allowed to do one practice run So what the skiers did this is Bode Miller would stand next to the course look up close their eyes take a deep breath and Imagine every move every turn and it worked extremely well The team got many medals the field of hypnosis began with a V&E physician France Anton mesmer in the 18th century I have used hypnosis with some seven thousand research subjects and patients and have devoted my career to studying What happens in the brain and how well hypnosis works? Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention the skiers at Sochi We're just focusing on where they put their skis and how they move their bodies that means Dissociating other things that would ordinarily be in consciousness fears about competition and competitors for example It also involves Suggestibility suspending critical judgment so you don't judge and evaluate you just do we decided that to make hypnosis widely available We had to understand how it worked in the brain We studied people who are highly hypnotizable not everybody is and found that they had coordination in their brain between their executive control Center that plans and does things and a part of the brain that engages in conflict resolution and decision making in fact When we hypnotize people in the scanner We found that we turned down activity in that brain region which is also part of the pain circuit in the brain So you spent less time worrying about what you were doing and more time just doing it There are two other effects in the brain that we see when we hypnotize people one of those effects Involves linking the executive control region to a deep part of the brain called the insula that is involved in brain body control in Pain and anxiety perception so you have better control over your body function and perception But we disconnected the brain from a part of it that is involved in self reflection So you no longer worry about what you're doing you just do it We Americans are in a lot of pain as your people in the rest of the world as you heard from Beth One out of three Americans has an opiate prescription the rate of accidental drug overdoses has tripled since the year 2064,000 people died of it last year twice the number of people at the peak of the AIDS crisis of car accidents So it's a terrible problem by contrast hypnosis doesn't kill people it doesn't addict people But it does reduce pain. This is a randomized trial of patients undergoing medical procedures The red line at the bottom shows you that the hypnotized patients had one-fifth the pain They used only half the medication they ended their procedures 17 minutes earlier than the other patients But does it last we did studies with women who have metastatic breast cancer We taught them to form bonds with one another face the illness They had to face and do self-hypnosis for pain by the end of the year the green line They had half the pain that the control group did on the same and very low amounts of medication The biggest surprise of that study was that after the study we thought had been finished We followed up on what happened to the patients and it turned out that the patients taught this self-hypnosis and group support Lived 18 months longer than control patients on the same kinds of medical treatment for cancer by four years After all the controls had died a third of the treatment group were still alive We're now using a new technique repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation a highly focused magnet To create the same kinds of activity in the brain that we observed in hypnotized subjects to enhance the hypnotic Capacity of people who are less hypnotizable and we're using it to treat fibromyalgia syndrome We also teach people to use self-hypnosis to control the lethal urge to smoke After a single session of self-hypnosis focusing on respecting and protecting your body rather than fighting the urge to smoke Half the people will stop half of them will not touch a cigarette in two years So we get one out of four long-term abstinence from smoking. We wanted to spread this We wanted to make it available to people who couldn't get to my office We've programmed an Alexa app if you say to Alexa Alexa hypnosis stop smoking You'll hear my malifluous voice saying for your body Smokings of poison. I need my body to live. I owe my body respect and protection and it's an interactive program So I see different things depending on the answers patients give So modern research has shown us how the brain regulates the body how it feels and how it functions It changes metabolism it changes pain as you've heard and it may even affect survival time So in health it isn't just mind over matter, but mind matters