Dr. David Spiegel: Using Hypnosis to Enhance Mental & Physical Health & Performance

I don't like stage hypnosis; you're making fools out of people ... And that's what scares people about hypnosis—they think you're losing control; you're gaining control. Self-hypnosis is a way of enhancing your control over your mind and your body.

It seemed that there is a rough correlation between the capacity to keep your eyes up while you close them and measured hypnotizability.

About a third of adults are just not hypnotizable; two-thirds are. About 15% are extremely hypnotizable...

Hypnosis is a state of highly focused attention. It's something like looking through the telephoto lens of a camera in consciousness. What you see you see with great detail, but devoid of context.

We're born with this brain, but we don't have a user's manual for it, and we don't use it nearly as well as we can.

Stage hypnotists drive me nuts; they make fools out of people.

There is one randomized trial out of Israel that shows that adding hypnosis to PTSD treatment actually improves outcome.

We know that the peak period of hypnotizability in the human life is the latency years in childhood.

The average kid has watched 20,000 murders by the time he's 20-years-old watching television and movies these days.