Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

James Harrison is a clinical hypnotist, and author of a new book, Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory: 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 that could be damaging to themselves and those around them. That baggage carries over into modern medical and clinical practice, with many people giving the side eye to 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 exploring how it might be explained in modern neuroscience terms and concepts. What he ended up with is an account of hypnosis grounded in the neuroscience of state changes, interoception, exteroception, and predictive processing. 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. James's website.

0:00 - Intro 4:23 - Why the book? 15:21 - Hypnosis as mental foraging 21:57 - Freud's unconscious 23:51 - How it all works 30:27 - Memory reconsolidation 36:41 - Historical rejection of hypnosis 48:44 - Old practice, new explanations 51:55 - Clinician is a guide 1:07:31 - Effectiveness 1:22:22 - Aristotle's common sense 1:30:47 - Allostasis and predictive processing