What hypnosis reveals about where healing actually lives
In January 2024, a team at Stanford published something in Nature Mental Health that should have been bigger news than it was. They recruited eighty people living with fibromyalgia, screened them for hypnotic ability, and deliberately excluded the naturally gifted, keeping only those who scored low to moderate. Then they aimed a brief, precisely targeted magnetic pulse at the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Ninety-two seconds of stimulation. Afterwards, those people were measurably easier to hypnotize.
It is worth pausing on how strange that result is once you sit with it a bit. Interestingly, hypnotizability is among the most stable traits psychology has managed to measure. It stabilizes in adolescence and holds across the adult lifespan with test-retest reliability comparable to IQ. Decades of attempts to train it, coach it, or talk people into it have produced very little. And here was a preregistered, double-blind, controlled trial reporting that the trait could be moved, on purpose, with a machine. The effect was modest and it faded within the hour. However, that is not the interesting part for me.
The interesting part is: Why did they bother doing this?
Nobody builds neurostimulation protocols just for fun. In this case, the Stanford group did this because hypnosis works on pain, meaning it works well enough and often enough that exploiring it more looked like a reasonable use of grant money. So, a major medical school ran the calculation and concluded that engineering more access to hypnosis was worthwhile. That conclusion, not the magnet, is the finding that is interesting.
Clearing the ground
I am a hypnotherapist, and I have always found people’s reactions to that word interesting, especially when this word brings up stage acts or props like a swinging watch or people clucking like chickens. In other words, people hear hypnosis which means they hear surrender. Most of the people who find their way to me have already had more taken from them than they agreed to give, so surrender is not on offer and they are right to refuse it or learn how to do that.
So I clear the ground the same way every time.
Hypnosis is not unconsciousness. You hear everything, you remember it afterward, and you can speak the whole way through. Hypnosis is not compliance. The research on this is old and consistent: people under hypnosis do not act against their values, and the entire clinical effect rests on willingness rather than overriding it. What hypnosis actually is, in the language the field now uses, is a state of focused attention with heightened absorption and reduced peripheral awareness. You have been there. It is the state you fall into inside a film you have stopped watching and started living in, or the ninety minutes of highway you cannot account for. The clinical version is that same state entered deliberately, held longer, and shaped by someone you have decided to trust.
Attention, absorption, relationship, language. That is the whole apparatus.
Pain is the most established territory. Hypnosis has been used as a primary anaesthetic in surgical settings, and controlled work on procedural and chronic pain has been accumulating since the 1970s. The gut is the other stronghold. Gut-directed hypnotherapy for irritable bowel syndrome has been through multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses, with results durable enough that it appears in gastroenterology guidance in several countries. Beyond those two, the picture thins appropriately: reasonable support for procedural anxiety, some sleep difficulties, and smoking cessation as an adjunct; weaker and more contested support elsewhere.
The field has its overclaimers. Every field working at the edge of the measurable does. A therapy that operates through attention and relationship will never be a cure for all things, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. As an example, Jiang and colleagues, scanning highly hypnotizable people under hypnosis, found reduced activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate, increased coupling between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the insula, and reduced connectivity between the executive control network and the default mode network. In ordinary language: the brain’s self-referential commentary quiets, and the connection between deliberate attention and bodily experience strengthens. Those are the some of the same large-scale networks that psychedelic neuroscience has spent the last decade describing.
What I find interesting
Here is what I find remarkable: nothing is administered. No molecule, no brew, no capsule. A person sits in a chair across from another person they have chosen to trust, words are shared and the body changes. For example: pain recedes; A gut in revolt for eleven years settles; a behaviour that outlasted a decade of willpower loosens its grip. If a compound produced these effects at these effect sizes, it would be a blockbuster and we would know its name. Hypnosis produces them outside of this, often subjectively, which is precisely why it lives in a blind spot. Our model of medicine finds it easiest to believe in healing when there is a substance to credit.
The clinical literature has a name for part of this. Daniel Moerman called it the meaning response: the measurable physiological change that follows from how an experience is framed, held, and made sense of, particularly by someone whose authority we have accepted. Moerman’s argument was that we mislabelled this as placebo and then treated it as noise to be subtracted, when it is in fact one of the more reliable therapeutic forces we know of. Hypnosis, and hypnotherapy, is the meaning response practised on purpose.
Two eyes
I try to work the way Elder Albert Marshall taught: Etuaptmumk, Two-Eyed Seeing. One eye takes in the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing. The other takes in the strengths of Western science. Neither eye is asked to become the other, and neither is asked to stand down. You learn to use both, together, for the benefit of the person in front of you.
Looked at with one eye, the Stanford result is a finding about the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and a trait that was thought to be fixed. Looked at with the other, it is a confirmation of something ceremonial traditions have known and practised for thousands of years: that a person held in trusted relationship, brought into deep absorption by rhythm and voice and the structure of the occasion itself, becomes reachable in a way they are not otherwise reachable, and that things long stuck can move in that state.
“Western” literature, in my opinion is starting to land on it. For instance, research on auditory effects in the early 1960s, and subsequent research on rhythmic drumming and altered states, points toward the same territory with different instruments. And, what the ceremony has that the clinic often lacks is the surrounding architecture: the preparation, the community, the songs that carry meaning older than anyone present, and the people who will still be there in the morning.
Two-Eyed Seeing means holding both, letting each correct the other’s blind spot, and noticing when they are describing the same phenomenon in different languages.
Where this points
None of this diminishes the substances medicine works with, and it is not an argument that everything reduces to suggestion. It is an argument about where we have been looking. We built our model around the thing administered, and we keep being surprised when context, relationship, and meaning turn out to carry so much of the effect that separating them from the compound becomes methodologically awkward. What is interesting is that hypnosis removes the administered thing entirely and lets us see what is left standing. What is left standing turns out to be most of what matters.
Heling enters the old way, slowly, through trust, in the presence of someone who knows how to hold a room and is not in a hurry. That has been true in the clinic and in the ceremony for as long as either has existed.
The medicine was never only in the cup.
References: Faerman et al., “Stanford Hypnosis Integrated with Functional Connectivity-targeted Transcranial Stimulation (SHIFT): a preregistered randomized controlled trial,” Nature Mental Health, 2024. Jiang, White, Greicius, Waelde & Spiegel, “Brain Activity and Functional Connectivity Associated with Hypnosis,” Cerebral Cortex, 2017. Moerman & Jonas, “Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 2002. Bartlett, Marshall & Marshall, “Two-Eyed Seeing and other lessons learned within a co-learning journey,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2012.
