The Suggestible Brain
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So thanks for supporting the show. Thanks for supporting Brilliant. Brilliant.org slash skeptic. Check it out. My guest today is Dr. Amir Raz, the world-renowned expert on the science of suggestion and suggestibility with recent research.

positions as Canada Research Chair, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery and Psychology at McGill University and where I know him from Chapman University's founding director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences.

We were colleagues there. I stopped teaching there a year and a half ago. But we're still colleagues. I'm not sure how that works, but in any case. And his son, his highly gifted son, was in my class. He took my Skepticism 101 class when he was 15 years old, and he was the smartest kid in the class. That was great.

Formerly at Columbia University and Cornell Medical Center, his work has been covered widely in the media, New York Times, Scientific American, Mind, and other publications. He's written over 200 peer-reviewed articles in publications such as Nature and PNAS and NeuroImage.

And he won the Young Investigator Award and Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association. He's a speaker in high demand. He has a TEDx talk, for example, When Can Deception Be Good For You? I just watched that, by the way. It was quite good. And he's been featured in documentaries for the BBC, National Geographic, and the CBC. And here's this new book, The Suggestible Brain, The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds.

Amir, nice to see you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I love the book. You sent me early chapters. I don't know, it must have been two, three years ago when you were working on it. And wow, it's so much better now. The stories you tell, you open up talking about your experiences as a magician, which I love. There's been a long time connection between skeptics and magicians. Penn and Teller, The Amazing Randy, and Banachek, and Jamie and Swiss, and

and others that do this for, I think, a good reason, but I like your explanation. Why do you think scientists and skeptics are so fascinated by magicians and magic? - Well, you know, magicians, first of all, being a magician really is a privilege, and I started out as a kid not really knowing what I'm getting myself into. It has become a life journey and a very meaningful one. I would say that my magic journey actually informed my decision to go into science.

I actually talk about it a little bit in the book, how that came about. But my interest and my research into hypnosis and into looking into altered states of consciousness, the effects of suggestion and so on came primarily germinated, marinated in my experiences as a young magician, interacting with audiences and so on. Magicians?

Are really clinicians of the public. I mean, they know how to deceive. They know how to create illusions. They know how to lie with grace and elegance and flair. And they do it for people's entertainment pleasure. And that's why they're so good also at detecting.

falsehoods and people who pretend that they say all kinds of things that are not true and so on. And magicians are just very good at guarding their secrets. They have been very good at that. It's a very private coterie of people who are trying to be extremely careful and discreet about what it is that they know and the gizmos and the props and the gimmicks and the different tools that they use and the

And many of the psychological methods that magicians use are actually not available to psychologists, believe it or not. I mean, most psychologists don't really know too much about the psychology of magic. And this creates silos. It creates silos of knowledge within the field of psychology, within human behavior, where when it comes to skepticism, when it comes to identifying problems,

Um, you know, certain things that are not true or they're half true, or when it comes to half baked presentations, when it comes to people saying things because they want to direct you to a particular place, magicians have a lot of experience with that. So hence the synergy. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. I had Jamie and Swiss on the show for one of his books on magic. And so we were talking about this phenomenon I've long observed. I'd like to get your thoughts on it. Um,

that there's something about mentalism that throws people off. Also, some of the close-up prestidigitation, like Uri Geller's spoonbending. Most people, especially skeptics and scientists, have no problem understanding that when Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear, they don't think for a moment that he's moving atoms around or anything like that. They know it's a magic trick. And they seem to accept big-stage magic as, well, of course, it's just magic.

But with mentalism, I've heard a lot of skeptic type and scientist type think, yeah, but how did he know that, you know, I was going to pick this card or that he knew the name of my grandmother, you know, this kind of stuff.

And maybe there's something else that I don't think it's supernatural or paranormal, but maybe they're able to read my body language or how my eyes are moving. Remember, Banachek has this great thing where he has whatever the trick is, and then he has the person look at his hand and he waves his hand around and he stares at their eyes.

And this is very clever because people think they'll tell me later, well, I think I must have been tracing out the card with my eyes and he could read the movement of my eyes. I'm just cracking up at this. They always think there's something else more complicated. Absolutely. Look, I was always attracted to mentalism as a magician. I mean, I could vanish handkerchiefs and coins and that's fine. But I was really attracted to mentalism from a very early age.

And I think mentalism does afford and provide a very interesting trajectory into the human mind in the sense that people feel a loss of agency. When you do a mental trick, when you do mentalism, you begin to tinker.

not with the Statue of Liberty, as you mentioned, and not with a stage illusion of sorts when something big disappears, as impressive as that might be. You're actually tinkering. You're messing with their agency. You're messing with their authorship. Am I the author? Is this my free will? Did I choose this number or did he make me choose this number? Did I choose that card or did he lead me to choosing that card? And these are existential questions. I mean, in people's minds...

They would like to know that they're brushing their teeth because they want to brush their teeth. They're not brushing their teeth because somebody's controlling them to brush their teeth. The same is true, by the way, in the world of management. If you have a supervisor or manager and they tell you to do something, it's very different than if you do it because you feel that this is your idea and it's your prerogative and it's your initiative and so on. So there's something very elementary, very fundamental, very rudimentary and very basic, foundational about management.

you know, tapping someone's ability to do something because you want them to do it versus if it comes from them. This agency, this sense of free will is something that mentalism taps. Yeah, nice. I'll tell you one last funny story about this. I was on a

a scientific American cruise where I was one of the lecturers. And so the dinners were, um, you know, fun with all the people that are mostly scientists and skeptics and so on. Anyway. So, uh, at one of the dinners, this guy tells me, look, I'm a skeptic too. I don't believe me. And I know Eric Geller is, he's kind of cheating when he bends it, but I saw this guy bend the spoon in, in a very peculiar way. It's like,

It wasn't like twisted, you know, where the bowl is just bent straight down, but it was like twisted between the handle and the bowl where the neck had been twisted all the way around. And that's just not, there's no way he could just muscle that. And as he's telling me this, I take the spoon off the table and I do the little move that Benachek taught me. And then when he finished, I held it up and said, did it look anything like this? And he's like, oh, oh, come on, really? Really?

you know i'll i'll tell you something about that particular move without getting into the details of course but um i was once having a similar situation i was having dinner with a famous scientist in europe and um he said to me i know you're a magician and i know you can do like all these things but um you know bending metal that's a completely different thing i mean i've seen people bend metal without really touching it and i don't understand how they do it and uh

By the end of dinner, his soup, you know, spoon was bent with this particular twist, with this particular twist that you just mentioned, which is a variation on the technique. And he said to me, wait a second, did you do it?

And I said, well, who else is here? I mean, how else would it happen? He said, but you didn't touch it. I said, that's right. I didn't touch it. And it happened. So it means that, you know, perhaps the soup did it or, you know, or maybe the waiter. And he said, no, but wait a second. You have to explain it to me. I said, look, you don't understand. It's an illusion.

It's an illusion. It's not real. And he said, Oh, so the spoon is actually straight. It's just an illusion. I was like, Oh my goodness. I mean, this can, this can get so far. It can get out of control so quickly when people don't know or don't understand something.

They just can't wrap their hand around it. They cannot understand how to think about it. They're so frustrated. They're so flustered. They don't even know how to start thinking about it. So even if you offer them something that is patently false, like I'm telling you, this is a visual illusion, although he can hold it in his hand and palpate, you know, the distortion and the metal.

It's so interesting for me to see how even intelligent people and sometimes extremely intelligent people fall into this trap time and again and sometimes do or come up with the most unintelligent explanations for it all. Yeah. Yeah. And people have a hard time remembering what the magician actually did. And if I recall the studies on this, they retell the story to make it seem even less likely for you to explain why it was a magic trick. He never actually touched it. Well, yeah.

Okay. And Randy has a funny story about going on Barbara Walters' show where Uri had already been on and bent her key, and she swore up and down he never touched the key. And then they just played the video back, where at some moment he says, you know, let me just check to see if it's bent yet, and of course he touches it. And she's like, oh, but that's not the way it will...

It's right there on the camera. In her mind, it didn't happen that way. And people are not trying to be manipulative about it. I mean, they really, truly, genuinely believe that the performer did not touch the physical object.

And this is also important for them in order to live peacefully with the effect that they just witnessed. Because if you actually convince yourself that this was not touched, it makes it all the more miraculous. And then, you know, you really need to resort to other types of explanations. So I think that sometimes people are sort of led into it and sometimes they fall into it. And sometimes it's a combination of both. But there's no question that there's some very effective techniques of through suggestion, right?

You know, forcing people or leading people down the garden path of changing their memories. And of course, this is well studied in psychology through false memories and, you know, the work of Elizabeth Loftus and other people who are really showing how with narrative, with very simple words and word choices, you can actually completely rewrite memories, including to very important events in people's autobiographies.

Yeah. Another funny story from Ray Hyman, who blurbed your book about Uri Geller, that in the early days when Uri would be tested by people like Ray Hyman and nothing was working, he would then tell a story like, well, it's not working tonight, but last night you should have seen what I did. And then he repeats everything he does.

And then Ray noticed that a lot of the people then later said, this is what Geller did, as if they saw what he told them happened the night before when they weren't even there. It's just incredible. People like Ray Hyman are very special and they're very few and far between because he really is a researcher, scientist, psychologist who spent most of his life

doing research in cognitive psychology and lab work and so on. And he understands quite a bit about statistics and about the psychological literature on the one hand. On the other hand, he's very well versed in magic and in magic moves and in magical techniques and so on. This marriage of magician-scientist is not very common. There are very few people who are actually well versed in both worlds at a high level. It's unfortunate, but it's true.

Well, that's what makes what you're doing so important, even more important and entertaining. It's really great. Yeah, so you talk a lot about suggestibility and magic.

So let's talk about the evolutionary origin of this. Why would we be – okay, first of all, let's define what you mean by suggestibility because most people think of it as gullibility, like it's a weakness. Right. So suggestibility really is the individual ability to respond to suggestion.

And, you know, this maybe is, you know, begs another question, which is, you know, what is suggestion or how do you define suggestion? And this is a conversation that we should probably have as sort of the building blocks of what we're talking about. But I have to say, as a sort of, you know, preliminary comment that sometimes defining concepts, particularly concepts like.

Art and love and consciousness and so on. Sometimes defining concepts like that does more damage than good in the sense that it creates some limitations on the conversation or it creates all kinds of weirdness in what people think, because we do have in practice some kind of an intuitive understanding of.

of what these things mean. So we can deal with art, we can deal with love, we can deal with consciousness even without having a precise definition for it. And the same is true for a term like suggestion. We understand sort of what suggestion is. It's some kind of a communication that, that, that somebody gives us that talks about, you know, us accepting certain kinds of information, maybe without our knowledge or, or something like that. And, and we, we do understand,

fluidly, we do understand intuitively that we are exposed to suggestions, suggestions from our spouses, from our partners, suggestions from our neighbors, suggestions from our teachers. We understand that in general. Suggestibility really refers to how suggestible are we in the sense that how susceptible, how vulnerable, how acceptable are we of a particular suggestion? So some people

are highly suggestible. You come to them and you say, you look a little bit tired to me today. Are you okay? You look like, you know, you look tired and they begin to feel sleepy. This is, this is, this is a common thing. It's, it's not, it's not, uh, out of the quiet. I mean, we all know people like that. Um, uh, some people say, oh, oh, it's one o'clock. I'm really, I, I must be very hungry now. It's, it's lunchtime and they begin and they're not peckish anymore. They're hungry. They're, they're ready to keep, you know, to eat a horse.

Five minutes earlier, 20 seconds earlier, they were not even thinking about food. So they have a particular, there's a particular suggestion, or if you want to call it conditioning, if you want to, whatever you want to call it, there's something there that triggers them into a particular kind of behavior, a particular kind of action.

This is interesting because this has been studied in psychology in different contexts. So, for example, we know that there is something called hypnotic susceptibility or hypnotic suggestibility. These are terms of art.

They're they're they're very, you know, some people make a career out of defining and tweaking and working with the semantics of what is the difference between hypnotizability and hypnotic susceptibility and hypnotic vulnerability and hypnotic responsiveness. I don't want to go there. This is the kind of scholarship that doesn't always, you know, help these these kind of conversations. But I've been in this.

for many, many years, for decades, actually doing experiments and, um, you know, defining the terms and refining them and changing them. And I discovered some very interesting things. I discovered that some people are extremely suggestible in some domains of life, but not in others. So some people can be very hypnotizable, but very stubborn. Uh, they can, you know, we, for many years, we thought that, uh, people who are suggestible, uh,

sort of are, you know, Star Trek fans. They cry at the opera. You know, these are the people who miss the phone ringing when they watch a movie and so on and so forth. And it turns out that it's not as simple as that. People who are highly suggestible are not necessarily the best placebo responders in the world. And the people who are the best placebo responders in the world are not necessarily highly suggestible in other domains. So it's a very complicated field, but...

But all people are suggestible in some domains. You just have to find the domain for that particular person. And you can find the domain by getting to know the person, by learning about their hobbies, about their personality, sometimes about their genetics. And you can find ways that you can penetrate, you can tap that suggestible fold that a person has. It might be through a pet.

It might be through their kids. It might be through a financial angle. It might be through something that is near and dear to their heart. It might be through a trauma in their life. It might be in different domains of life, but we are all suggestible to some extent if we can just put our finger on what it is.

Now, suggestibility, and this is, I'm just going to make a quick thing here because I know that we have a lot to talk about here. Suggestibility is something we can actually quantify. We can actually do a suggestibility test and the psychometrics, or if you want the test, retest, reliability of these things is better than IQ tests. And the interesting point here is that

If you were to give me an IQ test or I were to give you an IQ test, we would both want our score to be as high as possible. I mean, it's human nature. I want my IQ score to be high. Why? Because, I don't know, it says something about how intelligent I am maybe or how smart I am. But if I give you

A suggestibility test, do you want your score to be very high? I mean, some people will say, actually, I would want to score low on that because, like you said before, maybe it's an indication or an index of how gullible I am. Maybe it's an index of how feeble-minded I am, how spineless, how manipulatable. So some people who take a suggestibility test, their predisposition, their proclivity is to get as low a score as possible because they feel that that's an indication of how gullible

susceptible to manipulation they might be. And that's an interesting thing because in terms of the psychology of it, suggestibility tests are probably better than IQ tests in terms of what they predict and how reliable they predict it.

Yeah. I'm going to come back to that with hypnosis because I've seen stage magicians or mentalists, you know, get a whole group of the work, the audience, and they'll find like the six most hypnotizable people. And those are the ones that get up on stage or sometimes on these TV shows, you know,

They start off, the show starts up, the people are already on the stage. You don't see what they did to weed them out and so on. So I suspect there's something there. But I want to drill down a little bit more on the gullibility, susceptibility, suggestibility, whatever the right word is, because I've been having a debate with myself in my next book with a lot of my guests.

you know, how rational an animal are we? How gullible are we to cults, to fake news, to, you know, just bad ideas. And let me just riff on this for a second. So if,

I tended, you know, as a long career debunking nonsense to think people are really gullible. And you could sucker almost anybody into believing some crazy idea, flat earthers or UFOs or whatever. But I've now been rethinking it because I think it is domain specific, like you said. That is, most people most of the time are pretty rational about

You know, they keep their jobs. They have families. They got food in the fridge, gas in the tank and so on. And then and then something happens. And we know who these people are. And otherwise they seem like they're married. They got kids. They got jobs. They're like normal people. You know, this is one little domain. Right. And so a lot of it comes from, I think, social proof. Like most of the things that I say, I believe I don't really understand. Like I'm not a climate scientist.

People send me these papers. I can't really understand the modeling. It's not what I do. I mostly trust the scientists get it right most of the time. So when I say I accept climate science, I'm really just signaling I trust that the experts are probably right about this. And there's a lot of research on this on like, yes, students, do you accept the theory of evolution? And they go, yeah, yeah. Explain it.

And they can't explain it. They don't, you know, they give some Lamarckian thing, the giraffe stretches its neck or whatever, you know, they don't really know. So in a way,

You know, when we say I believe it, it's not gullible. It's just like I can't back check everything. And it gets even and it gets even more complicated than that, Michael, because when somebody says to you equal equals MC squared, what do you do with that? And, you know, and do you just believe Einstein blindly? I mean, how do you know it's not equals MC to the power of one point nine nine five? I mean, there's there's all kinds of interesting questions and debates that you have to ask yourself about.

How do we know that that's actually true? And that's where science comes into the picture. And that's where scientists come into the picture and experimental science and evidence-based and statistics and replicability and all kinds of things that most...

most people know very little about. And even if they know about it, it's not the centerpiece of their life. And they don't invest a lot of time into thinking about nuances and about different ways of presenting information and about what does it mean if something is statistically significant and what kind of a correction do you need. And it's just not part of the lingo. It's not

part of what people do. It's not. And when you're talking about fact-checking, there's a very big difference from fact-checking if somebody said that there were 10,000 people at a rally or there were actually just 10 there. That's one kind of level of information. It's completely different if you say that we did a study and we showed that this is an effective treatment because there are many ways to come to that conclusion and there are many ways to...

rebut that conclusion. And when people are not familiar with it, they're just looking at the bottom line. That's where suggestion becomes critical. Now it's about who's saying it. Now it's about, does he have a Harvard degree or a Bergen community college degree? Is this person a doctor or is this person only has a master's degree? How, how, what's, what's the wealth of this person? Is he, is he written up in Forbes? Um, what kind of a suit is he wearing? What kind of a car is he driving? Does he have white teeth? Uh,

Are the teeth crooked? How long? How much does he charge per hour? What's the wait list to see this person? Let's maybe check his website. Is he famous? How many followers? These are all questions that influence people in a tremendous way. These are questions that also influence not just people. They influence neurophysiology.

And this is really what I'm trying to say here. This is not a theoretical, ethereal, cerebral thing that we're talking about, you know, philosophizing about in some kind of a grand scheme of abstract notion. This is palpable. This changes neurobiology. This creates...

This creates neurochemicals in the brain. This creates electrical currents in the brain. This changes the weights that we associate with certain things in very, very real ways. And as a result of that, our physiology changes, our thinking changes. This is what people don't always appreciate. They think that this is all ethereal. They think that this is all like happening in some kind of a space that is completely abstract. It is not abstract.

This is concrete. This has to do with changing molecules in your brain, forming connections in your brain. And as a result of that, you can actually change people, not just how they think, but how they behave.

Well, that astonishing factoid in there in your book about the blood sugar level changing based on whether you think how sweet you think the thing is you're eating. How is that even possible? What's the mechanism for that? In general, in general mechanisms that are based on expectation that are based on, you know, what do you expect or what do you perceive if you perceive time passing a certain way? If you think that you expanded a certain amount of a certain, you burned a certain number of calories.

If you think that something is going to hurt you, if you think that it's going to be very painful, all these things have to do with mechanisms, neural mechanisms that we sometimes understand. And we, sometimes we think that we understand, but no matter how you look at it, we are beginning to unravel, you know, these things. And the way that we do it is,

is by experimenting usually with small groups because when you do hypnosis with, when you do experiments with hypnosis or with suggestion, you don't do it with 10,000 people. You don't do it with a million people. You do it with 17 people or 32 or 64 and you do it with hypnotic suggestions and with highly suggestible people versus low suggestible people, you do it with people with a certain neuropsychiatric or psychiatric problem. And it gives you evidence, it gives you data and you can do brain imaging and you can see what changes in the brain

but you have to take it with a grain of salt. These are small studies. They are revealing, but they're not revealing to the point of concluding in a sweeping way about the population. Maybe it's only relevant for people who have a particular mental condition. Maybe it's only for people who are highly suggestible. Maybe it's only for people who are susceptible to hypnosis and so on. What we're beginning to see, though, is that we are able to

to target with suggestion. We're able to target in some situations, particularly when it comes to visual attention and experiments that have to do with the senses, let's say with the sense of taste, hearing, visual information. We are able to target visual

Areas in the brain that are known to be allocating attention to specific domains like the anterior cingulate cortex or other areas that have very specific anatomy, very specific physiology. And we can show that people who have the gift, I call it the gift of focusing in such a tremendous, you know, laser beam fashion on something are able to activate these areas in ways that other people cannot.

These are dopaminergic areas?

um, is sometimes a function of how much attention do we invest in those things. So if I sit here and every time I sneeze, the door opens at some point, I'm going to think that, you know, my sneezing, uh, is responsible for, for the door opening. Of course, this is a correlation more than, you know, more than causation for, you know, for the most part, but how

How many times would it happen before I come to the conclusion that actually my sneezing is doing that? And I can lead people to think that. I can create an experimental situation that would lead people to do that. And that's what we often do. We create and we see how many repetitions does it take for somebody to start believing that they're actually responsible for this? How many kind of, you know, how much information does a person need before they say, actually, I am the author of this. I am causing this. Although, you know,

quite clearly, they are not the causal reason for this to happen. Yeah, interesting. I use this example to compare Richard Feynman with John Nash in one of my books. John Nash won the Nobel Prize for his discovery, basically, game theory, mathematics, and Feynman, of course, for quantum electrodynamics and the Feynman diagram.

So they both saw patterns that no one else had seen, and they were amply rewarded with Nobel Prizes. But John Nash saw patterns that Feynman didn't see, you know, because he's schizophrenic. So there, you know, you're finding patterns that are not real.

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packs are designed with durability and style in mind. Perfect for carrying all your essentials, no matter where your journey takes you. Join the pack today and experience the difference. Visit wolfpack.com and gear up for your next adventure. That's wolfpack.com. Wolfpack. Gear up. Stand out. You're seeing patterns that aren't really there. Yeah. You know, in my book, actually, I talk about Richard Feynman, who was hypnotized at Princeton. Yeah.

And, you know, the hypnotist, he was hypnotized at least three times in his life in some kind of a public domain and he wrote about it. And it's really interesting because you would think

that somebody of the caliber of Richard Feynman is not just a critical thinker and one of the marvels of the human intellect, but you would think that it would be difficult to pull a fast one on him because he's just too intelligent and too skeptical and so on. And he was, but he was also suggestible. And this is what most people miss in this equation. They think

That suggestibility means that you are inferior. They take the word suggestibility or they take this notion of suggestibility and they say, if I'm suggestible, it means that I'm weak. And that's not at all the case. As a matter of fact, and we were talking or you mentioned it at the beginning, there are evolutionary advantages to being suggestible. Being suggestible allows you to learn much faster.

Being suggestible allows you to navigate the world much more effectively and to be more adaptable because you can learn from the experience of others. You can learn by what others tell you. You don't have to experience it yourself. If they suggest certain things to you, you say, oh, I can learn from their experience and so on. It's a very important mechanism for humans to learn from other people's insights, from their life experience, from their even, I would say, experiences.

calculations from their observations. So if somebody tells me something and I trust that person and that person ranks highly in my hierarchy of individuals that I should listen to, why should I question that? Why not let this guide me in my life and make some shortcuts? And in that regard, suggestibility and being suggestible is very important. The question is,

Just like when we are skeptical, you know, should we skeptical of our belly buttons? I mean, you cannot be skeptical of everything because when you do that, you become paralyzed. You never get out of bed. You cannot be suggestible to the point that you believe everything. Yeah. And that's where it gets complicated. So all those things like degrees and credentials and where you went to school and who you know and those sorts of things, those are proxies for what? Trust and social proof that...

I can trust what this person tells me because look at all these other characteristics that I already acknowledge are worthy.

For some people, yes. For some people, no. I mean, I don't have to tell you, we live at a time where there's a backlash against, you know, a certain elite kind of strata. And there's a lot, you know, today, I don't know, to be a PhD or to be a DSC, to be an MD sometimes is, it's a disadvantage, you know, for, you know, sometimes. And to be honest with you,

um, some people are extremely impressed with, uh, physical stature. Some people are extremely impressed with wealth. Uh, some people are extremely impressed with intellect. Some people are extremely impressed with humor and so on and so forth. And it's, it's, it's also a cultural thing, uh, in different cultures, uh, different, you know, people attribute different meaning to, to different aspects of, of human personality, um, and to, uh, and to achievements and, and so on. It's very important to understand. And it's very important to explain that, um,

suggestibility changes over the lifespan. What you're suggestible to when you're young is not necessarily what you're suggestible to when you're older because you change. And some of the thinking that you have about certain topics changes, but we're all suggestible. And this is the key. And a magician doesn't ask you when they start doing a trick, they don't ask you, oh, let me just interview you first and see how suggestible you are before I do my trick.

But a magician would sort of say before the person say, can you tell me a little bit about the crowd? I mean, is it children? Is it are they, you know, are they all workers at IBM? Are they Google employees? Are they, you know, are they mostly, you know, educated people? What what age are they? Are they mostly in their 30s, more than the 40s? It's very important to know these things because you can actually tailor particular tricks to.

to a particular audience with higher statistical outcome. Like you can tailor it in a general way. But a magician really, if they're good, it's going to work. I mean, they know how to work the audience regardless of all these parameters. That's funny. Randy liked to say how easy it was to fool a group of scientists, particularly really smart, educated, and high status scientists, because they think,

they know what he's going to do or they can figure it out. And it's, it's always something super simple. That's, that's true. And there's another reason. And I'm going to tell you this, this is what I found as a scientist. I mean, I can, I can tell you. So what Randy said is exactly right. I mean, they, they think that they know, they think that, you know, it's going to be difficult to trick them and so on, but there's another thing that is actually a hindrance to being a scientist.

Let's go back to bending a spoon like we talked about before. If I bend a spoon at a scientific conference while we're having a coffee break or over dinner or whatever, I'll bend a spoon for the entertainment pleasure of my colleagues. That's great. And the first thing that they'll say is something like, hey, Amir, can you do it again? They want to see it again because this is what scientists do. They want to replicate. And now they're going to check something. So they say, okay, can you do it again now?

with your sleeves rolled up. So now I roll up my sleeves and I do it again. And they say, okay, so he can do it with his sleeves rolled up. All right. Can you do it again? And now I'll say, okay, but I'm going to roll down my sleeves because it's uncomfortable for me to have my sleeves up. I'm going to roll down my sleeves. We've already determined that the sleeves have nothing to do with it. And I do it again. And in the scientist's mind,

I'm doing it the same way every time. But there's 17 different methods of bending a spoon. And when I do it with my sleeves up, I do it using technique X. And when the sleeves come down, I do it using technique Y. So now they have no control and they have no idea how I'm doing it because they're only going by the effect.

Now, magicians are sneaky that way. They can achieve the same effect using different methods. And what they do is they let you, they deceive you with the method. So what you're controlling for is irrelevant because nature, when you're doing things in nature, nature doesn't trick you. Nature operates in the same way. And that's why scientists are used to thinking about things in a certain way. They let you.

roll your sleeves down. And that's a big mistake. And magicians, good magicians, smart magicians take advantage of that. That's a great story. Yeah, I've hung around magicians for so long. I've learned how a lot of the tricks are done. And I'm always disappointed that I know. I'd really rather not know because the explanation is always something like, that's how they do it? Really? That's all it is? Oh, no. I really prefer the super complicated thing that I thought was going on.

I have to tell you that I think, and I don't know if I'm speaking for other magicians, but I definitely am speaking for myself. My sense of wonder as a result of learning a lot about magic and about the stupid explanations and the actual mundane things that are going on in order to achieve these magnificent effects is

Um, my door of wonder has closed quite a bit. I mean, it's difficult for me as somebody who's been in this, you know, domain for such a long time. I don't, I still, I yearn. I really miss that feeling that I had when I was in first grade and I saw a magician perform something and I was like, Oh, you know, and I would get like pilar erection on my skin, you know, my, my, my, uh, hair would go.

And I would like, you know, I would like to experience this again. It's very difficult for me because I know too much. And as a result of that, when somebody is just beginning to perform a trick, I'm already controlling for certain things and I'm looking at certain things and

As a result of that, I don't have the same enjoyment. I can give it to others, but I cannot experience it myself because I'm sort of contaminated. I'm jaded. I'm tainted goods already. And I think that it happens to other magicians in the field as well. Yeah. Yeah. I've learned to just appreciate the art, artful presentation there.

and all the practice that goes into it. For example, Penn and Teller doing the cups and balls with clear plastic cups. So you can see exactly how it's done, and I still couldn't do it because it takes a lot of practice. It's smooth moves. Magicians are very interesting performers. They're not just actors who are playing the role of wizards. They also create their own shows. They decide on the tricks. They decide on the themes. They decide how to connect things.

when you are doing a comedy show, sometimes you're telling somebody else's jokes. Sometimes you're doing, you know, somebody else writes the text for you and so on. Most magicians have to perform. I mean, they have to perform. And, you know, if you're a comedy show kind of actor and you bomb out with a bad joke or something that is inappropriate and, you know, it's a dud and the audience doesn't take it, you pick it up with the next line and it's completely, if you're a magician,

you bombed out, you didn't do well on a, on a trick. This is going to be a serious scar on the show. I mean, it's very difficult to recover from that. Uh, and, and, um, magicians are on their toes all the time. Uh, they have to be, and it creates, uh, some pressure. It creates a, you know, pressure on them to perform, uh, and they need to be at the top of their game. Uh, this calls for, uh,

a particular, um, uh, alertness and vigilance that sometimes is not there for other, um, uh, performers, uh, stage performers. And, and, and the showmanship is tremendous. Yeah. Yeah. On the last point on this, the rationality, gullibility, uh, point, uh,

You know, there's a selection bias there of who we pay attention to, the people that actually fell for it. Like, these are the people that joined the cult and they committed suicide. Or, you know, these are the people that turned over their mortgages to Scientology or whatever. But there's a base rate neglect. That is, how many people did they try this on? How many people have taken the Scientology personality test or held the little cans down at Hollywood and Vine there where they set up their little desk? You know, probably millions, you know, and it kind of winnows down to just a handful of people that fall for it.

Or my other example is the Tinder swindler that, um,

Netflix documentary, I don't know if you've seen this, but it features four women in their mid to late 30s, never married, looking for love, want to get married, have kids, start a family, the whole thing, successful careers. And the Tinder swindler is this guy who's posed with his airplane and he's a good looking guy and he's looking for love and so on. He's not just looking for sex. In a long process that takes months, he actually gets them to wire him tens of thousands of dollars. This is the key.

So he's like this handsome international man of mystery, and he's got the plane. But they actually go out on dates with him where they're on the plane. They go to some resort, and there's this island, and all these romantic things, and they hold up their phones. They have thousands of texts from this guy. To me, there's a lot of social proof.

That went into before the moment where, you know, he's in Switzerland on some trip on the weekend and he calls the woman and says, oh, my God, the bank doesn't open until Monday. And I got to give these guys fifty thousand bucks. Can you wire it? I'm going to close the deal and make ten million dollars. We're going to it's going to be great. We're going to get married and all this. They do it. Of course, what we don't know is how many women he tried this on. Right. We only know the four. That's right. That's right.

That's right. Look, this is unfortunately people are I mean, fortunately and unfortunately, people are very partial to narratives. People love narratives. And if you have a compelling narrative.

A fascinating narrative, you know, Alice in Wonderland kind of narrative, something that is fantastic. And people go for it. People like to think that they're movie stars. People like to think that to see themselves, you know, doing things that you can only see in the movies. And people love legends and they love fairy tales. And if you sell them a good narrative and if they can see themselves as being successful and loved and so on, they'll go for it.

Yeah. Well, along these lines, you discuss in your book Milgram shock experiments and Zimbardo's faux prison experiments, now most famous in all of psychology. Obedience to authority, are these people just being suggestible because of the authority of Milgram in the white coat or Zimbardo at Stanford University? What else might be going on there in terms of social proof or evidence?

Well, I'm at Yale University. Here's this guy with a white coat.

I can't really be shocking these people to death, can I? I mean, there must be some other rationalization going on there. Well, you know, succumbing to authority is a huge thing. And there's a big difference, really, a remarkable difference between the Zimbardo experiment and the Milgram experiment. By the way, they were contemporaries. They even went to the same high school. The interesting thing there is that

Zimbardo actually gave his participants costumes to wear, and they knew that what they were doing was an act from the get-go. It was an act. They just got very deeply into it. They got so deep into the act that they sort of forgot or they turned off this particular monitoring system that tells them they're just acting and they're just wearing clothes of a prisoner or sunglasses of a police officer and so on. Zimbardo did not, I'm sorry, Milgram did not

uh do this uh in the same way zim uh milgram was a son of holocaust survivors and he was really interested after having heard you know certain things at home from his parents and so on he was interested can a second holocaust happen can we have this happen again where millions of people will just go with a with a particularly enthusiastic leader or a very dominant figure

And he wanted to ask the question from that standpoint. So he was the dominant figure, a Yale professor in a coat telling people what to do and so on. Zimbardo had a slightly different question.

And Zimbardo, the question that Zimbardo asked was also new for psychology because he was actually one of the first researchers who got what we call IRB, you know, Institutional Review Board approval at Stanford. It was early days. It was the 1970s, so it was not very sophisticated or very refined, but he got it. And.

And he did something that today would be very difficult to do. And a lot of people will get, you know, very upset if somebody tried to do it. But the effects are the same. It just shows you how vulnerable we are to social pressure, to authority, to authority figures. And I think that really there's no difference today. You know, the dresses change, the technological platforms change, the techniques change, but it's the same.

Yeah. I don't know if you know, I did a replication of the Milgram shock experiment for Dateline NBC with Chris Hansen was the host. And so we built a little toggle box with the electrical signals and so forth and the lights. And we tested seven people. The setup was they were trying out for a reality TV show called What a Pain. And they wanted to see, you know, how far they would go and give it electric shocks. Right. So

And it was, you know, under the guise of NBC, right? So we got six of the seven to participate. One woman said, I know what this is. I'm not doing this. I'm amazed we got anybody that hadn't heard of the Milgram shock experiment. But a couple of the guys were pretty enthusiastic about it. Most went all the way. But it was clear they were not comfortable doing this. I mean, they were squirming and sweating and groaning and looking at our actor playing our movie director.

Are you sure? I mean, I don't really feel comfortable. You must go on. I must go on? All right. And Milgram found the same thing. So again, I mean, they're not just blindly obeying some authority like, oh, I'm an idiot.

you know, there's a lot of social proof there. Yale university, you know, PhD psychologist or NBC. I mean, NBC studios, they can't possibly be having me kill somebody on film. I mean, come on. That's right. Somebody must actually know what's going on here. Yeah, no. And, and Milgram reports quite openly that people were squirming and sweating and, and, and, you know, and showing signs of discomfort and resistance and so on. But,

But at the end of the day, they were pressing the button. At the end of the day, they were, they were, you know, gauging up, um, the lever and, and, and they were doing it. And I have to say, um, I have to say that, um,

Today, we are dealing with not the Milgram experiment, not the Zimbardo experiment, but other social experiments are going on in our society right now. And they're going on all the time. And sometimes the experiment is about when do you not keep silent anymore about something? I mean, these are large scale social experiments that are not necessarily declared as such, but it's our life. It's the fabric of our life today. Yeah.

All right, let's talk about hypnosis. I'll tee this up for you because we've all seen the stage hypnotist where they give a post-hypnotic suggestion. You won't remember the number four. And then they wake them up and say, okay, you know, count to 10. And they, you know, end up at 11 fingers because, you know, the three blank that

They go one, two, three, five, six, and they end up- I did a demonstration like that for National Geographic at some point. I love that story. Was that in Vegas? You went to Vegas? Yes, it was in Vegas. That's such a great story. All right, what is going on there? I mean, where is the four? What happened? The first thing that we have to understand here is that there's a huge difference between stage hypnosis or what we usually refer to as stage hypnosis, which is

a performance in front of an audience and you invite people to come to the stage and you do some kind of a screening on them. And then you choose the ones who are, who seem to be very susceptible. And then you perform it for the entertainment of the crowd, because you're going to do something really remarkable or really funny or really ridiculous. So people do all kinds of things. They play, you know, 007 maneuvers on stage. They have sex with a chair. They have like, they do all kinds of things that would get the,

audience wild and, you know, and entertained. But stage hypnosis is actually different from medical hypnosis or from psychological hypnosis that we do in the clinic. Hypnosis really, first and foremost, is an acute intervention. I mean, it's an intervention that we are offering to people that is based on suggestion, usually for a specific problem. It could be, you know, pain management, smoke cessation, you name it. I mean, there's a whole bunch of things. And there's a certain...

medical literature, scientific literature associated with it. Sometimes not very good, by the way. If you go back in time, sometimes the experiments were not very well done. But with time, it has gotten a lot better. And as a result, we know a lot more about it. Stage hypnosis is

Is a form of entertainment. I mean, magicians do stage hypnosis without really knowing anything about hypnosis. I mean, and it just goes by the same name. So they will somebody would call themselves. I'm a hypnotist. And actually, they are just a stage hypnotist doing stuff for college kids or something like that. Not to be confused with an American board certified individual who has the right credentials.

I have to say something about not knowing the number four, like you mentioned. In order not to know the number four, you need to know it so that you wouldn't know it. It really is a very tricky situation. In other words, you need to know that you don't know the number four.

So you need to have sort of a meta cognitive process going on. When you count, you need to go one, two, three. Oh, now it's going to be four, but I don't know it. Five, six, seven. So something needs to be there to tell you, and this is the one that you don't know. And this is an interesting concept because metacognition is something that we do know a little bit about. And what do we do when we think about our thinking? And you can actually think if you go back to Zimbardo,

If you go back to the experiment, the Stanford jail experiment, these people knew that they were acting. They knew that they were actors playing the roles of prisoners. They were actors playing the roles of inmates. They knew it. But at some point...

It disappeared. At some point, you know, it just dissipated or it was so weak that they could ignore it. The same thing happens here. People know that they're not supposed to know the number four, but they put it aside in such a way that they are, it sort of, it doesn't bother them. It doesn't bother them that they know it, but it doesn't bother them that they know that they know it. It's like, it's like almost like ignoring something in your visual field. It's a little bit like daydreaming.

Like when you daydream, your eyes are open, but you're not processing the information. You are completely absorbed in your internal mental state. So you sit there, eyes open, but you are invested internally in your own thoughts. So something might be happening in your visual field. Your brain is registering it, but you are not aware of it. You are not attentive to it. We can create these situations. We know how to create these situations in the lab and ecologically in the world.

And we're getting better and better at understanding what is happening at the level of the brain, what is happening at the level of brain states that allows these situations to happen. How long can we prolong them? And who are the people who are more likely to experience them?

We know, for example, that sometimes psychedelic drugs can induce some of these states or states that are very, very similar. We know, for example, that meditation, contemplative practice are also experiences that can help get people to these places and also to activate the same brain structures.

So this is a fascinating field of study within the neurosciences, within the psychological sciences that we're getting to know more and more about. And it teaches us a great deal about mental health, about resilience, emotional resilience. It teaches us also about, you know, um, uh,

how to do, how to be a better athlete and how to use this mindset in order to get more performance, physical performance and so on. It's a fascinating field that we are getting more and more knowledge on and thinking about it, not just experimentally, but with applied techniques. Yeah. Let's exploit this for a second. I know the number four and I'm suppressing it or whatever, but,

The Zimbardo actors playing guards with the mirrored sunglasses and all that, they know they shouldn't be doing this, but they just what? Suppress it, they ignore it. And then let me just take one more step that, you know, the guards at Auschwitz or whatever. I know this is wrong. I know I shouldn't be doing this. Or just take the slaveholders at some level, you know, in the early 1800s America.

They had to know these people don't want to be slaves. That's why we have to chain them up and beat them. They don't want it. I wouldn't want to do this, but somehow they did it anyway. How did they do that? If they know, or maybe they didn't know, maybe it was a different time and they didn't know what was wrong. I don't know. You know, a role enactment, role playing and role enactment can sometimes become quite real. Um, if you are, um, uh, an actor, uh,

and you are playing a particular role, you can actually get quite absorbed to the point that you are actually living what you are playing. Now, some people are better at it than others, but a lot of it is a function of

of the kind of feedback, social feedback that you're getting from your peers and the kind of social fabric that you are within the milieu that you're, that you're set in. These are things that we are beginning to understand more and more because in science, when we do scientific experiments, we usually do them in a lab. We usually do them in settings that are very clinical, very anal, very, I would say, um,

not ecological. They don't necessarily reflect what's happening or the way that we behave in the outside world. We process information on computer screens. We do things in very controlled environments. This is not necessarily what is happening when we behave in the world and when we're exposed to all kinds of parameters that we often not measure in a controlled lab experiment. This is beginning to change.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. I would recommend people read Christopher Browning's book, ordinary men. There's now a Netflix documentary based on that, where, um, they follow the lives. He follows the lives of this, um,

a police battalion that was part of the, the Einstanzgruppen that followed the Wehrmacht, the German army into Ukraine, for example, to clean up after the army, kill all the Jews, for example, and others, but mostly Jews. And, you know, these were ordinary men, you know, they were slightly older than the young men joining the army. They were like late twenties, early thirties. And so the question is, is,

Did they enjoy it? How did they do it? How do you get people to kill people? So first, it was the Holocaust by bullets, it's called. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. They just put the gun right up to the back of the head, bam, blood all over the place. It's horrible.

So then they moved to having them shoot them further away with rifles in the pit. You can see pictures of this and so on. And then ultimately, Himmler went and saw one of these and said, we've got to do something different here. That's when they introduced gas and that sort of thing in the gas chambers. But if you look at their lives in the process of doing this, there was some obedience to authority. They weren't threatened, like, if you don't do this, we're going to shoot you or whatever. It was nothing like that.

But there was a lot of social pressure, like, you know, don't be a pussy. And, you know, we're all doing this. Get in here and be a man, you know, and then they all got shit faced afterwards. And there was a lot of alcohol and other things involved. But it was mostly, you know, kind of a band of brothers. Well, everybody's doing it.

You know, yes, I could, I could, you know, in front of everybody back out and say, I'm not going to do it, but well, you know, that, that's hard to do in front of everybody. So that is hard to do. It's hard to do. And it's not just a question of peer pressure. It's also a question of narrative. And you know, what, what is the overarching narrative that you're selling to people? If it's, uh, you know, about national values, if it's about, uh,

If it's got like race overtones, if it has to do with cleansing or purging, if it has to, whatever it is that you're selling, whatever it is that, you know, the overarching agenda is people love a good story. People embrace good stories uncritically, uncritically. People are not very critical when it comes to these things. Again, the skepticism element comes again into this, into this picture. People are not very good at questioning.

questioning, at asking, you know, is this true? Trying to verify, trying to go and see if something is falsifiable. It's not part of the lingo of most people. You need to be educated about that. You need to acquire this through education,

Through listening to people who tell you about this, through learning philosophy, through learning really how to think critically. This is something that is missing in our society. And you are trying to do the best you can to remedy that. I'm trying to do the best I can to remedy that. But from the scientific point of view, it's very clear that we're vulnerable to it. Yeah. Yeah. One more recommendation is a book called The Good Old Days.

And it's a collection of letters from the Seinzatz group and soldiers written to their wives and families back home. And the narrative was, this is really brutal. It is nasty. But what?

If we weren't doing it, they'd be doing it to us. If this war turns around, the Russians are going to treat my family, you guys, like you would not believe. So we need to win this war. And besides that, the Jews started the whole thing. Then they repeat the stab in the back conspiracy theory by Hitler and all that stuff. Okay, back to hypnosis. So the last time I looked at this was like the Ernst Hilgard's theory of the hidden observer theory.

which is sort of a metaphor. I know there's somebody in there that knows the four, right? And, and that's, that's somebody or neural network or whatever it is. There's some other module of the brain that, that keeps track of stuff, even though the conscious self is saying, I don't know what it is, right? Is, but, but that's, that's decades old. Now that theory, what's, what's the latest we know on the neuroscience of hypnosis. And so, uh, what Hilgard did was very interesting. He, uh,

the notion of the hidden observer he basically told people something like you know you're not gonna know i don't know scissors or something are you ready to unleash your inner beast introducing wolfpack the ultimate gear for the modern adventurer whether you're hitting the gym exploring the great outdoors or just need a reliable companion for your daily grind wolfpack has got you covered our backpacks are designed with durability and style in mind perfect for carrying all your essentials no matter where your journey takes you join the pack

today and experience the difference visit wolfpack.com and gear up for your next adventure that's wolfpack.com wolfpack gear up stand out some objects i'm you know and he would put a whole bunch of objects including scissors and say what's this what's this what's this what's this and when when people what he pointed to the scissors people wouldn't know this i don't know what it's a musical instrument i don't know i've never seen anything like that but he told them as part of the hypnotic induction he told them but when i touch your right shoulder you will know

And then what he did is he would say, what is this? They would say, I don't know. I think it's a musical instrument. I think it's this. And then he would touch their right shoulder and they would say, oh, it's scissors. I can see that now that it's a scissor. What we added to this

original Hilgard plot, which has to do with metacognition and hypnosis and all these things, is brain imaging. Today, we have imaging of the living human brain, which allows us to, with sophisticated technology, see what brain areas light up and what do they do and what happens when you have a hypnotic suggestion like this and a hypnotic suggestion like that. What happens when you're just hypnotized with no suggestion? What's the difference between relaxation and so on? And we're beginning to identify different

areas and different structures in the brain. And we're beginning to see what's the difference. And one of the things that we notice is that people really allocate attention very differently. The brain mechanisms that have to do with attentional allocation in the brain are being resourced very differently when you are given a hypnotic suggestion to do something, let's say to pay attention to something visually. For example, if I tell you, you don't know scissors, basically what happens is

they are blocking that part of the table where the scissors are. It's as if they see something hazy there. They just can't see what the object is. A little bit like the daydreaming that I described to you before. It's a little bit like it's masked. This is sort of the metaphor or the representation of what's going on. They can see that there's an object there, but it's too hazy to observe or it's too... It's masked. It's behind a veil of some sort. So...

It's not that they see it and they say, oh, this is scissors and I'm not supposed to know it. Maybe they do it once or twice at the beginning. And then they say, oh, this is a part of the table that I'm not supposed to look at. I'm not supposed to process. I'm not supposed to have access to. This is interesting because when we do these experiments time and again, time and again, we begin to see that different people have different strategies as to how to achieve it.

But they all use their attentional resources in different ways. Sometimes they try to avert their gaze. They try not to look at the object directly. Sometimes they try to look at it obliquely or through covert attention. We can see these attentional mechanisms working either in overdrive or underdrive, depending on what the instruction is and so on. So that's one way. I mean, there are many ways to achieve this. Now, we know that attention...

really is a very powerful filter to also regulating our emotions. It's not just regulating our senses and our perceptions. It's also a very strong filter of regulating our emotions, what we allow ourselves to get excited about, what we allow ourselves to get, you know, aggressive about. And

Attention is a very strong mediator of behavior. If you can, I mean, you can, you can create a lot of self-regulation. It's a function of temperament. Of course, some people are more trigger happy and they will, you will trigger them very, very easily. So there's, there's definitely a, an element of personality here and temperament and things like, you know, like that, but it's also a function of trainability. You can train your attention. You can train your attentional system. And there are ways that,

To train the brain. There are ways to train the brain through cognitive training and through certain exercises. How effective they are remains to be seen, but some people benefit from it more than others. And that's just a fact of life.

So there's no question about it, these people, subjects of your experiments or participants in the stage hypnotist show, they're not just going along and faking to not embarrass the experimenter or the magician. They really are in some kind of altered state of consciousness. Right. And this, I would say...

Um, twilight zone between is this role enactment? Are you just doing it because of social compliance? Are you just trying to be nice to me? Are you just trying to, you know, for me not to lose face and that's why you're doing all these things.

versus you're doing this because you're genuinely deeply entrenched in a brain state that makes you feel that this is real, we can show a whole spectrum. We can show a whole spectrum of some people who are towards this end and some people who are towards this end. And we're trying to understand what is it about some people that are closer to this particular distribution than people who are a little bit closer to the other part of the distribution. And we're beginning to see that this has to do with

certain genetic polymorphisms, certain brain structures, certain connections between brain areas, but we are identifying again and again the same brain areas of interest. We can name them, we can measure them, we can see the connections, and more importantly, we can see

adjacent behavior. So for example, when people are, as I mentioned before, psychedelic drugs, people who are doing meditation, people are, you know, Tibetan monks, people are doing, you know, contemplative practice and so on. We can see that some of the same areas are involved.

in these altered states of consciousness, in these pattern recognition kind of activities, in the ability to regulate pain, in the ability to demonstrate resilience to recover from trauma and so on. And this gives us the clues that we are on some kind of an interesting path where we can actually distill the neurobiological substrates of these things.

Yeah. One of my favorite magicians on that is Darren Brown. I'm sure you know him. Of course. And, you know, he does this hypnosis. He has this whole show about faith healers, in which he kind of makes the point indirectly that faith healers are themselves kind of hypnotizing their audience in a way and putting them in a state in which they're more susceptible to their particular message than he does it himself using hypnosis. But again, you

You know, we don't see where those people came from that are on the stage at the start of the show. You probably carefully selected them. Are there ways to test, you know, like if you had 100 people in the room, could you give me the, you know, through however many hours you need to do this? These are the 10 most susceptible people.

Yes. Yes. I mean, so when it comes to hypnotic susceptibility or hypnotic suggestibility, definitely. I mean, we have very good tools. We have very good instruments, psychological instruments where we can screen people for and sort of identify how good they are. Remember, suggestion, hypnotic suggestion is just one type of suggestion, but suggestion in general is an uncritical acceptance of an opinion or an idea or a behavior, uh,

which really arises from either within us or the influence of others. It could be me, it could be you. So there are ways to test that. We really, there really are ways to test that. And you don't need to sort of take it into a psychoanalytical domain or, or, you know, or, or, you know, Zygmunt Freud, uh, asking you to lie on the, on the couch.

You can do it in very practical ways. And we have tests that do that. But the take-home message is not just about identifying the people who are very suggestible because they could be vice presidents of companies, CEOs, or they could be the janitor or somebody else. The most important thing is to understand that everyone is highly susceptible to some form of suggestion. This is something that a lot of people miss.

often without realizing it, we are suggestible. And these suggestions shape our perceptions. They color our behaviors, even our physiological experiences in profound ways. And, um, and that's really what I'm trying to, um,

drive home in this book because the examples that I give are real life examples. They're not, I mean, they're from decades of studies that I've done throughout my life. Also from my experience as a magician. I mean, I remember being a teenager performing theatrical mind reading for, you know, all kinds of audiences and people will come to me, people my parents' age will come to me after and consult with me on

Life matters. They will say, you know, my aunt is dying. You know, what do you recommend that we do this or that? Or I'd like to invest in this company. I was 16. You know, I mean, I had no idea what and it was amazing to me that no matter what disclaimers I would use, no matter how many times I will say this is a show, you know, these are tricks.

The mental part is so strong. The effect is so compelling that they just forget about all these disclaimers. It's what they want to hear. It's what they want to see. It's not what you say is what they think you say. It's not what they see. It's what they think you see. Yeah, we did another TV show with James Van Praagh, who was a big psychic.

talking to the dead in the late 90s. So I was part of a history chat, history mysteries, I think it was. So they filmed him for hours.

And you could see how he got information from people. He would chit chat with them on the breaks and things like that, and then come back to the information he got because we filmed him. Well, he didn't know he was being filmed during the breaks. So we figured out how he was doing that. But the people themselves forgot. They'd say, I never told him my grandfather's name was George.

It's like, actually you did. And we'll show you how you did it. You know, cause he's like, I'm getting this name and this initial. And then he goes, yeah, that is George. Yeah. Letter G. Yeah. George is my uncle, whatever it was, you know, and then they'd forget that, you know, back to the forgetting thing. Um, yeah. Okay. So, um,

If you have some theory of altered states of consciousness, you must have a theory of consciousness. Do you want to wade into the hard problem of consciousness and give us your explanation? Oh, the hard problem of consciousness. So, you know, it's really interesting for me. So I've been dealing with aspects of consciousness, you know, most of my adult life through experiments, through philosophical discussions, through debates, through intellectual, you know, scientific conferences and so on.

And I have to tell you, and I'm being super honest, that I have learned as much from my magic experience and being a magician in the trenches, performing in front of audiences, making people believe or remember certain things that didn't happen, like you said, or making people see certain things that were never there, or making them forget things that were there. I learned a lot more or as much from magic

my magician role as I did as a scientist doing, you know, scientific experiments with hypnosis and doing, you know, masking and reverse masking and back masking and sub-threshold stimuli and all these things. And the reason I say this is because when it comes to consciousness, we have a fairly

intuitive understanding of what consciousness is just like we have an intuitive understanding of free will we we would like to think that we have free will not confusing free will with free speech or things like that just free will and the ability to go and tweak like to to rattle that fold of free will which magicians mentalists in particular but magicians can do so easily

So easily without going to college, without spending years and years and years studying statistics and research methods and, you know, going to seminars and all these things, you can do it when you're 14, you can do it when you're 15.

and you can do it well, and you can make a living being a good magician. Some scientists spend most of their life doing these things, and they can't make a good living. And this is not about a living. This is about, you know, what can you unravel? Now, the methods of a scientist and the method of a magician are completely different, but they can sort of converge on some of the same questions. And what I'm trying to say is that I'm

I'm sure there are other professionals out there. They could be marketers. They could be, you know, barbers. They could be accountants. They could be lawyers. They could be anything.

who are also illuminating questions related to consciousness through their own tools that I'm not familiar with. I'm not privy to what they're able to do, and I'm not part of their professional realm of techniques and so on. And I think these are the kind of questions that can illuminate consciousness in many interesting ways. It doesn't have to come from neuroscientists. It doesn't have to come from psychologists. It doesn't have to come from mathematicians or from

computational cognitive scientists. It could come from magicians. It could come from people who are doing some human interaction from marketers. It could come from other people. It's just a question of refining the questions and trying to systematically study them. And the reason I say that I learned as much about consciousness as a magician as I did from being a scientist is because

For me, magic is not a one trick thing. It's not that I, you know, read what's written on the cereal box and I tried it and that made me, it's a lifelong pursuit. It's a serious systematic study of a particular body of knowledge and trying things and being a member of a society, going to conferences, associating with colleagues and so on. The same thing is true as a scientist. I don't know that I'm the best magician within the scientist or the best scientist within the magician's

But it's very important to understand that both of these worlds illuminated my understanding of concepts like free will, conscious and so on in a very, very big way. So I don't expect magicians to know too much about neuropsychology. I don't expect them to know too much about brain structures, about, uh,

you know, things that are related to the technical jargon and, and, and the experiments that are related to neuroscience. I don't think it's even necessary, but I also have to appreciate that most neuroscientists, most psychologists know very little, if anything about magic and, and about the powerful techniques that these, um, um, performers, you know, actors playing the role of wizards can illuminate questions that are related to consciousness in no, you know, you know, less fundamental and practical away. So, um,

To answer your question, I'm blessed by having both these perspectives, and I think that that gives me perhaps something that most of my colleagues don't have. One of my favorite conspiracy theories that turned out to be a real conspiracy when I was writing my conspiracy book was MKUltra, the CIA's program for mind control, one of which was hypnosis.

worried that the North Koreans and the Chinese and the Russians are using these techniques to create super soldiers and so on. A lot of that didn't pan out. What are the limitations on, let's say, government or terrorists using these techniques to, I don't know, create an assassin by hypnotizing them or teenage boys that want to know if they can hypnotize girls to get them to take their clothes off, that kind of stuff. I mean, how much can we really control somebody else's mind

Or, and then we can move to the techniques you can actually use to, you know, stop smoking or lose weight or whatever. These are really hard questions to answer, but we have some leads that can help us answer them. So we are all familiar with stories about cults. They're well documented. We know that energetic, dominant, enthusiastic, you know, aggressive cults.

cult leaders can actually fascinate crowds. They can, you know, if you want to call it mesmerize, if you want to call it hypnotize, whatever you want to call it, that's fine with me, but they can captivate the imagination of people to the point that they would follow what the cult leader says uncritically. Again, this word uncritically, they will believe things that are

you know, blatantly false. They would discount things. When things don't go right, they just say, oh, you know, you didn't understand. We misunderstood. He misspoke. Whatever it is. So we know that. That's well documented. We also know about mass hysteria. We know that, you know, there's this phenomenon that is, again, well documented throughout the ages, going back to medieval times and even before that, you know, people can demonstrate these mass hysteria kind of situations as a result of

particular rumor, a particular suggestion. They think that there's a toxin in the water. They think that they're breathing something in the air. They begin to, you know, have all kinds of things. We know about the Salem witch trials. We know these things. These are things that are part, you don't need to go to college and spend, do a PhD in the paranormal in order to know that people

people are complex. We are very complex organisms and we have higher brain functions that are very susceptible to stories, narratives, ideas, beliefs. We know that and we know how powerful that can be. We can with techniques like hypnosis and with things like psychedelic drugs and with digital platforms and with information and by repeating information and with artificial intelligence, with deep fakes and so on. We can really today

influence the way people think in unprecedented ways. It's not just a function of hypnosis. It's not just a function of taking people and hypnotizing them with a pendulum or with other techniques that we have. It's just...

The convergence of what we're beginning to have, we're beginning to have information. We are bombarded with information like never before. We are exposed to explosive amounts of information without being able to screen it, without being able to vet it.

We are beginning to believe things based on our cultural upbringing, based on our religious beliefs or lack thereof, based on our education, based on our social milieu, who are the people that we talk to, where do we live, our geography. And this is beginning to create situations where not only

only people are living in echo chambers or in bubbles and they only speak to people who think like them or behave like them and so on, but we are beginning to also accept certain things that are completely untrue but are liberating for us. So

We feel very badly about the white rhinos. We just go into Wikipedia and we just rewrite the numbers and we save them. Now there are more white rhinos out there. They were extinct before. Now they're not. We don't feel comfortable with George Washington being a slaveholder. We just go and we change the Wikipedia entry or we say something about that.

This is a new thing. It's a new thing in our society. It's not just a question of alternative facts. It's a question of information. We have so much information, we don't know what to do with it. It comes from multiple sources.

We don't have the time. We spend our days scrolling up and down screens. If it's your smartphone, if it's your laptop, if it's your tablet, you know, whatever. And it's just information addiction. Some people are addicted to alcohol. Some people are addicted to drugs. We are getting to be as a society. We're addicted to information. We are bombarded with information and we don't have the tools to deal with that information onslaught. As a result of

suggestion becomes all the more powerful in our lives. It becomes all the more concrete and elemental. It becomes rudimentary because we are beginning to get more and more

We make decisions based on suggestions, not based on real information, because we don't have the time to process the information. We don't have the tools to process the information. When you talk about the Holocaust, you have become a scholar of the Holocaust. You have read so much about it. You have interviewed so many people. You have spent time going through historical records.

And this is one of the events in history that actually has a mountain of evidence about it. Compare it to other atrocities, other situations where we don't have a lot of evidence. People don't see that. They don't understand everything to them. It's all the same. And they put things in a very superficial, you know, plateau. The problem is that the.

The suggestions of an expert, the information of an expert or somebody who invests a tremendous amount of their intellectual prowess into a particular question becomes as valuable or as acceptable as, you know, the ruminations of somebody who just learned about it five minutes ago.

And this is the problem that we have. And that's where suggestion becomes so powerful, because now it's about how white your teeth are and how straight they are. And that's very dangerous. Yeah. All right. Last question. Somebody dealing with depression or anxiety or ADHD or they just want to stop smoking or drink less or lose some weight or exercise.

What can you recommend that they do? So, you know, I have a whole chapter on whether, you know, antidepressants, for example, are working through the chemical ingredients in them or through some kind of a, you know, complex suggestive process. And when we look at the data very critically and very carefully,

And it's not I'm not speaking on behalf of Amir Raz. I'm speaking here on behalf of, you know, a large group of scientists who are looking at these data for many, many years and doing all kinds of very sophisticated statistical analysis. We see that the effects are very, very small. So.

So when it comes to, for example, depression and millions of people, this is a very real disease and a very serious disease and a disorder that is not just debilitating in terms of life quality and things like that, but also in terms of suicidality and losing lives and families that are suffering from whenever there's a family member who's inflicted and so on.

But we are demonstrating time and again that some drugs, antidepressants in particular, are not as effective as we thought that they once were. And we can demonstrate that there are other techniques that are as good, sometimes better,

That antidepressants. And yet in our society, that's the first thing that we get. I mean, when we show signs of depression and we go to a psychiatrist, they usually give us antidepressants. And that's a backbone drug in modern psychiatry, despite in spite of all the science that we know. And, you know, you got to ask yourself, why is this happening? Why are we not?

doing something about this. This is scientific knowledge. It's well known. It's not well known from five minutes ago. It's well known for a while. Why is it that it's happening? And this is a very complex question to answer because it's not just about knowledge. It's not just about what we know. It's about regulation and big pharma and politics and insurance policies and regulation. It's about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with science and have nothing to do with it. And when we're looking at the data, it's clear suggestion plays a huge role in

Getting into depression, getting out of depression. And, you know, if we understand that, we can maybe do something about it in a different way that we're doing today. Now, I'm not poo-pooing antidepressants. I'm just saying there's something there that suggests to us that antidepressants are far, far away from the effectiveness that we once attributed to them. And they're probably on par with placebos for most kind of depression. And that's well documented here.

in the mental health literature. Now, what about the stuff that is not documented well in the mental health literature? Because we haven't even gotten there because science takes time. Research takes time. It takes effort. So when it comes to these things, if you can demonstrate this with depression, for example, and antidepressants, what else can you demonstrate? And

What I am attempting to say here is that the key takeaway about suggestion is that it's not just a tool for magicians or hypnotists, but a fundamental aspect of human neuropsychology in that it operates in all areas of life. If we understand how suggestion works, it allows us to harness knowledge.

It's power to improve well-being and resist manipulation, better navigate our personal realities. Ultimately, suggestibility is not a sign of weakness, just like we talked about before, but a complex, deeply rooted aspect of the human mind that

We can leverage in all kinds of ways to our advantage from mental health, like the depression that we talked about, through things like performance in sports, all the way to self-regulation, to resilience training, for example. Our mindsets and the functionality of our brains change.

Our brain states are as trainable as our anatomy. A lot of people don't understand this concept. Our physical bodies are controlled by our minds in addition to the muscles and the glands that they're connected to. And we should take advantage of the science and the research findings that unravel how we can better tap this mind-body domain.

And that's really the point that I'm trying to make. Yep. Well, you make it brilliantly and very readable. Here it is again, the suggestible brain.

The Science and Magic of How We Make Up Our Minds. It's a fun read. Thanks, Amir. Thanks for the book. Thanks for your work. Thanks for talking to me for so long. And yeah, good, good, good, good, good show. Thank you, Michael. I love your show, and it's an honor to be speaking with you. I really appreciate the opportunity, and I hope that my contribution would actually tickle some of the people out there. Oh, I think it will, for sure. Thank you.

Thank you.