ASM024 Hypnosis, Nervous Habits, and the Inter-dimensional Trinity

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hypnosis nervous habits and the interdimensional trinity all that and more on this week's episode of ask science mike

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this week i'll be spending a lot of time with my patrons on patreon talking about the direction of the show should we have special episodes themed episodes what should the rewards be for the program i don't know i'm asking you go to ask sciencemike to find out more but for now let's get it started hey science mike this is ryan miller from denver colorado love your work appreciate what you're doing question for you this evening is about hypnosis and i'm really curious about what your thoughts are scientifically and spiritually when it comes to the ability for someone to hypnotize someone which you have seen if not all of us have seen online via youtube videos or even in person with the ability to change one's thinking and how that could possibly play into addictions of changing addictions changing habits how that could affect one's spiritual life and all the above so would love to hear from you about hypnosis and how to potentially apply that to spiritual application thanks hypnosis is a weird topic i've always been sort of skeptical about it i mean a lot of people swear by it but whenever i've tried to dive into the science the research the studies i don't find great information not really for not really against um and whenever i dive into a field of study and the science is not definitive or helpful i tend to move on to something that's a lower hanging fruit but when you asked this question when it came in through the website i started looking into hypnosis again because i figured this would make the show at some point and it kind of leads to a wild story i wondered if hypnosis is driven you know by someone hypnotizing you could this you know happen if i watched a youtube video so i spent you know a little while looking at youtube and watching hypnosis videos and uh they did not hypnotize me and i followed the instructions faithfully it was open to the experience and tried to follow suggestions and nothing worked until i came across this one video with a guy with a great baritone a nice deep rich voice who took me through the relaxation process he told me that i wouldn't do anything that embarrassed me that i'd remain safe the whole time and uh begin the video by saying that at the end he'd snap his fingers and it would all end and whatever so he asked me to close my eyes he asked me to close my eyes tighter then he asked me to close my eyes in my mind like pretend my eyes were closed and pointed out that seemed silly because the eyes are already closed but we all know how to pretend just pretend your eyes are closed so i did that then he asked me to pretend that my eyes were locked shut and that the more i pretended the more sincerely i believed my eyes were locked shut the more difficult they would be to open and i sat there trying to open my eyes and i was shocked when i could not open my eyes and then the guy in the video told me that i couldn't help but laugh right around the time i was getting kind of panicked about that and what do you know sitting alone in my office i started laughing and then he snapped his fingers and it all stopped and that was a really disorienting experience for me now i went back and tried the video again same results this time i got to the point where i couldn't open my eyes and i simply thought i cannot be hypnotized and i was able to open my eyes with no problem so that's a really small very small personal experience to rely on but it does make me think that there is something to hypnosis i've watched videos of people being hypnotized doing strange things answering their shoes like telephones being unable to speak when someone holds their hand and i'm guessing that those are deepened states of whatever i went through now here's the problem studying hypnosis scientifically it's not well defined we don't have like a a scientific description of hypnosis we don't have a brain state that matches it so it's difficult to tell if someone is hypnotized or not so when we don't have a definition it's difficult to compose a test people use the word for hypnosis for different things some people say that the state of suspension of disbelief you get into watching a movie is a form of light hypnosis or when you drive down the road and uh you arrive your destination don't know how you got there they say that's a form of hypnosis other people say that it's an altered state of consciousness in general the most common language i've seen around hypnosis is it's a state of relaxation and heightened suggestibility and also i've seen including in some scientific literature that people appear to have different levels of suggestibility it's it's more or less difficult to hypnotize different people although tests designed to determine how hypnotizable you will be generally don't produce clinically accurate results kind of wild so i studied more into actual studies on hypnosis not just subjective experiences like me not being able to my eyes but uh you can imagine that you know this is sort of a very elaborate form of role play perhaps what's going on in the brain is by imagining and and and getting into that sort of semi-automatic state i get when i drive and forget where i'm going maybe my prefrontal cortex and my basal ganglia have different marching orders where one's trying to open the eyes the other is trying to keep them shut i don't know something wild like that that's only possible when you get in this relaxed state without distraction really focus really pay attention and sincerely participate in the exercise but when you look at things like treating depression or smoking or overeating most reputable hypnotists that i ran into online they seem to push back on the idea uh that you know hypnotic suggestions are indefinite that in fact uh you know they can't hypnotize someone in a week later snap their fingers and have them go to sleep which also limits the effectiveness of suggestions for depression for anxiety for those sorts of things so what i found in studies is for example with smoking cessation hypnosis is reasonably effective when compared to other means of cessation it's not the best it's not the worst somewhere in the middle of the back you know people have successfully used hypnosis to combat phobias or fears or psychological disorders that may simply be linked to people that are very suggestible and people who have a desire to change it's a visualization process however hypnosis has been demonstrated clinically to be effective in pain management people undergoing procedures tend to require if they're hypnosis or they're hypnotized or in a state of hypnosis they require less pain meds during and after the operation it can save money and medical procedures even for people that are very hypnotizable now i did look at hypnosis and memory recollections you know there's this idea of regressing people through their memories using hypnosis that produces really awful results you can just fabricate memories that way our memories are very suggestible and if you get a state of suggestibility you are likely to recall whatever you think your hypnosis wants to hear and your brain the marvelous machine that it will will manufacture that scene for you now that might sound weird but your brain also manufactures scenes for you when you read harry potter there's no voldemort but in the moment you're reading harry potter voldemort seems remarkably real so memory regression appears to be a form of imagination where your imaginary scene involves elements of your actual memory in people you actually know and it's widely believed and been studied that memory regressions have produced literally hundreds or maybe even thousands of cases of false molestation accusations for example so careful with memory regression and hypnosis now the spiritual angle no i don't think that hypnosis opens you up to demons or uh or anything like that i i found it to be remarkably similar to a deep meditative state in my own experience since i'm someone who meditates frequently you know it felt almost like a guided meditation when i'm doing a guided meditation someone tells me to relax my body feel the tension melting away that that verbal metaphor is something i can act on physiologically and it feels a lot like you know my my body is melting uh same thing about not being able to live with the eyes it's just kind of going along with it finding that state of relaxation that state of openness and i would imagine that it could be you know a beneficial or healthy spiritual practice if done in the context of something like meditation i'll have links to some things in the show notes this week especially a link to the youtube video that hypnotized me so if you want to try it you can try this one it worked for me make sure you follow the instructions very very closely you don't want to have any distractions around when you try out any any noises any movements that kind of stuff otherwise pretty awesome and i'll also have some links where you might be able to dig deeper into data on hypnosis on ask sciencemic.com great question [Music] our next question comes from the email inbox and it reads what is the science behind habits specifically picking your nails which i have done for a large portion of my life and my son who is 12 does as well can we use science to break this habit you usually hear habits like these described as nervous habits and that's not entirely accurate because they are also anxious habits they are stressed out habits they are bored habits they are little physical routines we go through to deal with something either not enough stimulus too much stimulus too much stress and you can look at our relatives in the animal kingdom to get some insight as to where they come from for example animals have grooming and preening instincts you know animals that exhibit a much lower level of consciousness than we do still have an awareness of their physical bodies and work to maintain them and this is very pronounced in vertebrates and you'll notice that some animals if they're injured or if there's just a small irritation on their body they'll pick at it they'll lick it they'll scratch it whatever it takes you know this one spot on your otherwise even skin that isn't right tends to draw your attention you fixate upon it you know when a snake begins to shed its skin they often rub their heads against objects to accelerate that or or when deer's antler are um molting you know they'll rub those antlers as part of that pruning instinct and when you add mammals on top of that mammals generally associate touch with pleasure and comfort because touch lowers anxiety there's a reason humans and dogs get along so well dogs love to be petted and people love to pet them and both benefit from the process both feel comforted both have lower blood pressure during that contact we mammals love to touch and to be touched and so you could imagine that these nervous anxious stressed bored habits emerge from our braining instincts and our desire to self soothe you know think about biting your nails you have some part of the nail that's rough or the nail bed or the cuticle and so you try to even it out with a little trim but you trim too much and now it's rough again and you just keep biting and you do this probably when you're not otherwise occupied or when you're so inwardly occupied you might rub your hands together some people stroke or twist their hair as a carryover of our survival need as an infant we have a desire to suck on our thumb or our shirt people get orally fixated overeating is another habit like that where we take a function that provides us pleasure and do it too much in order to cope with anxiety stress nervousness or boredom these habits tend to be unconscious we don't know that we're doing them uh sometimes when we realize we're doing them we respond with shame or distress as we continue despite our desire to no longer do this because the consequences can be unpleasant you can bite your nails to the point they bleed or become infected they can be embarrassing you can find yourself doing things in social context that other people think are weird i've got an uh it's not really a nervous habit but it's an energy expending habit i bounce my knee a lot and when i think really hard my knee bounces a lot and so if i'm in a q and a panel uh you know at a conference or a session or something as i'm spooling up my answer man it's like my knee is a mechanical actuator that's powering my brain now that's relatively harmless but you can imagine on stage if i had some less socially acceptable nervous habit it could be quite embarrassing so there are some well understood mechanisms to help you avoid this what you're doing when you have a nervous habit or one of these habits is your lower brain functions are sort of running the straw right first you want to stop you have to want to stop after that mindfulness can help the discipline of becoming aware of what you're doing all the time a mindful awareness so a moment ago i was sitting here talking into a microphone thinking about nothing but talking into a microphone as soon as i said there were mindfulness because i've done so much mindfulness meditation i immediately felt my weight in the chair i felt my feet on the ground i became aware of where my hands are and why my hands are there and why as i speak i keep moving one hand in the air because i talk with my hands i became aware of the computer in front of me and my surroundings the temperature of the room it's mindfulness it's something you practice and mindfulness can help interrupt these sorts of activities by helping you become aware you're about to do something you're basically going to notice and interrupt so you it would be unreasonable to say i'm never going to bite my nails again because you'll you'll fail at that but if you were to say the next time i realized my hands or my fingers or my mouth i'm going to remove them and just keep doing that you're interrupting that loop that creates the habit you can also ask your loved ones to gently remind you help you to become aware that external stimulus can help also physical limits can help if you really bite your nails a lot at home go ahead and wear gloves you will not bite your nails through gloves and every time a glove goes into your mouth it's going to remind you and help condition you to not bite your nails now if your habits uh if these things don't help or if you have habits that set in for more than three weeks in a way that interferes with your ability to live your life or maintain employment or those sorts of things you're moving out of a nervous habit and into a ritual or obsession and that's the kind of thing you probably want to consult a professional about either a mental health professional or a family doctor biting your nails is incredibly common this stuff is on a spectrum though so there's a lot of habits some of them are very extreme and some of them can really affect your quality of life the biggest thing is to not be ashamed this is a natural part of being an organism this is just a thing that nervous systems do so don't have any shame if you need a little assistance from a professional just get the help that you need in the same way you know there's nothing wrong with you have a sinus infection you just need help getting rid of the sinus infection so if biting your nails is a real problem and you need some help no big deal offer yourself grace which may actually even make you less nervous to begin with [Music] hey science mike my question to you is what is the science behind the love of money is it the root of all evil and how does having a lot of money versus not a lot affect your brain and how does tithing and giving play into how we look at money alrighty thank you for all you do first biblically money is not the root of all evil money is the root of all kinds of evil or many kinds of evil do you see the subtle distinction there in one case everything bad in the world comes from money in another case many bad things come from money it's a grammatical difference but an important one so even the bible does not say that money is the root of all evil that said uh man there's a lot of science on people and money an overwhelming amount of science on people money because people love money and our brains reflect that in studies for example i found one study where people actually felt less pain if they'd recently handled money so if you make people put their fingers in a hot bowl of water hot enough to not to skull but to be very uncomfortable um people who recently handled money showed a difference in reported pain levels similar to people that would have taken tylenol the brain is is treating the recent presence of money as a mild pain medication or or in the same study money was about as comforting as having an empathetic human being in the room people are comforted by people but they're also just as comfortable by money and i'm talking fiat currency here not barter currency where we trade goods directly to get what we want i'm talking about the weird sort of virtual currency fiat currency we call dollar bills in america that only have value because we say they have value and yet this shared fictional narrative uh that that money has value excites us tremendously our brains light up like christmas trees when we get unexpected cash and our heads are inside an fmri scanner it's really really crazy now this makes sense we associate money with desirable things status power freedom we also think that wealthy people are good people this is called the just world bias and we assume that people are wealthy because they are worthy of having wealth and we too would like to be worthy of having wealth and money is a means to get there you know studies don't necessarily bear that out i'm not disparaging people who have money and there are lots of very talented people who have money uh is there level of talent that different from someone else who doesn't have money i don't know the data doesn't seem to say so but it does seem to say that material wealth causes some problems for example more money tends to create less generosity the very rich are less likely to give to charity in difficult economic times than the middle class even though they have more money they give a much smaller percentage of their income compared to the middle class or even people in poverty in in general more money creates less generosity we also find that in general wealthy people can be less happy they have less life satisfaction they have more problems with family and children and they can even have a heightened risk of divorce now this is not universal i um in the last episode i talked about the danger of stereotyping people and this is certainly one of those cases i don't want to stereotype the wealthy there are generous happy family oriented rich people even very rich people but science looks at the likelihood of different factors given different circumstances and in this case all the things i just said you're at a heightened risk of if you are wealthy there seems to be a scientific case for resisting the allure of money avoiding a letting it dominate your life and frankly giving is a good way to do that we see for example that charitable giving stimulates the part of the stadium the part of the brain associated with with rewards giving makes us feel good feel good about ourselves and feel good about other people giving helps us be less focused with the things we have to be less anxious about the potential loss of money somehow surrendering what we believe is ours to someone else makes us less concerned about how much we have so this is one of those curious and interesting cases where traditional spirituality and science seem to be in agreement giving a tenth of your income to a church may be something that benefits you psychologically and benefits you behaviorally now don't take that as i say you have to give 10 percent of your income to a church i think it's important to give frankly i think some charities do a better job of turning money into social good than some churches so i'd be cognizant of who you're giving your money to and how much you give that's up to you there's no science to back up a specific percentage if ten percent is important to you in your faith tradition hey that sounds great uh if your interpretation of scripture indicates that ten percent is a necessary you know biblical mandate great go for it my point is simply that the science supports giving is good for you [Music] our last question is a doozy and it comes from the email inbox science mike i was thinking through the theology of the trinity i was wondering if it would be possible to understand the theology of the trinity in relationship to the theory of multiple dimensions so in a sense the third dimension representation of god is jesus etc i have no scientific background or really any theological training but i was just wondering your thoughts if nothing else i would love to hear you talk about multiple dimensions or string theory more in this realm versus what was discussed in episode four in episode four someone asked me about the multiverse and so i talked about dimensionality in the context of the multiverse you want to talk about the terms of the trinity let's do it let's start by exploring spatial dimensions or dimensions in general what is a dimension well in human experience we have four dimensions three spatial dimensions and one time dimension in other words to meet someone you need a coordinate that correlates to all those dimensions so if we were going to meet at a building downtown we need a street address to know what street it's on and how far down that street it is or we could get a crossroads where two roads intersect that gives us a point in two dimensions once we got there we'd need to know the floor of the building we need to know how high up we were that covers three dimensions but if we don't have a spatial dimension we can't meet if i said meet me at my house and didn't say whim you might come here and i might not be here or you might come here and i might not be ready so i have to say meet me at my house at 10 a.m tuesday to give us definition in this temporal dimension now it's kind of nonsensical to talk about a fourth dimension or a fifth dimension or an eighth dimension because you can't really differentiate between spatial dimensions or even time dimensions one of my favorite really accessible sources for science information is minute physics and they describe dimensions as a picture of water if you have three cups of water and a pitcher you can't really say which is cup one cup two or cup three now if you pour a cup of oil into that pitcher you can say one of these cups behaves differently it's a cup of oil and that's kind of how it is with spatial versus temporal dimensions what does that mean for extra dimensions there's a book flatland that i love and in the book flatland you're contemplating reality as a two-dimensional being imagine an entire world that was in a piece of paper where you had forward and back and left and right but no up or down if that concept didn't exist at all and you could imagine if you were a two-dimensional being and a sphere passed through your sheet of paper it would look like a dot that grew into a larger and larger circle before shrinking back down to a point and vanishing that's what would happen if the sphere intersected a two-dimensional plane that might be mind-blowing go back and listen to that as many times as you need to because this show is too short for me to really keep digging into that why does that matter well quantum phenomenon are weird we see things that appear to appear and disappear we have trouble reconciling gravity with quantum physics and so some physicists wonder if the reason we have such difficulty doing so is because reality is fundamentally happening at more than three spatial dimensions string theory for example has nine so you have these particles that are doing things that aren't so weird in other dimensions but from our dimensions they look a lot like a sphere passing through a two-dimensional plane it's an interesting idea with absolutely no experimental support whatsoever if you're thinking about the trinity father son and holy ghost that is a brain bender three personas for a single being i don't get it and it's a big part of uh christian theology especially since creedal days uh that was a big fight in the early church and the trinity guys won right it's like there's it never like mentions explicitly the three-in-one god anywhere in the bible that's something that came out through debates and arguments and theological discussions afterwards and i'm probably less suited to theological discussions than you are could the trinity potentially make more sense in some hyper dimensional or more than three spatial dimensions since i guess i just don't have any data to take me there i don't have a bridge that builds me to that place it's an interesting thought exercise i would say that if it turns out that string theory or m theory or membrane theory if any of these things have validity and it turns out reality is more dimensional than human experience well then of course we must assume that god is also more than our perceived dimensions because god is the source of all it's where everything emerged from and so by necessity god would incorporate any subset of everything into god's oneness i sound different when i talk theology because i'm sort of a mystic yeah so you know you can imagine that the spirit interfacing with the world the things that we've traditionally called supernatural could be happening in additional spatial dimensions i don't know if that makes god more or less interesting basically here's the point it's a fun thought exercise uh it is it has no practical application that i can think of i don't see how it's life-changing if the the trinity is something that happens in additional spatial dimensions and i also think people tend to just throw the word dimensions around and tend to think of it more in sort of a parallel worlds model uh as opposed to just a way of describing space and that's the thing in science dimensions are just a way to describe space mathematically you can throw any number of spatial and temporal dimensions you want and the math will work uh but of course our intuition doesn't get us there only math does fascinating question i'll have links to some youtube videos to explain this stuff a little bit better with neil degrasse tyson and my my favorite series minute physics i'll also have a link to the book flatland which is a short story that can help you contemplate what a world with additional spatial dimensions might look like great question thank you well that's another episode of ask science mike and the books will let you know the wild goose festival is right around the corner i'll be there with the liturgists we're going to do a lost and found liturgy i'll do a talk on the science of peacemaking i'll also be in california redlands california specifically for talk on cosmology and a talk on creation at the redlands church all my events can be found on my website you just go to asksciencemike.com click on events you can see everywhere i'm going and i'd love to come see you as well click bookmark if you'd like more information ask science mike is made possible by your question so if you've got a question for the show i'd love to answer it you can use ask sciencemike on twitter soundcloud or youtube or do what it seems like everybody does now just go to asksciencemike.com and type a question or record a question it goes right to my email inbox and i see it our show is listener supported if you'd like to help us have conversations about the intersection of science and faith that are open that are honest i could use your money a dollar five dollars whatever you've got you can change or cancel a pledge at any time you can find links or resources on asksciencemike.com for every question i've answered in the history of the program there's a lot of stuff on there people tweet me for my sources all the time and i try to give you a great way to get started just by going to the show notes you're going to see some of the articles i read to validate my answers or in some case to come up with it in the first place [Music] i'd like to thank hailey hyde for doing a pre-production on this episode greg nordin as always for doing the sound design and of course the theme song i'm a good friend jeff bodenberg if you're doing a podcast and you'd like high quality original music jeff can hook you up you can find links to hailey greg and jeb on asksciencemike.com so thanks for listening guys and i will talk to you 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