James Harrison: Mental Foraging and the Neuroscience Behind Why Hypnosis Works

In this episode of AWAKEN, Ryan sits down with James Harrison, a clinical hypnotist from Portland, Oregon, and the author of the just-released Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory: An Updated Model of Clinical Hypnosis. The book is six years in the making — and it started with three words from a double board-certified psychiatrist: show me the evidence.

James and Ryan dig into what that six-year journey uncovered: that hypnosis isn't mysticism, it's biology. The brain is a prediction machine built for survival, and a skilled hypnotist is someone who knows how to help a client's nervous system update predictions it couldn't update on its own. James walks through the core framework of the book — state change, interoception, exteroception, and predictive processing — and explains why these four domains give hypnosis a scientific foundation that can finally hold up in a medical setting.

The conversation goes deep on why insight alone rarely produces lasting change, how the placebo effect and hypnosis share the same underlying mechanism, and what Bingo in a dementia ward taught James about the most ancient learning system in the human brain. They also get into the ethics of guide work, the difference between a therapist and a hypnotist, and why James calls the book a love letter to the hypnosis community.

Three quotes from James worth writing down:

"You're helping somebody update their neurology. I wanted to know why — and the book really came out of that."

"Our ability to imagine is taking memory, putting it into the future, and removing the timestamp. That's what the imagination is."

"A good hypnotist reawakens that mental foraging capacity that every creature has — that's what we do."

Connect with James Harrison: Book & newsletter: mentalforaging.com Email: james@mentalforaging.com James will also be presenting at HypnoThoughts in July — come find him there.

Connect with Ryan DeJonghe / TranceWell: Website: trancewell.help Email: ryan@trancewell.help

catch Ryan's review of Mental Foraging (non-paywall link) here:
https://medium.com/trancewell/book-review-mental-foraging-and-the-evolution-of-memory-868d74488913

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome everyone. I'm getting goosebumps because you're here. Legit. I so appreciate you tuning in again. And again, because of you, we can have amazing guests. Let's welcome James Harrison. Welcome, James, today.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Thank you so much, Ryan. I'm excited to be here. I really appreciate what you're doing.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Oh, thank you. And we have reason to celebrate because you have a book coming out. Let me get I had to write it down. I couldn't memorize the whole title. Maybe you can help me with this memorizing the title, mental foraging and the evolution of memory, which is interesting enough. And then you got that little kicker in there updated mode of clinical hypnosis.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

That's right. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Okay. So now I'm curious. What do you mean an updated mode of hypnosis? Clinical hypnosis.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Right. So the the simple answer is that you know I became a hypnotist in 2016, 2017, thereabout, shortly thereafter, I ended up working on a medical team for elders with dementia, not as a clinical hypnotist, but as a life enrichment coordinator or what's called recreational therapy by another name. And I went to our medical director. And so we see, you know, our population is folks with dementia, and they get wrap around really good medical care. So they have doctors and nurses, they've got physical therapists and uh mental health practitioners and occupational therapy. And I noticed, like, oh, I'm new to this world. Um, I'd been working with mostly with men in midlife crisis mode, which is a whole other thing. But I went to my medical director and I said, you know, I it just so happens I'm a clinical hypnotist. Is there room for that in working here? And she was very open about it. She said, Well, I'm personally agnostic, and she's a double board certified psychiatrist. And you know, working in a medical institution, things are very by the book. And she said, Well, show me the evidence. And six years later, here's the um, you know, this this is the first copy of the book. If the the next copy won't be in a three-ring binder, right?

SPEAKER_00 2:28

Yeah, for the joy of those listening, it's a classic thick black binder with the tabs all throughout it.

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah. All the all the chapters. It took me six years. Um, and I wanted to know. So I wanted to put hypnosis to the test. Like, is this field that I'm a part of that I know is helpful to people and and far from all the time and and all that? Um, you know, it's it kind of breaks into three camps. Um, sometimes it doesn't help people, sometimes it helps people and it moves the needle, and then often it works like gangbusters. And I think the better you get at it, um the more you you increase your odds as a good practitioner, as a good clinician of getting somebody a big update, right? To me, it's it's just updates. You're up you're helping somebody update their neurology. So I wanted to know why, and the book really came out of that. So I like to say I did I did past life regression on hypnosis.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Oh nice, nice. I I was gonna say I appreciated all the effort you did with just going to town the X, and like if you look at your your history and the evening you talk about in the book, how you just went out and explored all angles and like you put the backpack on and you you eventually were talking to some who's who in the chronology fields and the science fields, and you really gotta handle it. And I love how you say that you want to be like gangbusters and how sometimes hypnosis is like, is it working? And then you want to like maximize the odds of what I'll call a miracle, you know, if it almost sometimes feels like that. Like, how can we maximize the results here?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Right. Get people uh self-generated epiphanies, is what I call them. And what's so cool is you know, literally maybe a week, 10 days ago, as I'm finishing the paper, a researcher at Oxford put out a paper that I can't remember the exact title, but it's about self-generated epiphanies and how they how to um kind of study the impact that they have on our neurology without going to the person and asking, was your near-death experience real or was your epiphany verifiable by outside source? It's more what does it do to anyone who has that kind of updating experience that puts them in their senses, takes them out of, I call it bad prediction mode, right? There's a piece of all of us where you know sometimes we're good psychics, but often we're we're kind of we're kind of crappy psychics, right? Oh, I'm gonna have a shit today, or you know, we we can sometimes fall into that sinkhole of well, yesterday wasn't good for me, so tomorrow's not gonna be good. And then we've created our own reality, and so much of the work we do is attack those kind of updates, and there is a lot of power to that.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

I like how you're talking about this. My question was gonna be when they have this update, what are the results?

SPEAKER_01 6:02

And then I think you just kind of knocked on the door of that, like it's almost like manifesting, like they've I think you even talked about the book with yes, like mirroring, the mirroring effect, like it's mirroring, it's also if you if you look at what is placebo, so there's you're gonna hear the term dimensions a lot in the book, and the way scientists refer to that or psychology refers to that, is um let's call it an uh any axis that you can measure something on. So with placebo, you've got conditioning and expectancy. Those are the two main dimensions that placebo researchers talk about. So conditioning is I'm used to this happening, and expectancy is more the thinky part. So, in a way, they correspond to terms of sub or unconscious and consciousness and manifesting falls in those domains too. It's like I'm acting as if this is gonna happen, I'm expecting it to happen, or I think you know, we've all heard in the field want it to happen, wish it to happen, and it will happen.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

So that's priming, that's eliciting, that's all these terms. Like we have a bunch of terms in it for in the hypnosis community, and have come to find out that in the medical community or the neuroscience community, they don't necessarily have the that lingo, but they understand perfectly well what elicitation is. Um that it and that's a big difference between like how a psychotherapist works and how a hypnotist works. So psychotherapist might go into what's the meaning behind your unhappiness, and a hypnotist might just work the state change aspect. Okay, so you're feeling this way now, and you've linked this feeling to this set of environmental circumstances. What do you want to have happen? How do you want to feel when this happens? Oh, I want to I want to not feel bad anymore. Okay, so what's the opposite of not feeling bad when this comes up? Oh, I want to feel like I got some insight from my traumatic experience or I learned something. You know, the client maps those things out, and then we help them ride along, update often through the, you know, you mentioned the mirror neurons. Um, I use that a lot in practice. It helps move people into a new state. So that's fully a quarter. I broke the that's a quarter of the book. I broke the book down into domains that neuroscience really has no issue with things that are solid, like state change work, breath work is change work, um, that everyone in the field is familiar with. And interoception, like the internal sensation is another big one, exteroception, the external perception. Well, we call that in the hypnosis world that's visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, gustatory, right? So go way down those rabbit holes. What does the science say in 2026? And the the final big chunk of the book is about memory. And nowadays, neuroscience has a very sexy term for that. They call it predictive processing. Right. So yeah, I you know, I can go on. So I'll take that.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

I was just thinking, I was just I appreciate you talking about those domains, and I wrote them down, so it's like a quiz time for Ryan. See if I got it right. So you got state change, interception, extraception, yeah, interoception, extrasoception, and predictive processing.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Okay, cool. Gold star for Ryan for the day. I get a little too great.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

So those middle two in tarot and ex tarot are are just perception, right? On either the inside or the outside of the skin, right? And there's a translation that happens if you think back to the early foraging creatures, right? They were moving one way or another, responding to, so say they were going, oh, there's a re there's resource, here's sugar over here, and and there's danger over there, right? So they're smelling and sniffing and otherwise sensing what's in the environment and going away from danger and towards resources. Right. That's what foraging is, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:59

And you got the internal part of like for the humans, you got those hormones like the the ghrelins and uh and the they're like I'm hungry, you know, right? And then you got the external, like this is dangerous and this is safe, and yeah, interesting. I really like all the research you did, and it's thick, like at the back. I love it. I get like kind of nerdy about it. Like you have like 30 pages of resources in there, like you've you've done some research, my friend.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

And but and my goal, but I think you know, full disclosure at the beginning, my egoic self wanted to be impressive, but after a while, I'm like, no, James, you know, calm down, be kind towards people. I had to learn this myself. And so the end of the book has I I went really in depth on the glossary. You haven't seen the glossary because it wasn't in the advanced reader copy. But the index is also a glossary. So if there's a term like predictive prospect, oh nice.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

So you can look it up.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

It did you can look it up, you can see where it appears in the book. Like it kind of it turned into a textbook in a way, but hopefully one that's funny and accessible and has good stories.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Yes, the stories I love. I really do appreciate that. It's not a textbook. Like at first glance, it might feel like a textbook. And when you start reading your and you your voice comes across very human, very story, funny. I appreciate that. One story, you talked about the placebo effect. One story that stands out to me is you're talking about the named placebo, like where they tell the placebo group this is just the sugar pill. And it still works.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

It still works. It it still works. Um, I reached out to placebo researchers who helped me get my head around like that's the mountain of the book. That was the hardest uh chapter to write and to understand, but we're very fortunate in the hypnosis community because placebo research is now at least in its third generation, where you've got thinkers like um Ted Capsuk and Urban Kirsch at Harvard who've been working on what they call non-deceptive placebo, right? Like if this effect works, doctors should be able to use it because the right the goal is healing. Now we don't want to deceive people. So but I I make the argument that placebo is not deception, it's not that's a that's a um carryover of our you know, the our our languaging can make it sound that way. But what's really going on is we have sensory limitations, right? We can only see in a certain wavelength band and only hear certain frequencies and only sense what we sense, and where that drops off, our expectations come in, right? And our conditioning come in and our learning comes in. And so uh it's the same reason magic works, right? We're we're we easily be fooled by a magician and we take delight in that. Oh my god, how did how did that happen? It's because our expectations got in front of our senses and what was truly we were able to detect. Placebo works in a in a similar way. So um, you know, my my stance is magic is fantastic, it's a wonderful part of being human. And because of that, we can update our neurology, and and what a what a gift that is. We're not um, you know, you think of a creature early in evolution, like let's say a spider probably doesn't have as many options to update their neurology as a human does. Um and that's that compounding effect of having um you know so so many layers to our neurology before you know it's the input and then a bunch of stuff happens and output.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Well, in in between, uh you know, neuroscience nowadays is much more interested in what they call network thinking, not that you know, so they don't say the limbic system takes care of promotion anymore. They might say, yes, the mid-brain architecture is involved with that, but really there's a lot of network stuff going on. And what that led to 26 or so years ago now, this um team led by Marcus Rakley wanted to study how much wattage did the brain use while it was resting versus while it was doing a task like shovel, you know. Yeah, so put the electrodes on and have the participant shovel and then have them rest and then have them do some cognitive thing, like do some simple math. And you would expect that under a cognitive load of any any task kind of load that the brain would be more metabolically intensive, and that was not the case. They found that rest modes used a different uh neural networks, but they used about as much energy, and that in the era of network thinking was kind of born out of that.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Interesting. What about do they talk about emotions? I feel like just at the body could be at rest, and if the mind is anxious or trying to solve a problem, it feels like it uses up more energy. That's my hypothesis.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

It's metabolically expensive, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Emotions are all emotions or are the emotions that we label as negative emotions like hate and fear and anxiety, are those more metabolic consuming than happiness?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

I don't know. That is a good research question. And there are people that are working on um there's even a name for it. I can't recall it off the top of my head, but what's the metabolic cost of different kinds of mental activities? Right. Um but what I can say is there the the neuroscientists call this affective neuroscience or affect, and it it means emotion, like emotional, and so sometimes they'll say affective emotional neuroscience or emotional affect neuroscience, and it means what you know there's people trying to understand, and that's you know, you asked me earlier about Lisa Feldman Barrett, she's strongly in that camp. Her idea, and if I get it right, it and maybe I'll get it wrong and I can be updated on it. I love getting things, I don't love getting things wrong.

SPEAKER_00 18:35

I love being updated on yes, updates, always updates.

SPEAKER_01 18:39

Yeah, but her thing is a theory of constructed emotion, that emotions are a network phenomenon, again, like we talk about network. Um so that it's it's a construction from more basic states. So what that gives us is you have a slightly different subjective experience to me, to the person next to you, to mom, to dad, to the child raised in Ghana or Afghanistan. That a lot of these things rhyme, but when you scale up to network thinking, the person's subjective experience colors their relationship to their emotion. And if you look at an earlier researcher who's still very active today, Antonio Damasio, he talks about it at he calls it the somatic marker hypothesis. So imagine you're a creature and you are, and you're walking through the world and life happens, right? Right. So everything that happens is what they call what neuroscientists call salient, which is just a fancy word for important. So, what's the salience of you know, you're walking down the street and you see a car go up onto the curve and it crashes through the used clothing store, and um somebody brought in a whole bunch of red t-shirts that day. And so, you what is salient to you in that moment is these red t-shirts going everywhere. Well, how random is that? It's random, but it's it's salient to you in that moment. So years later, you see a box of red t-shirts, and you know, it reminds you of that event, and all the other parts of the event are swept up in the salience. And that's the building of subjective experience. And so Dimasio's theory about that is well, you put a somatic marker down at that moment, which is uh you hear the crash, and your heart rate goes up, and you're alert and attentive and looking for danger, and then you see all these t-shirts, and that association you know is coupled, and it's gonna depend on uh it turns out you're safe and you weren't hurt, and so there's not a ton of extra juice put onto it. Um and so every aspect of everyone who's listening, their particular subjective experience in the world gets these um salience markers, somatic markers. And you know, what we're learning is the the model that Bessel Vanderkoalk put forward of the body keeping the score is not accurate. It's it's more um, and Lisa Feldman Barrett describes it this way she says the brain's keeping the score, but the body's the score card. Uh it's the somatic marker.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Got it. Okay. So then my theory then, and I don't know what you discovered in your research, is that these somatic markers are pieces of memory that have that are when you say talking about the scorekeeper of the brain and the scorecard is the body. So in order to write something on the scorecard, does is there always emotion involved? It feels like every percent that you remember.

SPEAKER_01 22:29

That's a great question. I love it. You you're asking some really good questions. Um so there's gonna be a range of emotion, right? From uh you know, from little to lots. There's gonna be a range from negative to positive valence as they so the the precursor to emotion is what's called affect. And again, if you think about foraging, I'm trying to get my fingers there.

SPEAKER_00 22:57

It's like holding up a peace sign for the listeners.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

And it and my reflection is reversed in this.

SPEAKER_00 23:03

Um it's it's it's weird, and it's reversed for you, it's not reversed for me or the people watching this. So like I could see your Portland organisation correctly, and I see it correctly.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

That's funny. It's it's messing with my neurology, man.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

I hear you.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

So if the creature is going towards this lamp, and let's say that's we'll make that one danger this time. So negative valence is the term that effective neuroscientists would use. So the danger has a negative valence, and the disco ball, that's my for disco emergencies, that has a positive valence. So let's say that's a pinata filled with sugar water for the roving bacteria, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, goody goody. So free energy right there.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Free energy.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

So from from valence scales up, but it's always to get back to your question, that is always coupled with physiology, right? So where your body is positioned in space and what it's doing, so what activity it's involved in, and then um, so an early the the father of American psychology was a man named William James, and he's my absolute hero. And you know, I don't want to spoil the book, but William James plays a prominent role, I'll just put it that way. Yeah, um, and he's adorable and avuncular, and kind I don't he's not overlooked, he's he's huge in psychology, but he he ought to be way more prominent than Freud and others, um in my judgment. Like the more I learn about him, the more delightful he was. But he talked about, he had a theory along with some other folks, that physiology precedes affect. And what that means is um you see a bear, your skin, your your hair stand up, the adrenaline spikes, yeah, and you run or you freeze or you do whatever you do, and then downstream we call that fear. Right. Right?

SPEAKER_00 25:21

So, like so the scorecard is starting to talk, and the scorekeeper is like, hey, I don't remember writing that down, so let's figure it out.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

Bingo! I I could have used you, you would be a very good um you're a good muse because you you've clarified that perfectly well.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

I like the I like the metaphor, I like playing with the metaphor.

SPEAKER_01 25:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

And then yeah, so go ahead. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Um another way to think of it at the time, a contemporary of William James put it this way. He said, instead of saying I feel happy, you can say I feel dancy, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:08

You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

And um, so any clinical worth their salt knows to use that in session. So if I'm working with somebody who is quote unquote depressed, you know, I might you know, feel happy now, right? You know, maybe that works with them. I don't know, it depends on the person. Sometimes you can just, you know, barrel through, but other times I might say, uh, feel dancy, or I might I might do that.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Or you might say, look at the disco ball. Uh-oh, it's time for the emergency disco ball.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

Emergency disco, right? That's kind of why it's there. I mean, I I started that when I worked in the dementia facility. It's like, I need to have an emergency disco ball. And so I I got a um, I bought a cart, a push cart from Harbor Freight and put um wheelchair wheels on it so I could get it around easy. Oh man. Hooked up a pole to it and had it on a pump so I could extend it out, so I could collapse it to get on the elevator and get in somebody's room. That's brilliant. And extend it out and fire up the Bluetooth speakers and that is brilliant. You know, and I love that. It was so fun. I don't know if this will be visible in the daytime.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

But you got colors flashing on it. I love that. It reminds me of. I know you've been busy writing a book and researching. I don't know if you've had time to watch the TV show Severance.

SPEAKER_01 27:51

I made it through one episode or sorry, one season.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Okay, yeah. So you probably saw the dance party when it's like it reminds me of you just pushing the cart like dance party time.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Dance party. You know, the the folks who really loved it were the caregivers, you know. I mean the residents loved it too. Yeah. But it was it was also like, okay, this means I'm I'm chief morale officer at this place.

SPEAKER_00 28:19

And it's a great pattern interrupt, too. Like you're in that frame in the hot in the hospital or the care environment, dementia, and then you're in there like Patch Adams. Like, let's go.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Now going back to that physiology before the affect, it's almost and I appreciate where you're talking about in your book, the differences between the conscious and the unconscious is maybe moving past that model. And then it's it feels like something else is watching besides our eyes. And I see that a lot with the blind center.

SPEAKER_01 28:53

Oh, yeah. And then so what do you see with that?

SPEAKER_00 28:59

Well, the first the first thing, the first thing that pops into my mind is like a mother sleeping at night. And I think there's a study where they had six babies crying and she only woke up for her baby.

SPEAKER_01 29:13

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

And then so I'm like, okay, so she's sleeping. Her body's doing everything that sleep does. It's clearing the the waste from the brain, it's healing the body, it's building muscle. All that is working. She feels well rested, and it's like it's constant alert. And I don't know. And then I appreciate what your book is saying too about the woo. I love how you kind of sneak that in. And that's where where I live. I live, I live in the land of woo.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

So I appreciate personally I do, but I wanted the book to be grounded in solid neuroscience and what they call biological naturalism, as yeah, philosophers refer to it. Want it to work there. I can be as woo as I want to be personally and in session because I see it work even if I don't understand what's happening. So that's like I feel like two humans together form a bigger antenna, even like you and me talking now in different parts of the world. Um, that's why we can work over Zoom. Like there's the antenna aspect of it that feels very real to me. I mean, my hands tingle when I ask somebody, they just do, right? That's interesting, yeah. It's a powerful thing that got me into the work, and we don't need it, quote unquote, to help people update and to pass muster with um a medical community that is set up for proof. And I I respect that. So I wanted to, and that was part of my quest like is hypnosis a fossil? Is it a relic from you know 18th century thinking? And you know, when we didn't know any better, and does it you know deserve the dustbin of history? Hey, if so, I'll you know, I'll help sweep it out to sea, right? Right. Like, I wanted to be fearless about it, and I love it. And I'm like, oh holy smokes, the neuroscience community is using a lot of terms. So I went to them first. It's like if I go to and ask hypnotists, is yeah, hypnosis a thing, you know, I'm gonna say it is, they're gonna say it is, but where is neuroscience right now? And yeah, the first chunk of the book is about how we kind of got duped by Freud, and you know, well-intentioned or not, I don't know. Like, um, but he decided, you know, as a doctor and man of his era, it was a number of people who came up with the models of the unconscious or the subconscious and news flash. The terms are interchangeable, they they're still useful as terms in the same way that Newtonian physics is useful for describing, yeah, you know, throwing a football or even sending um Artemis in orbit around the moon. Yeah, Newtonian physics is still useful, so unconscious, subconscious is still useful, but we can do better now. So, in his era, there was a group of folks working the issue, and they noticed that um people could be put into a special state using this thing they called hypnosis, so they called it die psychism. Dipsychism, too, psyches, right? And so you had the normal waking conscious and this underconscious type state. And what Freud decided was well, we don't understand the neurology well enough for me to know what's going on at a level of granularity, and now neuroscientists call that level of granularity, it has a name, it's called the neural correlates of consciousness, right? Of course it has a name, of course it has a name. They have a name for these things, folks. They really do. If if any of us, and I learned that that, you know, like, oh, if I think I've invented anything, wrong. They've thought, you know, the philosophers and the neuroscientists they're ahead of us. They're ahead into whether the brain's an antenna or not. Of course they study all that stuff, right? Like, um, so they're looking for evidence, and if they find it, the model gets updated. So Freud said, Well, we can't know what's happening on that granular neural level of consciousness level yet. So I'm gonna take my best top-down guess as to what's happening. So, as Mr. Dr. Freud, I am guessing that there is an ego, an id, and a superego, and that the id is a dangerous repository where the demons live. So he recreated the soul all over again, and there's no explanatory power for that when you get down to it. I mean, it's a nice idea, it's got legs, religion comes in there. Great. I don't have a personal problem with it, but western empirical double blind research is like, show me the money, baby.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Show me the money, or show me the research. Yeah, I'm curious. Did you ever go back to that woman and show her the research?

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Oh my goodness, I I have good news on that. I'm so thrilled. So I'm working at this facility for years, and I don't want to rock the boat or bother her, and you know, like maybe I am the wack-a-doodle that comes at the scientist and says, Hey, I got this great free energy principle. And you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to be that guy. So I, you know, I'm doing my homework. Um, and over time, uh, you know, I I take the approach, what do hypnotists do? We build rapport, right? So I just show up to work every day and aim to do a good job in my flipping lane, right? So I'm not gonna stray, I'm not gonna hypnotize people, you know, other than I have all the skills of a hypnotist, and believe me, I I couldn't have done the job without them. So, you know, you mentioned the the disco ball. Yeah. Um, you know, is that my disco ball induction for happy feelings? Of course it is, right? Of course, yeah. So I utilize what I can to put people in a happy state over and over because that's literally my job description, and I just stayed in good rapport with her, and um six years go by, she retires, and I go to her retirement party, and I just stay in touch with her, and then I send her the ARC copy of the book, which is Advanced Reader Copy. Um, and she reached out to me about 10 days ago and said I hadn't had a chance to look at it because of life things, and now I've looked at it and um I'll pull it up so that I don't misquote her.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

But basically, um I love the the full circle moment here, and while you're pulling it up, I appreciate you talking about doing it your job, and then I picture you as this like vigilante at nighttime. You're helping the middle middle-aged man find meaning in life as life has changed. Yeah, and just a little side note, it's interesting just as a story. I was talking to this Indian family from India over the weekend, and they said that the traditional Indian custom is that you change your name through the different cycles of life. So as you grow, your name changes. Yeah, isn't that cool? I get you talk about the feeling, I get goosebumps over thinking that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Isn't that interesting? Once goosebumps are involved, and now people in the audience are getting them too.

SPEAKER_00 37:48

Yeah. So, yeah. So, what did she say in response after she got a review of your work?

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Um, you know, she a little, you know, back and forth. And then she said, I think you have done a great job, and the comparison to psychotherapy is very useful. Um, I hope to finish it up and get a review online. And thanks, hope you're well. Thanks for writing the book. So for me, that was everything that um you know that that's that was the moonshot. You know, I'm an unknown guy writing an unknown book, writing a book that nobody asked for, right? Right. Um but specific enough.

SPEAKER_00 38:29

Now the scientist is like, well done.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:34

So that yeah, beautiful, man. That's so beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

And I was the other nice piece is it's a moment here.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

I recognize the moment, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:45

Thank you. Um, so I'm I'm really grateful to her. I didn't want to get out over my skis or make bold claims beyond what the research could could back up. And um your podcast, like I did a podcast last week that'll come out a couple days after this one, but it was with it's uh the Brain Inspired podcast with Paul Middlebrooks at Braininspired.co. And boy, I really like if if folks want to go, you know, we do a deep dive into the neuroscience side of it. Um, because he's a neuroscientist, and he's kind of the his podcast is the water cooler for the neuroscience community, which is worldwide and more than a little intimidating. Um Right.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

I was going, I was already picturing myself as like I feel like the proverbial janitor sweeping by as all these neuroscientists around the water cooler is like, don't mind me, I have no clue what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 39:51

That was that was me. I wanted to approach it with a huge deal of hum, like very natural humility.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Right.

SPEAKER_01 39:59

Like, as far as I'm concerned, these folks are the smartest people working today on the the challenges on planet having to do with understanding the brain and consciousness, and the and there's a a whole cadre of philosophers that support these folks, which is fantastic in and of its own right. Yeah, so I approached them kind of like are they gonna whack me with a shovel, you know, like fully expecting it. And to my and they embraced you, yeah. Well, they didn't whack me. Not they didn't whack you, okay. And so my ask of them and my approach to them is I'm a clinician, and we all clinicians sit downstream of or we better, we should sit downstream of the neuroscience, we should sit downstream of the most recent stuff and the stuff that's past the test of time. And the field is always updating. And please help me make the book better. So that was when I when I spoke to some of the folks, like I reached out to there, there's a an incredible researcher working in that there's a whole field called reality monitoring.

SPEAKER_00 41:20

I'm like interesting.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

Holy shit, what is that?

SPEAKER_00 41:23

Yeah, that's like that's like knocking on the door of metaphysics, there.

SPEAKER_01 41:27

Yeah, it absolutely is. And so for a lot of the current research to work, it's because the field of phenomenology has really been working like gangbusters. And so if you think about like, like, what is phenomenology? Like, oh, it sounds fancy that I could say this term from philosophy, but what the hell is it? Well, it's really like it's our lived experience, it's how do we describe our lived experience, our sensory experience in philosophical terms. So there's a very famous, relatively recent essay in this arena of phenomenology called What's It Like to be a bat? Uh that's funny. What a great title, right?

SPEAKER_00 42:17

That's funny.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

And and so the author, and it's a fantastic read, it's very readable, and it poses that question like, can we ever know? And in the phenomenology world, it's like, well, is Ryan's red the same as my red? Is your you know, how do you experience your experience? And for a long time, it's like, well, this is unmeasurable. This is the realm of the unmeasurable. Well, with a lot of people, so in psychology in the 80s, um there were two researchers, um, Carol, somebody, and some I'm forgetting their name off the top of my head, that that wanted to look into so they called it reality monitoring. And they approached it from the position of memory, like um how humans construct their reality. Um, and now the current wave of that is um this uh researcher named Nadine Dykstra, and she looks at it through a perceptual lens, so perceptual reality monitoring. And they're getting to where they can weigh um what's the difference between a um remembered sensation, like you know, we all do the lemon test as hypnotists, right? Right, and that elicits the physiological response for somebody.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

Yeah, my mouth is already watering just at the mention of it.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Yeah, squeezing a lemon into the world and it's going through, and everyone's feeling perky on the other end, you know, or biting an apple and getting that. Physiological response in the chin. Right. Um, so Nadine's work, Dr. Dijkstra's work, is um measuring this phenomenon. And then there's other folks at the University of Sussex underneath uh Dr. Anil Seth, who wrote the book Being You, and they're studying what they call phenomenological control. Well, that's that uh another name for that is um wearing rose-colored glasses or walking under a cloud. But in the hypnosis world, it has a name, and it's called hypnotizability. So there's research. So I came to discuss not discover, but I came to find for myself, oh shit, there's researchers who are studying hypnotizability. They just they call it something different, but it is the same thing. It's how much control somebody brings, how much uh emotional effective plasticity any given individual has to their physiological parking in their environment.

SPEAKER_00 45:19

I feel like it boils down to being a kid again, believing in Santa Claus again.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

It absolutely does.

SPEAKER_00 45:26

That's so how do we do that? How do we rewind and become and get back that childhood sense of wonder? How do we do that?

SPEAKER_01 45:35

And that's the book, absolutely, and a good hypnotist reawakens that mental foraging capacity that every creature has. Now, for some folks, it's dangerous for them to change their outlook, right? They get you know, we we come across rigid thinkers or folks that dissociate too hard as a protective stance, and or folks that have any kind of uh hallucinatory experience that feels beyond their control. And so in the West, that's labeled as schizophrenia often, not always. Uh yeah, and then there's modality, you know, we are in the hypno world, like we are shamanic adjacent, and in plenty of shamanic traditions, they have ways of working with folks that have that kind of if you want to call it psychic splitting. Um but that's that's arenas of specialization, and I don't I will never claim expertise on that. I'm I'm interested in it, I've done it myself, I've been on both sides of that. Um, all of that I think is fertile ground for recasting how we treat it. And when I was working in, you know, on the recreational therapeutic end, I worked with plenty of folks with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar. And I met them where they were at, and I was careful around all of that because that was my silo.

SPEAKER_00 47:16

It feels like you're almost like uh modern day Oliver Sachs. Like you're getting there.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

Yeah, I don't I don't know. And then like that poor guy made shit up, right? Unfortunately, it's like, dude, did you really have to make up your research? No, you really shouldn't have done that. So I'm very careful about like I don't want to make anything up. I want the like I think hypnosis is amazing on its own. And if a client, like I do past life regression kind of work with clients, and I've had it done on me, it's a you know, and it's very profound, and it's also ordinary. Like one of my teachers was like, you know, we were mostly potato farmers, we weren't always Cleopatra or you know, um, something that grand. And that's been my experience with it. And is it like my my personal belief is uh pretty out there and that the veil is very thin, and that by working in this work it's much easier to. I mean, I feel it now, and I think folks listening or watching probably see that in me, my shift. It's a very powerful thing for me, but I don't make those claims, I don't really touch it that much in the book. You know, I kind of ground woo and say, for the purpose of this book, it's not necessary to legitimize us.

SPEAKER_00 49:01

Gotcha. And maybe that's yeah, and maybe the next book will be more exploring the woo side.

SPEAKER_01 49:09

It it will. It's the you know, the next book, it it might be called applied mental foraging, but it'll be it something like that, and it'll be clinician focused. This book is more to, you know, my my hope is the neuroscience community reads it and goes, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Yes, but this makes more sense than the psychology model we've been given. Next is I hope the medical community will give it a fair shot and read it and go, Oh, yeah, he's got something we should look at this for as an adjunct, as they call it, or a compliment, as they also call it, to medical practice, or to be on medical teams as an adjunct for pain relief for the things that we score high on. And then thirdly, it's all the clinicians out there, everyone who works with folks, whether you have you know the medical license or uh hypnosis certification or you know, any of the certifications, because we're a self-police field, you know, that that's the way so the ethical aspect of the book is very deep. It's very important to me that we practice ethically, that we that we will never exploit someone's vulnerability, that we we are the guard, so that they can let down their guard enough to explore. Like that's super important to me, that those kind of updates. So that's who the the book is for. And the next book is much more the applied side. I think any smart clinician who wants to update themselves will get a lot that they can use by reading the book, but the next book is much more focused on the application side. This one is maybe a convincer, if you will. Yeah, this is what's really going on. Right. You know, of course, predictive processing is timeline work, right?

SPEAKER_00 51:16

And I appreciate it. It's like ethical magic.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

It's ethical magic, yes.

SPEAKER_00 51:23

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

Anyone who wants to join is welcome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:28

And please share, like you mentioned, you know, let's get the word out. So if you're watching this, listening, share this with a friend of yours that might be a clinician or might be in the field, and so we can keep moving that needle.

SPEAKER_01 51:42

I'm really looking for ambassadors. Yes, ambassadors. They can go to mentalforaging.com and have a place to sign up for a newsletter for announcements and stuff. I I really need help with getting the word out. I'm not some big name. I'm just I'm I'm just James, you know.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

Just James. Yeah. Very good. And then so and you're on Twitter and Facebook or X now. Yeah. Uh so if people want to ask questions like you ask other people questions, they can go there and ask questions and I'm setting up my YouTube log as well.

unknown 52:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:18

Cool.

SPEAKER_00 52:19

I'm wondering before before we go, what's what was the biggest oh that's so cool moment when doing this book? Like what like really like opened your eyes?

SPEAKER_01 52:31

So many of them, but the funny one that starts it, I call that part of the book bingo all the time. Cause I was like, I'm new to this role, and part of the role is I'm doing games and activities for people. Well, I can offer chair yoga and trips around the world and the price is right, and other games and uh basketball and sports that are age appropriate and ability appropriate, but bingo brings all the kids to the yard. Like, what is it about bingo? Right?

SPEAKER_00 53:10

That's the same in the blind center where I work. It's the same thing. There's yoga, there's painting, bingo always fills the seats. And so, yeah, same more. What's going on there?

SPEAKER_01 53:20

So I'm not making that up. If you go to any elder care facility, it's bingo all the time. We want to play bingo, we want to play bingo. Well, it's foraging, it's mental foraging. So, you know, think of it from a hypnotist's perspective. So the number is called, all the audio neurology lights up, and what does that do? It sends the eyes into search mode, right? Sacades, so hunting mode, right? And what's you know, if you look at the visual cortex, um the neuroscientists talk about the first six layers of the visual cortex being things that uh like detect movement and shape and color orientation, right? All these things like object permanence comes a little later because that takes more wattage to build, but movement, ooh, right? That's more important than anything else, right? I mean, light and dark, maybe, maybe that's number one, but movement is right there behind uh, you know, you need light and dark to see anything, yeah. But right behind that is movement. So we're keen for movement and we like to track things and we like to search. So I'm like, holy shit, these folks are mentally foraging. They're foraging, and then you know, they're seeking and finding. There's no cognitive skill involved that you know, other than the cognitive skill of seeking and moving the eyes, and then they you know, they get the number, they get a little dopamine rush, and they put a bottle cap down on that number, and then they get two or three, and that anticipation builds, right? And then they get all five in a row, bingo, and they get the dopamine hit.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

I was about to say the dopamine and then the prize. Sometimes there's a prize that helps the dopamine.

SPEAKER_01 55:17

You you better give a prize if you're calling bingo folks. Right, right. If you're calling bingo and you're not giving prizes, you're doing it wrong. You know, get the room excited, whip them up. Yeah. Um, so that was this, that was kind of the epiphany that started it all. It's like, oh, people want to forage because the folks I'm working with, they're not stupid because they have dementia. You know, I and and they and they not not only are they not stupid, they can still learn, right? So that was an interesting thing. I had um, you know, without revealing any HIPAA information, I had folks from all walks of life. Yeah. So I had folks that were very, very, very, very intelligent. I had other folks that were very spiritually off the charts that um lacked some abilities that would allow them to function outside of an institution who more than made up for it with these incredible um let's call them uh, you know, their sensory abilities were just incredible, you know. Oh my goodness, you know, people that couldn't see with their eyes, but they made up for it in other ways, let me tell you. Right. Um I witnessed that all the time. It's like, huh? Okay, this person knows I'm in the room now, you know, yeah, since my presence, like, okay, okay. Trying to communicate with them, like I don't know what's going on with that. That's not the scope of the book. But there's but I kept coming back to foraging, foraging, foraging as the most ancient behavior. So we started, and I said I put hypnosis on the couch and I did past life regression, and you know, I'm joking, but I'm not. I really I'm like, what are you, hypnosis? Are you real or are you some made up bullshit? Right.

SPEAKER_00 57:23

Or a mix of both.

SPEAKER_01 57:24

Or a mix of both, or what, you know, and it said, look to foraging. So I look, I'm like, what do you mean? And I realized, like, so foraging is a researched field and it's a domain, but it hadn't really, to my knowledge, and maybe it has been, and I'm just it's not my field, so I'm dipping a toe in all these fields. But so evolution does not have an agenda, right? But individual creatures, you bet they do, they absolutely, and that comes from the science writer Philip Ball. He pointed that out that individual creatures they want to live, they want to reproduce. So happy accidents happen. Foraging is metabolically expensive, right? So you do one thing and live, and you do the other thing and die. Well, that that's expensive, so that created pressure for memory. So that's why the book is called Mental Foraging and the Evolution of Memory. There was evolutionary pressure to remember things. Well creatures did not have nerve nervous systems in the early days, right? There's plenty of creatures that evolve things that are memory-like. So think about um, you know, you drop a stone into the sand, it leaves an imprint, right? Well, that's a form of memory. And maybe that's the oldest form. And so there's a physicality even to how molecules organize themselves and what they call chirality or directionality to molecular layout. And you know, you do something a billion times, you might make a mistake now and then, or you might get good at the repeated action. And so through the twin forces of repeated action and mistakes and pressure for, you know, um, do this live, do that, die, do that live, do that, die, da da da da billion times, billion times. Well, that was single cell life for a long time, and then it started eating itself, and then it accidentally cooperated, and you got multicellular life from that, and then you get the the pressures leading to like memory at its most basic is comparison, right? Oh, last time I ate that, I died. Oh, last time I ate that I lived, right? Right. Last time grandpa ate that, he died. Uh mom fed me that and it worked, so I'm going with that, right? I mean, it is that simple, and that scaled to memory. And the white queen from uh Alice in Wonderland put it the best. She said, It is a pool of memory that works only backwards. So, you know, our ability to imagine is taking memory and putting it into the future and removing the time stamp. That's what the imagination is.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:54

That's that's a brilliant way to do it. And it's almost like you're time traveling in the other dreams.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:03

Exactly. Like, and I wonder, out of all the clinicians in the world, who has kept that alive? I'm talking to you, hypnotists. Thank you. You know, and so this the book is a love letter to the hypnosis community because we've taken our shots, right? And we've kept this alive, we've kept uh timeline work alive, we've kept things like interoception, listen to your heart. What are your feet telling you? What are your lungs telling you? What's your heart, what are your hands saying, right? Richard Hill and Mirroring Hands. Yeah. So this is the book's a love letter to Ernest Rossi. You know, so it's very much for folks, anyone in the community that knows of him, he's you know the Ericksonian tradition, but he really brought it into he he Ernest Rossi talked a lot about what we call transduction, which is one bodily system, how it communicates with another. And then Richard Hill brought that into the contemporary era. So I'm kind of, you know, like uh Richard, I don't know if I've told you this, you're my mentor, you know. Oh and Ernest is my mentor. Um it's kind of keeping that that branch of uh you know that that role is being carried, you know, in a ritual way, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:41

James, this this is an absolute pleasure. And before we let you go, what's how can people get in touch with you and your book one more time?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

So mentalforaging.com, uh James at mentalforaging.com. Um, I've just set that up. Uh so it's brand new. And what I'll attempt to do is keep any link to like your podcast and the brain inspired podcast and any announcements. Please sign up. I I ask for your help with being an early ambassador. If this resonates with you, I need people who understand it to help tell the story. So, what what I invite you to look for is very soon in the coming, probably within a week or two, I'm gonna start offering. Um, I'll probably do a zoom thing for the launch, and that'll just be feel good, yay, da-da-da, balloons. You know, maybe I'll get some balloons.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:42

I should get disco balls, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:44

You know, I'll turn the disco ball on. But then after that, I'll do a book walkthrough. So chapter one is the overview of the book. Chapter two is the wedge between the brain and the mind. So, what happened? Why did psychology kick us to the curb? Backstory, and then you know, I go uh, so I'll go into the book with differing levels of clinical depth, like you know, maybe one's more general clinician for like doctors and nurses who aren't gonna get the hypnosis lingo, but they're gonna understand, you know. So I may you know frame it to those folks and then like deep dive for the serious clinical hypnotist community. Um, so I want to start putting together um you know little workshop y things like that. And and then the the longer term goal is to do you know, full-fledged workshops where we do deep dive into the applied side, you know, how to be even better at your craft. Yeah, do you wonder, does it align with the latest, greatest? Um, you know, all that. So yeah, please come and sign up, mentalforaging.com. Um, and I I won't, I'm not a spammy guy. I I want to help get the field to uh a new, stronger, foundational, grounded place.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:18

Sounds great. Thank you so much, James. We appreciate you. I appreciate you. Thank you so much, Ryan.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:24

You're a lot of fun. You too, I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:28

Yeah, a lot of fun at Hypnothots.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

That's right, and I will be presenting at Hypnothots in July. Perfect. So um come and meet me there and I'll I'll do a book signing. Wow, I've never Yeah, look at that.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:40

A book signing.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:41

I I bought one of those you know, those squeezy things that puts a imprint on the book with a gold sticker, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

Oh, that's fancy.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

You know, go the full why not? You know, it's why not? It's a treat for me, you know. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:00

Bye bye.