My journey, from the child who saw life through rose-tinted glasses despite family chaos to the neuroscience researcher, has always brought me back to one and the same conviction: hypnosis is not just a therapeutic tool; it is intelligence itself, a philosophy of life.
I discovered hypnosis very young, at around 8 or 9, in meetings called “La relax”. These sessions taught me to direct my thoughts and to create mantras that gave me positive automatic responses, such as “I want, I believe, I succeed”. Hypnosis allowed me to exercise my joy and remain the little girl who saw life through rose-tinted glasses, despite heartbreaks that could have been devastating. I understood very early on that imagination was my superpower and that hypnosis revealed it.
My professional path, from psychology to neuroscience, then brought things full circle. My PhD work on hypnosis and chronic pain highlighted a fundamental premise: chronic pain is a form of negative self-hypnosis. From there, it became obvious to me: if pain is negative self-hypnosis, then rising in intelligence and performance is nothing other than positive self-hypnosis.
The state of absorption is only an opening; for hypnosis to be complete, a message must be conveyed. Formal hypnosis aims to move the subject from an ill-suited system of thought to another. It is a very powerful tool of persuasion, which mainly uses suggestion to convince the brain to adopt a new mental attitude. Suggestion is not an order but a discreet communication that works behind the scenes, often through metaphor. Hypnosis relies entirely on imagination (or mental imagery) to reframe thoughts, since it is a dialogue between two imaginations. Words thus become action.
Hypnosis, as I see it, rests on the understanding that it is never life that makes us suffer, but the way we interpret it.
We begin by guiding the subject towards a different state of consciousness, known as trance, hypnotic state or absorption. This state is essential because the more we think and reason (System 2), the more we judge and raise objections, which prevents us from embracing a new state of mind. Hypnosis aims to depotentiate consciousness as an instrument of algorithmic reasoning (sequential logic) in order to achieve greater flexibility of mind.
In the brain, this state is underpinned by reduced activity in the default mode network (DMN). Trance is above all mental absorption and attentional tunnelling, in which the subject is fully attentive to their inner experience and unaffected by distracting external stimuli. It is a gateway.
I have defined intelligence not as an ability (such as philocognition) but as a state that reveals our abilities. Hypnosis is the vehicle par excellence for this state of intelligence.
The hypnotic state resembles flow, that moment of performance when everything seems easy and you are perfectly connected with your environment (resonance).
Being in a state of intelligence means modulating your mental representations to foster your own growth and direct your attention towards opportunities. This requires trusting the cognitive unconscious (Kahneman's System 1), which manages 90 to 95% of our brain activity and excels at heuristic thinking (through associations and metaphors).
When hypnosis is practised as self-hypnosis, it necessarily becomes a philosophy. It frees us from conditioning by giving us the power to recondition our own mental dispositions.
Ultimately, hypnosis is a storyteller that turns words into action (performative language). It is a pursuit of excellence that encourages us to assert our difference and become the captain of our destiny, because “everything you can imagine is real” (Pablo Picasso).
Today I practise hypnosis every day, for myself and with my patients… because yes, hypnosis by phone is entirely possible… and even better, if you want my opinion.
My research aimed to prove this hypothesis clinically, in particular by using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) to study the modulation of chronic lower back pain. Chronic pain, defined as pain lasting more than three months and often resistant to treatment, is an insidious, invisible and particularly disabling condition.
We observed that patients with chronic pain often showed specific psycho-cognitive processes, such as attention being captured by the experience of pain, a tendency to catastrophise, and negative anticipation of symptoms. These mechanisms can lead to depressive symptoms, depression being considered the strongest predictor of pain becoming chronic. Chronic pain then resembles an almost hypnotic confinement.
Our PET results demonstrated the effectiveness of hypnosis for patients with lower back pain: perceived pain decreased by 64% after the hypnotic state, compared with only 28% after the normal waking state.
More importantly, we identified two distinct neural networks:
Analgesic suggestion activates a cognitive-sensory network (including the frontotemporal cortex, the insula, the somatosensory cortex and the cerebellum).
Hypnoanalgesia activates an emotional network (including the frontotemporal cortex, the insula, the caudate nucleus, the nucleus accumbens, the lentiform nuclei and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)). These regions are involved in the emotional modulation of pain and in the reward system, suggesting that hypnosis modulates pain by activating positive emotions.
Hypnosis proved more effective than the waking state for both types of suggestion, probably thanks to the effectiveness of the emotional network.
