What Happens in the Brain During Hypnosis?
One of the reasons hypnosis can feel so different from ordinary thinking is that the brain is not simply “relaxing”. During hypnosis, the brain reorganises the way attention, body awareness and self-reflection work together — and that reorganisation is what makes hypnotherapy such a powerful tool for change.
The brain’s alarm system quietens down
One of the first things that appears to happen in hypnosis is a lowering of activity in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. This area is involved in what neuroscientists call the salience network — the system that helps us notice what feels important, urgent, threatening or demanding of our attention.
You could think of it as part of the brain’s alarm-and-orientation system. A loud noise happens, something unexpected moves in the corner of your eye, someone looks at you in a certain way, and your attention is pulled towards it. Something in you says: pay attention, this might matter.
In hypnosis, activity in this system quietens down. This is significant, because it allows attention to become much more focused. The mind becomes less scattered by every external cue, every small worry, every background noise, every ordinary demand of self-consciousness. Something can move into the background, so that something else can become more vivid, more available, more absorbing.
A stronger connection with the body
At the same time, hypnosis appears to strengthen the connection between the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain involved in executive control, direction and organisation — and the insula.
The insula is a small but very important area of the brain involved in sensing the internal state of the body. It helps us register breath, tension, sensation, emotion, discomfort, ease, movement and visceral feeling. It is one of the places where mind and body speak to each other.
So in hypnosis, you are not becoming less embodied. Quite the opposite. You become more connected to the body, more able to feel the body from the inside, more able to let imagination, emotion and sensation communicate with each other.
This is one of the reasons hypnotherapy can be so powerful therapeutically. It is not just talking about change. It is not just thinking about change. It allows an idea, an image, a memory or a possibility to be experienced through the body.
The “me” network becomes less dominant
Then there is another important shift during hypnosis.
The connection between the executive control network and the posterior cingulate cortex — an area associated with the default mode network — changes. The default mode network is highly active when we are thinking about ourselves: who we are, what we should be doing, what other people think of us, what kind of person we are, what kind of person we are not allowed to be.
It is the network of self-reference. The “me” network. The part of us that keeps narrating identity.
In hypnosis, this ordinary self-referencing becomes quieter. Not absent, not erased, but less dominant.
And that matters enormously. Because so much of our suffering is held in the assumptions we keep repeating about ourselves:
I am anxious. I am not creative. I cannot speak in public. I am bad at relationships. I am not the kind of person who can change. I have always been like this.
In an ordinary state of consciousness, these statements can feel like facts. They can feel like the architecture of the self.
Trying out a different self-experience
In hypnosis, because the usual self-monitoring and self-defining systems are softened, you can begin to try out another possibility. Not as an abstract positive thought. Not as an affirmation stuck on top of fear. But as an actual, lived experience.
For a little while, you can experience what it might feel like to be less afraid. More spacious. More creative. More able to speak. More able to move. More able to choose. These are powerful experiences to have, especially if you have denied them to yourself until that very point.
This is what makes hypnotherapy such an interesting therapeutic space. It brings together focused attention, absorption, a temporary loosening of habitual self-consciousness, a stronger connection with the body, and a greater flexibility in the way we imagine ourselves.
The kind of imagining we are talking about here is not the same as the imagining you do in an ordinary waking state. Research has shown that what the mind experiences in hypnosis is, at the level of brain activity and physiology, almost indistinguishable from what we experience when we are having a “real” experience. Hypnosis allows us to live internally something that the brain and body register as equal to what we live in everyday reality.
From suggestibility to cognitive flexibility
What used to be called “suggestibility” is perhaps better understood as cognitive flexibility. The old word carries too much baggage, as if hypnosis makes you weak, passive, gullible or open to manipulation. That is not the interesting part of hypnosis at all.
The interesting part is that hypnosis allows you to try on a new pattern of experience — a new way of feeling, of perceiving yourself, of inhabiting your body.
And because it is experienced rather than merely discussed, the possibility becomes more real. Hypnotherapy opens a door onto a different story and a new set of experiences that become immediately logged in your body and your mind, filling up new reference points and new perimeters of what is possible.
That does not mean every change happens instantly. But it does mean that hypnosis creates the conditions in which change becomes more available, more imaginable, more embodied — and therefore more possible.
This is a short and simplified account of a much richer neuroscience framework, developed through the work of Dr David Spiegel and his team at Stanford University, whose research has been central in showing how hypnosis changes patterns of attention, body awareness and self-experience
