Translator: Shadia Ramsahye Reviewer: Denise RQ
When I was little, I used to play the piano.
I loved that instrument,
Well, more so in the beginning.
After that I was at the Conservatory of Music,
and there were exams twice a year.
You had to spend several weeks
preparing for one piece that you would play in front of a jury,
or sometimes even for an audience.
From that point on,
playing the piano became mainly a feeling of stress for me.
I remember I had a professor who I loved.
She was always smiling, very enthusiastic.
One day, just before an exam,
she held me by the shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and said,
"Above all, don't stress out."
(Laughter)
"No matter what, don't think about stress."
That's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to ask you right now to not think about your breath
or even to not remember a number that has no significance to you.
For example, the number 834.
(Laughter)
Don't picture an 8, a 3, and a 4.
Don't engrave it in your memory.
You definitely shouldn't fall asleep thinking about this number,
dream about it, or wake up with it in mind.
(Laughter)
So, please take a moment to really not cement it in your memory.
(Laughter)
You can imagine it didn't work at all when she told me that.
It just made me focus on my stress. I felt it even more.
I was very happy at that moment.
This professor really meant well.
But you know, there's a saying,
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
She was so full of good intentions.
She had just given me a tip,
but she had no idea how the mind worked.
As for me, I had to wait many years
before I was able to touch a piano again.
It was after the conservatory that I enjoyed it again.
It gave me two ideas.
The first is, we don't really know how our brain works.
And apparently, our parents and teachers have absolutely no idea.
They try to help, but they don't have the tools.
And the second idea
is that if we don't learn to control our brain, it will control us.
In our education, they usually ask us
to learn to control ourselves, to channel our attention.
They ask a bunch of things,
but at no point does someone tell us, "Here's how it works."
We're kind of left on our own.
We're told to be rational, to make logical decisions.
But most of the time,
as soon as we get emotional, reason is swept aside.
We are not rational beings.
We are first and foremost emotional beings.
Take for example someone who has a phobia.
If a person with a fear of flying is boarding a plane,
you wouldn't calmly explain to him, for example,
that planes are the safest mode of transport in the world.
That there's no danger in getting into that machine.
I think he'd look at you even more angrily and say,
"I know that. That's not the problem."
Reason isn't enough.
We can't channel our emotions using reason.
Besides emotions, and that type of emotion,
we notice that most of the time, our brain works in ways
that are so not adapted to modern society.
We could take many examples.
For example, we talk about stress.
But stress is, fundamentally, a good response.
In nature, if you had to run fast, it was a good thing
blood flowed into our legs for our flight reflex.
The problem is that a lot of situations - a test, a job interview, etc -
don't really require that you run away.
(Laughter)
The situation is not well suited at all.
Imagine a little country road at night.
There's a rabbit crossing the street,
and a car comes up with all its headlights on.
For the rabbit, there's a logical reflex,
because hundreds and hundreds of generations of rabbits developed
a precise reaction for confronting a predator: freeze.
(Laughter)
Play dead.
Except that a rabbit doesn't really know what a car is.
(Laughter)
The car runs it over.
It's revolting!
But that simply means it's an archaic function.
So fortunately, we could reeducate our brain.
We could teach it brand new functions,
modify our perception, modify our reactions.
But that forces us to learn how it works.
I don't know if you do the same, but I find it pretty strange
that we've all spent more time
learning to use a computer, or a telephone, or a TV,
than what's floating between our ears.
Especially now that we're starting to get a sense of how it works.
Before, we could say there were some gaps,
and that it was intuition and maybe some strange things.
But today, neuroscience, social psychology, and cognitive psychology
are slowly starting to map the brain.
We're far from knowing everything,
but we already have some useful ideas, some useful principles,
and it's been so for quite a while.
So if we could imagine an ideal world,
we'd take a brain class in first grade.
(Laughter)
Imagine you're back in first grade.
The very first day, the teacher would have come in
and started explaining how it works.
Before having to memorize anything,
someone would have taught you, how to memorize.
Wouldn't that be great?
Imagine all the time you'd save.
We would learn how to memorize and store images.
We would learn there's also an auditory memory,
and how to use it alongside visual memory.
We would even learn there is muscle memory, sensory memory,
and that when we pair another type of memory with that,
it's even more efficient.
We would learn that memory needs maintenance.
There are people today who win memory contests after 60 years,
memorizing some pretty amazing stuff.
So, we'd learn how to memorize and we'd save ourselves endless time.
After, we'd even immensely enjoy doing it.
We'd learn other things in this brain class.
In a few weeks, we'd know how to memorize.
Next, we could learn to manage emotions.
We'd learn how to transform stress into confidence or to surpass ourselves.
We'd learn to concentrate.
Maybe we'd learn how to become more creative.
And yet, those would be just the basics.
If we did that,
we could easily completely change our relationship to the world.
But there's still one problem:
understanding is not enough.
While we might know exactly how we work, we'd still struggle to act it out.
As I said earlier, our emotions override reason.
I can try to control myself or even explain how I should be able to,
but if something happens, I'll usually be reacting to that.
The emotional brain is a lot faster than the logical brain.
Plenty of solutions have been created to address this well-known problem.
In nearly all civilizations, since the beginning of history,
there were attempts to answer it.
In some civilizations, we called it meditation.
Several types of meditation were created.
We called this zen, we called that yoga.
We used movement.
We used rituals, rhythm, music, sometimes even psychotropics.
There was every possibility you could imagine.
They all had one thing in common: altering our state of consciousness.
We very quickly realized that in our normal state,
we didn't manage to act upon the rest.
On what was unconscious, as if there were a barrier between us.
But in an altered state of consciousness, this kind of thing became possible again.
In the West, there was a way of doing this,
a rather modern way that we call hypnosis.
I discovered hypnosis when I was little,
right after piano.
It was something I was passionate about.
Today, I'm lucky enough to manage a school
where every year, we give hundreds of people
the tools to use hypnosis in daily life.
Our students are coaches, therapists, speakers, a lot of teachers,
and they all have something in common:
understanding how to modify consciousness
in order to act upon what usually escapes us.
I told you earlier we're starting to have a sort of map of all that.
And obviously, you could also say that these modern disciplines,
and hypnosis is not the only example,
can also be applied to what neuroscience teaches us.
Hypnosis seems to suffer
from a lot of myths, cliches, and stereotypical images.
Most are spread by the movies, or sci-fi.
Sometimes, the image still shocks us,
but hypnosis is also something very, very simple.
In fact, hypnosis is a daily state,
and we experience it several times per day.
Yesterday, for example,
and I think you've seen this thousands of times,
I was walking a route I regularly take.
I've probably taken it hundreds of times.
At a certain point, my thoughts wandered.
I didn't know where they had gone,
but my body continued walking.
Then a few minutes, or a few dozen minutes after,
I arrived exactly where I had wanted to.
I have no idea if I stopped here or there, or if I crossed here or there,
if the light was red or green when I crossed.
All I know is I arrived at my destination.
We call that sleepwalking, don't we?
I let my body go. I trusted it.
And we all do that.
We have plenty of expressions for this state.
we were somewhere else, in the clouds,
we were on the moon, we were on Mars.
(Laughter)
We were elsewhere, for sure.
That is to say that we were a lot more unconscious than conscious
of what was happening to us at that moment in time.
Sometimes, when reading a book, maybe in the evening, when you are tired,
and then at some point, a word, or a phrase, or an image carries you away.
And then, your eyes keep following the lines,
your hands keep turning the pages,
and we wake up three or four pages later.
We have no idea what we read in that time.
(Laughter)
Our body must remember something, but we don't know what happened.
That's exactly what hypnosis is.
But if we go even further,
we'll realize that hypnosis is a state we often seek out in our lives.
Since naturally,
like when we we go to the movies,
we want the film to absorb us, hypnotize us.
When we open a book, we want it to hypnotize us,
that the suggestions inside act on us
and lead us to a new state, a special experience.
so that we enter the story.
When we go to a museum and stop in front of an artwork,
that our pupils dilate, that we feel an emotion.
We're hypnotized by this work.
I think hypnosis is what we seek the most in life.
That which lifts us from the banal, towards the emotional, the living.
I even think that an artist's main goal
is to hypnotize the people who go to see his artwork.
What makes hypnosis something both common and very special,
since perhaps it's what links all experiences that mark and touch us.
If that's what we consider hypnosis,
it's no longer about falling asleep or being manipulated,
but about taking control of oneself.
Hypnosis comes from Greek - Hypnos was the God of sleep.
We see the asleep part of it, but then, Hypnos was the one
who stayed awake while everyone was sleeping.
Maybe hypnosis is a state of greater lucidity.
So if I summarize,
we have, on the one hand, a map that's starting to be drawn,
a map of our brain, and how it works;
and on the other hand, where once we had a frontier,
now we have a mode of transport,
a vehicle that allows us to access to what escapes us.
The problem is that most of the time, when we're hypnotized,
we don't want to be; it just happens.
We need someone who can drive us there.
That's what a practitioner of hypnosis learns to do.
He'll learn to discover the path
by which we can bypass our habitual consciousness,
displace our level of consciousness.
Usually, it happens with games.
A mental game.
A game that we can play with ourselves.
Before there is a first-grade brain class,
perhaps we could do it as adults.
And we can take the idea even further.
If we think of our brain as a giant receiver,
our senses constantly gathering information.
From day one, we're bombarded with information.
In fact, there are thousands and thousands of inputs
that shape our perception and end up creating our worldview,
from which we create our identity, our subjectivity,
and thus our personality.
We could almost say that,
we're all already hypnotized by all of these inputs;
what's said to us, what's taught to us,
beliefs, ideas that we read, hear, feel, deduce.
And in turn, all of that creates our personality.
Personality comes from the Greek, "persona."
It's the mask we choose to wear in order to face reality.
That could imply there are several of them,
several potential masks that we could change, play with.
I was reading an article a while back that said in the morning,
when we're getting ready, when we step out of the shower,
we take about a minute and a half -
from the moment we open our closet to check out all the possibilities,
to choose what to wear that day.
We know that wearing a suit or shorts and flip-flops
are not the same thing, that we influence the way people see us,
and we influence ourselves.
We modify the image we present and what we feel.
Imagine next to your real closet
there's a virtual closet - an imaginary, mental one.
You open it, and there is every possible version of yourself,
every possible mask.
You could look at them and ask yourself, "What do I need today?
Do I need to be more creative, more free, more focused?"
You could look at all that and ask, "What emotion do I want to look like?"
If you took a few moments to do that,
you would undoubtedly change the day's possibilities.
You would model your identity according to all possibilities,
and you wouldn't end up taking yourself seriously
trying to fit into one single mask.
You could have fun with it, play with it.
Perhaps even one day, looking at all these masks,
asking yourself which you'll wear, you could say to yourself,
"No mask today."
And just see what happens.
I think that it's often the multiplicity of experiences
that makes us free.
So before leaving, I'll suggest one thing.
Rather, I'll ask you one thing.
Tomorrow, when you wake up,
when you ask yourself, "What clothes am I going to wear?"
at that moment,
do not think about a mental closet.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause)