What Actually Happens to Your Brain in One of My Trance Sessions

Let’s start with the myth, because the myth is doing a lot of damage.

Somewhere between Hollywood and the self-help industry, hypnosis got flattened into a parlor trick — the swinging watch, the vacant eyes, the subject clucking like a chicken while the hypnotist smirks. Or worse, the darker fantasy: a defenseless mind being written over by someone else’s will.

Neither is what happens in my sessions.

Not even close.

What actually happens is more interesting, more nuanced, and frankly more powerful than either cartoon. And the neuroscience — which has caught up considerably in the last two decades — backs every word of it.

Let me walk you through what your brain is doing when you sit with me.

First: What Is a Trance State, Actually?

Your brain is always operating across multiple frequencies simultaneously — electrical patterns called brainwaves that neuroscientists measure in hertz. In your ordinary waking state, you’re predominantly in beta — fast, alert, analytical, task-oriented. This is the frequency of email responses, deadline management, and the mental voice that narrates your day.

Beta is useful. Beta is also exhausting. And beta, critically, is heavily defended. It’s the frequency at which your critical faculty — the part of your mind that filters, doubts, categorizes, and rejects — is most active.

When I guide you into trance, we’re moving deliberately through two other states.

Alpha comes first — the gentle threshold between active thinking and receptive awareness. You’ve been here before: the shower, the long drive, the edge of sleep where ideas suddenly arrive uninvited. Your body relaxes. The internal narrator quiets. You’re still present, still aware, but the guard at the gate has stepped back.

Then, if we go deeper, we reach theta — the state associated with deep meditation, REM dreaming, creative insight, and what researchers call heightened suggestibility. This is where memory consolidates. This is where insight arrives not as an argument but as a felt knowing. This is where the most interesting work happens.

I am a guide into theta. That is the most precise description of what I do.

What the Research Actually Shows

Stanford neuroscientist David Spiegel’s lab produced landmark imaging research showing that during hypnosis, three significant things happen in the brain simultaneously.

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex — the part of your brain responsible for worry, self-monitoring, and what researchers call “task-switching anxiety” — goes quiet. The internal noise that tells you to second-guess yourself, to perform, to manage how you’re being perceived? It dims significantly.

Meanwhile, the connection between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (your executive control center) and the insula (which processes body awareness and subjective experience) actually strengthens. You develop a tighter link between intention and felt experience. You become, paradoxically, more connected to your own inner life, not less.

And the connection between the executive control center and the default mode network — the part of your brain responsible for self-referential thought, the internal story you tell about who you are — decreases. The ego loosens its grip on the narrative.

Read that again. During trance, your anxiety quiets, your mind-body connection strengthens, and your fixed self-concept becomes more flexible.

This is not loss of control. This is the neurological definition of freedom.

Pharaoh Muse is an Afro-Latina hypnotist and trance guide whose practice draws on Kemetic tradition, diasporic spiritual intelligence, and contemporary neuroscience. To inquire about sessions, visit https://ohh.me/pharoahmuse