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Hypnotherapist's simple 'installation' trick gives negative people a more positive outlook

“My life completely changed and my mind was completely blown when I learned that it was possible.”

via Canva/Photos

Thumbs up or thumbs down.

Emilie Leyes, a certified hypnotherapist and brain-training specialist, is helping people turn their negative outlooks more positive by teaching them a simple trick based on neuroscience. The trick is called “installation” and was developed by neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, Ph.D. Over time, it’s a simple practice that can reprogram our brains to counter our natural negativity bias.

Negativity bias refers to our proclivity to “attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information.” It’s why people tend to read negative headlines more than positive ones or are more likely to remember bad experiences than happy ones. It’s also why we have a larger emotional and physical response to adverse stimuli than things we enjoy.

Even though it’s an unpleasant trait, our focus on things that can harm us has helped humans survive for hundreds of thousands of years. However, according to Leyes, there’s a way to bring our minds into balance so that we don’t have such a negative, dour outlook on life.

How to have a positive outlook on life

“The good news is that you can actually counteract this negativity bias and change the way your brain functions. There's an amazing little tool, brain trick, whatever you want to call it, called installation,” Leyes said in a video with over 4 million views.

@emilieleyes.hypnosis

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“It was developed by psychologist Dr. Rick Hansen, which is basically the act of, like, amplifying the positive experiences when they come. Because, remember, the positive experiences are less intense than the negative ones,” Leyes continued. “And the practice of installation is really all about savoring those positive moments longer and more intensely than you normally would.”

Leyes says you can use the technique whenever you have a positive experience. Let’s say you are enjoying a big, cheesy, saucy piece of pizza. As you come to the last bite, focus on all of the incredible flavors and slowly chew it. Savor every moment it’s in your mouth. “And in doing that, you're actually growing that emotional response to that positive experience, which over time can start to balance out that negativity bias,” she says.



Dr. Hanson says it’s ok if we create our own positive experiences by thinking about things we’re grateful for or remembering a time we stood up to a bully or had genuine compassion for someone in pain. “Then, once you’ve got that good experience going, really enjoy it: taking 5, 10, or more seconds to protect and stay with it, and open to it in your body. The longer and more intensely those neurons fire together, the more they’ll be wiring this inner strength into your brain,” Dr. Hanson writes.

The great thing is that the installation trick will not only improve your outlook but also open the door to more positive experiences.

“It's actually priming the brain to take in more good experiences as they come,” Leyes says in her TikTok video. “Cause what we put our focused attention on is amplified in our minds and totally informs our experience. So your brain will start to learn from that and start to recognize that positive experiences are equally important to the negative ones.”

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Man was awake and playing the saxophone throughout his entire 9-hour brain tumor surgery

Several times during the surgery, the patient played the theme song from "Love Story" by Francis Lai.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

"Awake surgery" allows brain surgeons to see the functioning parts of the brain to avoid during surgery.

This article originally appeared on 10.17.22


Do you ever step back and marvel at the miraculous things human beings have figured out how to do?

Less than 200 years ago, no human being had ever played a saxophone, there was no such thing as anesthesia and if you had even a simple brain tumor, you were just out of luck.

Now, a team of doctors in Italy has successfully performed a highly complex, nine-hour brain surgery on a man while he was awake and while he played the saxophone. Not only that, but the patient reported feeling "tranquility" during the surgery and only spent a few days in the hospital after the surgery before being discharged.

According to CBS News, a 35-year-old male patient had a brain tumor removed at Paideia International Hospital in Rome, Italy, on October 10. The surgery was led by Dr. Christian Brogna, a neurosurgeon who specializes in complex cancer surgeries and "awake surgery," in which patients are not put under general anesthesia. According to the Mayo Clinic, certain brain surgeries actually require a patient to be awake and responsive during the procedure to lessen the risk of the surgery damaging areas of the brain that could affect vision, movement or speech.

Dr. Brogna told CBS News that this particular surgery was located in "a very, very complex area of the brain" and also pointed out that the patient is left-handed. "This makes things more complicated because the neural pathways of the brain are much more complicated," he said. Recent research shows that left-handed people differ in brain asymmetry from right-handed people and that the right and left hemispheres of the brain tend to be more connected in people who are left-handed.

The team of 10 who successfully completed the surgery was made up of neurosurgeons, anesthesiologists, neuropsychologists, neurophysiologists and engineers from around the world. Though other awake craniotomies that included a patient playing a musical instrument have been done before, the level of complexity and cutting-edge technologies used in this surgery made it a notable accomplishment.

Why the saxophone? The man had told the surgeons that retaining his musical abilities was of the utmost importance to him.

"Awake surgery makes it possible to map with extreme precision during surgery the neuronal networks that underlie the various brain functions such as playing, speaking, moving, remembering, counting," Brogna said in the hospital's news release. Playing music during the surgery gave the surgeons a visual of where those functions were in the patient's brain and helped them ensure they were keeping them intact.

Several times during the surgery, the patient played the theme song from "Love Story" by Francis Lai and the Italian national anthem on his saxophone. (You can watch him playing in the video below shared by Voice of America.)

"To play an instrument means that you can understand music, which is a high cognitive function," Brogna told CBS News. "It means you can interact with the instrument, you can coordinate both hands, you can exercise memory, you can count — because music is mathematics — you can test vision because the patient has to see the instrument, and you can test the way the patient interacts with the rest of the team," he said.

Such surgeries require intense preplanning and familiarity with the patient's normal functioning, and the team met with the patient six or seven times in the 10 days leading up to the surgery.

"When we operate on the brain, we are operating on the sense of self, so we need to make sure that we do not damage the patient as a person — their personality, the way they feel emotions, the way they get through life," Brogna told CBS News. "The patient will tell you what is important in his life and it is your job to protect his wishes."

As amazing as surgery like this is, Brogna reminds us that there's still so much we don't know about the way the brain works. Prodecures like this one help doctors learn in addition to helping patients.

"Each operation in awake surgery not only allows to obtain the maximum result in terms of removal of the pathology, but it is a real discovery," Brogna said in the hospital's news release. "Each time it offers us a window into the functioning of this fascinating, but still in many ways mysterious organ, which is the brain."

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America's favorite science teacher Bill Nye explains how your dreams work.

You know emojis have taken over when scientists use them to explain how things work.

In a new series from Mashable, Bill Nye, America's favorite science teacher takes a look at the science of dreaming.

When you turn off your alarm clock in the morning, your day is just beginning. You're groggy. You're tired. You hit snooze like a million times (if you're me). But you're awake.

Your brain, on the other hand, never went to sleep. It was busy working the overnight shift.

We've all been there. Image via iStock.

Sometimes you wake up and your dreams from the night before are so vivid. Sometimes they're just straight up bizarre. And sometimes you can't recall them at all.

The average person dreams about four to six times a night, so whether or not you remember them, if you're sleeping, your brain is busy dreaming.

Basically, it's always up to something. One brain would never walk up to another and be like, "Hey brain, what's up?" and receive an "Oh, not much" in response. It'd be more like ... "EVERYTHING IS UP! ALL THE TIME! I'M A BRAIN!"

Or to put the beautifully complex behavior of the brain simply...

Bill Nye has found the perfect emojis to explain just what the heck your brain gets up to at night.

GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.

Basically, neurologists say your brain can be found in three states:

1. Your brain is AWAKE!

That's your brain RIGHT NOW! That's why you're reading this! And getting lost in Wikipedia rabbit holes and getting distracted by the Internet and living your life. I can't even explain it more because it's so obvious! You're awake! And your brain is too!

She's awake! GIF from "30 Rock."

2. Your brain is in a rapid eye-movement (REM) cycle.

This is a fun one. This is when things start to get weird and dreamy. This is the part of your sleep sleep cycle where your eyes start to move rapidly (ha! rapid eye movement! get it??) and your body goes through many physiological changes. Your limbs become limp and your breathing becomes irregular. This, believe it or not, is the perfect condition for dreaming.

When you're in the REM state, your imagination runs wild. GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.



3. Your brain is in the non-rapid-eye movement (NREM) cycle.

Non-rapid eye movement doesn't sound as fun because it's considered dreamless sleep, but it takes up more of your life than REM. So you should get to know it.

About 80% of your sleep takes place in NREM. This is when your breathing and heart rate are slow and regular and you are pretty still. This is most likely not the time when you are talking in your sleep or rolling around stealing the covers from your partner. Which they definitely appreciate, by the way.

Word of the day: extrastriate. GIF via Mashable Watercooler/YouTube.

Nye briefly touches on this, but humans aren't the only ones who experience dreams. Animals likely do too.

Most mammals experience rapid-eye movement, so "it is reasonable to suppose that animals have something like what we call dreams," Patrick McNamara, director of the Evolutionary Neurobehavior Laboratory at Boston University, told National Geographic. That's pretty cool to think about.

Scientists are busy discovering more about how the brain works in humans and in animals.

From the amount of sleep disorders faced every day to the effects smartphones may have when you're trying to get some shut-eye, we're giving scientists plenty of material to work with.

While we wait to learn more, just try to get a decent amount of sleep at night. Netflix will be there in the morning. And besides, you're clearly awesome at dreaming, so DREAM BIG.

Here's Bill Nye to explain more about your dreams:

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