Learning to Heal: Hypnotherapy, Neuroscience, and the Inner Life

A neuroscientist with a Buddhist meditation practice signs up for a hypnotherapy course. He expects to stay sceptical. Over ten weekends in a converted hospital in northern England, he keeps watching people change in ways none of his frameworks can fully explain.Learning to Heal follows what happens when three ways of understanding the mind are forced into the same room: computational neuroscience, Ericksonian hypnotherapy and Tibetan Buddhist practice. Each has a serious account of what the mind is and what can be done with it, and they rarely speak to one another. Side by side, they keep pointing at the same few things. Attention changes experience. The ordinary mind is not the whole story. And the technique is never what matters most.This is not a self-help book, and it does not tie everything up. It is an honest, sometimes uneasy account of one training course, told by someone who is trained to doubt and who still can't explain what he saw.