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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Hope you're doing well. Dr. Lee Warren here with you,
and it is time for some self-brain surgery.
We're going to go down a little philosophical rabbit hole today.
I got an email from Keith Cox, who is a retired police officer in Kentucky,
and Keith asked a question that's kind of the question for the ages.
And as I stumbled around trying to figure out how to reply to Keith,
I realized this is really right at the heart of everything we've been talking about lately.
This question that Keith Cox asked really takes us down to the nuts and bolts
of what this brain-mind life, this self-brain surgery practice,
this abide practice, all the things we've been talking about really have to do with this question.
And we're going to get after that in just a minute today. We're going to answer
the question that Keith asked, which is this, do thoughts have mass?
Where do thoughts go when you forget them? Does it seem like it seems like it's
obvious that they contain energy, but where does it go? What does it convert to?
Keith said, I have heard one person explain that they are and are not mass.
I can't reconcile that in my brain.
Any way to explain this to a retired police officer for Kentucky?
Thank you for the question, Keith. Keith, this is a question,
friend, that we're going to dig into a little bit today.
And it's going to pivot right into our Abide practice and right into this whole
brain-mind-life thing that we're trying to sort out here on Self-Brain Surgery
every day on the podcast.
This is really the root of the question of how do we live life in the midst
of all of its traumas and tragedies and massive things. It comes down to this.
What are thoughts? Do they have mass? Are they real?
And what part do they play in our overall experience that we call life?
But before we can answer that, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
healthier, feel better, and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right. You ready to get after it? Here we go. Imagine that you walked into
my studio right now where I'm
recording and I was eating something and you said, Hey, what you eating?
And I said, well, I'm eating roasted peanuts, corn syrup, whole grain oats,
sugar, flour, lecithin,
rice flour, palm kernel oil, vegetable glycerin, whey, salt,
cornstarch, barley malt extract, extract, natural flavor, baking soda,
vitamin E, and bioengineered food ingredients.
You would say, what? What in the world are you talking about?
Hand me that. And I would hand you the package of what I'm eating.
And you would say, oh, wait, you just read off an ingredient list,
but this is a granola bar.
So it's a salty peanut granola bar from Nature Valley.
And so what we've done here is you asked me what I was eating and I told you
the ingredients to to what I was eating, and it didn't make sense to you.
Because in your brain, a list of ingredients is not something that you eat.
What you eat is the product, the completed, cooked, baked granola bar.
Right? Well, let me take that back to Keith's question. Keith said,
hey, do thoughts have mass? Where do thoughts go when you forget them?
Do they contain energy? Maybe they contain energy. Seems like they do.
Where does it go? What does it convert to?
Some people People say they are masks. Some people say they're not masks.
What's the deal with thoughts? Well, it's a good question.
Now, if you think of a thought as a purely physical process in your brain,
if you're a reductionist neuroscientist,
if you're one of those people that thinks everything can be explained by science
and you can eventually break everything down to its component parts and therefore
understand it, like as if you could take a biopsy of your Aunt Sally's brain
and look at it under the microscope and go, oh, that's Aunt Sally.
If you think that way, that we're just parts and someday science will be able
to explain everything about you by the sum of those parts in a Cartesian kind
of manner, then it makes sense to you to read an ingredient list and think you
can understand the whole thing.
But most of us operate more out of a perspective of...
Thinking that things can't be defined purely by their component parts.
So let's talk about thoughts for a moment.
It's getting a little philosophical here, but it's important.
We think about thoughts. That's funny if we think about thoughts.
When we think about a thought, you could define it as an electrical impulse in your brain.
And in that context, Keith, the electrical impulse being generated by electrons
and chemical signals in your brain that have individual mass.
If you think about a molecule of
dopamine or serotonin or GABA or norepinephrine, then yes, that has mass.
The electricity has electrons and other quantum particles that could be measured and weighed.
And therefore, when it's stored in your brain as a memory, it has chemicals
and neurons and all those things that go into storing that impulse that created
the thought or carried the thought.
Then yes, thoughts would have mass. But if we think about a thought as a process,
something that you see, you see a picture of your long-lost grandmother,
Floyd, and you see her and a whole flood of memories pop into your mind.
The entire life that you had with her and the life that she had before you knew
her and the life that she lived when she married your grandfather and all that.
There's a whole stream of things
that are outside of your brain that are triggered by that photograph.
And that photograph then hits your retina and goes back to your occipital lobes
and triggers a whole release of a bunch of memories and chemicals and electrical
events that generate retrieved memories that you then modify with your current
experience and perspective.
Perspective, and that whole experience you could think of as a thought,
but it's really a process.
Of metaphysical, sort of philosophical things, things that you know from your
right brain about your grandmother that you remember, that you put into context,
that you sort of wrap up and create this whole thing that in your mind says grandmother.
And that's far more complex than just a string of electrical impulses and chemical
signals that could be measured and weighed in In a laboratory, right?
Does that make sense? Keith, I hope. What I'm saying is thoughts are things,
yes. They're also processes.
And therefore, things have mass and can be weighed and measured and studied.
But you couldn't go in your brain and pick out a particular neuron and say,
oh, there's that thought I was looking for.
Because nobody, no neuroscientist has ever been able to do that.
In fact, they never will be able to do that because we know that individual
feelings and thoughts aren't particularly located to a particular neuron.
They're part of networks of neurons that are connected together through synapses,
and the direction of that process is completely mysterious to science at this point.
And I think, I believe, and I think you probably believe, that that's because
mind, spirit if you will, is a separate entity entirely from brain.
And it interacts with brain, but it's not brain, that it persists beyond brain,
that our minds will persist and our memories and our emotions and all those
things will persist when our physical body's not here.
And so to answer the question, do thoughts have mass? Yes and no.
So the truth is, it's a process, it's a thing, it's both at the same time.
And you can't list out all the component parts of human thinking and come up
with what a thought is any more than you could list out the component parts
of my granola bar and put down what that thing is and what it tastes like, okay?
So I want to do something this morning. I want to think about something.
I want to think about the fact that all of our lives have ingredients.
They have parts that have occurred. They have things that have happened,
traumas and tragedies and massive things and good things and births and graduations
and joy and falling in love and proposals and the first kisses and finding out
who Jesus is for the first time.
And all those things go into your life as it sits right now.
Okay? And what you think about?
A loaf of bread, okay? My wife, Lisa, is an incredible chef and baker.
She might make a loaf of bread, and it might have some salt and flour and maybe
some rosemary and maybe some nuts or something in it.
Maybe it has a whole bunch of different ingredients, oil and flour and yeast
and all those things that she puts in there, right?
And then she bakes it in the oven, and it becomes a wholly different thing.
If you tasted it when it was dough, it would be sticky and kind of yucky,
And if you tasted any of the ingredients individually, garlic flour,
garlic salt, or whatever she might have put in there,
that any of those particular ingredients might not taste very good on their own.
But then something magic happens when it gets baked in the oven, doesn't it?
And you can get that bread out, and you put some butter on it,
and the aroma fills up your mind, fills up your brain, and you have all these
sensations that happen with the cooked, finished product of that pile of ingredients.
And it turns into something complex and nuanced and beautiful and wholly different
than it was when it was just a pile of disembodied parts, right?
So I would ask you then, take a bite of that granola bar.
Take a bite of Lisa's freshly baked bread and tell me if you can identify one
of the ingredients individually in there.
Now, sure, if you're not a very good cook and you put 10 times more salt than
there ought to be or 100 times more yeast or something, it's not going to work
right. It's not going to cook properly.
And yes, it will be defined and overwhelmed by the excess or absence of one
of the parts that should have been there, right? So obviously the analogy doesn't work all the way down.
We're assuming that the chef in charge, the person running the lab,
the person running the kitchen knows what they're doing and that the recipe ultimately is right.
But in that model, in that analogy, take a bite, taste and see,
and see if you can pick out any of those individual parts or if the whole thing
blended together turned out to be exactly what it was supposed to be in the end.
When we talk about self-brain surgery, we talk about the biopsy process a lot.
We talk about learning to biopsy these thoughts and learning to not identify
your life as a collection of traumas and tragedies and massive things,
but rather than to kind of use that right half of your brain and begin to see
that life is bigger and far more complex and far more nuanced than any one experience can be.
Remember in Ephesians 4, when Paul tells us, I tell you this,
this is Ephesians 4, 17, I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord,
you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking.
He goes on to say the the whole problem with the non-transformed,
non-renewed mind is that your life is defined by faulty thinking.
Just as if you put a bunch of bad ingredients in your recipe,
or if you tried to define your entire life by the list of ingredients in the
recipe, then you would never really have a good sense of what your life was
because you would be focusing on the ingredients and not the finished product. product.
What Paul says in Ephesians 4, 23, is that you're to be made new in the attitude of your mind.
To be made new in the attitude of your mind. You're not supposed to focus on the parts, okay?
So do thoughts have mass? Yeah, if you look at them as parts,
if you look at them as components, but do thoughts have mass if you look at
them in the context of the whole process?
Not so simple, is it?
We can drive ourselves crazy by overthinking things like this.
And that's what the left side of your brain does. The left side of your brain
wants to take a snapshot, wants
to define everything as a two-dimensional object. Yes, this is the thing.
This is my life. This has happened. This is how it is.
This is what it's always going to feel like. This is what I need to operate with now.
And that's the left side. Right side says, wait a minute.
This recipe has a lot of components, a lot of ingredients.
Some of them don't make sense. Who knows what bioengineered food products are anyway, right?
This ingredient list doesn't make sense.
It's a lot of different things, but I can swirl them together,
and I can put them in the kitchen and let the chef, the master baker,
work some kind of magic that I don't understand, and that dough will rise,
and these ingredients will mix together, and they'll bake, and somehow in the
process of that baking, they will blend together, and the end product here,
will turn out to prove that Romans 8.28 is true.
All things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called
according to His purpose to conform us to Christ.
It's some sort of magic, some sort of grace of the Holy Spirit in the master
baker's oven that these ingredients of our lives can turn out to taste right in the end.
This is kind of a philosophical meandering. I just want you to realize,
friend, if somebody asked you what you were eating, you would never read the ingredient list.
You would say, this is what I'm eating. And if somebody asked you about your
life, tell me about yourself.
Wouldn't it be better then to say, I've been through a lot, and I have found my path and my purpose.
And I don't really understand all the whys, but I've come to understand the what for.
And the big picture is that life is not a set of things to be defined as what they are.
And if you can learn to say, not what it is, but what's it for?
Not what it is, but what it's like. And learn to describe the taste.
Learn to describe the finished product. Learn to describe the feeling that you
get when you smell the aroma of all the things that have happened and how they've
turned out to be worked together for your good somehow. You start seeing the bigger picture.
Then I think we can take that abide process and use it to our advantage in this
endeavor of trying to begin to understand how to move from contemplating our
lives to operating and taking our brains under the direction of our minds to improve our lives.
That's this idea that Lisa and I are talking about now, brain-mind-life.
How do we operate on our brains under the influence of our minds to improve
our lives and the lives of those around us?
Let's go back to that abide process. Let's just assess the situation for a minute.
Yes, I've had some massive things. Yes, I've had some difficulties.
Lord, I'm bringing you this pile of ingredients, and I want you to show me how
you can bake them into something that turns out to be good.
Because right now it feels like I've got way too much salt and way too much
of this stuff that doesn't taste very good.
But you tell me in your word that you can turn it into something that's going
to ultimately be for my good,
something bigger and deeper than my understanding it's
not just a thing it's a process and and i'm in the middle of
that and so help me use my right half of my brain to
start to see this more than just a two-dimensional thing and then help me to
believe that you actually have the power to do it that you say and that in your
word that you have the power to raise christ from the dead and that that same
power is in me and you can work anything for my good that you have a plan for
me is for my my good and not to harm me.
And then let's pick up the knife. Let's get in the kitchen. Let's do what Lisa
does and let's start baking.
And let's say, okay, if you're going to give me this pile of ingredients and
I'm going to trust that you have the ability to turn it into something useful,
then let's mix them all together.
And let me stop focusing on the fact that I have a particular ingredient that
I don't like, that is tasting bad in my mouth. I didn't want to go through that.
I I didn't want to have that in my recipe, but it's in there.
And you tell me that somehow it's going to turn out to make this whole thing
better than it would have been if that wasn't in it.
There's some mystery in the kitchen. There's some mystery that I don't understand.
Lisa will have me taste something and it'll be disgusting.
But if you don't put it in the recipe, then the recipe turns out not to be right.
That's just a fact of food science. It's a fact of your life as well,
my friend. So at some point, we have to pick up a knife.
We have to get in the kitchen. We have to make the incision,
start the operation, stop contemplating, and get after it. And then we have to go deeper.
And we have to press into that process and keep after it.
Because if we don't finish, if we forget to turn the oven on,
if we forget to take it out and it overcooks and bakes up and burns up,
then we haven't done our job.
We've got to be there to make it happen. and we got to go through the process.
And at the end, when it's time and the bell goes off, then it's time to pull that out of the oven.
We're going to have a product that's right, that tastes good, that's for our benefit.
And we're going to expect, that's the E part, we're going to expect that the
master chef, that the great physician can work this out because he promised that he could.
And at the end, we'll taste a product that turns out to be good.
And we'll be not necessarily glad glad that all the things happened the way
that they did, but we'll be really happy with the outcome ultimately.
And we'll begin to understand that thoughts become things and that our life
has a purpose beyond what we can understand.
And we'll stop beating ourselves to death, trying to understand every little component part.
And we'll understand what Isaiah, what God said in Isaiah 30,
15, when he said, in returning and rest is your salvation and quietness and trust is your strength.
Because once it goes into the oven, your work is done until it's time to take it out.
And you're not responsible for the magic and the physics and all the stuff that
happens during the baking process.
Your only job is to submit the ingredients in the proper ratio and wait for the oven to do its job.
That's what the furnace of suffering is about, by the way. It's to refine us. It's not to destroy us.
So I hope that's a weird, rambling, philosophical answer to your question,
Keith. Do thoughts have mass?
Depends on how you look at it. Does your life taste right?
Depends on how you look at it. You can't refuse to put all the ingredients in
there that God has placed in your pantry, friend.
You can't. because in the end, they will bake together and they will produce
the product that you're supposed to have.
And that's what Abide's all about, is staying there and letting the oven do its job.
And the good news is we can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,
helping people in all 50 states and 60-plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is, you can start today.
Music.