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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. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,
and we are here for some self-brain surgery today.
It's Theology Thursday, and on Theology Thursday,
we usually try to tie some scriptural element, some spiritual element,
some faith element to some specific science principle, and today's going to
be a doozy because today we're going to cover the ninth commandment of self-brain surgery.
The ninth commandment of self-brain
surgery I must believe that what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
We're doing a dedicated episode on each of the Ten Commandments as I write the
definitive Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery.
I'm going to give you tools to rewire your brain, reorder your mind,
and radically transform your life. That book, Be in Prayer, Please,
it's in the hands of publishers now.
We're working on pitching to publishers so we can decide who the perfect partner
will be to bring you the Handbook of Self-Brain Surgery, hopefully sometime in 2025.
And so as we get into this process of selling the manuscript,
completing the manuscript, editing it, all that stuff, we'll be using the podcast
to flesh out these ideas and bring you more deep dives into the content.
But today we're going to talk about the ninth commandment.
I must believe that what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
This is faith and neuroscience smashing together to teach you a principle of
how your mind influences your brain and how your brain influences your body,
how synapses and habits and circuits are made and how you can make things better.
Because I want you to get better at getting better starting today.
We're going to get after that in just a minute. But before we do,
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. I love talking to and reading
and learning from and spending time with smart people.
That's one of the reasons I love Lisa so much. I was amazed at how beautiful
she was when we first met.
I was amazed at how well she sang. We met on the worship team at church.
But mostly I was amazed at her brilliant mind.
I just love being around smart people.
Well, recently I discovered a very smart person who lived in the 19th century,
died in the early 20th century.
William James, a psychologist. William James, I first heard about him from Jeffrey
Schwartz's book, The Mind and the Brain.
Schwartz described a conversation that he had with quantum physicist Henry Stapp, who I'm also reading.
Henry Stapp was the first guy to sort of figure out that you could direct the
power of your mind, your mental force, as Schwartz calls it.
And you could make structural changes in your brain and that quantum physics
is the mathematics behind how you can actually understand that that's a real thing.
It's not just some self-help idea. It's not some mumbo-jumbo.
It's not some metaphysical magic.
It's actually, there's a quantum physics mathematical explanation for how the
things you think about can turn into real things in your brain.
Well, way back in the 19th century, William James was writing about that.
He was so smart. He observed human behavior, and he recognized that habit has
to have a physical basis.
Now, let's just talk about that for a second. I'm going to read you some James.
James says in his book, Psychology, The Briefer Course, on principles of the atomistic philosophy.
Now, what does that mean? In the 19th century, the prevailing philosophy was
that everything was made out of atoms, and these atoms were the smallest particles
that there were, and they couldn't be changed.
They were unchangeable, unmalleable physical structures that made up everything in the universe.
That was the idea, going back to Newton, atomistic philosophy.
So, Williams James is saying.
Something different from what it was. That is, they can do so if the body is
plastic enough to maintain its integrity and not be disrupted when the structure yields.
What in the world are you talking about, Dr. Warren? So James was observing the universe.
He observed, for example, that you could change the behavior of a bar of iron,
that even though it was invisible and molecular, somehow the outward shape wasn't
changing, but a bar of iron could not be magnetic and then something could happen
and all of a sudden it was magnetic.
Or you could take a rubber and if you worked with it enough,
you could make it malleable and all of a sudden rubber could be used to shape
and form and create other things.
Even though you haven't changed the appearance or the outward structure of the
rubber, something was happening to it that made it more friable or plastic as he called it.
That word plastic doesn't mean what we think of it. We think of a bottle of
water that's made out of plastic, that's a plastic material,
but the word plastic actually means something that's shapeable or malleable.
And so he talked about plaster, how it sets and becomes hard.
It changes its form because of its plasticity.
So way back in the 19th century, William James is noticing that some things
in the physical universe can change their shape, their behavior,
their their qualities, even though the molecular structure,
he understood, atomistic philosophy, that means that the basic particles that
make up those things can't change.
So he was noticing that there was something up with the idea that atomistic
philosophy might not be 100% accurate because things could actually change.
But then he made the big switch. This is the brilliant switch that James made
that, as far as I know, was one of the first people to ever talk about this
sort of thing that we now routinely call neuroplasticity.
He says this, plasticity then, in the wide sense of the word,
means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence,
but strong enough not to yield all at once.
So if you try to bend the rubber and you do it, it's too stiff and you do it
too aggressively, it might break, it might crack or fracture.
But if the material is plastic enough, then it'll yield to that conforming influence
slowly enough that it doesn't break, but it actually just changes.
James goes on to say, organic matter, especially nervous tissue,
he's talking about the brain now, seems to be endowed with a very extraordinary
degree of plasticity of the sword, so that we may without hesitation lay down
as our first proposition the following,
the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic
material of which their bodies are comprised or composed.
The philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance, a chapter in physics
rather than in physiology or psychology, that it is at bottom.
A physical principle is admitted by all good recent writers on the subject.
So James here in the late 1800s is saying, hey, when you change how you think,
something Something structural must be changing in your brain because your brain
starts to act differently.
People can break habits. They can overcome addictions. They can learn new skills.
He was noticing that the brain has some sort of plasticity to it.
You can take a grown man who doesn't know how to write with his left hand, for example.
You cut off his right arm, and he can learn how to write with his left hand.
That means they're Jamesaw.
That means there has to be some structural changes happening in the brain. Well, guess what? Yes.
Fast forward 100 years, now we have functional magnetic imaging scanners,
now we have advanced neuropathology techniques, now we have electron microscopes
and abilities to actually look at what's happening inside the brain.
And guess what's been figured out? Your brain actually does make structural
changes within minutes of you changing how you think or behave.
And the underpinning mechanism of that is something called microtubules.
We've done a couple of episodes of Microtubule Mondays.
And microtubules are the sort of girder, the sort of internal structure that
guides neurons as they're making synapses.
And those things are created quickly and die quickly.
And within minutes of you changing how you think, your brain starts to say,
okay, this must be something we're supposed to automate.
And your brain begins to automate synaptic structures to make that thought process easier.
And if you persist in it for a while, you'll lay down the tracks of a new train
of thought, and it'll become automated, and you won't have to think about it
so much before all of a sudden you're in that same thought process, behavior,
physiological reaction, whatever it is. And you know that's true already.
The good example is you can learn how to use the keypad on your keyboard if
you're punching in numbers.
And at first, you have to look at it. You have to make your hand type in 1,
2, 6, 8, 9, 4, 7, right? But over time, you can do it in your sleep.
You can drink a cup of coffee, you can be looking at something else,
and you can be adding up all those numbers without even having to think about
it because your brain has learned how to operate that keypad.
And that happened because microtubules laid down, girdering,
and made structural changes to create synapses in your brain between your thoughts,
your neural circuits, and the muscles in your hand.
And that happened within minutes. Now, the bad news is.
Those microtubular synaptic constructs that are made begin to be repurposed
and degraded and removed if you don't do something new after you've learned
it within about three weeks.
So habits, systemic laying down of structural change in your brain can happen
within minutes, but it'll go away within a few weeks if you don't continue to use those structures.
Now this obviously, underneath it, how does the mechanism of all that work?
Well, genes have to be switched on and off.
That's epigenetic influence of your genetic structure when you decide to make new habits.
And that happens within an hour that this structural stuff is happening.
There's gene expression that occurs almost doubling within the first hour of
new thinking around an idea.
And those ideas, again, persist for up to three weeks without you doing anything else.
Even if you just try something new for one day, there's some structural changes
that happen in your brain and go away within about three weeks.
So why am I telling you all this?
I'm telling you this because the ninth commandment of self-brain surgery is
that you must believe that what you're doing, you're getting better at.
Why? Why is that so important? Because our world tries to convince us,
your enemy, the society that you're in, your past history, your automatic thoughts,
the feelings that you have that are wired in to make you feel like you're stuck.
That all conspires to make you think that you, of all people,
are the one person who is incapable of positive change.
You're the one person who's really stuck. You're the one person who's always
going to fail when you try something new.
You're the one person who just can't get over this particular habit,
just can't move forward after that one failure, just can't get over that one
massive thing that happened to you.
And I'm just here to tell you, friend, you're already made structural changes
in your brain that you didn't even have at the start of this podcast because
what you're doing, you're getting better at.
And so if you're listening to my voice and you're starting to hear yourself
say, wait, maybe the physiology applies to me too.
Maybe the way God made my mind will make my brain be able to change.
Maybe I am capable of change.
Guess what? You're already starting to lay down some positive structural change
in your brain that can help you. You are not stuck, friend, because what you're
doing, you're getting better at. Now, what's the flip side of that?
If you spend your time rehearsing failure, ruminating on the past,
thinking back on the thing that that person did that offended you and hurt you,
guess what's going to happen? You're going to automate that thought.
You're going to become better at being bitter instead of better at being better.
If you're looking back in time, you're going to your therapist every week and
drudging up everything that everybody's ever done to hurt you and why you're
so anxious all the the time and why you can't seem to get over what so-and-so did,
and you need to figure out a way to blame your parents for all the things that
are hurting you, guess what you're doing? You're getting better at that.
You're getting better at looking backwards instead of looking forward.
And then you wonder why things aren't making progress, why you can't seem to break free.
Well, it's because if you focus on something that's hurtful,
you're going to get better at focusing on the thing that's hurtful.
Let's go back to James, late 19th century. street.
Just so in the nervous system, James says, the impressions of outer objects
fashion for themselves more and more appropriate paths,
that's synapses, he didn't have the word for it back then, and these vital phenomena
recur under similar excitements from without, even when they have been interrupted
for a certain time. What's James talking about?
When you have something that triggers a synapse, a memory, a habit,
a past failure, a rehearsed trauma, tragedy, or massive thing, whatever it is.
If you have something that you've created a synapse around,
you reach for a glass of wine when you get a certain text message,
when you reach a certain time of day,
you open up a bag of Cheetos because you've created that synaptic habit because
that's how you numb yourself so you don't have to think about the thing and
you're paying tomorrow taxes every day and you're not loving tomorrow more and
all these other commandments that you're breaking.
You do that because you've created a synaptic trail.
James calls it vital phenomena under similar excitement.
So you have a similar stimulus, a time of day, a certain place,
a certain trigger, a certain memory, a certain thing that you've trained your
brain to fire at a certain time.
And that's going to come back without you having to think about it.
Why? Because what you've done, you've gotten better at. Right.
So the secret to overcoming it then is to direct yourself, direct your mind
to tell your brain to start making new pathways to replace those old ones.
And within about three weeks, that's why everybody talks about 21 days of forming a habit, by the way.
Within about three weeks, the microtubules are starting to break down and being repurposed.
And used for new synapses. So James calls this scar, this sort of synaptic scar
that automatically fires, he calls it a locus minoris resistiente.
This is such a brilliant connection that James made.
LMR, locus minoris resistiente, is a term we use in medicine that refers to
an injury or a pattern that shows up when something stimulates it.
We see it in people with psoriasis where the rash shows up in the same place
over time because that area of skin has become conditioned to have that particular
reaction when somebody's under stress or a particular joint shows up with gout again over and over,
even though the overall biochemical situation should be the same in every joint,
but gout tends to show up.
LMR, locus minoris resisti, and here's what James said.
In the nervous system, a scar anywhere or anywhere outside the nervous system as well,
a scar is a locus minoris resisti more liable
to be abraded inflamed to suffer pain and cold than
are the neighboring parts a sprained ankle a dislocated
arm are in danger of being sprained or dislocated again joints that have once
been attacked by rheumatism or gout mucus membranes that have been the seat
of inflammation are without or with each fresh recurrence more prone to a relapse
this is why you bite your cheek in the same place it gets a little swollen it's
a little bit easier for you
to bite it again and it just keeps happening over and over.
James says the more chronically morbid state substitutes itself for the sound one.
And in the nervous system, it is well known how many so-called functional
diseases seem to keep themselves going simply because they happen to have once
begun and how the forcible cutting short by medicine of a few attacks is often
sufficient to enable the physiological forces to get possession of the battlefield
again and to bring Bring the organs back to functions of health.
Epilepsy, neurology, convulsive affections of various sorts,
insomnia are so many cases in point of these locus minoris resiciente,
these LMRs. And you've got them too, friend.
To take what are more obviously habits, James says, the success with which a
weaning treatment can often be applied to the victims of unhealthy indulgence of passion,
of complaining, or of irascible dispositions, shows us how much the morbid manifestations
themselves were merely due to the inertia of the nervous system when once launched on a false career.
I love the old language. What he's saying here, the false career.
He's saying you can create habits and synapses in your brain because your brain is a plastic organ.
And if you think about the wrong stuff, if you get in a bad mood,
if you get routinely grumpy or easily offended,
or you start rehearsing past traumas, or you start bringing up things that people
haven't sufficiently thanked you for or apologized for,
didn't give you enough credit for, or didn't properly address you when you walked
in the room, if you start rehearsing all that stuff,
you're going to create an LMR, a locus minoris resistante, that's more easily
fired up the next time, even if it was a false start in the first place, right?
Because the truth is people aren't mostly, aren't out there.
Spending their time figuring out how they can dishonor you or not live up to
what you wanted them to be or not remind you of the way that they hurt you 10 years ago.
Most people are just living their lives and they're not thinking about you at all.
But you're spending your time rehearsing, replaying, rebuilding synapses.
You're firing that habit again.
You're opening that bottle of wine again. You're reaching for the cookie again
because your uncle hurt you when you were nine.
Instead of finding a way to cut those synapses, repurpose them and get better at getting better.
Because the commandment is, what I'm doing, I'm getting better at.
So William James, way back in the 19th century, saw this clearly.
The brain has some ability to make new pathways, to break old ones and make new ones.
And you've got to decide to break that inertia down that he calls the inertia of the nervous organs.
You've got to decide that you want to make things better.
Now let's bring it home for Theology Thursday, okay? Okay.
Why does God care about your thinking?
Right. I mean, the whole society thinks that God's all about your behavior.
He doesn't want you to have fun. He doesn't want you to have sex.
He doesn't want you to drink alcohol. He doesn't want you to do this or do that.
That's what the world thinks about God. Right. The world thinks God's about
rules and about stealing all your fun and about you not getting to do all the
things that you think are going to make you happy. That's not what the Bible says.
I love Tara Lee Cobble. Tara Lee Cobble said, read the Bible once and you might not like it very much.
But read it again and say, I'm not looking this time for what I want out of it.
I'm trying to find out who God is. You read the Bible from that point of view,
and you're going to see a God who cares about your quality of life, internal and external.
And that's why Psalm 51, 17 says that God doesn't want your bulls and goats
and your your blood sacrifices and all that.
He says, my sacrifice, oh God, is a broken spirit and a contrite heart.
That's what you won't despise. God wants your heart.
Jesus said it. Don't talk to me about whether or not somebody's committed adultery
or whether or not somebody's committed murder.
Tell me what they think about because if you think about hurting somebody,
you're just as guilty. If you think with lustful thoughts, you're just as guilty.
I want your mind, Jesus says.
That's why he said the greatest commandment, love the Lord your God with all
your heart and all your soul and all your mind.
Why does he use three different words here? Because back in those days,
the people listening, they had different ideas.
They thought mind and heart and gut and soul were all different things.
Now we know they probably all are really different aspects of mental force that
your brain exerts on, that your mind exerts on your brain.
But in those days, when they said heart, they thought about your feelings.
And when they said mind, they thought about your thoughts.
When they thought about soul, they thought about your devotion to God and all those sorts of things.
And then your body was the things that you actually did, and they were separate.
Jesus is saying, I want all of it. I want all of your thoughts.
And that's why the psalmist in Psalm 1914, the man after God's own heart,
said, Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable
in your sight, O Lord my God. God, my rock and my redeemer. Why?
Because your thinking is part of what you're getting better at or getting worse at.
And when you think better thoughts, your brain creates better synapses.
Your heart beats in a healthier way. Your body gets stronger.
Your relationships get stronger. You improve your electromagnetic field.
When you think better thoughts, you create better synapses and you make a better
brain and a better body and a better life. That's why you can't change your
life until you change your mind and what you're doing, you're getting better at.
That's why it's the ninth commandment, because you deciding that you're going
to follow the advice of 2 Corinthians 10, 5 seriously and say,
I am going to get my thoughts under control.
I'm going to take my thoughts captive.
If you take it seriously and you do that, guess what's going to happen?
All these inertia of habit and thought that James was referring to turn into
better ones because your microtubules start breaking down old synapses within
minutes of you deciding to think differently.
God's payoff here is quick.
He says, if you start thinking better thoughts, you're going to start feeling better feelings.
You're going to start making better neurotransmitters. You're going to start
making a better hormonal environment for the organs in your body.
You're going to start feeling better and being happier and becoming healthier
because you're changing the way you think and what you're doing,
you're getting better at.
And those locus minoris resistentes, those LMRs are going to stop being so irascible,
stop being so easily irritated.
Your ankle's not going to turn quite as easily, the mental one that we're talking about here.
Jesus wants your heart and he wants your heart not because he's trying to be
a big fuddy-duddy and control every aspect of your life, but because he knows
that thoughts become things.
We're gonna talk about that tomorrow on Frontal Lobe Friday.
He knows that what you think about, it turns into how you live.
He knows that what you think about turns into how your brain functions and how
your body functions and how overall happy and healthy you are.
Because you can do all the hand stuff right. You can do all the sacrifices.
You can do all the deeds correctly and you can still be a miserable,
lost, hopeless, desperate person in between your ears.
And God says, I didn't come here so that your life could be stolen and killed and destroyed.
I came here that you might have life and have it abundantly.
And I'm just telling you, friend, if your thought life isn't abundant,
nothing else in your life will be either.
You can have all the money in the world. You can have the big house.
You can have the fame. You can be the super movie star.
And you've seen it before. Those people frequently are the most miserable,
unhappy people. They drink too much. They have high divorce rates.
They sometimes commit suicide because they're not happy in their heart,
because they're not happy in between their ears,
because they didn't know that what they're doing, they're getting better at,
and what they're getting better at is becoming more miserable if they're placing
their hopes and they're placing their thoughts and they're placing their mind on the wrong stuff.
You can change that, friend. Friend, your microtubules will respond to you directing
them to break those inertias and break down those old LMRs and find some new
ways to get your mind right.
Because thoughts become things and what you're doing, you're getting better at.
We're going to dive more deeply into the 10th commandment tomorrow and remembering
that thoughts become things.
But today I want you to know that what you're doing, you're getting better at.
So do you want to get better at getting better?
Or do you want to get better at getting bitter? Do you want to get better at
blaming? Do you want to get better at worrying? Do you want to get better at drinking?
Do you want to get better at not getting healthier?
Because what you're doing, you're getting better at. So if you want to actively
practice the practice of getting
better, it's going to be started by you thinking different thoughts.
So take a moment today, just a second, when you find yourself going,
gosh, I wonder why she didn't write me back or I don't like the tone of that text message that I got.
Or gosh, I just spent two hours thinking about the last time I went to this
event with my family that I have to go to next weekend.
And the last time somebody said the wrong thing to me or didn't compliment me
on my dress or didn't do this or didn't do that or didn't ask me to sit with them.
And I'm rehearsing those traumas. And what I'm doing then is I'm building synapses
to make it easier for me to rehearse those traumas again. And God says, time out.
Think for a second about the fact that you've done things that I needed to forgive you for.
You've let me down before. You've overlooked me before. You've not done the
thing that I would like for you to have done in the right way before.
And yet I'm here offering you a whole new set of microtubules and synapses that
you can have if you'll just change your mind.
Just look forward instead of back.
Just think different thoughts and you'll become less anxious.
Just change your mind so you can change your life because my friend,
what you're doing, you're getting better at.
And the very good news here on Theology Thursday is that you 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 audiobooks.
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.