Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is September.
I can't even believe it. We're coming into the end of the year.
It's getting cooler here in Nebraska. We're starting to see the geese come in and I'm so excited.
I love this time of year. We have all the wildlife and the waterfowl coming
through our part of Nebraska and it's just a cool, fun time of the year here
with incredible amounts of wildlife. life.
In fact, I got charged by a badger on the driveway a few days ago.
First time I've ever seen a badger in the wild. He was very aggressive.
He didn't try to bite me or anything, but he was not backing away.
He was coming down the driveway towards me and ended up throwing some rocks
at him to get him to go away or he or she, I'm not sure how to tell, badgers.
But anyway, it was interesting. Just another example of crazy diversity of wildlife
we have here in Nebraska.
Listen here, It's September, and we're doing a thing on Instagram.
If you're not following me on Instagram, at Dr. Lee Warren on Instagram,
at Dr. Lee Warren on Instagram.
And we're doing 30 good decisions for September. We did this last year on the
podcast. We did 30 days making good decisions.
If you could just decide one thing every day that you could make a decision
about that day and stick with it, or one decision that you made for the whole
month, what would that look like?
How would it move the needle for you in changing your mind and changing your life? life.
People who have trouble with substances talk about sometimes that one of the
secrets to overcoming substance addiction or abuse is to not have to make so
many decisions around it. For example, alcohol.
If you have a bottle of whiskey in your cabinet and a bottle of vodka in your
freezer and a bottle of wine in your refrigerator, then it's three decisions
that you've got to make that evening if you've decided not to drink.
I'm not going to drink wine today. I'm not gonna drink vodka today.
I'm not gonna make whiskey today I'm not gonna go to that cabinet that when
I open it I see that thing and it reminds me that I want that drink I'm gonna
I'm gonna have to make multiple decisions around,
Whether or not I'm gonna engage with alcohol that day because I've got opportunity
in my house Or you could make one decision. You could say I'm gonna get that out of my house and.
And the decision that I'm going to make today is I'm not going to go replace
that with something else. And so there's just one decision. I'm home.
I'm having dinner with my family. I'm being present with my people,
engaging in activities that make me healthier and feel better and be happier.
And I've made one decision today that I am not going to purchase alcohol and consume it.
So that's one decision instead of having to make three.
You see what I mean? So sometimes one of the secrets is to not make an operation
out of everything. thing.
It's hard to eat Cheetos every night and overwhelm yourself with calories right
before you go to bed if you don't have Cheetos in your cabinet because you made
a decision when you were at the grocery store this time not to buy them.
And that was one decision that you made. It was a decision to take a walk instead
of watching television.
It's a decision to hold your spouse's hand and have a conversation instead of
scrolling on Instagram.
Although you You should follow Dr. Lee Warren on Instagram, but don't doom scroll
for hours instead of talking to your spouse. Have a conversation.
You wonder why you're not having success in your relationship,
your intimacy's off track, or you're having trouble with your teenagers or whatever.
Maybe it's because you're all living your own lives, scrolling and looking and
streaming and listening to whatever you feel like instead of having community
and relationship with one another.
So make one good decision, okay? That's a long preview. you remember in september
i'm not giving you new episodes okay we're gonna do four weekly episodes.
And in october we're relaunching the podcast as part of a new network of christian
podcasts it's going to be incredible,
expansion of the network, of the ability of the podcast to be discovered by
people all around the world.
And you're a huge part of that. You've gotten us to the place where this is
possible now to take the self-brain surgery message to potentially millions more listeners.
We're so grateful that you've been along for the ride.
And so this month, we're going to give you four very carefully selected episodes
to get you ready for what's going to happen in October.
Because in October, we're going hard after self-brain surgery.
We're going to start with the basics, with the contemplate side.
We're going to talk about the Ten Commandments. There's going to be lots of
people that have never heard it. And we're going to go deep on each one of them.
And then we're going to go into the operate, the tactical side.
And I'm going to give you tools and operations and procedures to do.
Then every month, we're going to have a theme. So the theme is going to be four
episodes, sometimes with a special guest or more than one special guest who
have something to say that's relevant on that topic.
These are going to be influential people, thought leaders, writers,
people with great stories, people
who can help us wrap up the context and content of a session for a month.
It's going to help us go deep, deeper than we ever have.
Not going to be any fluff here, okay? This is going to be serious school of
self-brain surgery training, and it's going to be powerful to help you change
your mind and change your life.
If you're grieving, if you're hurting, if you've been through some kind of massive
thing or trauma or tragedy or drama,
then this podcast is going to be your place to understand how your mind is in
charge of your brain and how the system is designed to work so that you can recover,
find hope, find meaning, find purpose, understand what the science has to say,
and smash it together with your faith to build a life that is resilient and
strong and can hold on no matter what happens to hope and meaning and purpose
and maybe even happiness again,
no matter what you've been through. That's where we're going, okay?
It's It's going to be incredible. So this month, I'm going to give you four
episodes to get ready for that.
And they're not all going to have a new preamble from me, but I felt it was
important to start you today with this.
And we're going to have one new episode this month because my friend Max Lucado
has an incredible new book out called What Happens Next.
And it's unbelievably important about the end times and what's going to happen.
And we are going to release that this month.
So that'll be the one-off new episode this month. It'll be on the same topic
that we're talking about for everything. I'm going to give it to you on the
podcast in the middle of the month.
It's going to be unbelievable. We're going to have a good conversation.
And you're going to love that. And we're also going to release that later on
the Spiritual Brain Surgery podcast.
We're going to have some new Tuesdays with Tata episodes on Spiritual Brain
Surgery this month. So I'll let you know when those are going to happen.
But as far as the Dr. Lee Warren podcast, the Cell Brain Surgery podcast,
we're going to have four episodes this month.
Other than the Max Lucado special episode. And they're all going to be preparing
you for what's going to happen in October when we're going to start the School
of Self-Brain Surgery for real.
Now, if you're a paid subscriber to my Substack, if you're not getting the newsletter,
go check out drleewarren.substack.com.
Every Sunday since 2014, I've given you practical, tactical advice on how you
can change your mind and change your life.
And now we're doing the 10 Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery series.
We just finished the second one yesterday. And go check it out.
Drleewarren.substack.com. It's incredibly helpful. And the paid subscribers
over there who have really helped us take this podcast to a new level,
have really helped us, financially supported us, allowed us to upgrade the studio
and really help you get this message out.
Those folks have an opportunity to participate in a live two-session training
that we're getting ready to do.
We're going to start the School of Self-Brain Surgery live.
It's going to be a monthly training program. You're going to be able to get
online, connect with me, and sometimes with Lisa, and have live interaction,
deep training, how you can change your mind and change your life,
the tools of neuroscience and faith smashing together.
And we're going to do a two-session test school for that. And if you're interested in being part of that,
we're only going to pick about 10 people, maybe up to 20, to help me check out
and perfect the technological and moving parts of how to do live training because
I've never done it before. So I'm going to practice a couple of sessions.
So we're going to do two 45-minute to one-hour sessions. They're going to come
up starting in about two weeks.
And if you're interested in that, you have to be a paid subscriber on Substack
to be part of that test group.
So go check out drleewarren.substack.com.
If you're interested on the paid subscriber episode this week that will be released
later today, there will be a link to sign up to be one of the test subjects for that training.
The first session is going to be probably some technological goofing around
trying to figure out how the system works and making sure I can interact with
you and answer your questions and how the chat function works and all that stuff.
We'll be doing some testing of the system on the technological side and I'll need some feedback.
The second one, hopefully, will be much more smooth. It'll be deep training.
We'll go through the philosophical foundations for self-brain surgery and really get into some training.
So you'll get something really out of it in exchange for your help.
But I need 10 to 20 volunteers to help me make sure that product,
that school, is ready for primetime.
Because when I release it worldwide, I want to make sure that we're helping
people change their minds and change their lives.
And I don't want to be hung up on the tech side of everything.
So I'm going to need some help. We'll call it a clinical trial.
We're doing something to learn how to use the system and the technology so we
can make sure this message has the impact and meaning that it's supposed to. Okay, so check it out.
DrLeeWarren.substack.com. Sign up as a paid subscriber, and you can potentially
be part of that test group to the School of Self-Brain Surgery when it starts in about two weeks.
It's going to be Friday, September 13th. It's going to be the first training
session, second one probably two weeks later, and then we'll roll the school out in October.
Okay, that's the plan. The school's going to be a paid product because I want
you to invest in your own healing. I want you to invest in your own training.
And it's going to be powerful and deep. It's going to be an hour of my time once a month.
And it's going to be worth it. Okay? So that's the idea.
School of Self-Brain Surgery coming soon. Now today, we're going to go back
and play an episode from last year called Am I Just My Brain?
This is important because one of the most important things that keeps people
stuck stuck, it's when we believe that we don't have the capacity to change.
When we believe that we're stuck with the brain we have because of genetics, or because of biology,
or because of trauma, or something that somebody did to us, that our brain is
broken in some way, or that our personality type limits us in some way,
that our Enneagram type limits us in some way, that we don't have the capacity
to heal or change because we're autistic,
or we're neurodivergent, or we have some sort of ADHD or something that keeps us stuck.
That message that the world has sent us is that if your brain is broken in a
particular way, you can't fix it.
And that produces hopelessness, despair, and stuckness and a circling back to
finding blame and finding somebody to pat you on the back and tell you it's
okay and that will keep you stuck.
And I'm interested in you moving forward in your life.
I'm interested in you flourishing and becoming healthier and feeling better and being happier.
And this episode is gonna give you the basis of why you can truly believe.
It's not motivation. It's not metaphor.
You can truly believe on a cellular,
structural, atomic level that you are designed to heal and to change.
You are not stuck with the brain that you have. That's where we're going today.
That's what we're getting ready to get after right now. I've got an important
message for you today that was prompted by a letter from a listener named Stephanie.
Stephanie, I'm going to protect your identity here a bit, but I want to get
to the heart of the question that Stephanie asked me because I have so much
compassion for this concept because we have been really sold a bill of goods
over the last 90 years, 80 years.
We've been convinced that our genes and our physical brain structure determine most of our lives.
We've been convinced by this, by science, by the media, by entertainment,
and by almost every other aspect of our society and culture,
we have been convinced that we have little to do with the outcome of our lives.
And we're mostly just determined by genes that we inherit from our parents.
And I just want to tell you, that isn't true. And there's something important,
a little important thing I want you to know about your brain and your mind and your spirit today.
We're always talking about smashing neuroscience and faith together on this show.
And I think my mission, my primary mission is to teach you that your creator
put your mind and your brain inside your body in order to help you become healthier
and feel better and be happier, not to be victims of them,
but to be able to use them the way they're designed so that you can and break
free because he knew that massive things were coming, because he knew that you'll
have trauma and tragedy and hardship and difficulty and relationship problems.
In this world, you will have trouble and we know we're not alone in that.
But if you are saddled and burdened with the wrong idea about your brain,
it's an easy off-ramp to despair and hopelessness.
If you don't think that those things can get better because of that's just how
I am or because this thing happened and that broke my brain,
and now I can't be better.
I want you to know there is real hope, and the truth is that the bill of goods
we've been sold isn't the case,
and there is a path to real hope by understanding the mind-brain-spirit interface
smashing together of neuroscience and faith, and that, my friend,
is why we're here together today.
Hey, I've got an email from a Stephanie. Stephanie, I'm going to reply to you
personally because I want to address.
I'm so grateful for your email, But let me just give you the gist of this, okay?
Stephanie says she listens to the show every day, and she wants to put into
practice everything that we talk about here.
And she's been more aware of her thinking, which is all good stuff.
But here's what she said.
I haven't had a traumatic loss or event that I'm trying to move past,
but I was in a car accident when I was a teenager, and I believe I sustained a brain injury.
And the doctor said I was fine, but looking back, I can see what led now to
my 26-year struggle with depression and other brain injuries,
brain issues. I've been on medication and have not really felt better.
I think my question is, am I just spinning my wheels trying to change my thinking
if I have a chemical imbalance?
And is a chemical imbalance a real thing? I pray every day for healing and help
and joy to be restored. I don't want to use depression as an excuse.
And at the same time, I feel like for me trying to change my thinking and get
out of these ruts is as though I'm running a race with other athletes while I'm missing a leg.
I know you've mentioned depression in your episodes before, so I apologize if
I've missed you addressing this episode, this issue already.
Listen, this is a perfect example, Stephanie.
It's a perfect example of the kinds of things that I want to get to here.
And in my next book, the self-brain surgery book that we're going to be working
on, that I am working on, okay?
It's always funny how you spend so long writing a book and when it finally comes
out, hope is the first dose is out in the world. and promoting it and interviewing
about it and talking about it, but I'm already working on what's next.
You constantly have the next thing ahead of you. Hope is the first dose. It's brand new.
It's just a little baby out there in the world and I'm already working on the
next thing. They flow together, okay?
But the next book is all about this issue. What's going on between brain,
mind, spirit, and your life?
And how do we smash those things together, okay? So here's the root of the question. Here's the root of it.
If we have a brain injury that creates a problem with our neurotransmitters or neurochemicals,
does that mean that we cannot influence that or get better from it by addressing
it on the thinking and our thought life side?
Or are we just hopeless? If our brain isn't working properly,
then does any of this other stuff matter?
And that's really what we've been taught, right? If you don't feel good, you need a medicine.
If you have a feeling, you have a diagnosis. And if you have a diagnosis,
then other people need to just empathize with you and understand and avoid triggering
you and do all these things that your culture is telling us right now.
We built this system around feelings.
We built the system around diagnoses. We pathologized everything.
And there's some value in some of those things, okay? But the bottom line is this.
From a Christian perspective, we believe that God says he can heal our diseases.
We believe that God says that he can make things better for us, right?
So that's one part of it. The other part of it is the neuroscience with a capital
N as the academic neuroscience,
the media, the public wants us to think that mind is a concept created by brain.
That you don't really have a thought life. You don't really even have free will.
You just have what your brain does.
And that's amazing to me to think that because the science actually over and
over again has shown us that is not the case.
But we're dealing with dogma which becomes religions
don't let anybody tell you that atheists or materialists or
hardcore scientists don't have their own religion they do
and they defend it to the death okay and it
goes all the way back it goes way back actually all the way back to hippocrates
but more recently in 1962 francis crick who was the co-discoverer with james
watson of dna and won the nobel prize for physiology and medicine in 1962 wrote
a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis. And here's what he said.
Get this, Francis Crick said this.
You, quote, end quotes, you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will,
are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and
their associated molecules.
As Lewis Carroll might have phrased it, you are nothing but a sack of,
you are nothing but a pack of neurons. This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas
of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing. Astonishing.
Francis Crick wants you to believe, the guy who discovered DNA,
wants you to believe that everything about your life, even your choice to listen to this podcast,
is just a result of neuronal activity from nerve cells and the molecules in
your body, and that you're basically nothing but a pack of skin cells and electrical
impulses, as I said in my book, I've seen the interviews, I quoted that thought process. says.
Francis Crick and all of established academic neuroscience wants you to believe
you don't have a choice in the matter, Stephanie, that you're just stuck.
If you got brain damage, so be it. You're stuck with it. Take medicine, right?
I'm here to tell you something different because guess what the Bible said?
This little scripture, I think it is the key idea and I've missed it so many
times in my life. I read right past it.
Here's 2 Timothy 1.7. Are you ready for for some cognitive neuroscience from your creator.
Here it is. God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love.
And I've stopped right there many times when I read this.
God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love. But keep reading.
God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
2 Timothy 1.7. God hasn't given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
He didn't say he gave you a sack full of neurons and that determines everything
else. He says, I gave you a spirit of a sound mind.
Holy spirit of God. If you're a believer is inside you and he communicates with
your mind and that tells your brain who's boss. Okay.
You can change the way that your brain works by learning to change the way that
you think. Now there's some implications for people that have brain injuries.
There's some implications here that we need to get, okay? This is important.
And there are roles for therapy and there are roles for medicine and there are roles for surgery.
All those things are true. I make my living doing brain and spine surgery, okay?
So don't conflate the idea that, don't take away from this that I'm saying it's
all just about how you think and the spirit changes how your brain works and
everything's going to be fine.
I'm not always saying that because God God created medicine too, okay?
This is an incredibly crucial point that we're getting ready to make.
Before we make it, though, we need to understand something. I used a quote from
E.B. White. E.B. White was a writer.
He wrote some famous books, Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet and
the Swan, The Trumpet of the Swan.
He also was a writer and contributing editor to the New Yorker magazine and
the co-author of a book that's required reading for anybody who wants to learn
how to write books called The Elements of Style with another guy named Strunk.
That book, Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Basically, you have to read
it if you're going to learn how to write because all the publishers,
all the agents, all the editors expect certain stylistic things of your writing.
And if you don't comply with them, nobody buys your book. Nobody publishes your book.
So you got to match it up with Strunk and White, even to this day,
even though that book's been around forever.
In fact, I remember Kathy Helmers, my agent, when Philip Yancey introduced me
to her after I decided I wasn't going to really try to be a writer.
And my self-published book, in Philip's estimation wasn't good enough to be published.
Kathy said, hey, I'm going to give you a pile of books or recommendations and
I want you to read them and use them to rewrite this manuscript and we'll see
if it's good enough to be published.
One of those books was Strunk in White's Elements of Style. Another one was Bird by Anne Lamott.
And as an aside, a number of people recently have written in and said,
hey, you mentioned books in almost every episode and there's so many of them
we can't keep up, but please do an episode or make a list somewhere about all
the books that you want us to read.
I'm going to do that. I'm going to start a recurring, let me ask you if you
think it would be valuable.
I was thinking about doing a series of episodes once in a while called Three
Things I've Learned From Three Books I Love.
And so each episode would have a conversation about three books and one take
home from each of those books.
And then I would put in the show notes, links to where you can buy them and
all that stuff, as I always do, by the way.
And if you hear me say something about a book, if you go to the notes of that
episode, it's always going to be in there. I always put a link to the book.
So I do always tell you where they came from. But if you think that would be
fun to do episodes about books from time to time, I'd love to do that.
I think it would be great. Let me know if that sounds fun to you. Okay.
So Strunk and White.
Wrote the Elements of Style that's still used. And E.B. White was this famous author.
He died in 1985, born in 1899.
And he wrote Charlotte's Web and all these other great books. But he had a letter.
He was famous almost for writing back to fans that wrote to him.
And this one guy named Mr. Nadeau wrote him a letter that basically said he was feeling hopeless.
It was in 1973. 1773, this guy had lost his hope. He lost his spirit.
He lost his faith in humanity.
And here's what E.B. White said to him.
Dear Mr. Nadeau, as long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one
compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.
Hope is the thing that is left to us in a bad time.
I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Hang on to your hope. Hang on to your hope and wind the clock for tomorrow is another day.
Now, obviously, we don't have to wind clocks very often anymore.
Apple watches keep on running. Our batteries in our watches keep us from having
to wind the clock. So that phrase is old.
But his point is, I'm going to get up tomorrow morning. I'm going to wind the
clock and I'm going to get after it no matter how I feel because there's always a reason to hope.
If you read, I've seen the interview, if you had an opportunity to go to a book
signing, and if I signed a copy, I almost certainly signed Romans 12.12 when
I signed copies of I've Seen the Interview.
Romans 12.12 in the voice translation says, don't forget to rejoice because
hope is always just around the corner.
That's why you wind the clock, okay? There's always hope. Today,
Stephanie and everybody else listening to this, I'm going to give you a reason
to hope, okay? I brought up that
quote about E.B. White, which was amazing because he talks about hope.
But I brought it up because in my epigraph to chapter 28 of I've Seen the End
of You, I quoted E.B. White when he said this.
And it makes the point about how often famous scientists are elevated to some
position that's almost godlike.
And I'll get back to Francis Crick in a moment.
But I just want you to recognize this thing that we do in society.
Society somebody comes up with a smart idea or writes
an important paper that turns out to be important or understanding of
something some scientific concept and then we make
this switch to where they have a voice of a celebrity in society that gives
them the ability to speak into things as if they're true and everybody just
believes them because they're so smart here's what eb white said einstein is
loved because he is gentle respected
because he is wise relativity Relativity being not for most of us,
we elevate its author to a position somewhere between Edison,
who gave us a tangible gleam, and God, who gave us the difficult,
dark, and the hope of penetrating it. E.B. White said that. He's exactly right.
He's saying people can't really even understand what Einstein wrote about in
relativity, but they know he's super smart, and so they elevate him to this
celebrity position where he's almost like God.
So if Einstein says it, it must be true.
Now, come back to Francis Crick.
Crick and Hippocrates and lots of other scientists did something smart, right?
He discovered the identity of what the nature and characteristics of DNA.
Amazing. So now we understand how we inherit our hair color and eye color and
bone structure and all those other things that come along with genetics.
But we turned it into this religion, right? Where this thing called genetic
determinism came along out of this teaching that you're all about your DNA.
Genetic determinism is basically, I can't help it.
I'm made that way. My mom and dad were that way. I'm just stuck with how I am.
I inherited it. I'm big bone. I'm going to have diabetes.
I'm going to be overweight. Everybody in my family is. And we know now that's just not true, right?
The vast majority of how our life plays out comes down to our decisions.
Remember T.D. Jakes said, we're born looking like our parents.
We die looking like our decisions.
And here's some stunning things. You can have Francis Crick say,
hey, guess what? You're just a sack of neurons, right?
You're all stuck with how you're made. You can't change it. This idea that you
have a mind, it's independent.
You're just, you're wrong. You're just a pack of neurons. There's no hope in that, right?
And years and years later, we still think that's true in some way.
We still buy into it, at least subconsciously. And we've bought so much of our
teaching that we begin to to feel hopeless if we're diagnosed with something.
I'm sorry, you're depressed.
You just stuck with it. You better take Wellbutrin. Okay.
Let me just give you some other ideas. Okay.
This idea, the reason it's so important to drill into this is because we've
accepted a lot of beliefs without critically examining them.
That's a, you could say that about a lot of our society right now, by the way.
And it's our job is discerning smart people who God gave us a sound mind. Okay.
We have a job to relentlessly refuse to participate in our own demise.
That's one of the commandments of self-brain surgery, right?
And part of that is to pay attention to places where culture is putting ideas
into us that are going to harm us if we don't root them out.
Because this idea that we don't have free will, that we're just stuck with our
genetics and with our neurons that are built into our head, and we don't even really have a mind.
In fact, the strict materialists will fight you if you say the word mind because
they have this belief that mind is just a concept, but it's all about brain.
There's actually a neuroscience term called reductive physicalism,
which is the view that the mind is reducible to physical processes in the brain.
Everything about what you think is mind is just some physical process in your brain.
Therefore, there's really no such thing as the mind. The mind is the brain.
The flip side of that is that substance dualism where there are two distinct
substances that characterize a mind and brain, a physical brain and a non-physical mind.
And the mind can exist without the brain, but in humans, they interact.
Now, let me ask you a question.
If you listened to yesterday's episode with John Burke about near-death experiences, and I hope you did,
how could someone whose mind was created by their brain and whose brain is dead
and has no discernible electrical activity, how could they then come back and
report on things in a near-death experience?
There was one woman, we didn't talk about it yesterday, I wanted to try to avoid
some of the more sensationalistic things that some of these folks have described,
But there was more than one study,
more than one person who had a near-death experience that described things that
could not have been described if they didn't really see them.
One was a woman came back and reported having been observing her surgery from above the room.
And she reported on a sticker that she could see on the blade of a ceiling fan in the room.
And she said the color of it and some numbers that were written on it.
And several witnesses in the room got a ladder and checked that and the sticker
was there and it said what she said that it said.
Okay, so that could not have happened accidentally and it couldn't have happened
if she wasn't actually having this experience and if her mind was creating her
brain, I'm sorry, if her brain was creating her mind and her brain was dead clinically,
there was no heartbeat, no electrical activity, no pulse, no brainwave activity
during that time, then that mind couldn't have been there to observe the thing that she observed.
So this reductive physicalism idea, I'm just telling you, it's a doctrine that's
been taught. It's not a scientific reality.
It's a doctrine that's been taught. And your job as a discerning person with a mind of power,
a sound mind that God has given you, is to look for those places where you've
been hoodwinked, where we've all been hoodwinked, and get them out of our thought
processes because that's the path to freedom, okay?
So this reductive physicalism idea came from Francis and people like that.
And the whole idea is that we just aren't anything but our brain.
We're just stuck with our brain.
And I'm just here to tell you on Self-Brain Surgery Saturday,
my friend, that just isn't the case.
So now let's go to this idea of Francis Couric saying you're just a big sack
of neurons. And let's think about some of the implications of that.
There's a woman named Sharon Durkix who's written several really incredible
books. She has a PhD from Cambridge in functional brain imaging.
And she wrote this book called Am I Just My Brain? Am I Just My Brain?
And I hope to get her on the podcast sometime. time. But she talks about the
implications of Francis Crick's worldview here.
If you're just a sack of neurons, then there's some implications.
There certainly are implications for free will. If you're driven by your brain,
then you're not really free to make decisions.
You are simply driven by the chemical reactions within the processes of your body.
And therefore, how could you hold anybody responsible for their actions, evil or good, right?
If it's not your fault, you don't have free will. Why is it a problem if you
stab somebody? You just, your brain made you do that. It's not your fault, right?
There are implications for robotics. She says robots occupy more and more of the workforce.
They're all over the house. Every time you say somebody's name,
a speaker talks back to you and asks you what you need, right?
I'm not going to say her name because she'll speak up on the podcast right here next to me.
And eventually those will be able possibly to have consciousness and artificial
intelligence will become able to start to assume things and make decisions for you.
There's implications in that. There are implications for ethics.
If you're defined by your brain, then who's a person?
Is a person every human from the moment of conception on, or only those people
whose brains are developed enough to be fully functioning?
Because if you're really only dependent on what your brain does and your brain
isn't working, you've got Alzheimer's or vascular dementia, or you've had a
stroke, or you're a baby, and therefore your brain isn't working in full capacity,
then maybe you shouldn't have rights.
Maybe in order to protect the planet and reduce carbon, maybe we should kill
everybody body that doesn't have a fully functioning brain.
That sounds crazy, but these things are being discussed, friend.
If you don't have free will because your brain is just an organ that creates
this illusion that you have a mind and free will, then why wouldn't that make
sense? We got to protect the planet, right?
There's implications for religion. Since it's come to light that the brain is
highly involved in religious belief and experience, as we've talked about here,
Can neuroscience actually explain religion enough to make it go away?
Is it just a bunch of electric-like impulses in your brain that make you think all these things?
Listen, this is an important idea, right? It's so important that we begin to
root this out, that we need to pay attention in culture even,
in the places where it shows up. There's a Disney movie.
Sharon Dirk explains this out. I completely missed it. There's a Disney movie
that talks about the brain. It's basically, I think it's called From the Inside Out.
Yeah, it's called Inside Out, and it basically depicts the complex idea of human
brain and the importance of different emotions like joy, sadness,
anger, fear, and disgust. These are characters in the movie.
Sharon Durkix lays this out. And this idea that we can be neuroplastic,
that we can change our brain, it's depicted in the movie as the breaking and
reforming of these islands in her experience.
And the narrative thread that runs through the movie is that everything that
makes Riley, the character, do what she does and be who she is comes from these
physical mechanisms that are happening inside her head.
That when her core memories are intact, her outward behavior is balanced.
And when they're not, the outside world falls apart.
So this idea that's just teaching little kids is that what your brain is, you are.
Everything happens from the inside out. Nothing on the outside can affect you.
You've got to get your internal state ordered and you're just stuck with making
sure that works as well as it can work, right?
So this is cognitive neuroscience being depicted in a entertainment way to teach
children that they are just their brains, okay? And this is important.
I'm not telling you not to watch movies. I'm not telling you not to listen to music.
Tata and I last week talked about one of the reasons that I've chosen not to
listen to a lot of secular music, even though I'm a huge music fan,
is because I find myself repeating lyrics and then I stop myself and say,
wait a minute, that lyric I just sang wasn't holy.
It wasn't good. It wasn't even true. It was counter-truthful.
And a good example was I was singing along with a song that came on the radio
that Lisa and I heard the other day.
And one of the lines was, it can't be wrong if it feels so right.
And I was just singing along. You light up my life. It can't be wrong if it
feels so right. And I was like, wait, time out. Hang on a second.
My whole platform is about the fact that feelings aren't facts.
And sometimes feelings will tell you that something's good when in fact it is
not good and you should quit it.
Right. And so you have to learn then to pay attention to the things that you
put in your brain and the things that you put in front of your eyes,
that old children song, be careful little eyes what you see. Why?
Because what you see, what you hear, what you take in, what you swallow whole
without discernment turns into how you live.
This is important, okay? I'm not ranting. And all of this comes back to the original question.
Let's go back to Stephanie's question. Am I spinning my wheels by trying to
change how I think if I've got a brain injury?
And I just want to tell you this is super important, okay?
You can change. Several studies have shown that up to 95% of mental illness, including depression,
anxiety, Anxiety, all of these things comes highly influenced by our state of
mind, the things we think about, the things we talk about, the way that we perceive
the things that we're going through.
Up to 95% of the symptoms of mental disorder come from thinking disorders.
That's incredible. And it puts some responsibility on us because God says,
I didn't give you a spirit of fear or anxiety.
I didn't give you a spirit of
depression. I gave you a spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Understand this. I'm not saying that it's wrong to feel symptoms of depression or anxiety.
Those are normal, natural things that do happen to all of us.
But where we go off the rails is when we begin to think and believe the idea
that we're powerless to do anything about them. Okay.
Daniel Amen, my good friend who has led his field of psychiatry in the understanding
the importance of functional imaging has shown, for example,
I've gotten several questions recently about ADHD.
There are multiple types of brain disorders that come from trauma,
the different ways that people hit their heads or different ways that people
have brain injuries that create symptoms that are commonly diagnosed as ADHD,
but they're all different brain disorders, all different types of brain injury,
and they all need to be treated differently.
And so if you go to a health practitioner, a therapist, a psychiatrist,
a doctor, and you say, hey, I'm feeling depressed, or I'm feeling anxious,
or I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts, or my kid can't pay attention in class.
And if your words about your symptoms are met with, let me give you a prescription
to handle those symptoms because you must be depressed, or they must have ADHD,
or they must have anxiety disorder.
If you get a prescription for a symptom without doing brain imaging to understand
what the actual problem is.
Then effectively you're treating a symptom as if it all comes from the same problem.
Even though Daniel has shown with SPECT imaging, for example,
and multiple studies have shown with functional brain imaging,
functional MRI scanning,
that ADHD, for example, is actually not one disorder, but multiple disorders
from multiple different types of injuries, from multiple different types of
brain regions, and all of them need to be treated differently,
sometimes with medication.
Daniel has shown that cognitive behavioral therapy and learning to think about
your thinking and improving your diet and reducing caffeine and avoiding alcohol
and reducing nicotine and other toxins and things like that can actually make
a huge difference in almost all types of mental symptoms from any type of disorder.
And the whole point of that is just to say this, if you are struggling with
some sort of mental symptom, depression, anxiety,
ADHD, whatever it might be, okay, from trauma or not from trauma,
from PTSD PTSD or not from PTSD, from an adverse childhood experience,
from any of those things, you need to get with a provider who understands that
the brain is an organ that needs to be imaged.
And if you're really struggling, now, obviously, a lot of things can be handled
by improving your thought life, the things that we talk about on this show all
the time. But if you're really struggling and you can't make progress or you
have major depression or major anxiety, you need a provider.
And sometimes you need medication.
Even Daniel Amen, a great psychiatrist, world probably most famous psychiatrist
alive today, who's been on this show at least four times.
He says there's no harm in medication in some settings.
But once you start them, it can be very hard because now you're tinkering with
your brain chemistry and it can become very difficult to get off those medications.
So before you go on them, you want to make sure that you're treating the right thing.
Okay? Now, if you're taking an antidepressant, if your providers put you on
one, there's nothing wrong with that.
And I'm not saying you should go stop all your medicines. Please don't do that.
I'm saying, check out Daniel Amen, amenclinics.com. Check out other places.
Get a second opinion before you give up on the idea that you can get better. Okay?
Because remember the promises of God. Psalm 103, there's five things that God promises us. Okay?
He says, bless the Lord on my soul, bless the Lord and praise his holy name.
Bless the Lord on my soul and forget not all his benefits.
What are the five benefits? He says he forgives my sins.
He heals all my diseases.
He redeems my life from the pit. He crowns me with love and compassion and satisfies
my desires with good things so that my youth is restored like the eagles.
He forgives all your sins. That's the number one benefit.
Number two, he heals all your diseases. Now, does that mean that he'll heal your glioblastoma?
He may not in our timeline, okay? We've been talking a lot about retrocausality
and about the long-term arc of his narrative plan for redemption and how he
doesn't always remove our struggles, but he comes along aside us within them.
And so the answer, will he heal me? Yes, eventually he will.
We know he will eventually because we know where we're going if we believe in
it. And it's not a cop-out.
It's to say that you can learn to live in this world with hard circumstances
and know that he does have a redemptive plan for you and he will eventually heal all your diseases.
Either here or in the next life. It's not a cop-out.
It's a great source of peace and hope that he wants to get in this story with you and help you.
But in the meantime, believe that he can heal because he can.
And certainly, even if you tend to struggle with a bias towards anxiety or a
bias towards depressive thought, we know there are lots of things you can do
to make it better without medication from the start.
Thinking about your thinking, learning to aggressively challenge Challenge those
same synaptic thought processes to avoid habits that reinforce the feeling.
Alcohol, binge watching TV or Netflix or whatever it is you do that puts you
in that place where you usually feel the thing that you feel, right?
Avoiding reading or listening to or watching things that reinforce those thought
processes that you're just stuck with how you feel.
Challenging lines of thought that you receive from outside influences that make
you feel hopeless and pursue things, relationships,
environments, reading, listening, podcasts, all those things that you can use
as prehab to fall back on a better state of preparation the next time you feel
the thing that you feel so that you can more adequately challenge it and move
forward in it to get better, right?
The cell brain surgery piece, these are all important. Now, let me sum this up.
Yes, depression and anxiety and ADHD and all these things are real things.
And yes, sometimes we need medication.
Sometimes we need intervention. Sometimes we do.
But you are not stuck living a life suffering under those things.
There are things that you can do to help.
And the first piece of it always is to get your head on straight about the fact
that your brain is not just a big sack of neurons and your mind is not just
a construct of your brain,
but you are created with a spirit of a sound mind.
There is a way that you can get your mind and your brain and your spirit in
order. And it starts with self-brain surgery.
Remember, self-brain surgery is just a moniker that I give you for the piece
that you do yourself, which is just to say, hey, great physician,
come here and do some brain surgery
on me and help me get my head on straight so I can find hope again.
You don't have to do it yourself. It's God that works in you to will and to
act according to his good purpose. That's what he says in Romans, okay?
Your job is to consent to the procedure that the Holy Spirit wants to do inside
you to rectify the mind-body-brain-spirit interface.
To smash them together and give you hope.
There's a treatment plan, okay, that can help you with anything.
Sometimes it requires going to see Dr. Amen. Sometimes it requires going to
see a different doctor who won't just write you a prescription first,
but says, hey, let me write a prescription for you to de-stress, to take a vacation,
to get off this train of thought that you're on that's harmful to you.
Don't just pharmacologically treat the symptom.
Get after the root cause of what's happening. If there's an old unresolved trauma
in your life, even if it was a car accident when you were a child,
if your brain isn't working properly, guess what? You can learn to work around it.
If you have chest pain and your cardiologist says you have a blocked artery,
that means there's something physically wrong with the organ of your heart and
you go do something about it, don't you?
You get a stent or you change your diet, you get on your cholesterol medications,
you do all these things to try to make sure that artery and that cardiac muscle
works better. But we don't ever do that with our brain.
We just treat symptoms. We just say, oh, I have anxiety. It must just be the
way I am. My aunt Sally was anxious, and so I'm stuck with it. No, you're not.
You can deal with it more effectively by learning how to control the thought
process side of it, by understanding if there is a structural brain injury,
which requires imaging to diagnose,
then maybe I need to work on nutrition and blood flow and watch out for dietary
things that I'm doing that make it worse instead of better.
Maybe I need to change some relationships that are adding stress to my life.
Maybe I need to learn a different way of thinking about how I put my thoughts
together in the first place.
Maybe I need to do some soul surgery and go back and resolve some of that past
trauma that's contributing to this.
And I'm blaming myself for something that I know now, if I had known what I
know now, I wouldn't have done it that way. So I need to forgive myself.
Maybe there's some stuff like that in there. And a good therapist will help you get that done.
I think it's important to to have a therapist that has some spiritual understanding.
So you're not going to just get told, oh, you're just stuck with that.
That's your great aunt Sally's fault that you feel that way,
and you can't do anything about it.
So let's just make everybody bow to your feelings and accept this is how you
are, and you better protect that and be triggered if somebody doesn't agree with you about it.
Those are not helpful, okay? At the end of the day, what's helpful?
Becoming healthier, feeling better, and being happier. And you can't do that.
By just accepting that you're broken in some way. God says, I will heal all your diseases.
God wants to help you. He wants to change your mind and he wants to change your life.
He wants to help you do self-brain surgery because he's the one actually,
after all, doing the operation because God didn't give you a spirit of fear.
He gave you a spirit of love and of power and of a sound mind and he will help
you change your mind and he will help you change your life.
Just because Francis Crick said it my friend
don't make it Stephanie friend everybody listening
out there across the world I just want you to know there is
great hope to be found no matter what you're
struggling with no matter what kind of massive thing you've
gone through no matter what kind of thought disorder you're dealing
with no matter what kind of problem you have there is valid hope yes sometimes
you need medication yes sometimes you need a psychiatrist yes sometimes you
may need a therapist but there is a lot of good that you can do by working on
the space between your ears and lining up your spirit with your mind and your brain.
It is not a bottom-up, brain determines everything.
You're just a sack of neurons and it's hopeless. It is not true that you're
just what your DNA gives you.
Up to 95% of the things we feel can be modulated by changing how we think.
That's why Paul said in Romans 12, up to. Stop conforming to what Francis Couric,
that's my translation, stop conforming to what the world wants you to do and
think and feel and believe.
Rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind. It doesn't have to be that way.
We can influence it. We can change it. We can do self-brain surgery.
And guess what else? We can start today.