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Today we speak with Dr. Thomas Verny about his new book “The Embodied Mind”
What happens when a scientist, a mystic, and a comedian walk into your nervous system and refuse to leave? TrueLife is speculative audio that takes the most dangerous ideas in neuroscience, consciousness, and human potential — and makes them impossible to unhear. Fictional compounds. Real mechanisms. Experiences that don’t have names yet. For the seekers, the rebels, and everyone who has ever suspected that reality is significantly stranger than advertised.
Speaker 0 (0s): Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the true life podcast. I want to introduce to you an incredibly important episode. One of my favorites, the great Dr. Tom is Fernie gets into us about the embodied mind. I want to try and explain to you with my limited vocabulary, how important I think this book is. If you take some time to read it, you will be incredibly impressed. As I hope you will be with this interview. Something to keep in mind is the inter disciplinary subject matter.
If you pay attention to this book, please buy it. It's amazing. Don't buy it for the money. Don't buy it for him. Buy it because of the information inside of it. I believe what this gentleman is discussing is exactly what's happening to our world. It gives me pause for hope. It helps me to better integrate what's happening. Take some time, listen to the interview and read it. If you like it, please subscribe below. Reach out to him, reach out to me what an incredible interview. One of my favorites.
Thank you so much for spending time with me all Loha.
Speaker 1 (1m 8s): Yes. Yeah, I think we've got a great connection.
Speaker 2 (1m 11s): Good, good. Well, fire away.
Speaker 1 (1m 13s): Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the true life podcast. We are here with an amazing individual. Who's enjoying some warm weather that may have to fight the cold in a few days here. He's wrote an incredible book that the more you read it, the more you realize there's more to understand the book is called the embodied mind. And it is by Dr. Thomas Verny and we have him right here. Dr. Tom is when he, could you just introduce yourself a little bit in until the people about you?
Speaker 2 (1m 47s): Sure, sure. Be happy to, and let me just say how happy I am to be with you. It's always a pleasure to be with someone who likes my books. It's much better than being with someone who does not like it. Yes, yes. And there are a few of those around too about myself. Well, I guess if I can give you a little bit of my background when I was 13 years old, I was in Vienna, living in Vienna from the age of 13 to 16.
Originally I'm from Czechoslovakia and we came to Vienna and I didn't speak any German. And there was some books on a bookshelf where we were staying and there was a book by Freud and it was the interpretation of dreams. And I was 13 years old, but somehow God knows how, but somehow I knew that Freud was important.
Like this is an important person. I should, this, there was a voice inside of me, I guess that said that. And so with a little dictionary German check dictionary, I started reading interpretation of dreams and it just really spoke to me, you know, how sometimes that happens. And I just, I just loved the way Freud's mind worked and how he was sort of gradually, you know, like an archeological dig, just going sort of deeper and deeper into the unconscious.
I just love the process. And so then, and there, I made up my mind that I would become a psychiatrist. So then we immigrated to Canada, to Toronto specifically, and I went to medical school in Toronto university of Toronto. And at that time, this was the late 1950s. Many of our professors had served in the armed services in the second world war.
And they were kind of tough, no nonsense sort of Sergeant major types, you know, and they did not like psychiatry and they did not like Freud. And so the, the message that I got from these professors was that psychiatry is like, you know, like if you want to spend the rest of your life, seeing rich women complaining about their little dogs, well then that's for you.
Well, that certainly wasn't for me, you know, not, not a young guy who is ambitious and trying to make his way in the world, right. So I didn't want to do that. And so then I decided, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna do that. And so I started becoming interested in obstetrics and that went very well. I loved obstetrics until I started working in a hospital, delivering children.
And I absolutely hated the way the obstetricians treated women. And it was push, push, push, God damn it. What's wrong with you. You know, stuff like that. And it just, I mean, it was so inhuman. I, I couldn't stand it. And so after delivering 26 children, I decided to give psychiatry another try.
And this was after my third year of medical school, I went to work in Middletown state hospital, which is up New York. And this was one of those old, huge hospitals. I'm sure you have had them in Hawaii. Also, there were 5,000 patients and about 30 doctors, but most of the doctors were, were immigrants who were studying for their exams.
Okay. They mostly, they were from the Philippines and Vietnam and places like that. And they really had no interest in psychiatry. This was just a place for them to make some money and to have lots of time for study. So in the morning they would go around prescribed medications that the nurses told them they should. And then in the afternoon, they went back to their, to their rooms and studied for the exams.
Well, I was interested in patients and I knew very little about psychiatry, except what I read when I told you about dreams. And I also knew that you have to take a, you have to take a history. So I started taking history of people and looking into their backgrounds and their family life. And the word got around that. There was a doctor here who actually spoke to people.
This, this was like a revelation for these poor patients. And so within, within a week, there would be these huge lineups in front of my little office, people trying to see me and my patients were being discharged, left and right. They were getting better. And so I saw with my own eyes that there was much more to psychiatry than treating, treating little old ladies concerned about their pets.
So that's when I made up my mind that I would go into psychiatry. And so I did. And when I started my psychiatric practice, of course, I was interested in dreams. And every once in a while, you know, I would ask people about their dreams and we would talk about it. And about two or three years into my practice of psychiatry, I was seeing this young man and we were discussing his dream. And suddenly you started crying like a little baby.
And he continued like that for about 10 minutes. And then he came out of it, so to speak. And I asked him what had happened. And he said that he had just found himself in a little crib as a baby crying for his mother. Then being a somewhat skeptical young lawyer. He said, you know, there's something wrong with this picture because I've actually seen photographs of myself as a baby.
And they were always taken in a blue crib. And the crib that I had just found myself in was white. So this doesn't make sense. So I told him to talk to his mother was still alive and find out, you know, perhaps what happened. So he came back a week later for his regular appointment and he said, this is really amazing, but it seems that the first two or three months of my life, my parents did not have enough money to buy me a crib.
They borrowed a Crip from a neighbor. The borrowed prep was white. Only three months later, did they have enough money? They bought a crib that was blue. That's where all the pictures were taken. So that kind of, you know, made me think, but you know how doctors are, they don't really give patients much credit for anything. Right. We are so much more intelligent than the rest of creation.
So, you know, so yeah. So I, I kind of, you know, I noticed it then put it aside as one of those strange things that you just can't explain. But as time went on, I started having more and more experiences like that. Who's patients without me leading them in any way, just listening. And then one day, one day I heard this radio interview with a very well-known conductor in Canada.
And he was asked how, how his sort of conducting career started. It was at the end of the interview. I guess the interview had just run out of questions. And he said to everybody's astonishment. He said it started in my mother's womb. So of course everybody said, oh really? What do you mean? You know? So he said, well, it seems that when I was just 18 years old or 19, whatever it was, and I started conducting, sometimes the cello line would just jump out at me before I even changed the page.
I knew I knew what the next notes would be. Although I had never seen that piece of music that I was conducting before. It was the first time for me. So then I went home to my mother who was a cellist, and I asked her about this. And she said, what are the pieces that seems so familiar to you? And he told her, and she said, those were the pieces I was practicing when I was pregnant with you.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is absolutely 100% true. So when that happened and I had these other experiences, I couldn't set up altogether, started reading up on it a little bit. And I heard that there was this big conference in Rome, the fifth psychosomatic international conference on obstetrics and gynecology.
And I had never been to Rome before. It sounded interesting. And I knew that if you present a paper, you are treated better than the rest of humanity. So why not? Right. So I, I submitted my paper. I was like a totally unknown. I was just a young psychiatrist from Toronto and the lo and behold it was accepted. I called it the psychic life of the unborn child.
And so it was accepted. Not only was it accepted, I mean, you know, your listeners might be interested in this. I think because so much of life is, you know, a combination of hard work, talent and luck. And I was incredibly lucky. I was put on the major morning of presentations when some of the best known psychiatrist and obstetricians in the world were presenting and little me, you know, so I got 20 minutes in the sunshine.
And so when I have you ever heard of RD, Lang RD Lang was on the same program, many other people, she looked good singer, many other people who were like world famous were on the same program. So I presented my 20 minutes and I could, after about 10, 15 minutes, I could see that people in the audience were electrified. Like they were really excited.
And so when I observed that, I said at the end of my presentation, I said, if anybody here would like to continue a discussion of these things, please come to my room at five o'clock. And at five o'clock, once again, there was a lineup in front of my room, you know, and Ronnie Lang was there and many other people were there and I got to meet them. And they were all very supportive and very excited about this. And so when I saw that, when I experienced that, I said to myself, you got to write a book about this.
And so I spent the next two years putting together all the knowledge, which at that time was available about the science of the unborn child. And so in 1982, I think I published my big book that turned out to, you know, change my life, the secret life of the unborn child. And that was published by Simon and Schuster in New York.
And they sent me on a trip at that time publishers had money, which they don't seem to have anymore. They sent me across the nation, across the United States on a, on a book tour. And it was amazing. And the book got a lot of publicity and it's now published in 27 countries. So that was a huge change of life for me. But I always wondered, and we are coming to the end of my presentation here.
I have always wondered, you know, like, how is it that so many people are able to remember things and documented memories of things that happened to them in utero before the second trimester. In other words, when they were less than six months old after conception, because we know that sort of at the end of six months, the brain is sufficiently developed to lay down memories, some memories, but before six months, not so well, how is it possible?
I asked myself all these years, I was not comfortable not having an answer to that question. And, but I could not, I could not answer it. I thought of cellular consciousness, but I have always had a scientific bent of mind. And just to say, cellular consciousness is a nice praise, but it doesn't explain anything really.
So about seven years ago, I came across this article, which described a, a French, a friend, a 44 year old Frenchman who went to a doctor complaining of weakness in his left leg. And when they did all kinds of tests, including taking a circle x-ray they found out to their absolute astonishment that the men practically had no brain.
His skull was filled with water, which is cerebral spinal fluid, scientifically speaking. And he only had a thin crust of, of, of brain tissue. Yet this was a 44 year old civil servant gainfully employed father, married father of two children, and no brain, no brain to speak up.
So when I read that, I thought, how is this possible? This makes no sense. And I started looking into the literature and I found to my astonishment that actually there were many, many, many studies done, many, much research done on children who have had parts of their brains removed because of usually epilepsy, but also brain tumors, adults, same thing, lots of brain tissue removed.
And many of them continued functioning, normally, not all of them, of course, but many of them yet. And, you know, I could give you lots and lots of examples. They have been, they have been described from all over the world from, you know, some of the best research facilities and universities. This is a fact. And so I thought, well, here it is.
If people with 90%, let's say of their brains can function. Well, the only, the only explanation that I can think of that could stand, you know, scientific exploration that the rest of their body cells, tissues organs in the rest of their bodies act as kind of a backup system, just like we have in computers.
So, you know, it's your iCloud. And so when I had that idea, that's when I started looking into how this is possible. And I spent the last six years studying that I read approximately 5,000 books and papers of which 500 are now referenced in my book, the embodied mind.
And I think that I have demonstrated that we have, we have put much too much emphasis in science, on the brain and not enough emphasis on the rest of the body. The brain is connected to the rest of the body, but science has sort of treated the rest of the body as inferior and not important. Really. You know, it's all about the brain, it's all about the head.
And I think that our civilization has been in a large way responsible for that, because God knows for how long, you know, certainly beginning was the Greeks, but even much before Greek civilization, we have lived in a patriarchal society, we, which is hierarchical and everything is top-down. So we talk about, you know, the head of the head of your, I don't know, w radio broadcasting, you know, we talked about the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, it's all top down.
And what I'm, what I'm trying to do in my book is to show that really it's both Swayze it's top down and bottom up, and that we need to take into account the importance of everything that's below the neck, not just above the neck,
Speaker 1 (22m 8s): That it's, it's so well done. And I really appreciate the intro. And I, I just want everybody to know that the book is called the embodied mind and in a way, I think it represents a Copernicus moment in medicine. Yeah. And when you say you can look at the language and see our society from the past or the future, you have terms like the head honcho or, Hey, he's the head of the household. And another point that I want everyone to know is the way the book is written it's as if every single chapter is its own book, it has an intro, it has statistics.
It has stories that back it up, and then a summary at the end. And it's very well noted with just so much information for people who are curious to do their own research. And I'm sure you would want them to do that. Yes. You really make it easy to do that. I want it to also, as you were speaking, you know, as I've been talking to you, I have noticed the way that your book tends to, you know, be a section of life. And let me try to give you an example of this.
So you said for so long, we have run our society from the head down. And in your book, you give examples of how every potential cell has a memory and how science or our species has been leading a certain type of life from the head down. It's so interesting to me that you have come out with this new particular idea about medicine, and it seems that the exact same way our society is beginning to move. We're beginning to move from the head honchos. We're seeing this, you know, decentralized model developing.
And isn't it interesting that you have come up with the same type of idea for the body as decentralized medicine. It has to be a connection there. And I, I just wanted to invite you to continue talking about, you know, the single celled organisms demonstrating memory throughout the body. And, and can you talk a little bit more about how some of the cells can actually have memory?
Speaker 2 (24m 16s): Yeah, well, you know, cells are amazing. I mean, one of the most surprising things that I found doing this research, because a lot of the things that I write about, I was not aware of. I mean, I had to learn a lot that you find in the book and sometimes, you know, it, it's not the kind of book that you can read 50 pages at one sitting.
I, you know, I would really encourage anyone who is interested in the book to, you know, read perhaps one chapter at a time. Okay. Don't and don't do speed reading, you know, really enjoy it, you know, page by page because almost every paragraph has got some to me, at least really interesting information coming back to the cell, you know, cells are cells are amazing little machines.
First of all, you have to realize that cells are incredibly small. The only cell in the body that you can actually see with the naked eye is the oval. The XL, the rest of the cells are incredibly, incredibly, incredibly small. Now within this incredibly small grain of sand, so to speak. So there's seven tiny organelles, 12 million different proteins, 12 million different proteins.
Plus you have DNA and RNA right in the nucleus. Everybody knows that. But what people don't realize is that if you took the DNA, which is all, all kind of in a coiled up, if you put it into end, it would measure two meters. Two meters of stuff is in this tiny cell that is smaller than a grain of sand.
It's it's really, I mean, it's, it's totally astonishing. It's almost enough to make you believe in God.
Speaker 1 (26m 37s): It is
Speaker 2 (26m 38s): Right. Almost, almost so you know, no, let me give you an idea. So this DNA packed into a nucleus of roughly 10 micro meters in diameter. That is the width of a cotton fiber. And it's that DNA that tiny minuscule in describable, small, a bunch of proteins that contain all the instructions for the rest of, for building the rest of your body.
I mean, it is really, really amazing. So when you, so continuing then about the cell and memories in cell, the cell membrane, the cell membrane is very interesting because it has both, it has, it has proteins, which act as sort of sensory organs and they tell the cell what's happening outside. And then they also have activating activating protons and not totals proteins, sorry, activating proteins so that they make the cell do things.
Okay. So it's a little bit like our eyes, ears, nose, and our hands. Okay. So all those things are on the cell membrane. Now inside the cell, there are many places where scientists believe some scientists believe that memories can actually be stored. And one of those places is called the cytoskeleton and the cytoskeleton has got tiny little fibrils in it.
And many scientists believe that that is one place where actually memories are stored. Also the cell membrane seems to act like a transistor, and we all know that computer stars and transistors are sort of the memory anchors of, of our, of our computers. So there is much research, not totally documented, but certainly pointing in the direction that there are a number of places in a cell where memories could reside and well, they certainly reside in the DNA.
There's no doubt about that. What has also been done is, and this is really, really interesting is that some scientists and in, in my book, I give the references. Some scientists have actually encoded in DNA, huge amounts of information already. About 10 years ago, one scientist in coded a whole movie into the DNA of a living cell.
And certainly a lot of computer desserts are working on using DNA as, as, as a better computer chip. Then what we have at the moment, because in DNA, you have, you have four different, different pieces. I forgot exactly what it's called, but there's like SIS sister scene one in Aberdeen and timing.
And those four substances make up the whole DNA. And so instead of having binary, a binary computer where it's only zero and one, you're only playing with zero and one, you actually have four numbers here that you can play with so that you can inscribe much more information into a smaller place. And that's what they are trying to do. And that's way beyond my understanding, but that's, I know that this is what is happening.
So they are playing with these four substances instead of zero and one, and it gives them, excuse me, it gives them a much better chance of importing more information into a smaller place. So when we come to interesting things like heart transplants, when we come to such things with heart transplants and we read in the literature about people, actually, how recipients change their personality as a result of getting a heart transplant and how that change in personality parallels the personality of the donor.
Well, then again, the only way that you can explain that is by the transfer of memory from the cells in one heart, to the body of the other person. The other interesting thing of course, to realize heart transplants are, are amazing. The other thing about heart transplants is that when you transplant the heart in order to put the heart in order to do that, of course you have to take the old heart, the one that's diseased and put a new heart in.
It will take a long time. It's there seems to be some discussion about how long does it take for the recipient's body to connect nerves with, to connect the nerves from your own body, to the new heart. But obviously whatever it takes might take two or three months during the intervening period, that heart could not function, unless it had all what it takes to beat on its own.
So what we are dealing with here in the w with the new heart is that it already has its own pacemaker. And even though it's not connected by nerves to the person, the recipient, it is able to function on its own, which again, shows the independence of that organ from the brain.
You don't need signals from the brain, which is usually the biggest nerve that tends nerve from the brain to connect to the heart, to make it beat. It will, it will be on its own because it is a very self-contained organ with millions of cells that contain must contain memories. Otherwise, how would the person who has had a new heart transplanted into them, change their personality without knowing anything about the personality of the donor.
And I don't know whether you have read that particular chapter in my book or not. They do.
Speaker 1 (34m 7s): I have, I, I thought it was fascinating to hear about how the heart has its own brain and how it's connected to the higher, some higher functioning parts of the brain. Can you share maybe some stories about some of the transplants people?
Speaker 2 (34m 20s): Yeah, sure. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, there was, there was one transplant, for example, to a young woman who was very gay, not interested in men at all. Only interested in women women's issues, things like that. She was also a vegetarian and she had, I, I believe she had the transplant of a young guy who died in a motorcycle accident and she didn't know that.
And w after the heart transplant, she started having an intern. She, she totally lost her interest in other women sexually. She became sexually interested in men. She loved meat, stopped being a vegetarian. And what was most interesting actually was that she complained of feeling in her chest, the impact, the impact of, of, of something.
And it turned out that guy whose heart was transplanted died in a motorcycle accident. And he, the reason he died was because somehow accidentally a car, hit him in the chest, and that's what he died on. She could actually feel the impact of that car in her chest. So there are many, many stories like that.
I would say that the great majority of cardiologists or medical doctors will not give much credence to these stories, but that doesn't really mean much. I'm afraid because scientists have always, always fought against new ideas. You know, just think of, you mentioned Copernicus, you know, just think of Galileo and Copernicus, you know, well, Freud himself, you know, I mean, his, his ideas were met with incredible hostility.
Think of Darwin. You know, even, even when, when for example, anesthetic was first introduced, ether was first introduced. You know, a lot of church, a lot of people in the church were opposed to it because after all in the Bible, it says that women should give birth in pain to their children. So, you know, this, this goes against church doctrine.
So either the church or other doctors, doctors by and large believe in what they were taught at university. And then when they continue practicing, please don't tell me anything. That's going to upset what I already know. That's their general orientation. And very few doctors I'm afraid are open to new ideas.
Max plank, who started, you know, the plant max Planck Institute in Germany, which is one of the finest research institutes in the world, said science progresses one funeral at a time. And you know what that means, you know, that some of these old timers need to die out before we can make progress. And another very, very nice gentleman who interviewed me was kind enough to say that Dr.
Bernie writes outside the box until the box catches up with them.
Speaker 1 (38m 32s): What really well put?
Speaker 2 (38m 34s): So know. So I wrote, I wrote the secret life of the unborn child, which at that time was incredibly attacked by all kinds of people. And today is just middle of the road. Like nobody doubts any of, any of the things that I have written. I'm proud to say any of those things that I've written in the secret life of the unborn child in 1981 or 82, I forgot what it is. None of them have been this, this what's the word I'm looking for, like opposed to, you know, thrown out.
They still stand the test of time. Okay. And when it comes to the embodied mind again, I mean, this is so well-researched, this book is so incredibly well-researched that although, you know, scientists will probably, although actually so far I have not received too much hostile mail. I'm actually surprised, I guess people have other things to worry about right now, but this proven was the word that I was looking for.
Okay. Nothing that I had written in the past has been disproven in any way. And I hope that the same thing will happen with the embodied mind.
Speaker 1 (40m 2s): I, I think so. What one? Well, a lot of things I've noticed, but in this book you really weave together a lot of interdisciplinary. Yes. There's different ways to see it. And I don't think anybody could possibly disprove or even try to discredit anything because it seems to me, specialization has taken over in the field of medicine and everyone is so narrowly focused and you've panned back. Maybe it's because your career has lasted so long and you've seen so much, Right?
Speaker 2 (40m 33s): Yes, yes, yes. That's exactly right. You know, specialization is really killing medicine in some way, you know, I mean, th it's almost coming to the point where somebody specializes only in the left ear, you
Speaker 1 (40m 48s): Know, it's so true.
Speaker 2 (40m 51s): It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. What we need is a much more holistic approach. And, and it's, it's one of the reasons that sort of nonmedical healers are doing so well all over the world is because people have kind of lost trust in, in medicine because it is so narrow. Yeah. And, and also, you know, I, I attended Harvard, Harvard university.
I won the scholarship to Harvard and I attended Harvard and I get the Harvard health news every week. And the way the other day, sorry, the other day there was a, there was a health special health lecture on the interaction between the gut and the brain. And so I thought to myself, oh, this is great. You know, I write about that. This is really important.
And you know, and then it went on it, it had one sentence. One sentence was, there is a lot of communication between the gut and the brain. And then it went on to describe how anxiety, stress, all kinds of emotional problems lead to gut disease. So ulcers, ulcerative, colitis, Crohn's disease, all those things from the brain down to the gut, nothing about the bacteria in the gut and all the cells lining the gut, having to do with what's going on in the brain.
Nothing, which is totally wrong. Honestly, God, it's totally, totally wrong. For example, you know, we know, I, I'm sure you have heard of Prozac and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. Something like 85% of serotonin is produced in our gut. It's not produced in the brain. It's in the gut gut bacteria have a tremendous effect on many of the antidepressants and antianxiety drugs that we take.
It may very well be. There's very little research that has actually been done on this, except for what I'm saying now, but it may very well be that the reason that some people react well to antianxiety or antidepressant drugs is because the biker microbiome, the viruses and bacteria in their gut have a positive effect on those medications. And if you don't have those bacteria in your gut, you are not going to get better, no matter how much medication you are taking.
So looking at the big theory in the gut is incredibly, incredibly important. And hardly anybody is really doing that. So, you know, we have, we have to call for a much more holistic approach to health where I'm not, I'm not this, I'm not claiming that the brain is not important. All I'm saying is we need to have a more balanced approach.
And it's very important to look what the brain does to the, and what the gut does to the brain. For example, just give, let me give you another example. It has, it has been shown that people who are more lonely, who socialize less have different gut bacteria from people who socialize more. And so the question arises are they lonely and less sociable because of the bacteria in their gut or the have the bacteria in the gut being affected by their loneliness and less sociability.
We don't know, but is anybody looking into it? So, you know, these are, these are such interesting questions that I just hope, you know, that people will wake up and see this. Let me give you a very, very easy example. You, you, you have a beautiful laugh and your face is so full of joy. It's wonderful to look at.
Thank you. There's research to show that even if you are depressed and you put your face into a smiling mode, you start feeling better. You start producing catechol, Amiens you start producing and Trenell in the face is sending messages to the rest of the body saying I'm feeling happy. Oh, really? Okay. Well then the hormones and everything else comes in and you start actually feeling happy just because you put your face into a happy mode.
That's called interoception. In other words, there's extra reception and interoception extra reception is when you get messages from the outside wheel eyes, ears, nose interoception is when you are connected to the rest of your body. So for the skin. So when your skin goes into a smile, interoception tells the brain you're happy and you become happy lungs. Same thing.
You know, when you go and look at Eastern philosophies, particularly in India, China, Japan, places like that, they spend a lot of time and give a lot of importance to meditation. Meditation also always involves a certain type of breathing and many yogis, for example, can, can even stop. There can slow down their heart rate by breathing.
And we all know how, how healthy and beneficial meditation can be. And meditation then, and breathing is another way in which we communicate with the rest of our bodies. All the cells in the body then become more oxygenated. And although all kinds of good things can happen. So there are just millions of examples that I can give you that shows the importance of, of messages from down below the neck, to the, to the brain and how important they are.
Speaker 1 (48m 7s): Yeah. It's, you know, I really, I really hope people, listen, if you're listening to this podcast or watching the video, you, you must buy this book. Let me, let me just like, I keep rereading it. And I keep finding stuff. And let me share with you an idea that I just had as you spoke. I, I think what you're describing through epigenetics through a new understanding of the way communication in the body works is you're. I think you're laying a groundwork for a new type of language in a way.
Let me explain to you, when you, when you say about, you know, when you talk about Buddhism or the east, and you talk about us in the west, isn't it fascinating to think that the left hemisphere of the brain is like this logical scalpel, like Western medicine, and then the right hemisphere, this brain is like this holistic approach to integration. And you need both. You need the Corpus callosum you need. And if I, if I may share one more quick, little story that I heard, that it pertains to what you said is There's this old Limerick that says, you know, the body gets together and the hand say, Hey, we do all the grabbing.
And the feet say, well, we do all the walking. And the mouse is we do all the chewing and his lazy stomach just gets all the food. Doesn't do anything. So they decided to go on strike in the hands, quit picking the feet, quit walking. And the mouth stops chewing. Within a matter of days, the hands are too weak to grab anything, the feet and laser too weak to walk anywhere in the mouth can even chew. And then they realized the stomach's not lazy. It distributes all the food and nutrients to them. And when we start looking at the language we use, whether it's the head honcho, it's the head of the household or the fish rots from the head down your book is, is I think laying a foundation for us to not only practice medicine different, but to see ourselves as one body, like we were in the middle of an integration.
And I think your book speaks to this. If we can begin practicing medicine, at least exploring these ideas that have been taboo, because books have been written and institutes have been built and pharmaceutical companies have so much money. If we can begin to crack that we can begin to crack the problem of a human kind, being sick. There's so much in your book. I mean, there's one term I would like you to, to meet it the fine. And it's this term of psycho-physiological coherence that is towards the back of the book.
And it was talking about the magnetic field of the heart and how you can, when you see people. Can you explain that to people? I think it's profound.
Speaker 2 (50m 51s): Well, thank you. Thank you. How many people are listening to this
Speaker 1 (50m 57s): Right now? I'm just recording it. So that,
Speaker 2 (50m 60s): And then on a good day, can you tell me how many listeners you have?
Speaker 1 (51m 4s): I can on a good day, I can get a couple hundred overall throughout my each particular episode can get somewhere between maybe 100 and say 3000 and that's probably for a month.
Speaker 2 (51m 21s): Right. And is that in Hawaii only or does it
Speaker 1 (51m 24s): No, that's that's, that is me just putting it out there and that's with zero that's with zero money behind it. If I, if I took, like, I could get 15,000 downloads, if I put 500 bucks, it's me in a bucks at it. But you know, I, I do to economic times, you know, I don't have the money to, to pump it up like that, but I I've, I've been able to distribute them pretty well. And mostly Europe, most of my listeners would be in Eastern Europe for some reason or over in that area.
So
Speaker 2 (51m 58s): That's amazing. Yes. Like I I'm, for example, very big in Japan.
Speaker 1 (52m 6s): We do. I'm talking about,
Speaker 2 (52m 8s): Oh yeah, they, they, they absolutely love it. They love my work. And in Japan, it's very interesting. Like you say, you know, in some countries you are more accepted than in others. And so that's how it feels. But coming back, if you don't mind coming back to your question, I think that one of the interesting things about the heart is what you mentioned, that it has this huge electromagnetic field, which is much bigger.
I think it's at least 10 times larger than the electromagnetic field of the, of the brain. So that in itself should tell you something about the importance of the heart. And of course we have all these sayings in the popular, popular consciousness about the heart, right. And I don't have to go into that. So when I think that when people are sensitive, because again, some people are more sensitive than others.
If a person is more sensitive, more into their own bodies, they will be more receptive to the electrical magnetic field of another person. And so one of the things that happens is that very often people feel attracted to each other. And at other times they don't feel anything. And at other times they feel like an immediate hostility. Why would that be? I asked myself, right?
And so when I learned about the, I didn't know that the heart has an electromagnetic field until I studied. I, you know, it's not one of those things that you are taught in medical school. So when I found out about that, I started looking into relationships and one of the things that we humans do and probably all organisms do is that when we are with other people, we start, we start vibrating at the same frequency as those other people are.
So, I mean, imagine two tuning forks like this, and you hit one and the other one is still, and the moment that this one starts vibrating, the other one also starts vibrating in the same rhythm. Right? And that's kind of when, when that happens between people, when my heart starts vibrating at the same frequency as your heart, then we are really at the same wavelengths. We are really together.
We are communicating and there's a good chance that we'll like each other. When people say I fell in love the first time I saw her or him, whatever. Then I think one of the things that happened is that they immediately vibrated at the same frequency. And we, a lot of, a lot of the organs in our bodies have vibrations. Like our gut, for example, you know, has it's called peristaltic movements, right?
It moves the food down from, you know, the stomach down through the large intestines and out direct tomb. And so the heart vibrates all, all the cells and tissues vibrate. So I think it's really, really important for people to be as open as they can be when they are with other people. But if we put up walls around ourselves, if we are protective, then we are not going to be very good communicators.
So, you know, I think that one of the things that we can learn from these physiological, from this physiological knowledge is to try to be more open so that we can receive messages, not necessarily verbal, But also nonverbal. And we can be open to these vibrations. I wanted to say, when we talked about heart transplants, that I was speaking to a cardiologist in California the other day, and I asked him whether he tells is actually a cardiac surgeon, whether he tells his patients that there's the possibility of a personality change.
Oh no. Oh no, we no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't do that. What can I say? You know, keep, keep, keep them ignorant. Right? Keep your patients ignorant. Don't tell them anything that, you know, might be a problem for me later on me as a doctor. Right. You know, I mean, they might come and Sue me for, you know, having transferred a heart, a heart from a young motorcyclist to the heart of a young woman, which reminds me a couple of weeks ago, you must have read about pick trends about a person receiving a pic transplant.
Well, you know, if you give any credence to what I have been saying in terms of cellular memories, I don't think that we should rush into giving people pick transplant, You know, because God knows what that will do, you know, to their personality. We don't know. We don't know much about the personality of a pig. Right.
Speaker 1 (58m 13s): We know enough.
Speaker 2 (58m 17s): Right, right, right, right, right. So, you know, I, I think that we need, I mean, sometimes science does things just because they can, rather than because they have a good reason.
Speaker 1 (58m 33s): Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58m 33s): And so I think that a lot more thought should be given before we start transplanting, you know, from animals to humans, particularly the heart. I think that kidney liver, perhaps it's different, but the heart really seems to be much more than just a pump. This is what we have to remember. The heart is much more than a pump. It really is a very important organ.
Just, just like the brain.
Speaker 1 (59m 7s): Yeah. I think, you know, I think that there is something to be said for, you know, the existence of something bigger than us, whether if that's just us connected or something like that. But when you started speaking about, or when I start thinking about people becoming cameras with pig hearts and stuff, like we must understand that we are something in process or we are something that is in the state of becoming and you know, we, we're not, we're not a pig, you know, and I thought it was amazing.
The story you told about the young woman who got a man's heart, like men and women are different. And when you transplant different parts, men have thicker bones, we have different testosterone levels. So of course, if you put a man's heart in a woman going to visit, you're physically changing her with an Oregon, of course, it's going to change your personality. Right. You know, and I, I, I was thinking too, combining the east with the west. Like, and, and when you though the words you use, like, I want to open up to you. I want to take the walls down.
So if I come up to you and you're sad, and I rest my arm on your shoulder in a way I'm transferring my heartbeat, you can feel someone's heartbeat through their fingers. If you're sensitive. Another interesting point is there's a book by Chris Ryan and he talks about the grasshopper becoming a locust and a grasshopper is a grasshopper until he becomes into a swarm. And once the grasshoppers get around some sort of probably electromagnetic process or some sort of process happens when they're all together and they begin vibrating as one, and they physically transform into the locus, the same thing with a mob mentality, or you look at someone like Charles Manson or some sort of charismatic leader, they're able to get people together and transform the group into one.
And I think that's probably sync synchronizing heartbeats, synchronizing, serotonin levels, synchronizing a form of communication that we don't thoroughly understand, but your book hits on all of this. And that's why it's so much more important than just a, an idea of medicine. It's like a medicine for the soul of our humanity. There's so many important parts in there. You know, another part you had spoken about eight, a gentleman in San Francisco. I don't think he was an endocrinologist, but he had an idea and he has a belief contradictory towards yours.
And basically what he was saying was that the brain secretes consciousness or something like that. Do you remember that story now?
Speaker 2 (1h 1m 54s): No, I don't remember that, but I, I know about, you know, that kind of a thinking and
Speaker 1 (1h 2m 1s): That a
Speaker 2 (1h 2m 1s): Little bit. Yeah, sure. You know, I mean, a long time ago when sort of medicine was in its infancy, there were people who, whose, who thought that consciousness the mind, and often the two are equated. Let's say the mind rather than consciousness, that the mind was an epi phenomenon, a product of the brain just like, forgive me for saying this.
But that's the example that was given just like urine is a product of kidneys. The mind is a product of the brain and you know, nothing, nothing could be further from the truth. Because if you look at the analogy, you know, you're in, is physical. You can see it, you can measure it, et cetera, et cetera, you don't need to go into details. Right? On the other hand, you cannot measure the mind.
It has it, it's a non-physical concept in a sense, right? It's an abstraction. And so to say that the mind is a product and scientifically, they love, you know, science, sciences, love giving, giving Latin or Greek names to things because then it's somehow elevated and it becomes more real.
So epi phenomenon, which is very nice. It becomes an LP phenomena of the brain. Just doesn't just doesn't make sense. Just doesn't make sense, because as you have said, and I agree the mind has to be more than just a product of the brain. It has to be at least a product of every cell in the body, not just the brain.
And because now we are getting more and more into quantum physics, it seems very likely that the mind sort of oscillates between quantum, between following the rules of quantum physics and Newtonian physics. So Newtonian physics would be all the things that we can measure, right?
Quantum physics is different because it only has probabilities. So we can never say where a proton is going to be. Only that the chances are that it's going to be there or there. And then we have this very interesting phenomenon in quantum physics where a particle that somehow is divided into two. We'll always be connected, no matter how many millions or thousands of miles away from each other, they are.
If you do something to one proton, the other proton is going to react instantaneously much faster than the speed of light. Okay. According to Einstein and everybody else who has since followed the own the fastest way for anything, for any communication is the speed of light. You cannot go faster than the speed of light, but this communication is faster than the speed it's instantaneous.
So there's something wrong with physics, with Newtonian physics, right? And every, everybody, since quantum physics was quantum physics, quantum mechanics was first sort of discovered, has been trying to bring those two ideas together and so far unsuccessfully. But what is interesting about quantum physics is that we know that when there is an observer, the presence of an observer will change the outcome of the experiment.
And so my thinking is that if we do, if we are insightful, if we introspect, if we think about ourselves in our minds, then we can change the outcome of the mind. Like we have an influence on that just through introspection.
And so I think that one of the reasons that for example, psychoanalysis or psychotherapy works like insight works is because we are changing the physicals. If I can speak of the physical structure of the mind, although it is an abstraction, but somehow we are able to change our thinking and feeling by introspection. And if that is successful, then we can benefit from it.
Speaker 1 (1h 7m 36s): That that should be a whole nother book right there like that right there is. And that is, I've never heard that connection before, but that makes so much sense. And it would make so much sense that that's why we're in such profound changes all this internal observing and like, it just catches fire. And It reminds me of a joke that, like I heard, I went into the physics office the other day and there was three physicists in there. And I said, gentlemen, could you just explain to me very quickly, what reality in life is?
The one guy says it's all particles. And the second guy says, no, no, it's all waves. And then the third guy says, now it just depends on who we're lying to.
Speaker 2 (1h 8m 17s): Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, in quantum physics it's vehicles,
Speaker 1 (1h 8m 22s): I don't know what that, I don't know that term. What does that,
Speaker 2 (1h 8m 24s): Yeah. Yeah. So which is somewhere between a particle and a wave is a vehicle
Speaker 1 (1h 8m 31s): I've never even heard of that term.
Speaker 2 (1h 8m 32s): Yeah. Yeah. So waves change into, into particles, particles change into waves and all of that is affected by the presence of an observer. And if you observe yourself, then you are changing the waves and particles inside of you and things can happen. I wanted to give you one, one example, you know, you were talking about, about sort of action on mass, like a swarm.
Speaker 1 (1h 9m 4s): Yes.
Speaker 2 (1h 9m 6s): So Jean Robinson professor at uni at Illinois, university of Illinois has done these incredible, I think it's one of the most elegant experiments in science that I know of and it's in my book, but I will just repeat it very, very briefly. He, what he did, he started African killer bees, which are very, very aggressive and European gentle bees. And what he did well was his students because Nope, no one person could do that by himself.
It's good. When you have PhD students,
Speaker 1 (1h 9m 45s): You
Speaker 2 (1h 9m 45s): Can, you can sort of use them as slaves
Speaker 1 (1h 9m 50s): From the head down.
Speaker 2 (1h 9m 51s): Yeah, I know. So, so what, what they helped to do him was that he took 300 new just born BS, just moments before, after they were born very, very soon after they were born, it took 300 of these newborn bees and he put them into the beehive of the other and vice versa. So he took 300 newborns, African killer bees, which are very, very aggressive and put them into the gentle European bees and vice versa within a few hours, the bees change so that they would fall in line with the behavior of the hive that they were in.
So although the gentle newborn bees were supposed to be gentle, they became just as aggressive as the beehive that they were in and vice versa. And what gene Robinson also observed was that the expression of the genes change, this is the important thing. So this is where epigenetics comes in. Okay. We have, we have this wonderful ability that although the genes don't change, gen geneticists have been right about that.
What that's changed is that is whether they are active or silent. So they, they get activated. And so genetics is referred to this as expression, the expression of the genes changes, but you and I, we can just call it activation. And so the, the aggressive genes that made these aggressive bees aggressive became silenced.
And what is very, very important of course, is that this is the kind of thing that happens when you have riots. Okay. When you have, thank God, we don't have those anymore. But when you in the United States, for example, they had lynchings in the, in the 1920s, a mob becomes people, individuals in the mob take on sort of the behavior of the majority because their genes are also being the activated or activated, whatever the case may be.
And so this is one beautiful explanation of sort of why mobs can become incredibly violent because although individuals afterwards are say, I don't know what got into me. That's not usually how I behave. I don't know why I did what I did. We have had a lot of that, you know, in the United States and certainly in the rest of the world. And I think gene Robinson and his experiments are a tremendous indication of, of why, of how that happens.
Speaker 1 (1h 13m 9s): Yeah, I would agree. How does that, you know, it brings a question to my mind in that on some level, it makes me think of, I think it was Steven, Pinker's the blank slate, you know, how, how, like you give, or you the Catholic church, give me a child for seven years and I'll give you a good Catholic or something like that.
Speaker 2 (1h 13m 26s): Yeah. It's the, oh, the Jesuits were supposed to
Speaker 1 (1h 13m 33s): The masters. The masters.
Speaker 2 (1h 13m 36s): Yeah.
Speaker 1 (1h 13m 37s): So, you know, when I think about taking a young bee and putting them in another hive and that, or that cell potentially take on the genetic coding, I don't know if that's the right term, but it takes on the behavior
Speaker 2 (1h 13m 51s): That behave
Speaker 1 (1h 13m 52s): That, which is put into like a cold water would become warm water. Yes. But do you think that translates into one human being able to become another group of humans?
Speaker 2 (1h 14m 4s): I'm afraid? So once in a while, you know, once in a while there's a person, because I think, you know, we do have better brains than so once in a while you have a person who will sort of go, who will swim against and against the way the, the water
Speaker 1 (1h 14m 29s): Moving current, I
Speaker 2 (1h 14m 30s): Think the current, that's it. Thank you. So once in a while you get a person who will stand up and no matter what happens like it happened in, in Russia, you know, a couple of weeks ago, when a woman on television, you know, protested against the war, the Russians of aging against Ukraine, and she was immediately put into prison and, you know, she was in incredible danger, but in spite of that, rather than a green, she stood up and that happens once in a while, but it does not happen because a majority of people, unfortunately, and I mean, who, who knows, you know, who knows how you, or I would act in those circumstances, we don't know.
And I hope we never have to find out. But what is interesting is that once in a while, I mean, I'm reminded, you know, of that picture that we have all seen when there was a Chinese man in Tiananmen square. Right. And he stood up against the tanks. I mean, imagine that, you know, where thousands and millions would just not, you know, let's not make waves. Right.
But he stood up. So once in a while it happens. But I think for the majority of people, they just go along with the stream.
Speaker 1 (1h 15m 59s): That's it? You know, if you look at the, the, the tank, what is called the tank, man, if you look it, like, imagine the tank man, as an epigenetic phenomenon, where all of a sudden it turns on everybody else's, you know what I mean? Like, and that is, I mean, those stories are hard, coded into literature. They're hard. Coded into our DNA. Like he, all it takes is one or two people to show everybody else. Oh, there it goes.
Speaker 2 (1h 16m 22s): All it takes all it takes. That's right. But George, I need to go in a few.
Speaker 1 (1h 16m 27s): I know you do. I, I, I can't help. And I love talking to you. Thank you so much for your talk. I really, really, really enjoyed it. It was really fun.
Speaker 2 (1h 16m 35s): Very much wonderful.