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Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. This is Dr.
Lee Warren, and it is Theology Thursday here on the podcast.
Every week we try to do an episode where we get into science and faith and smash
them together in a unique way, a little bit heavier on the spiritual side.
And today I want to give you just a couple of thoughts about the difference between your
right half of your brain and the left half of
your brain and some ideas from Scripture and science about how the world is
viewed by those two halves of your brain and how that may come into play when
we try to grapple with big things like how to handle trauma and tragedy and
massive things that occur in our lives and how we even come to understand and know what we believe,
or what we feel about the world and the universe around us and maybe even where God is when things hurt.
So today we're going to do Theology Thursday. We're going to talk about left
and right and two ways of knowing things.
And we're going to kind of wrap up this German language concept that we've been
talking about for a couple of weeks now on the spiritual brain surgery and Dr.
Lee Warren podcast size. We talked about it on Tuesdays with Tata.
These three German words for knowledge, I think, has something to do with our
right and our left brain.
I think that has something to do with how we encounter God and the universe
around us and what we do when things hurt.
And I want to give you some quick thoughts on that on Theology Thursday.
But before we do any of that, I have a question for you.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place, Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
healthier, feel better and be happier.
This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
All right you ready to get after it so on the
podcast on the spiritual brain surgery podcast and
the dr lee warren podcast for the last couple of weeks i've mentioned a
few times that in german there are at least three different verbs for what you
say when you're talking about what in english we would say i know something
or i know someone in german it parses it out into to three different words that
mean three different things. There's this word kenon that's the.
Description you would use if you're saying that you know the qualities of someone.
Like when I talk about Lisa, I can tell you a bunch of facts about her.
I can tell you how tall she is or where she was born or what her birthday is,
those kinds of things. And that's not Kenan.
Kenan is, I can tell you what I feel when I see her walk across the room or
when I hold her hand, how she sounds in her spirit when she's happy versus when she's sad.
I know these things about her because I have have a relationship with her and I've experienced her.
And that's a different kind of knowledge than a set of facts.
The facts about something are wissen in German. This idea that when you say,
I know that, you mean, I know how it was manufactured or I know how much it
weighs, or I know the general shape of it.
But kennen is something deeper, something more experiential.
I know the ways of, I know the nuances of, I know the experience of knowing
this person or knowing that thing.
And then there's a third word, Conan, that's meaning sort of,
you know, how something is.
Like if you say, I know French, you might mean that you have a passing familiarity
with the French language.
In German, that word Conan would actually mean, I know how to speak it.
I know how to read it. I know how to translate it. I know how to communicate
in it. It's a deeper level of this sort of knowledge about the how.
So there's this sort of what, this sort of Wissen idea, the facts about something,
and then there's this sort of experience of something, this canon,
this deeper experiential type knowledge, and then there's this sort of how idea of Conan, okay?
So I'm giving you that because I want just to reintroduce to you the idea today
on Theology Thursday that your brain is divided into two hemispheres,
left and right, and they look the same for the most part on the surface.
There are some observable differences, but for the most part,
They generally look the same, and they generally both do the same set of stuff.
They're involved in language and experience and movement and sensation and all that stuff.
So you could say on a mechanical level that the two sides of the brain do a lot of the same things.
But on a deeper level, they have differences.
Yeah, the left hemisphere is more focused on language.
The right hemisphere is more focused on experience and awareness and a broader
level of attention than the left hemisphere is. But they have some very distinct
differences in the way they process and understand what we would call knowledge or experience.
And one of the principles that I'm learning from Ian McGilchrist in his indomitable
book that, again, don't recommend you buy it right now, The Matter With Things,
because it's like 8,000 pages long.
So don't go buy it. But I'm going to try to give you some ideas from McGilchrist
that help you understand this left brain, right brain thing and why it's important. Okay.
Before we go many farther, let me just say, if you're not a spiritual person,
I want you to come to this podcast with a willingness to ask questions.
And so I assume that you're here. Most people get here because they've gone
through something hard and they're trying to find hope.
And somehow they found my books or somehow they found my website or my podcast.
And they're just trying to find some answers.
But if you come at it from a non-spiritual place, if you're not interested in
God or you don't believe in him or you don't know any of those things,
it's okay. okay, I want you just to understand one thing.
There is a way that you assess what you think is true in your life.
There's a set of principles that you operate by, and your brain certainly has
a set of principles that it operates by. So understanding those things is important.
And when I talk about spiritual things, I just want you to be aware that there
are different ways that you can experience things.
And over the course of Western civilization over the last few hundred years,
we have focused strongly on the left side of our brain and the way that the
left side interprets reality.
And we've mostly distilled what we think is real into what the left brain presents to us.
And what the left brain does is it takes a bunch of snapshots of the experience of the world.
And it tries to put a concept in your mind, if you will, of what those things
are so that you start to see the whole world and the universe around you as
a set of things that can be interacted with. with.
Relationships, people, the universe, the cosmos, your experiences,
your traumas, your tragedies, all a set of things, a set of data that can be known or understood.
And if you could just figure the things out, then life would start to make more
sense. That's kind of a left brain idea.
But the right brain is much deeper than that.
The right brain is all the things right now, look in front of you and out to
your peripheral vision, there's a whole room around you, a whole car around
you, a whole world around you.
And all of that stuff is getting into your brain, whether you're focusing on it or not.
Like right now, I'm looking dead ahead at my computer screen,
but I can see Lisa off in the far left side of my peripheral vision, having a cup of coffee.
I can see my Fender Telecaster guitar off to the right.
I can see the statues and figurines and books on the bookcase off to the right-hand
side and the lamp off to the left-hand side.
I can see the picture of Jesus off to my far left.
There's things around me that I'm not focused on or consciously aware of that
are getting into my brain and my consciousness.
And my right hemisphere is using all of those to make me feel a set of things
and know a certain set of things.
I know where I am. I know that I'm safe. I'm in my home.
I know that people who love me are close by to me. The things I love to do are nearby.
The books that I have for information and knowledge are close by.
And all of that sort of experiential stuff that Kenan is filtering into my right
brain and building a worldview for me that says I'm home,
I'm safe, I'm surrounded by people and things that I need and that need me and
that I love and they love me and all that kind of stuff.
My left brain, however, is taking a snapshot.
And it's saying, I'm sitting in my office, I'm recording a podcast,
I've got to get this information out because I have to get to the office pretty
soon and make rounds and take care of patients.
I've got this set of data in front of me, and I'm trying to transmit that to you, okay?
So again, if you're not a spiritual person, understanding the way that your
brain creates the reality that you view as your reality will come into play
when you have something hard happen and you are going to fall back on your preparation.
You're going to have to process this hard thing in some way.
And if you can learn to use both sides of your brain to do what they do well,
then you'll find a better path forward, okay?
And so if you're just willing to come to this podcast and ask big questions
and be willing to accept some maybe big answers.
Maybe some ideas that might change your mind about some things,
then when I talk about spiritual things, don't be turned off or put off by that. Yeah.
Just be willing to say, maybe there's more at play here than I thought.
Okay. Let's start from that place. Now let's go back and let's just talk for a second.
If we know that the brain is presenting different ideas to us about how the
world works, okay, that the brain is presenting different types of information.
And we know that those two sides of our brain are connected by the corpus callosum,
which is a big bundle of white matter fibers that connect the left and the right sides.
And in humans, the corpus callosum is mostly inhibitory.
In other words, it's trying to convince the left and the right half of your
brain not to fight over the processing of that information, to integrate it somehow.
And so that the ideal state of how your brain is working would be for you to
find a way to synthesize that fact-based sort of viscent idea of what your your
left hemisphere is presenting to you,
and that experiential type of information and knowledge from the right side of your brain.
And what I want to present to you today, in just a quick moment on Theology
Thursday, is that this idea that Jesus had a brain, right? Jesus had a physical brain.
He was a person with a brain who was also God, who connected his mind and his
spirit to his Father all the time and used his brain,
his mind rather, to communicate with his brain and And therefore,
since we know that in the science of neuroplasticity, we know that our thinking
affects the structure of our brains, right?
So if Jesus had a brain and Jesus had a mind and he communicated with this mind...
With his mind to his brain, then he would have never created harmful synapses
or harmful physical structures in his brain with his thinking, okay?
Now, you are told in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians, that you have the mind of
Christ, 1 Corinthians 2, 15 and 16.
If you are a spiritual person, if you come to know him, then you have the mind of Christ.
So, that means it's possible for you to operate your brain on a level that looks
more like how Jesus operated his brain, Okay, so if we just accept the idea,
even if we're not a spiritual person, if we say, okay, we know that how we think
changes the structure of our brain, and we can either harm our brain and make
it harder for us to live a life that seems to be becoming healthier and feeling
better and being happier, or we can make it easier,
then let's apply that neuroplasticity, let's apply that neuroscience to our
own benefit, and let's start following the Ten Commandments of Self-Brain Surgery,
which the first one is, first, no harm. arm.
Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise. So if we have this attitude
that we're going to use our minds to improve our brains and make these better,
then we need to understand that our brain presents to us two different ways of looking at the world.
And that we've focused for the last several hundred years in the Western society,
at least, on this fact-based idea.
And I would just submit to you that if you keep trying to figure out the world
and it's just not working and you keep trying and you keep trying to change
things and change your attitudes or overcome habits or overcome traumas and it's just not working,
maybe you need to get a little bit more in touch with the right half of your brain.
Because the right half of your brain will say, wait a minute,
yes, I went through this hard thing, but there's a whole room around me,
there's a whole world around me filled with things that are also true at the same moment.
What your left brain is trying to say, this thing that happened is the only thing that matters now.
This event, this trauma, this tragedy, this massive thing, this problem.
It's the only thing that's true anymore. Your grief will become the biggest thing.
We talked about Anthony Roberts a couple of days ago on the podcast about getting
something stuck in your vision.
And we talked about Tina Tisdale getting stuck and being unable to accept the
fact that she had pain, but she could also still have a life.
And that's a left brain type thing. This thing happened and that's now the only thing that matters.
And your right brain is saying, wait a minute, but there's still a whole set
of other things that are also true.
And so I want you to start using your corpus callosum to integrate those two
realities that are both true at the same time.
And now I want to give you some scripture to build a framework around that.
Now, again, you're not a spiritual person.
Just let these be ideas that you can ruminate on and think about,
and maybe they'll start helping you in some way. Okay, Paul talked about, the Apostle Paul, St.
Paul, talked about in Romans 1, how God was frustrated with people because they
refused to believe Him. It says in Romans 1.19.
Now, let me just submit to you that in the church, I've always heard this taught,
that you can just look at the universe and you see all the things God made,
and obviously there has to be a creator, and obviously God's real,
and people that don't see that are just delusional, and they don't see it,
and they're condemning themselves because they're refusing to see what God made.
Well, that's one way to look at it. But I would tell you that's a very left-brain way to look at it.
I think what God's really saying here is use your whole brain,
and you look up at the stars, you look at the sunset,
you look at the mountains, you look at the sea, you look at the baby being born
and the miracle of birth, and it's not a set of facts that say to you, oh, there must be a God.
It's an experience of the awe and the wonder of creation and the fact that God's
invisible qualities, if He made these beautiful things, He must be beautiful too.
If He loved me enough to to put me in this place with these people who love
me and this world that is painful but also beautiful, then he must be able to
navigate those realities at the same time.
Get that right brain involved, and it starts to become clear that there's way
more to this story than just a bunch of facts.
Because the problem is if the facts start to feel like they outweigh,
that one set of facts start to outweigh the other, that the trauma and the tragedy
and the pain and the grief and the suffering and you start to outweigh the good,
then you can start to build a case in your mind, well, there can't be a God
who loves me if all these bad things are true.
But if you start using that right side of your brain, you start seeing the beauty,
you start remembering that you can't be anxious and grateful at the same time,
that joy and sorrow can coexist at the same time, that there are people who
have done that, and so maybe you can do it too.
That's a right brain type of idea, okay?
And so I'm just saying, let's start trying to integrate and use both halves of our brain.
And then I think we're going to start seeing some other scripture come true.
And I want you to realize that the Bible, the New Testament particularly,
is full of scripture that point to the idea that what we see right now isn't the whole story.
Paul talked again, the Apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 3.18, talks about how we can contemplate God.
And he gives us this metaphor of having a veil over our face.
He says, with unveiled faces, we start to contemplate the Lord's glory,
and we are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory,
which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
So in other words, when you start communicating with the Spirit,
when you get into your right brain, when you calm that language center down,
you start this abide idea that we've been talking about with meditation.
You start to let the right half of your brain come more alive.
It's like taking a veil off your face and you
start being able to see things that are bigger and more sort of more wondrous
than you can imagine with that fact-based left side of your brain and paul says
take that veil off your face and you'll start being transformed into his image
paul further says in first corinthians 13 12 we don't yet see things clearly.
We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist, but it won't be long before
the weather clears and the sun shines bright. We'll see it all then.
See it as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly as he knows us.
What he's saying here is there's going to come a time in the future when your
brain is able to see things clearly.
You won't have this divide anymore. You won't have this confusion over facts
versus experiences. You'll have the Kenan and the Visen all smashed together
in one place, and you'll be able to see things as they really are.
And Paul then tells us in Ephesians 1 to pray for that, to pray that God starts
giving you the ability to see these things more clearly.
He says, I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that
you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious
inheritance and his holy people, to see his incomparably great power for us who believe.
The power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ
from the dead and seated him at his right hand.
I'm telling you, friend, this is how you survive trauma and tragedy and massive things.
As you start to be able to see, open the eyes of your heart and start to be
able to see the fact that there are two things that can be true at once and
that you actually do have the power to navigate this hard life because you're not alone.
You're in a room full of things that you are experiencing all at the same time
as that fact-based left brain is trying to make you think there's only one thing.
But in reality, you're still in a world full of good things,
even when some of those things are harmful or hurting.
So you're not alone. You're not stuck with a bunch of facts that seem to outweigh
the fact that there is still some good stuff out there. And you actually can change.
And we could have a long conversation about quantum physics and non-locality
and how the fact is now science is starting to understand that even in the quantum
world, even in physics, two things are always true at the same time.
An electron can be in two places at the same time.
And we can have a whole conversation about how Einstein wrote a whole paper
in which he finally admitted to himself that the fact is the universe is far
more complicated than you can put on a piece of paper or on a set of facts or in a set of equations.
And I just say that to introduce the idea that even science has come around
to the understanding that what you see with your eyes is never the whole story.
And what you seem to be able to distill into language and articulate about how
life has made you feel a certain set of things is never all there is to the story.
And so just today on Theology Thursday, I wanted to give you this idea that
you need to start spending some time letting that right half of your brain convince
you that what you feel isn't always what's true,
and what you see isn't always the whole story.
And what your left brain is trying to turn into a set of words that you can
put around this thing that's happened is only a small part of the whole picture,
because you, my friend, have a whole brain and a whole heart and a whole life and a whole mind.
And it's not just what you feel today. And it's not just what you went through yesterday.
And it's not just the fact that you feel like tomorrow's destined to look just
like today and yesterday did, because you have the same power that God used
to raise Christ from the dead inside you.
You have the mind of Christ. You don't have to conform anymore to the way the
world wants to to make you think that you're just a set of electrons firing
off impulses and your whole life
can be deduced to this electrical stuff happening in between your ears.
The fact is, you are a creature that's fearfully and wonderfully made.
And there's more to the story than one half of your brain can tell.
And it's time to learn that both sides can help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.
And both sides will tell you the truth that you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news about that, my friend, is that you can start today.
Music.
Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my
brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering
from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.
It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.
Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,
available for free at tommywalkerministries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high God.
And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries.org.
If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer,
wleewarrenmd.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,
Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014,
helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.
Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your
life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.
Music.