How Changing Your Mind Can Physically Alter Your Brain

Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today's episode comes to us from our sister podcast, Mind Matters News, a production of the Discovery Institute's Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. You can learn more about the show and access other episodes at mindmatters.ai. Welcome everyone to Mind Matters News. This is Mike Higner, and today I have the great privilege of having my friend and colleague, Dr. Lee Warren, join us. Dr. Warren is a neurosurgeon, an author, and a podcaster. He's the author of many books, and has a wonderful, fascinating book that I want to ask a lot of questions about called The Life-Changing Art of Self-Brain Surgery. And so, Lee, welcome, and thank you for joining us. Mike, it's good to see you again. Thanks for having me today, my friend. Sure. So I'm curious on behalf of our audience, brain surgery is pretty hard, and I would imagine that self-brain surgery is even harder. What is the life-changing art of self-brain surgery? What's that all about? So, this came about, Mike, as you and I have talked about before. My upbringing in neuroscience, I think, like yours, really was the training of the materialist worldview, right? Where we're kind of the product of our brain activity and everything we think of as ourself and our personality and our thoughts and all that came from the activity of the cells in our brain. And that's kind of the way we were trained. But at the same time, I was raised in a Christian worldview. And I think, although I never really thought about it, Christians don't believe that. Christians believe that something about us persists after we die, right? That this soul, mind, heart, as the Bible kind of conflates, is separate and different from brain. And as you wrote a beautiful book about, that's important to discern the difference between brain and mind. So in my life, in 2013, we lost our son, Mitch, who was stabbed to death. Oh, I'm sorry. at age 19 and at you know when when you face those kinds of hard things you naturally question your faith and you feel a lot of anger and guilt and all those things that you feel when you're bereaved and grieving like that and my wife Lisa ran our practice at the time and we practiced in Auburn Alabama on the university campus there at Auburn University and our office was on the third floor of the building where they were doing functional MRI research with a seven Tesla scanner was at the time one of only three seven Tesla MRI scanners in the country. And the day we went back to work was about a month after Mitch died. And we took a month off to kind of try to recover and all of that. And so we were still obviously grieving and released under a lot of pressure and doubting and, you know, upset still after losing our son, naturally. And we went back to work. And on that day that we went back to work, there was a research meeting on the first floor in the functional MRI scanner suite. And we didn't have anything else to do. We went down to just watch this research. And they had somebody in the scanner, and they were doing the functional brain imaging on them and asking them questions over a headphone. And the researcher said to the patient, hey, think about the worst thing you've ever thought or experienced in your life. Think about the worst, darkest moment of your entire life. And I could relate to that because I was feeling my own. And we watched this person think that thought and recall that memory. And then we watched her brain respond by changing its blood flow patterns in areas that are involved in fear and anxiety and amygdala and hippocampus and all that. And then shortly after that thought turned into brain activity, we watched her physiology changes. Her heart rate and blood pressure went up and her respiratory rate went up and all that. and then a few seconds later the researcher said okay now think about the best day of your life the happiest memory you can recall and within just a few seconds the amygdala kind of calmed down and the frontal regions of the brain began to light up and get more activity and metabolic activity and then her physiology improved her heart rate came down and blood pressure came down all that and my wife said that kind of reminds me of Philippians 4 where it says if you don't want to be as anxious think about different things and think about something you're grateful for and pray and you'll be less anxious. And it kind of clicked in my head. The mind and the brain are not the same thing. Like I kind of integrated that worldview that I've been raised in science and my Christian faith sort of came together in that moment and said, no, the brain is not the whole story here. You can decide something and your brain will respond to that. And then I had this simple thought that when we go to surgery, you and I as neurosurgeons, what we're doing in brain surgery, Mike, is we're intentionally making structural changes in somebody's brain for the purpose of helping them in some way, right? And what we were watching these people do in the scanner that day was intentionally change what they were thinking about, which then made structural changes in their brain for the purpose of helping them think one thing and not another. And that was the same thing as surgery in my mind is we're choosing to make a structural change in our brain. And so we just saw it like God gave me that gift of letting me see with my eyes something that I needed at that moment to believe that all these things I was hearing in my head after my son died weren't going to tell the whole story about how the rest of my life would play out because I could choose different thoughts and it would help me heal. Wow, that's fascinating. That's absolutely fascinating. And your observation that the mind isn't the same thing as the brain, that the mind can affect the brain, I think has been mine also. And I think a lot of neurosurgeons feel that way. I think it's pretty widespread in our profession because we're kind of on the front line of the mind-brain question. We see it in a direct way every day. And just a note on the tragic loss of your son. My oldest son passed away at 32 a couple of years ago. I'm sorry. About four days after the second Pfizer dose of the COVID vaccine. from myocarditis. So I've kind of been there. Oh, I'm so sorry. That's okay. It's a club you don't want to join, but people who've lost kids. That's right. So how can this insight, and I think what you've seen is a tremendous insight into the relationship between the mind and the brain. How can this make people's lives better? Well, so I spent the last 12 years since Mitch died, really, once I had that realization that what we think about structurally changes our brains, then I started trying to understand the science more, I think much like you have, and then understand what the Bible had to say all along. And I started finding all these places where neurosciences sort of validated what scripture said a long time ago about how humans are best able to flourish. And so what I tried to do then is figure out the different ways that I could use my mind to improve what my brain was doing and break old patterns of thought and patterns of behavior. And what I found was that that gives you tremendous agency in your life. Like you don't have to think anymore that the genes I inherited from my mom and dad and the way that I was raised and the traumas and tragedies that I've been through get to change my brain in some way that's going to reduce me to reacting to those things for the rest of my life. You don't have to adopt those things as your identity. And I think in this cultural moment that we're in right now, all the young people especially are being encouraged with things like follow your heart and live your truth and believe your feelings and all of that. and then they're asking everyone else to validate what they feel. And what we know now from the neuroscience research is that about 80% of what we think and feel is false. It's just not true. And so then if you learn that you can change what you think about and that will change your brain and that will change your physiology and how you feel, then all of a sudden you're not a victim of the things that happen to you in your life anymore. You actually have some agency and some control and how you're going to respond to them. So we don't have to live in this real amygdala-driven fear response of reacting to everything. We can choose to plan out our responses and sort of control what we decide to allow our brains to do to us. And I think that gives you tremendous hope that you're not stuck with the way things have always been because we know now new microtubules and synaptic changes start to happen within seconds of thinking one thought and not another thought. So if you can learn to direct how you think, then you're literally performing surgery on your own brain and you're in charge all of a sudden i call it the patient to doctor shift like before everybody right everybody thinks that that they need outside help they need a therapist a doctor and sometimes we do i'm not saying that but but everybody thinks that somebody else needs to change or somebody else needs to validate them or somebody else needs to do something or the circumstances need to be a certain way or we can't be happy we can't be fulfilled. And what we know now is none of those things will actually produce internal change until you change how you think. And so once you learn how to do that, then you all of a sudden are back in the driver's seat. You're the surgeon with the knife in your hand instead of waiting for somebody to come and fix everything for you. Well, it's fascinating because it really gives meaning to the title of your book about self-brain surgery, that you really can change the way your brain works. And I think Benjamin Leibitt did some fascinating research years ago on free will. He did all sorts of great stuff, but stuff on free will. And he sort of described the way the mind and the brain interact. And he was a dualist. He was a property dualist. So he definitely believed that the mind was something separate from the brain. And he described the brain as giving us this mass of what he called validity, which I guess by that he meant temptations and thoughts that we didn't really totally control. It was kind of pre-conscious, but that we retained the free ability to choose, to go along with what our brain was pushing us to do, or to veto it, to tell our brain that we're going to do a different way. And he had first rate neuroscience. I think he should have won the Nobel Prize. I mean, he's a legendary researcher. How do you put this insight into practice on a daily basis? I think that, well, what the Bible would say is, this is verse in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, that says, take every thought captive, right? And that sounds impossible if you think, well, I've got 6,000 to 8 or 10 or 60,000, depending on what research you read. All these thousands of thoughts every day, how am I supposed to take them all captive? And I think the secret to that lies in the fact of neuroplasticity that what Donald Hebb said, the neurons that are together, wire together, this sort of idea that the more you do something, the better you get at that thing. So I think the secret to getting this under your belt is to begin to practice thinking about what we think about rather than just reacting to the things that we think and feel. So we call that metacognition, right? This idea of getting above your thoughts and observing them. And if you know that 80% of them are false, then as neurosurgeons, we commonly look at a scan and we see a spot and we think, well, that might be a brain tumor. But we don't just go off to the operating room and go do radical surgery or do chemotherapy or radiation because we think it might be a brain tumor, right? We gather more data. We do a biopsy. We do some sort of procedure to try to identify the true nature of the thing before we decide the appropriate response to it. And so I think we usually in our lives have it the other way around. We feel something, think something, and we react to it as if it's true. and that often puts us into a bind because we've sent off an angry text message that we have to apologize for or we've done something we wish we hadn't done because we felt or thought something that turned out not to be true. So if you can develop this process of kind of biopsying your thoughts, thinking about what you're thinking about and deciding and interrogating whether that's true or not and then forming a frontal lobe appropriate cognitively valid response to it, then you're going to find that you're making better decisions. And then neuroplasticity will kick in. And that repeated exposure to the biopsy first and respond later process will become your second nature default over time. So we go from that reactive fear-based response that was automated before to this building in this getting good at what we're doing over and over thing. And all of a sudden you'll find that you take that pause automatically. like you just automatically think about your thought before you think that it true and that becomes this source of good decision in your life And before long you find that you flourishing in places where you been suffering before That's a wonderful insight. And it's kind of interesting because there is a parallel to that way of looking at things in 20th century philosophy with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made a very strong point that what we think is not the same thing as knowing what we think. That is that when we think it's kind of automatic, we don't control it, it kind of comes upon us. But knowing what we think is a very different process of analyzing our thoughts and so on. And so that they really are two different processes. and what you're describing is kind of the neuroscientific correlate of that. I think so. Very, very fascinating. And you've mentioned biblical insights here. And what kind of insights have scriptures offered us into neuroscience in this way? That's a fascinating perspective. Well, I think the first one is go back to what Lisa saw in the scanner that day in Philippians 4. So there's this little passage in Philippians 4, verses 6 through 8. And it says, don't be anxious for anything, but in everything with prayer and thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds in Jesus. And so if you break that down, what he's saying is if you want to be less anxious, choose gratitude instead, and then you'll be filled with peace. and it'll guard your mind and so what we know from the neuroscience research now is that there's this sort of one-way switch activity in the hippocampus where you can't really be anxious and grateful at the same time there's a gratitude activates this switch from hippocampus to frontal lobe and you get this all this ration and and good decision making and executive stuff starts to happening and that switch seems to happen when you when you think about something you're grateful for and that's been shown with really good research with people who practiced a gratitude journal or some kind of meditation and gratitude practice for about 10 minutes a day for six weeks. I think this was Andrew Newberg's work from Penn. And they showed that the hippocampus gets about 22% bigger over six weeks of that short little gratitude practice every day. And the hippocampus, of course, is involved in emotional resilience and managing threats and detecting threats and all of that in addition to memory processing. But then when you're anxious, hippocampus switches down to anxiety, to amygdala, which then triggers that anxiety cortisol response, fight, flight, freeze, and all of those things. And so if we learn that anxiety and gratitude are the gateways to that switch happening in the hippocampus, then we learn what scripture was saying all along is actually true. Like, don't be anxious, be grateful instead. And then you'll have peace. So 2,000 years before we had functional MRI scanning, we had a prescription for human flourishing in Philippians chapter four that turns out to be true neuroscientifically in the 21st century. So that's one really good example. I think it's almost an inside joke, too, when it says the peace of God will guard your heart and your mind in Jesus. And we turn out to find out that the hippocampus serves as this sort of guard dog role because it's guarding us from external threats and helping us determine what the best response is. So I think it's an inside joke of the Holy Spirit. And then you've got things like Ephesians 4, which is this long passage from verse 17 to 23 in there, where he's talking about all the different bad decisions that humans make. He calls them Gentiles, the people that don't know God in that context. And he talks about murder and adultery and all these bad things that happen to people in their lives. And then he ties all that behavior to, in verse 17, what he calls futile thinking. He says, don't live like those people because they're lost due to futile thinking. And so he's saying that things that they think about lead to things in their lives that are bad for them. And then he says in verse 23, but I want you to be sort of saved by renewing your mind. So he's saying, if you want your life to play out better and not to have as much trouble at your own hand, think different thoughts. Like, think about better things and you'll have better outcomes in your life. And again, that turns out to be true. We know now that as I wrote in my book, and I give you these 10 neuroscience principles that are called the 10 commandments of self-brain surgery. The 10th one is thoughts become things. Like, everything that's real in your life started with what you were thinking about. It started with the way that you were thinking about a particular thing. that turns into what's real in your life. And so here in Ephesians, you've got that map. Everything that happens, murder, wars, adultery, divorce, all these things start with bad thinking. That's absolutely fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Something that I still can't wrap my mind around is the relationship between spirit, soul, and brain. I think there is an overwhelming neuroscience evidence for the existence of the spirit of an immaterial aspect of the human mind and what you're describing here is also very very powerful evidence for that is the spirit something separate from the soul is it just an aspect of how the soul works do you have thoughts about that I don't think it's separate I think the Bible kind of conflates these words, heart, mind, soul. And they seem to all relate to aspects of the same thing to me. And so I think what I think is when you go back to the book of Genesis, when the creation story is happening and God made all these things, he made the earth and the stars and the sun and the ocean and the animals. And he said, it's good. And then it says he made man in his image. And after that, he breathed life into the man and says that was very good. and so all the things he made the thing that was very good was the embodied spirit that he put into man and i think i think what's eternal about us what lives beyond our bodies passing away is this you call it soul in your book i think it's it's mind soul and and spirit and heart and all those things i think is the same entity that god created in an immaterial way and then he gave us in an embodied way, the human brain, as sort of the interface between spirit and physical flesh. And so I think it's going to turn out that the neuroscientists had it backwards. They thought that brain generated mind, but it turns out that mind empowers brain to let us live the lives of the way we do. And so I think spirit and soul and mind and heart are probably all the same thing, Mike. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I mean, William James, a famous psychologist around the late 19th century, adhered to a perspective on the relationship between the mind and the brain, which I think has a lot to say for it. And that is that the brain doesn't create the mind. It doesn't give rise to the mind. It focuses the mind. that our minds are much, much bigger. There's much more to our minds than we experience on a daily basis. And the brain's job as an organ is to permit us to use our mind in everyday life to survive. If our mind just used all of its powers, we would forget to eat. So that the brain does a lot of practical things and kind of lets us live in this physical world, but our mind is much greater than our brain. I think that's true. And we know, Ian McGilchrist has written about this. It's something like 90% of the neurons in the frontal cortex and the corpus callosum are inhibitory. So we all have this idea that our brains are showing us a map of what the world really is. But what probably is true is that our brains really filter most of what we experience, and our minds sort of create the expectation of how those filters are set. So what seems real to most of us most of the time is probably just what we're telling our brain to filter and allow us to see. Yeah, yeah, that's a fascinating insight. And to me it makes so much more sense than the traditional materialist view that the brain is just a computer that generates the mind. And as a neurosurgeon, what I see in daily practice as a neurosurgeon, I get the sense it's the same thing you see. I think many neurosurgeons see this. That's just not the way it works. The mind is something far, far deeper and far, far bigger than just the brain. Brain's a wonderful organ, but it's an organ. It does organ stuff. It doesn't create the mind. It influences the mind, but it doesn't create it. you mentioned Ian McGilchrist who's a fascinating author wrote a book called The Master and the Emissary and he's fascinated by the interaction between the cerebral hemispheres between the right and left cerebral hemispheres and what do you feel about that perspective on things Ian feels that the left hemisphere is sort of the rational, linear processing way of thinking that we have. And the right hemisphere is the holistic, integrating way of thinking. And you think sometimes we get it all mixed up where the right hemisphere should really be doing the dominant work and left hemisphere helping out. And sometimes it gets flipped. But how do you feel about all that? Well, I think he's probably right. And I've been trying to work my way through his second book, which is called The Matter With Things. And that's his book about consciousness and mind and brain. And it's about 3,000 pages long. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's so long. But the guy just is brilliant. But I have an experience with right hemisphere in that my brother had a massive right hemispheric stroke in 2004. Wow. And he has lost every bit of anything related to nuance or big picture thinking. Like everything is a fact. really oh it's just it is this thing and it's got to be dealt with in this way and everything is very you know contextualized exactly this thing and before he was a really nuanced you know normal kind of person and after he blew up his his right hemisphere went out he is just the most fact-based person you've ever met and so mcgillkis talks about that how we've we've over our western education over the last 300 years or so have really driven the left side into dominance of everything has a two-dimensional quality to it and the only time that it becomes different than that is if you if you're in your own thinking like if somebody tells you a lie for example you categorize that person as a liar you don't trust them anymore they're a dirty rotten liar that's all they are you know you turn them into that thing but when you tell a lie not that you and I ever tell lies but if you do if you do you have a whole story about why that was necessary and in the context for for telling it was probably beneficial to the other person so you wouldn't hurt their feelings and you have that whole story around it and that's what mcgilkis would say was a right hemisphere function like like that big picture kind of thing and i think it's right and if you start thinking about god and how we relate to him i think god is probably a an integrator he wants us to be in our whole person and to do that you have to be using both halves of your brain and so if you think about if you if you think about everything even god as a is a fact or a specific thing all the time it gets really hard to have relationship with that but in the right hemisphere context there's a whole universe of ideas and possibilities and stories that he that he that if you can bring all that together you can really have an integrated life and i think i think that's really powerful thinking from McGilchrist there. Wow. Yeah, your experience with your brother is, you know, it's fascinating. It's tragic. I'm sorry what he's been through, but it's fascinating that how closely that parallels what McGilchrist has, you know, has written about. I've been a little skeptical of some of McGilchrist's sort of scientific claims. I think his philosophical perspective is right on target. I think he's quite right about, but I wasn't so convinced that it's so dependent upon separate right and left hemisphere function But your brother experience is fascinating Have you had much experience with split patients with patients who have had commissarotomy No, I haven't. I read in your book, you tell some really great stories about that. But I haven't had a lot of experience in my practice, no. Yeah, I've had a little bit. I'm not a functional neurosurgeon, so I don't do it a lot. But I've encountered the patients, and I've done the surgery a few times. and what strikes me about them after splitting the corpus callosum is how unchanged they are meaning and they feel the same way they really feel normal you know you can find with very careful testing some disconnection syndrome issues but the patients don't really experience there but yeah I think Miguel Crist is a delightful writer and I think he's really gotten a very deep insight into problems with the modern way we think. And I'm fascinated by how closely that correlates with the way the right and left hemisphere work. It's very interesting. Wow. What you've written and spoken about so well, about the ability of the mind to alter the brain and to change the way we sort of instinctively think about things. I think parallels very nicely the experience of contemplative monks and nuns who spend a great deal of time in prayer. And really seem to, I mean, that's a powerful, powerful effect, I think, on the way the brain works. Have you thought about how this fits into contemplative prayer life and so on? I think there's good research on prayer that shows that people who spend time in prayer, and it's even been researched in non-spiritual applications of people just spending meditative time. And so contemplative practices in general, but I think specifically with faith-based approach to prayer, there's good examples of showing that people become more resilient, more hopeful, more oriented towards the positive or towards there being a possibility for navigating difficult situations when they train their brains and their minds in such a way and for me i found that if i if i have a disciplined approach to how i first spend my part of first part of every day if i spend time in prayer and in silence and in journaling and finding things to be grateful for and Bible study and those kinds of things, then I find that I have a much more firm grasp on whatever might come along for that day. I'm not as reactive. I make better decisions. I don't respond to things in a fear-based way. And so I think it works out practically in my own life what the research has shown that people's, their hippocampus gets more active, they become less triggerable and all those things. So I think the monks were onto it a long time ago. And for those of us that live out in the world where we don't have the opportunity to spend our whole lives in that space, we find that even practicing it for just a few minutes a day makes a huge tangible difference in your quality of life. Sure. There's been a real increase in functional neurosurgery over the past several decades. And I have a partner, a colleague, who does quite a bit of that, particularly deep brain stimulation, in which he inserts electrodes into some of the deepest parts of the brain. And it's used predominantly for people who have movement disorders and tremor, but it can be used for depression also. And there actually is some applications recently in schizophrenia, which is fascinating. But do you have thoughts on that, about the potential for deep brain stimulation to help people with issues of their mental states? I think it's been fairly, of course, you said widely known and used for many years now for Parkinson's and dystonia and subthalamic syndromes and things like that. But I think there's some hope that major depression can be improved with deep brain stimulation. But even with things like transcranial magnetic stimulation, it's been shown that you can improve depression. And so there's some ability by depolarizing cells in the brain to control neurochemical events. And so I think that it's exciting and I think it indicates that our chemical environment does affect our mood and our emotion. But we're also seeing that cognitive behavioral therapy and non-interventional therapies can have similar or sometimes even greater effects on people with depression and OCD and other things. So I think mind has controlling influence over brain. And when brain isn't working properly, then sometimes mind can't overcome those physical issues. And so I think things like DBS and transcranial magnetic stimulation, vagal nerve stimulation and things like that can drive brain in a different way than mind can maybe. Yeah, it's very interesting. And as you mentioned, the vagal nerve stimulation, and I've done that a little bit for seizures, but it's also been used for depression. And it's a rather amazing thing. I mean, the vagus nerve, its main function seems to be the regulation of the autonomic nervous system to the body. But if you stimulate it, you get this retrograde activity up into the brain that can really change the way people, change people's emotions. What's your take on near-death experiences? What do you feel? First of all, do you feel that these are genuine experiences that people have about survival of the mind or the soul after death? And what can we learn from them? And are there pitfalls in talking about them and thinking about them? Yeah, my friend John Burke has probably the most experience with this in the world. He's written two New York Times bestselling books. He's interviewed over 1,500 of these people that have had near-death experiences. and he and i had a long talk on his podcast recently about two hours we talked about this and i think i think the evidence is solid that that people that have these experiences across the world from different backgrounds different genders races religions ideologies philosophies they have similar very similar experiences and they report very similar things when they have these events and so that gives a lot of credibility to it i think in one regard that people from different cultures, different education levels, they come back from these experiences and say the same kinds of things that they experienced. And many of them have been well documented, as you know, as you talked about in your book a little bit. There's documentable evidence that these people had achieved brain death or physiological death. And they come back yet and can report things that happened in the room around them or sometimes report things that were on the ceiling fan blades. Or they can say things that they could not have known about without having been out of their bodies in some way. So I think the evidence, if you just look at it from a non-cynical standpoint, is pretty strong that these are real experiences. But then what the implication is, is that has to mean that there's something other than the brain that lives after the brain is dead or is gone. And so I think in a Christian standpoint or faith-based standpoint, we would say that's soul, that's mind. And I think the fact that these people across the world have very similar experiences says that there's something real to it. So I think you put those two things together, the similarity of the experiences and the fact that it's documentable that these people have died by all our standards. There has to be something real to it. I think it's just good evidence for mind being separate from brain. The other thing that's interesting is a lot of the people that come back and report these experiences are people that have a lot to lose from saying that they had them. So there's doctors who are heads of departments. There are Hindus and Muslims and people who can be killed if they say things like that, like they saw a God that looked like the Christian version of a God. And so people who have a lot to lose tell the same stories that people that don't have anything to lose. And so I think to me it seems like some sort of evidence towards dualism being real. And I think they're fairly encouraging stories. something else that fascinates me um is that um as best i know there has never been a report in the scientific literature of a near-death experience in which someone has seen a living person at the other end of the tunnel uh that is that you know a lot of people not everyone but a lot of people go down this proverbial tunnel and they see another world on the other side and they encounter people on the other side that they've known in life but everybody they encounter is dead and you think that if this was wishful thinking or hallucination or you know anything except actually seeing the other side that once once in a while somebody'd run into somebody who's still alive you know and uh but it's only dead people over there and uh that's fascinating also you and i over the years have have seen undoubtedly thousands and thousands of patients who have brains that are compromised patients who are hypoxic and acidotic and hypercarbic and brain damaged and the kinds of things that happen to people when they are in extremists when they're in when they're getting cpr and when they're when they're dying don't make don't make your brain better uh you know but near-death experiences have um people say it's the most beautiful thing they've ever seen that that they can't believe what what how beautiful the the world looks uh They understand things much more deeply. They have a lot more insight. They'll have a life review where they go through all the major events of their life. And that certainly is not what happens to the brain when you're having a code. That's right. So that's absolutely fascinating. One thing that I've thought a lot about and that kind of troubles me a little bit, and I've talked to my co-author on the book that we did, Immortal Mind, about this a lot, Denise O'Leary, and Denise has thought about this a lot too, is that what people see on the other side of the tunnel in near-death experiences isn't always what those of us in the Christian tradition would have imagined. Any thoughts about that? Any thoughts about why doesn't everybody see St. Peter right over on the other side? There he is standing there at the gates. you know and uh so i don't know i you know i i really don't understand that it's a it's a poorly understood phenomenon obviously um but there are like you said there's there's things that almost all of them see they all see light they all see this they all feel this sort of welcoming kind of warmth and there are a few people that have reported kind of hellish experiences too oh yeah obviously but i but i don't have a good answer for that why it's not all exactly the same and It may be related to what their options are, what God's asking of them, giving an opportunity to encounter. I don't know. Sure. There are two perspectives on that that make some sense to me. One, which Denise has suggested, is that it's kind of what she calls a disconnection syndrome, meaning that if you remember with the old television sets, I think maybe you and I would recall these. Some are younger viewers, might not. But when you would turn off your TV years ago, it would just go down to a little focused white light, which would linger for a little bit until it would go out. And so that you really haven't gone over to the next world yet. You're still in this sort of limbo that what you're seeing there really is not kind of completely over the bridge. And often people say when they have near-death experiences that they're told when they get on the other side of the tunnel, that they can't go any further because if they do go further, then they can't go back. And so you're not really on the other side yet. You're just on the outskirts. The other perspective that I think is absolutely fascinating is that of Carol Zaleski, who was an author of a wonderful book called Otherworld Journeys. and it's really a historical review of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences that people have had over thousands of years and many different cultures and all that stuff it's beautiful work and she believes that part of what goes on is that in this mortal life we don't have insight into the spiritual world with any kind of depth when we actually encounter that world in a very immediate way that we do in a near experience we don have words for it It ineffable It something that we can describe And many people say the same thing, that I'm going to tell you what happened, but I'm not telling you what happened because I don't have words for what happened. So it may be that there's a cultural conditioning that people say, well, I saw something incredibly beautiful, but I'm Hindu, so I'm going to try to explain it to you with Hindu from that framework, or I'm Muslim, or I'm Christian. It kind of made sense to me. How could somebody ever describe that kind of experience in ways that we would understand in this limited mortal world? That's right. That makes sense. Yeah, I've been asked. Some of my adventures in talking about mind-brain stuff, some of the materialists have said that neurosurgeons are kind of an arrogant bunch and that we have all these wacky ideas. And I must admit, I think there are a lot of neurosurgeons that share the perspective that you and I have on this. And do you get a sense or do you think that's true? I mean, my sense is a lot of neurosurgeons are rather skeptical of the materialist understanding of the mind. and do you have the same sense and do you have a sense as to why that is well i think there are a lot of neurosurgeons who are um materialists i think and or at least i've never really thought deeply about these things i know a lot of the people that train me were atheists or or wouldn't have called themselves believers in any way but i think what's happened over the last 25 years especially as functional imaging and things like that have come along i think we're seeing a lot more evidence that makes us begin to ponder. I think if we're good scientists, right, our scientific method is supposed to allow us to challenge our beliefs if evidence that is contrary to our belief shows up, right? We're supposed to question what we thought was true. And science is never supposed to be settled. And so, I think a lot of us have responded to what we're seeing in our practices and in imaging and in research findings with, and then things like near-death experiences and patients who shouldn't have made it but did and you know i had a patient that had ondine's curse and couldn't come off the ventilator had a stroke in her brain stem couldn't do automatic breathing so she had to be ventilated all the time and if you take the ventilator off the patient has to be awake in order to breathe because as soon as they fall asleep they don't have automatic breathing so they die and i remember an experience where i told her husband hey tomorrow's the day we have to do a trach and she's got the tube in too long she has have a tracheostomy because you can't leave the tube in forever. And he said, no, God's going to heal her and she won't need a tracheostomy. So I was like, okay, you know, pretty cynical about that. Well, I come in the next day and she's sitting at the bedside extubated and she's breathing and she's in bed that night extubated. And she woke up the next morning extubated and she was cured. And she, and that happened overnight after he said he was going to pray for her. And that's a miracle or a cynical neurosurgeon would say, well, that part of her brainstem just got better overnight right after her husband prayed. It was just a coincidence. But I think a lot of us see so many of those coincidental things in our practice that we start to say, wait a minute, this just can't be the way I was trained. So, we start to wonder and doubt the training and believe the experience, right, over time. We start to believe what we've seen with our eyes. That's what happened to Wilder Penfield, right? He was a dedicated materialist, but his experience with awake brain surgery and mapping really taught him like, wait a minute, people are having all these encounters and they're thinking about one thing, even though I'm stimulating a different part of their brain and they understand the difference between what I'm doing and what they're doing. And so he convinced himself that dualism was the right path because of brain surgery. So I think that, I think our profession gives us an insight and an opportunity to see things that changes our minds over time. I think that's really true. I think that's a very important insight that neurosurgeons, of course, part of it may also be that we tend to be rather egotistical, aggressive people who will just say, well, this is what I believe. So we're kind of not afraid to let people know what what we think. But neurosurgeons do have a unique insight into the mind-brain relationship. There are no other people who will meet somebody in the office and talk with them, and then operate on their brains, deal with their brains in as intimate a way as you possibly could deal with someone's brain physically, and then talk with them afterwards. You take them through the whole process. And I found, you found, Wilder Penfield found. I think Ben Carson has the same perspective. There's a pediatric neurosurgeon, Leland Albright, who's a devout Christian. I'm sure he has the same perspective. We find that, boy, these materialist textbooks just aren't telling the truth about the relationship between the mind and the brain. Or it's not the complete truth. Obviously, there's some truth to what's in the textbooks, but it's not the whole story. That's right. I had an experience of my own. You mentioned the Undine's curse experience, which is fascinating. And my experience has been people don't easily recover from that. They certainly don't recover overnight. That's something that's really out of the ordinary. I did a third ventriculostomy on a seven-year-old. It was about 25 years ago. And a third ventriculostomy for our audience is a procedure where you go into the ventricles of the brain with an endoscope and you make a hole in the bottom of the third ventricle for people who have hydrocephalus to allow the spinal fluid to circulate in a different way, which often helps the hydrocephalus. And this was a child who had actually had a previous third ventriculostomy and I had taken care of her for most of her life and it was very close to her family. and she came in kind of emergently in trouble. And so I took her to the OR and it was on a Thanksgiving day. And her mom was with her when she came into the hospital and was waiting in the waiting room. And so when I was going to redo the third ventriculostomy, what I didn't realize was that the basilar artery, which for our audience is a major artery at the base of the brain, had migrated up into the prior hole in the bottom of the third ventricle. So when I went to remake the hole, I actually made a hole into the top of the basal artery. So I got this geyser of blood up the endoscope. And I said, well, you know, I just killed a seven-year-old. You know, this kid's not going to live through this. So I did a few things to try to make things better. I put in a regular ventriculostomy. I gave the kid pentamart coma. I did a bunch of things to try to protect her brain, but I figured she just had a massive brain hemorrhage and that this is not going to end well. So I left the operating room once we had stabilized her. And the bleeding up, the endoscope stopped after about 10 seconds. It just cut off and stopped. But I still thought that she's going to have interventricular hemorrhage, sub-branon hemorrhage is going to be really bad. So I went out to talk to her mom. And of course, as you know, every neurosurgeon's worst nightmare is to go out and tell a family that there's been some catastrophe in the operating room. And her mom was alone in the waiting room because it was a holiday and there wasn't other surgery going on. And so when I walked into the waiting room, her mom ran up to me and hugged me. And she said, I feel so bad for you. And I said, what are you talking about? She said, oh, I know what happened. And I said, well, who told you? She said, no, I was praying. I was praying to God, and God told me that there had been bleeding in the operating room. And then she described to me in detail what happened. And she said the top of the basal artery was injured, but the bleeding stopped spontaneously. And God told me to tell you not to worry about it, that she's going to be okay. Wow. And so she was comforting me. And so I checked with the nursing staff and so on, and nobody had talked to her. and she was alone in the waiting area and nobody had told her what happened. She knew all the details of the operation and the child did fine post-op. The scan was clean. She had a small pseudoaneurysm at the top of the basal artery. We did an endovascular procedure and fixed that. And she went home and it was about two weeks later perfectly normal. So as a neurosurgeon, as neurosurgeons, we see stuff. We see stuff that's not in the textbooks. and it leads us, I think, to have a different perspective on the mind and the brain. Wow. That's fascinating. And I think that is an example of what we would call quantum entanglement, right? This process by which our brains and our minds can align with those of other people and with God, I think, and that's how intercessory prayer, I think, works. maybe is she's communicating with God about her daughter and on your behalf at the same time while that surgery is taking place and that's that kind of immaterial faster than light communication stuff is is is real I believe that to be real oh yeah yeah yeah the uh Roger Roger Penrose has has written a lot on that he's a he's a theoretical physicist who has thought and a Nobel laureate has has thought a lot about the mind-brain relationship, and he believes that quantum entanglement plays a major role in that, which I think is a wonderful way to look at things. And I'm especially fascinated by what I think is the mind-brain interface, which is the quantum world. That's right. And the observer effect and so on is absolutely fascinating. Well, I'm fascinated by your book, and I'm going to study it very, very carefully because the kind of things you write about, I mean, I could use a little self-brain surgery myself. There's all kinds of stuff that we face in everyday life that I would sure like to change about the way my emotions drive me in my work life, my family life. and I think your perspective is illuminating. I mean, it's a beautiful perspective and it can be very, very powerful. I'm honored by your kind words but also by your endorsement. Thank you so much for putting your name on it and I'm grateful for you, Mike. Yeah, well, what I'm hoping is that with what I think is really an emerging deeper insight into the way the mind and the brain work that comes in part at least from people, from ordinary people like you and I who are on the front lines of the mind-brain question. We see this every day in real life. I think giving a much deeper insight into how the mind and the brain work, that we have spiritual souls, that we are created by God. And you can still do great neuroscience this way. This doesn't preclude neuroscience. It just precludes a strict materialist way of understanding things. That's right. So, Lee, it's been a privilege. It's been fascinating, the most fascinating podcast I've done. And I thank you so much. And please, please come back. We'd love to talk to you more. Love to do so, Michael. Thank you so much for your time today, my friend. Thank you. And God bless you and God bless your family. God bless you. Thank you. This has been Mind Matters News. Explore more at mindmatters.ai. That's mindmatters.ai. Mind Matters News is directed and edited by Austin Egbert. The opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the speakers. Mind Matters News is produced and copyrighted by the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Discovery Institute.