S9E100
· 47:24
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm Dr. Lee Warren,
and I'm here with you for a little self-brain surgery Saturday today.
I'm so grateful, Lisa and I, and Tata are so honored and humbled that you've
come along for the ride as we dig into the big questions of what do we do when
life brings us trauma and tragedy and other massive things? How do we use our neuroscience?
How do we use the mind and the brain that God created to help us find our feet
and hold hold on to faith when we have faith and doubt and the things we think we know are challenged.
And we're almost at a thousand episodes since I started this podcast back in 2014.
And we're at a little bit of a branch point. As I told you yesterday,
we're gonna break off two shows now, not creating more work for myself,
but just to give you episodes that you know exactly what you're gonna get.
On the spiritual side, we're gonna have spiritual brain surgery episodes.
Some of them are gonna be our quiet times, our Bible studies,
our prayer times, our Tuesdays with Tatas, things like that.
Some of them are going to be guests that are more focused on spiritual,
church-related things, spiritual growth, and your relationship with God,
and prayer, and things that are not so science-y, but are more specifically
related to our faith, and how do we hold on to faith when life gets hard.
And then the Dr. Lee Warren podcast, the Self-Brain Surgery podcast,
we're going to continue this journey of smashing faith and science together.
There's no change in how we are going to attack the problem of holding on to
faith, even when science says you ought not to or how to use science to see God more clearly.
We're just gonna go a little bit deeper on the science side in season 10.
If you're a seeker, if you're a doubter, a seeker, an agnostic,
an atheist, I want you to be able to come to this place and find some people
talking about real things and find some hope.
Even if you're not sure what you believe about God or even if you think you
don't believe in God, we're going to give you a place to ask honest questions and find answers.
It's going to be a place filled with hope. I couldn't think of a more perfect
guest for the last episode of Season 9 of the podcast than our guest today.
Day, we're going to wrap this up with a conversation that's really about one
of the big questions that science has given us.
A lot of people, if you put yourself in a corner of saying, okay,
we only believe in a material world and we have to use our scientific method
to ask questions of a material world and not invoke anything supernatural to get to our answers,
then that leads you into some uncomfortable places when you start thinking about
the fact that you can think and you have to say, say, wait a minute,
how does my brain, which is a bunch of cells and electrons and nerve impulses
that some people think just evolved that way over millions of years,
how does my brain generate what we call consciousness?
And is consciousness even real? And do I really have free will?
And is there really a mind inside my head that's separate and distinct from
my brain that will persist after my death?
And all those kinds of big questions and science has struggled to answer for them.
In fact, some scientists, famous people like Hippocrates, for example,
said everything you are is your brain.
Like there's nothing else about you other than your brain. You're all about your brain.
Well, Sharon Diericks is a PhD who received her PhD from Cambridge University in brain imaging.
She's right up my alley because she looks at functional MRI scans and asks big
questions about what's happening in your brain and in your mind when you think
about certain things and when you live your life in certain parts of your brain, what happens,
how the networks come together and what cells are firing and what neurotransmitters
are involved in different things.
And she's had an incredible career. and somewhere along the
way she started asking some deeper questions
that could be answered just from the science side and
she tried to smash faith and science together like we do here on our podcast
and she started writing books and her first book was called why looking at evil
and personal suffering and that won several awards in the uk is a really successful
book and then in 2019 she wrote am i just my brain and that's the book we're
going to talk about today her most most recent book is called Broken Planet.
It's about suffering and natural disasters. Very fascinating book.
But today, Sharon has joined us to talk about, am I just my brain?
This mind-brain conundrum.
And I'm here to tell you, friend, there's not a lot of hope to be found.
If you believe that everything about you and your entire life is a bunch of
electrical impulses happening inside of neurons, and there's no real concept
of mind, and there's nothing beyond the time you take take your last breath.
If there's just a big black void out there, there's not a lot of hope in that.
And for years, Christians have had to think that they just had this wishful
thinking that the scientists were all in agreement that there was nothing more to it.
And if you were a Christian or a believer, you had to sort of bootstrap an ability
to believe that in spite of what science told you was inevitably true.
I'm here to tell you that the more we learn about physics and and imaging,
and biology, and everything that we can study, and measure, and test,
the more questions we have, and the less certain those conclusions that the scientists had are.
And we're going to give you some unbelievable conversations in the coming season
with scientists who, like Michael Gillan recently, Dr.
Michael Gillan, the cosmologist, astrophysicist, and we're going to have John
Lennox coming up, who's a famous Oxford mathematician, mathematician who's debated
people like Richard Dawkins and has really stood up for the faith.
And today we have Sharon Derricks who's doing the same work, incredible.
She's speaking and writing and appearing on a lot of podcasts and she's just
doing this apologetics meets science work that I'm so interested in and we're trying to do here too.
And I think this conversation will give you a little insight into the fact that
you are more than just your brain.
You, my friend, are fearfully and wonderfully made. There's a mind inside you.
That's separate and apart from your brain that's generated by your creator.
And it's the interface with which your creator communicates with your brain.
It's how thoughts become things.
It's how you use your brain and your mind to their fullest created potential
so that you can become happier and healthier and feel better in your life and
how you can navigate and have resilience for hard things.
And we're going to teach you all that because you need to know.
No, you need to have no cognitive dissonance about the fact that you are fearfully
and wonderfully made, that you are more than just your brain.
And Sharon Derricks is gonna help get that done as we finish season nine of
the podcast. I'm gonna take a little break.
We're gonna take a few days off here so you won't have new content for a little bit.
We're gonna start the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast on Tuesday, the 30th of January.
And that's gonna be the first episode with Elisa Childers and Tim Barnett to
talk about their really amazing new book, Deconstructing Christianity.
So the first episode of the Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast will be in a couple of weeks.
We're gonna take a few days off from the podcast, reset, I've got some writing
to do and some things I need to get done. So we're gonna take a little break.
I'll be giving you some older episodes so you'll still have some things hit
your inbox and hit your podcast listening apps so you won't have a void of things to listen to.
I'll give you some carefully curated new thing or old
things to help you think about the new things that are coming the things
things I want to be top of mind for you as we get into season 10
and as we get into spiritual brain surgery but for now
we're going to take a little break I'll let you know when we're coming back
it's going to be a couple of weeks before you have new content and we're going
to be doing some work in the background that will really help season 10 blow
you away we're going to have some of the most helpful content you've ever heard
helpful and hopeful and healing so that we can change our minds and change our life.
Before we get into sharing Derek's conversation today, am I just my brain?
I just have one question for you, my friend.
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. Let's get after it.
Music.
We're back and I'm so excited to be with you again today.
We're going to do a little self-brain surgery around the conundrum of the mind
and the brain. I've got an incredible guest with us today.
Dr. Sharon Diericks is with us today, all the way from Oxford,
England. Welcome, Sharon.
Hi, it's great to be here. So glad that you took the time to be with us and
tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
Yeah, so I live in Oxford with my husband and two children.
I have a background in the sciences.
I work now as a, I guess, an apologist, speaker, communicator,
but originally I studied biochemistry.
I came to faith while studying biochemistry and went on to do a PhD in brain
imaging using functional MRI, which is a way of looking inside the human brain
without cutting into it.
And so I spent a decade in brain imaging before moving into this area of responding
to people's objections and questions about the Christian faith.
So yeah, that covers a few decades just there in those few sentences.
Sentences what what got you into sort of moving from the science field and into
writing about apologetics and faith and those kinds of things what triggered that.
Well it started off by uh my my kind of pivot from neuroscience into um apologetics
began with actually being in a lab in the States.
Actually, I was doing a postdoc at the Medical College of Wisconsin,
and I was having all kinds of conversations with people around me about the Christian faith.
And I realized that I didn't necessarily know how to answer their questions,
and I wanted more training equipping myself.
So that took me actually to Oxford to study at at the centre that I ended up
becoming part of and ended up working for and teaching on staff there for 12 years.
And that was OCCA, the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.
And so I received that training myself.
And so it was born out of those kind of on-the-ground, kind of gritty conversations
with people who had questions.
And then I realised as I began to do that that I really enjoyed speaking and communicating,
about these topics as well and then that led me to think well maybe there's
a case for writing about it as well because books can go to places that we can't
always get to and it's a way of capturing something.
And capturing, you know, one's voice. And so, yeah, I really enjoyed and really
had a sense of it being very right to write my first book, which was on personal suffering.
And that was very much born out of our personal experiences of struggles with
health in my marriage to Conrad.
And so, So, yeah, that was kind
of the beginning. And then the other books have sort of come from there.
So was there a moment, did you grow up in the church or in faith,
or did that happen later in your life?
No, I didn't. I went to church maybe a handful of times growing up.
I knew virtually nothing about the Christian faith.
And really my first contact with Christianity was as a teenager.
I went to a youth group in my hometown.
And then later I went on to college, to university.
And I think by the time I arrived there, I was probably an agnostic.
I didn't really know what I believed. I didn't really think about it terribly much.
But what I did know was that I was a scientist and I wanted to study the sciences.
And so somewhere along the line, though, I had absorbed the view that science
and God were not compatible.
I wouldn't say that I I'd actively made that decision.
But I think we absorb all kinds of opinions from, you know, from books,
from social media, from our friends, from magazines.
And I had just absorbed this and I arrived at university with it.
And I actually was invited to an event in the very first week called Grill a
Christian, which was where there were four Christians and a room full of people.
And you could ask them any question that you wanted.
And so I listened to all of the questions other people were asking.
And then I put my hand up and asked my own question.
Surely you can't believe in God and be a scientist at the same time.
And I was given the answer that, yes, you can.
Actually, that's a bit like saying that you need to choose between,
you know, Bill Gates as the founder of Microsoft Office And the undergirding
processes and process programs beneath Microsoft Office that enable it to run.
And of course, you don't need to choose between those two explanations for why
Office exists, but together they give a more complete understanding and they
are kind of complementary and work in parallel.
And so this was a game changer for me to realize that I didn't need to choose
between my love of science and the possibility that God might be real.
And that actually opened up a whole horizon for me.
It led me to grill a lot more Christians and ask a lot more questions over the
course of the next 18 months.
And it was in the middle of my second year that I didn't think I had all of the answers.
I didn't have all of my questions answered, but I knew enough about the person of Jesus Christ.
I was persuaded about the reliability of the biographies that tell us about
his life and was persuaded that he really did rise from the dead and decided
to follow him. I was about 20 years old.
Wow. And did that pursuit of that knowledge, when you decided,
you said that he was really risen from the dead, did your study of history and
what history has to say about that come into that part of that understanding?
Or was it purely kind of a spiritual exercise?
I began to read what I now know to be apologetics books.
And this was kind of 30 years ago, so there was a lot less available in the UK.
But I do remember reading about the number of manuscripts of the New Testament
that there were and how we know we can trust them.
And even historians who are not necessarily religious agree that the methods
by which we can establish reliability and that these definitely apply to the New Testament.
And I remember being really surprised and thinking, this feels like the world's best kept secret.
Why hasn't anyone told me this earlier, that this is not just mythical,
it's not just kind of some nice ideas that one person had.
And it's actually something that is really rooted in history and backed up by
thousands of documents that you can trust. And so I was surprised.
I was surprised that I hadn't heard that earlier.
But I was glad that I did. That's amazing. And I'll just say for the listener,
you know, we don't talk about it very often.
I think we often assume that people listening to Christian content know this,
but the validity as a historical fact that there was a person named Jesus Christ
and that people in his time believed him to have really been risen from the
dead is astonishing from a historical point of view.
It's well documented beyond, like Sharon just said, beyond things that we consider
to be absolutely factual, like what Homer wrote and what Ulysses wrote.
We have way more copies of those early manuscripts of Scripture than we do of
those early Greek and historical documents.
So there's real evidence to believe that a person named Jesus Christ was crucified
and in fact rose from the dead. That's astounding, as you said.
That's neat that you told that. It's always fun when we do a podcast and we
find ourselves going into areas that we weren't planning on.
Different areas. I love that.
So how did you end up going from a brain imaging expert?
You have a PhD in brain imaging from Cambridge and you're looking at the brain and what the brain does.
And at some point you start to grapple with this big question of,
is what I consider to be me just a bunch of neural impulses inside of neurons
or is there more to it than that?
How did you come to start grappling with this yeah well so
um i spent a lot of time initially looking at the science and god question because
having a scientific background gave me a credibility and then um i began to
just think about the area of neuroscience which is a particular branch of the sciences and um.
And of course the question of who we are what a human being is is coming up
all the time in conversation in the media, on social media.
And it seemed like there was a need for,
a response to that kind of question. But very often, human consciousness is
this topic that seems very inaccessible, that it's too confusing,
too hard to even think about.
It's a mountain that's just too hard to climb.
And so I thought, well, there's a need for a book that is accessible to the
everyday person that can help them grapple with the key points in this conversation.
And I actually don't think, you know, you don't need a PhD in philosophy or
neuroscience to really get a handle on what's going on here,
because a lot of points can be made that are in the everyday,
they're in our experience of the everyday.
And so I really enjoyed boiling it down to its essential components and writing
something, I hope, that is straightforward forward to read,
even if you don't consider yourself an expert in this area.
It is. I shared with the listeners already that you wrote it in a way that anybody
can access it and understand that the science is there, but it's not overpowering.
I think you did a brilliant job of laying it out.
And I love how you've weaved in your faith in a way that's accessible too.
Give us just a, I guess for somebody who hasn't read the book yet,
most of the listeners probably probably haven't read it give us a
an overview of the the viewpoint of
some scientists that the mind is is just generated by the brain or that there's
no such thing as mind at all that's a pretty strong opinion out there in neuroscience
and then and then the mind maybe that mind and brain coexist or that one creates
the other and then and then what you believe about the about the matter yes Yes.
Well, yeah, I mean, I think you hear quite a lot that it's said that, you know,
Whenever you do something, this is your brain doing that thing.
And perhaps put a little bit more strongly, there are people like Francis Crick,
who was kind of famous for saying you're nothing but a pack of neurons.
That really everything that determines who
you are the choices you make the personality you have
the behaviors you exhibit they're all driven by the
um the chemicals and neurons inside of
your skull um but of course um that that's only part of the picture because
we don't just have a brain we also have a mind we have a sense of self we have
an inner reality there's something that it is to be you that I can't access
by measuring your brain.
I have to ask you to kind of share with us what it is to be you, but I can't be that you.
You know, there's something distinctive about the mind that is not the same thing as the brain.
But of course, people that say those two things are synonymous are essentially
saying there isn't anything that it is to be you. There's just brain activity.
But that's kind of crazy it's
also incoherent because the person expressing that view
is saying my perspective on the world is
that there is no first person perspective on the
world which collapses into incoherence yeah you can't um and we can't we don't
live as though it's true we live as though we have a genuine meaningful first
person experiential interaction with the world world that is to be noted.
And so, there are many agnostics and atheists as well as Christian theists that
argue that mind and brain are real and genuine, and they are two very distinct things.
One of the reasons they believe that is because of something called qualia.
So, perhaps a helpful qualia, and it's one that I talk about in the book,
is a cup of coffee, the smell of coffee.
Maybe you've had one this morning. I've had a couple. You know,
imagine that we live in a purely material universe and all that we have are
physical descriptions.
Then describe to me the smell of coffee.
Well, you might offer me the chemical structure of caffeine,
and that would be very interesting, but it doesn't get me any closer to the smell of coffee.
Or you might describe to me the physiology as you drink it and digest it.
That would be interesting, but it doesn't get me any closer to the smell of
coffee. And so the point being that if you want to know what coffee smells like, you need to smell it.
There's actually no other way to access this phenomenon.
And there's no physical description that gets you there.
And philosophers of many faiths and all faiths and no faith agree that physical
descriptions can't capture what it is to be us because the biggest qualia of
all is the experience of being you or of me being me.
And measuring our brain does not give us that access to that phenomenon.
And so there are other ways of describing the mind-brain relationship that maybe
help us have a more holistic approach to what it means to be a human being and
that perhaps help us make better sense of what we see in the clinic.
And I'm sure as a neurosurgeon, you've seen some very interesting things clinically.
And I think that's one of the most powerful sets of data in this case to say
that we are so much more than just our brains because people are strange.
And actually, clinically, they can do some very interesting things.
But anyway, before we even get to that, in the book, I didn't end up saying
here is my position on this.
I decided in the process of writing the book to say, look, here's why a purely
physicalist approach to human beings doesn't work, that we are way more than our brains.
And here's a variety of other ways of describing the mind-brain relationship
that work better than this one.
And I leave that kind of choice up to the reader, because I don't know that
we can actually nail it down to one particular position.
But just by way of summary, some people say that, you know, the brain generates
the mind, that the mind emerges from the brain somehow.
But of course, so, you know, when a number of building blocks come together,
something new comes into being that is greater than the sum of its parts.
And that's interesting.
But the question that people holding that view have to answer is,
how on earth do you get...
Uh mind from non-conscious neurons
you still come up against this problem of you've
got human consciousness from a non-conscious system of
atoms and molecules that's right um but there are some christians that hold
this view and they argue well we don't just have atoms and molecules in the
equation if god exists then there's more going on than simply non-conscious
neurons because god exists.
So that's how they would get around that.
And then there's the position that the mind is beyond the brain,
that we actually have a physical brain and a non-physical mind.
And this is known as substance dualism. And so proponents of this would say
that actually, yeah, there's a non-physical realm as well as physical realm.
But those two interact very closely. But of course,
proponents of that view have to wrestle with the challenge of
how on earth does a non-physical mind do
that and how do we how do we
reconcile that with neuroscience which is
showing these two things to be so closely integrated which they are and then
there's another view that says that um everything is conscious even you know
human beings of course animals have levels of consciousness But there are also conscious properties,
even down to the atomic scale and electrons and quarks and so on,
that their kind of consciousness is kind of...
Kind of infused into the cosmos and into
matter itself and this is a view called panpsychism which
comes from the greek pan meaning all and psuche
meaning soul and that's
a very a growing view more and more people are talking about this but of course
the challenge that panpsychists have to answer is how do you explain the very
different levels of consciousness that that human beings seem to have even compared
with the most advanced primates.
There seems to be something qualitatively different about the kind of consciousness
that human beings have. How do you explain that?
So every view has its challenges.
I think this is this interesting thing. There's a scripture in 1 Corinthians.
I can't remember where it is right now. but he says when someone
thinks they know something they do not yet know as they
ought to know and i think what we're learning from science
is that the more we drill down into something the more questions we find instead
of oh now we understand i think materialism basically thought that eventually
we would get to some place where we could explain everything with science we
would we would know everything that could be known and then we would understand
why the brain did what what it did and all that.
But instead, as the quantum physicists have started to teach us,
like the mind is non-local.
There's a lot of connections between my mind and your mind and electrons can
be entangled with one another across vast distances and faster than the speed of light.
All these crazy things that the quantum physicists have come up with.
And I think what it does is it shows us deeper and deeper insights into the
mind of God and how he created us.
And I'm just fascinated the more we learn. And I think brain imaging has just
sort of taken the lid off of a little bit of that and allowed us to say,
wow, we didn't know as much as we thought we knew.
And I think that what the science tells us is that mind and brain are connected
and they're connected very closely.
You know, if you put someone in
an MRI scanner and ask them to use their mind, what do you see light up?
Networks in their brain. Of course, these two things are connected.
But the mistake that's often made is that people extrapolate that to say because
they're connected, they must be synonymous or one must create the other.
But in making that judgment, we've actually moved out of the domain of the sciences
and into philosophy where we're taking a philosophical position and imposing that back on the data.
You know, I saw one time on the cover of Scientific American,
it said how the mind arises as this very attractive strapline and network interactions
in the brain create thought.
But actually, there's no scientific study that can tell you that network interactions
create thought. That's right.
That's a philosophical statement that's been imposed upon the data.
And this is happening all the time. And I think one of our...
Um roles as kind of thinkers and and
philosophers in in this world is to discern when
is that a scientific statement that's empirically derived
or is that actually philosophy and that's
my philosophical position that i'm imposing yeah so this is a fascinating area
it's what we slip from science into scientism like sort of the religion of science
and how we think we think we know know things and how science can explain all knowledge eventually.
I think that's the difference is we redefine terms and we start calling what's
really the religion of science, we call it science.
Which we mean when you and I talk about that, we mean a method of coming to
know things by testing and refining hypotheses and asking questions and being
honest with our assessments and all that.
But we've turned it into a religion of its own where we start with a presupposition that materialism,
you know right materialism explains everything
that there is and now the more we learn the more
we question i think i think it's beautiful how you've done it and ultimately
how does this study for you
reinforce and grow your faith and what can you say to somebody out there who
might be a little bit of a doubter a little bit on the fence like as a person
who's worked into this deeply as a scientist like how does this booster your
faith bolster your faith well i would say that um you You know, at the end of all of this,
the question that science could never answer and was not intended to answer
is why on earth are we conscious in the first place?
Why do we think at all? And I even remember asking that question myself as like
a 10, 12-year-old, one rainy day looking out of the window.
I became aware of my own consciousness. Why do I exist? exist? Why am I here?
Those questions do bubble to the surface sometimes in us.
And actually, if there is no God and if the material world is all that there
is, then what explanation do we have for why we can think?
I suppose where it lands with that view is that somehow.
Conscious human beings have arisen from a non-conscious universe.
And that's not impossible, but it's kind of surprising.
You know, it's kind of not consistent with the starting conditions.
But if God exists, then we've actually lived in a conscious universe all along.
That's right. God is a conscious community of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
And has actually made human beings in his image.
And so we can have a very clear and helpful response to the question, why can we think?
Well, we can think because God is a thinker, which is another reason why your
ministry and my ministry and all kinds of other ministries of people really
trying to dig down and think about matters actually really matter.
Because God thinks and God is a conscious thinking being that has created humans to be like him.
And so why can we think? Because God exists. And we are able to think these
higher thoughts so that ultimately we can know him.
You know, we're the only creatures arguably that are capable of that higher
rational thinking and asking big questions, why are we here?
I believe that that's because God's made us to know Him, and He's searching
for us, and we search for Him whether we necessarily realize it or not.
And that's because God is real, and He knows us and loves us,
and He can be known by us because we are conscious thinking beings.
Wow, that's beautiful. I can't, listener, I can't encourage urge you highly
enough to read this book, Am I Just My Brain?
We talk on this podcast all the time, Sharon, about the fact that the work of
people like Andrew Newberg and Jeffrey Schwartz have shown us that you can change
your brain by changing the things you think about.
There's this fascinating work on looking at the hippocampi, the volume of the
hippocampus in people who pray and meditate.
And it gets bigger when you change how you think.
And I've drawn the analogy of, I have an old iPhone, it's an iPhone 11,
and I can plug it in at night and it can do a software update.
But when I wake up the next morning, it has new software, but it's still an iPhone 11.
It hasn't changed the hardware. But our brains, we can change the hardware.
We can change the structure of our brains by changing the way we think,
the things that we think about and how we think about them.
And so what does that say to you as a neuroscientist? Like, how do you,
How do you reconcile the fact that the mind can actually change the structure of the brain?
Yeah. I mean, this is another argument for why we are way more than just our brains.
It's not just one-way traffic that your brain drives your mind and that's it. End of story, actually.
As you just said, the mind is powerful in its impact on the brain.
And this is a phenomenon known as downward causation that a lot of neuroscientists
talk about. And that it's actually an argument for why the mind is just as important as the brain.
And in fact, as you say, it can bring about changes in the physical brain.
Brain um and um yeah
i think that it's it's a it's an argument for for
why the brain isn't the whole story and we see it also in
things like the placebo effect yeah you
know where your um beliefs about a supposed
drug that you're receiving can have a therapeutic benefit to you even if it's
a placebo because of what you believe to be true about it and we also see it
in things like psychosomatic illness or phantom limb pain is another fascinating area you know where.
There's kind of severe pain in a part of the body that has actually been removed
and um the mind is a powerful and mysterious thing that that can't be necessarily
pinned down and And of course,
you know, Andrew Newberg and Jeffrey Schwartz have done fascinating work on,
as you say, what happens in the brain when you pray.
And this is not data that we need to be afraid of either.
Just because there are studies showing brain networks that are active during
all kinds of meditation and prayer
doesn't mean that that undermines the validity of that prayer. prayer.
Just like, you know, if you were to scan the brain of somebody about their love
of chocolate, you would see all kinds of network interactions activated,
reward centers firing, and similarly areas, similar areas to when you're in love.
There are all kinds of networks in the brain that light up that are associated with romantic love.
But that doesn't mean that the The experience of love isn't genuine.
We come back to this qualia. You know, the experience is very different to the networks.
The two are correlated, but they are distinct phenomena.
And of course, we wouldn't question the validity of the relationship itself.
In fact, the existence of the relationship is why there is activity in the first place.
And so this kind of data is not data that we need to be afraid of or shy away from.
It's actually kind of confirming what the Bible says, which is that we are physical and spiritual beings.
We're integrated, holistic, physical and spiritual beings.
Things um and uh
that's a that's a great thing um we
should be more concerned if there was nothing happening in our
brain when we're praying that's really i find it i find it highly encouraging
you know paul told us 2 000 years ago hey if you want to be less anxious then
pray and be thankful and now we know from neuroscience for example that when
you're anxious your hippocampus short circuits down to the amygdala and gets
that fight flight freeze thing happening in a very direct direct pathway.
But when you're engaged gratitude and things like prayer and gratitude,
the circuit goes to the frontal lobe and gets your thinking involved and calms
things down and lets you make executive decisions before you decide what emotion means, right?
So to me, it says that the scripture told us what was going to happen in the
neuroscience and why it was helpful to us thousands of years ago.
It's corollary to me. I love it. Well, and also Romans 12, be transformed by
the renewing of your mind.
There's neuroplasticity right there, you know, that there's kind of,
or even cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, that the thinking,
that the thoughts you have, has a really tangible impact on who you are.
And of course neuroscience tells
us that the brain is very very plastic and
it can change for the better or for the worse throughout
our life it's not a fixed thing once we reach adulthood it's very plastic we
tell our people you can't change your life until you change your mind and it's
because we've learned and you've helped us see now that the things we think
about turn into the things we are and affect the way our brains work and tell
us a little bit about your other two books before we go.
Oh, yeah. So my first book was written in 2013, and that was about personal suffering.
Both books, and my second, my most recent book is about natural disasters.
So a particular form of suffering, how do we explain earthquakes and hurricanes, tsunamis, and so on.
Both books use the format of combining personal stories with apologetics arguments.
So you've got that combination of appealing to the head and the heart and looking
at arguments and reasons,
but also at people's actual lives and any reasons that we give have to be able
to land in the gritty reality of life as well.
And so with Broken Planet in particular, many of the stories,
some of them have come from North America or they have come from people who
have experienced natural disasters like wildfires,
hurricanes,
tsunami, earthquakes,
locust infestations, and also pandemics, which is a form of natural disaster
that came to us all, actually.
Sometimes we experience the cataclysmic ones from a bit of a,
you know, far away from a distance, but the pandemic came close to everybody.
And so I have written very specifically to this form of the question of suffering.
If God has created the natural world, then why has he made it the way that he
has such that we are caught up in these events and suffer and die?
And there are lots of things we can say on that, which I unpack in Broken Planet.
Well, I'm so grateful that you're writing and that you're doing the work that
you're doing. It's already helping me, and I think this book is going to make
an impact for our listeners.
I just can't thank you enough for your time here today, Sharon.
Thank you so much, Lee. It's been an absolute pleasure to be here,
and thank you for your ministry as well.
Absolutely. God bless you. What a great conversation. I'm so honored and thankful
that Sharon took the time to be with us.
And I told you that was going to be a mind-bending conversation.
You're not just a bunch of cells, friend. You didn't just evolve out of the
sludge into some organism that somehow attained something that you believe is consciousness.
You are an incredible, well-designed, well-constructed, ever-changing,
ever-healing, ever-improving structure that your creator has made you in his image.
And he made you so that you could think and communicate with him,
with your mind, and that you could use your mind to improve the health and the
function of your brain, that you could take charge and dominion over your genetics through the magic,
the incredible gift of epigenetics, that you can engage your frontal lobes for
selective attention so that you can stop thinking about harmful,
repetitive, automated things.
And you can create new synapses. You can harness Hebb's Law and the quantum
zeno effect and make new structural connections between different parts of your
brain. and you can improve the function of the networks of your brain.
You can change your mind and thereby change your life.
I'm so thankful that Sharon took the time to help us. Hey, I want to thank Abigail
from The Good Book Company, the publicist that helped arrange this podcast,
Abigail Talbot, and the incredible work that they're doing over at The Good Book Company.
And we have, amazingly, they've donated three copies of Sharon's book,
Am I Just My Brain, that we'll be able to give away to listeners.
So the good folks at the Good Book Company, Abigail and Tim Thornborough as
well over in the UK, made this interview and the one coming up with John Lennox possible.
So if you'd like to have a copy of Sharon Deer's incredible book, Am I Just My Brain?
Send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com with your name and your mailing address.
And we'll choose three names out of that list of people that write in to receive
a copy of her book from the Good Book Company.
Get that book in your hands. It'll be really helpful, especially if you know
somebody who's kind of interested in science, but also trying to figure out
how faith and science fit together.
This would be a great gift for somebody like that.
It's well-written, it's accessible, it's not over your head.
Even if you're not into science at all, Sharon did a beautiful job of writing
it on a level that anybody can understand these big concepts about mind and
brain and neuroscience and philosophy and theology.
It's just, it's beautiful. actually shed some tears during the last chapter of this book.
She did such a great job of doing exactly what we're trying to do here,
smashing faith and science together.
Really, really well done. And so if you'd like a copy, please send me an email,
lee at drleewarren.com.
Do not leave your address in a comment somewhere that I have to hopefully find.
I need you to send me an email.
They're going to get a lot of people writing in for this book.
So don't make extra work for me.
Send me your name and your mailing address with your zip code to Lee at drleewarren.com
and we'll choose three of those winners to send over to the Good Book Company
and Abigail will send you a book.
God bless you, friend. I'm so grateful for the ground that we've covered here in season nine.
I am more excited about season 10 than I've ever been excited about anything.
And the new Spiritual Brain Surgery Podcast, I think is going to really,
really be a powerful place for us to get together and get to know our creator.
Even more intimately through the magic, through the incredible gift.
I keep saying magic because it feels like magic to me how he's
made us but of course it's not it's just the incredible skill of our designer
creator guide how we're put together and we're going to smash all that together
in season 10 and in the spiritual brain surgery podcast in a new way we're going
to open your eyes heal your heart help you find hope and we'll get after it
all but before we do any of that. You get to 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
Available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.
They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.
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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.
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