Mirror Neurons, Thermometers, and Thermostats: All-In August #24

Good morning, my friend. Hope you're doing well. It's Saturday.

If you're new around here, this is a Neuroscience Meets Faith podcast.

We always talk about how you can't change your life until you change your mind.

And I'm here to help you understand how your brain is wired,

how your nervous system works, how faith and hope play into the ways that our

days play out in this life, and how there's always a reason to hold on to hope

no matter what life seems to be bringing you.

And if you can combine the realities of neuroscience and how you can be in charge

of how you feel by changing how you think with understanding that hope and faith

are the driving forces of happiness and the ability to look forward in life and not only backwards,

then you'll have an amazing ability to be resilient no matter what comes along in your life.

Because there's hard things coming. All of us face hard things.

Today, we're going to really quickly talk about the nervous system,

how your brain is wired, and the difference between thermometers and thermostats.

We're going to talk about mirror neurons and how your limbic resonance system

works and all kinds of cool stuff about your brain and your mind and your body and your life.

And that's what we're going to do today. But I need to remind you that it is all in August.

All in August is when we draw a line in the sand. we

remember our principle of neuroscience that what

got me here won't get me there the other principle

that what i'm doing i'm getting better at so if i've

had a life that has led me to frustration or a

performance issue i can't break through to the level that i want in my profession

or my finances if i'm stuck in my relationships or some massive thing or some

habit or addiction or problem has limited me and held me back then i've got

to say hey what got me here to this place where I know in my heart where God

is calling me to a different level.

My life needs to look different than it has looked in the past.

I've got to make a change. I've got to go all in in pursuit of what needs to

happen differently than has happened in the past, because what's the definition of hope?

I was talking to my friend Susie Larson about this yesterday.

Hope is the belief that you can get there from here.

Hope is the belief that there is a path forward. It's not incessant toxic positivity.

It's a belief that God has endowed you with the tools and the skills and the

talents and the mechanisms, cellularly, emotionally, physically, to make changes happen.

That's why he says, take your thoughts captive, renew your mind,

transform your thinking, and things will happen.

That's what All In August is about. out. So my question for you today on Self-Brain

Surgery Saturday, my friend, is have you begun?

And if you haven't, guess what? There's 23 episodes of All In August that we've

done every day for you this month.

You can go back and get after it. And every day you can get a few minutes of

thinking about thinking differently and how to go all in in your life. Catch up if you haven't.

Get started. Today's the day. It's never too late to go all in.

So remember that hope is the belief that you can get there from here.

But it's also not an accident. Hope is not a passive process.

It's not a treasure hidden in a field waiting for you to find it.

Hope is a verb. It is an action word.

There is a reliable mechanism by which you can produce hope in your life.

And that's why I wrote you an entire treatment plan.

My last book, Hope is the First Dose, a treatment plan for recovering from trauma,

tragedy, and other massive things.

It's a a treatment plan and it's the description and definition of how you manufacture

hope even when all hope seems lost. Hope is a verb.

It's an action word. It's made up of memory and movement.

And there's lots of episodes of this podcast where you can learn about that

if you need to refresh it. But check out Hope is the First Dose.

This month we're doing All In August.

It's based as our textbook on Mark Batterson's book All In.

And I would highly encourage you, friend.

I highly encourage you to go read Mark Batterson's book, All In.

It's a game changer for me. It made a huge difference in my life and Lisa's

life when we were recovering from losing our son.

It was time to go all in. It's time to make a change. It's time to get after

it. It's time to remember that what got us here will get us there.

And there's a path to hope and it involves memory and movement and getting after

it. And that's what we're going to do today.

Today, we're going to talk about the difference between thermometers and thermostats,

the second episode of Self-Brain Surgery Saturday back in September of 2022.

Was about thermometers and thermostats. I'm going to bring you back to that

this morning, but I just want to talk for a second about some neuroscience,

okay? There's a thing called a mirror neuron.

You have these neurons, a network of them in your brain called mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are the system that's in place to help you line up emotionally with other people.

It's a fact. If you notice, if you smile in a baby's face, the baby will smile back at you.

If you frown and look grumpy and you walk into a room and you bring all that

negative energy other people will begin to frown, begin to lose their countenance

because their mirror neurons are mimicking what your emotional state is signaling to their brain.

They're positioning themselves subconsciously before they even think about it.

They're positioning themselves.

Am I about to get in a fight here? Is there a problem here? Are we sad about

something? Is there bad news incoming?

Do I need to prepare myself for something bad happening or something good?

Am I smiling? Am I happy? Am I letting my guard down? Am I about to have a nice

hug? Am I about to have having a good encounter.

Mirror neurons are that system that starts to light up networks in your brain

to get ready, not only to empathize and to be ready to help people,

but also potentially to defend, protect, run away, fight, deal with all those

things that might be necessary.

Mirror neurons are a system in place in our brain that allow us to begin this

thing called limbic resonance,

which is where unintentionally and uncognitively, you don't think about it,

your brain and your emotional state

and your body physiologically starts to line up

with the emotional state of those around you

okay your whole system starts to get all

kinds of clues they're not necessarily clues based

on verbal cues or tactile cues or specific information it's more subtle it's

environmental it's electromagnetic it's field and what happens is you start

to resonate with the people around you and you start to line yourself up with what they're feeling.

This is a gift that some people have, the empaths and people who are really

empathetic can line up with you and feel what you feel and empathize with you

and all of that. But everybody does it on some level.

And because you have that system and because you, once you are aware that you

have that system, this creates a responsibility for you in two ways.

One is that you need to be aware that if you're not careful,

you can become a thermometer.

Thermometer, you can become a person who warms up, gets angry,

gets hot, gets sad, gets frustrated, gets stuck because other people around you are.

Even though that might not be relevant or appropriate for what you are doing

in your life at this time, you can become a person who follows the emotional

state of the crowd around you. This is relevant in politics.

This time of year in our country, we're getting ready for an election and it's

easy to get fired up, wired up, frustrated,

sad, despair, stressed, angry, because the culture and the people and the media

around you are, without actually processing those things intellectually for

yourself and researching and finding out what's true and making a good decision,

you can just follow emotionally everything everybody else is doing.

And you can be a thermometer.

But the other thing you can do, once you know about this system,

limbic resonance and mirror neurons and the way that your nervous system is

wired to interact with other people, You can also become a thermostat.

You can say, I'm going to be the person that sets the temperature.

I'm going to bring reason and I'm going to bring logic and empathy and passion

and compassion and positivity to the situation. Talk about that in this episode.

You're going to be a thermometer or you're going to be a thermostat. Lisa, my wife.

Is a thermostat. People cue on her. She walks in a room and the room attends

to her. People pay attention.

If she's fired up about something, you're going to get fired up about it.

If she's calm and peaceful and energetic, you're going to become that way too,

no matter what's going on.

She's got this power, this limbic projection that people respond to.

And she does that purposefully.

She brings that energy because she's a leader. And she recognizes that her emotional

state It affects the emotional state of those around her, and she's careful

with it, and it's the most powerful thing I've ever seen.

Everybody lines up like she's the lodestone, the magnetic resonance of the room.

When she comes in, she's got to be careful with that because she can make everybody

fall into despair, or she can draw everybody to stepping up and being better,

and that's what I want for you, friend. I want you not to be a thermometer.

I want you to be a thermostat. It's all in August. this. It's time to go all

in to say, hey, God's going to reorient me here and give me an opportunity to step into my own life.

And that means I'm also going to have to remember that there's a two-patient rule.

I'm not only doing self-brain surgery on myself, I'm also showing other people how they can change.

I'm also influencing and impacting

other people because they're going to resonate with me limbically.

They're going to have mirror neurons that reflect what I'm doing.

It's going to make them, if they're not careful, thermometer function and become

more like what I'm doing.

And so it's time to go all in. This episode will give you a set of things to

think about thermometers and thermostats.

I just wanted to give this preface to think about what you're doing and recognize

that this is a responsibility not to be unduly and,

subconsciously influenced by others in a negative way that hurts you or takes

you off your mission or messes up your recovery or throws you out of your all-in decision.

But also not to be unaware of the fact that you have an impact on the people

around you. You are a thermostat.

In some place in your world, you are a thermostat.

So wield that wisely. Be careful with it.

Have intention and purpose in the way that you live your life.

That's how you start today.

That's how you go all in. Hope you enjoy this episode. Let's get after it.

So every Saturday, we're going to look at different aspects of the operations

that you can perform, You can learn to perform on yourself to change how your brain works,

change how your mind works, to take control of that six inches of space between

your ears that so often is a battleground for all of us.

So, I want to just talk about the human brain for a minute. I think,

personally, that the brain is the coolest and most intricately designed piece

of ground that God made in the universe. 600 billion with a B or so cells, okay?

There's hundreds of billions, some people think almost up to a trillion cells

connected by trillions and trillions of chemical connections called synapses

in the six inches between your brain and that three pound blob of flesh that is the human brain.

And the cool thing about the human brain, my friend, is that it contains you.

It's the only organ that's more than an organ. Kidneys filter stuff and has

some influence on your hormonal state. The heart pumps blood.

Lungs handle the exchange of gases that oxygenate your tissues and get rid of

harmful byproducts from your breath, right?

They do a thing. Organs do a thing or a set of things.

But the brain moves everything, feels everything, thinks everything,

remembers everything, tastes and smells and sees and hears everything that puts

together who you you are in your life.

All these interconnected neurons create every program that the computer of your

brain works to create the mind and the person that you are.

And I live in a world as a neurosurgeon, I live in a world where I get to see

what happens when parts of the brain aren't working and people become someone

different than they've always been.

I'm used to telling an old joke. It's not really a joke, but it helps you remember.

If you damage one frontal lobe, your family might know.

If you hit your head, your family might notice the personality difference,

especially the non-dominant frontal lobe.

If you damage the frontal lobe, your family will notice subtle or not so subtle

changes in your personality.

You won't be exactly who you were before your head injury, but if you damage

both frontal lobes, the story goes, everybody will know.

And the reason is people with frontal lobe injuries are weird.

They act differently. They don't behave in a way that normal non-injured humans

act. They don't have the same social controls and inhibitions.

They talk louder, tell different kinds of jokes, behave in ways that aren't socially appropriate.

Sometimes frontal lobes control our ability to execute our lives in a way that

makes people behave in a way that's socially acceptable and quote-unquote normal for you.

Like who you are depends on your frontal lobes being intact, right?

So your brain is an organ that contains more than just a set of things that does something.

Your brain contains this person, this mind, this It's thought life and all these

amazing things that are more than just the function of an organ.

And so Self-Brain Surgery Saturday is going to be about creating some operations

that we can perform on ourselves when our thought process and our mental state

aren't working in ways that help us accomplish our lives.

We want to learn how to control as much as we can control of what our brains

are doing because the fact is we know from functional neuroscience that you're

not stuck with the thoughts and feelings that you have.

You're not stuck with feeling the same old way that you've always felt. You can change it.

Your limbic system runs a whole set of programs that are designed to keep you

alive when the bear comes or when the fire happens or when pain arrives.

Your limbic system is automatic and quick and reproducible and you pull your

hand away from the burning stove. your limbic system is in charge of keeping you alive.

The problem is the same set of chemical triggers that make you feel fear or

anxiety or physical pain when a real threat is present are the things that you

feel when there's not a real threat but something hurts you emotionally or you

are in a situation that reminds you of the previous time that you were hurt emotionally.

So somebody broke up with you or cheated on you and that set of feelings triggers a bunch of

responses that happen when you're starting to get close to somebody later in

your life and you can't pull the trigger on a healthy relationship because you're

feeling all that fear and pain and anxiety from your previous failure.

It's the same thing that when a certain type of pain happened to you when you were a child,

when your dad did this or your uncle did that or your mom said

that happens and you reproduce those feelings in a relationship later on and

you can't have a healthy marriage because you don't know how to engage because

you're running programs that aren't about the person that you're with now because

fear and anxiety and pain feel the same no matter what's triggering them on a neurochemical basis.

Well, you're not stuck with that. Your frontal lobes can change how your limbic

system behaves, but you've got to learn that ability to biopsy your thoughts

and not believe everything that pops into your head and talk to your brain and transform your mind.

And that's where faith comes in.

So we've talked a lot before on this podcast, if you go back,

how the Bible always backs up neuroscience and neuroscience always backs up the Bible.

And that's why as a scientist who's also a man of faith, I'm completely encouraged

every time we discover something new about the nervous system,

it backs up what the Bible's been saying all along.

I jokingly said that I want to write a book called The Neurosurgeon of Nazareth sometime.

Talk about how Jesus gave us this tremendous example of controlling our neuroscience

and how that plays out into a healthier and happier and better life, a more resilient life.

Because the same Jesus that said in John 16, 33, that you're going to have trouble

in this world also told us in John 10, 10, that he came that we can have an

abundant and joyful life.

And he gave us a whole speech in Matthew 5 and 6 about all the different ways

that we can be happy in this life.

You might know it better as the Beatitudes when he says, blessed are those,

and blessed are those, and blessed are those.

And we've talked before about how the word blessed that's translated as blessed

is a Greek word, makarios, and it actually means happy.

So Jesus was here to tell us how you can be happier by living differently.

And I'm here to tell you that starts with thinking differently.

So I'm just introducing this idea of self-treatment Saturday.

Every Saturday, we are going to talk about some different operation that you can learn.

Last week, we did an introduction episode. We covered all the first five introductory

self-brain surgery operations.

And the first one is the bad thought biopsy, where you learn how,

as Daniel Lehman said, not to believe every stupid thought that pops into your

head. that Max Lucado, my friend, has said, just because you have a thought

doesn't mean you have to think it, right?

So we're going to learn all that stuff. We're going to learn how to sever sick

synapses and lobotomize lousy attitudes.

We're going to learn how to graft in gratitude when we're struggling and drain

doubts and fill up faith and all kinds of other things.

And we're always going to have some ability to tie that neuroscience to scripture

and put those two things together so that you can smash faith and doubt into

science and understand that they're not enemies, but they actually are working for your good.

And our theme verse for Self-Brain Surgery Saturday, as always, is Romans 12.2.

It's all about changing your mind.

It's right there in the Bible. It's been there the whole time.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

You change your mind, you'll change your life. It's right there in the Bible.

It's right there in neuroscience, friend. So here's the thing.

When we understand that we have to change our minds before we can change our

life, then we can start to see what Martin Luther King was talking about.

He, in the context of talking about the church, said a sentence that has stuck

with me, and I think it applies very well to the concept of self-brain surgery.

Martin Luther King said, There was a time when the church was very powerful,

and the time when the early Christians

rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.

In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas

and principles of popular opinion.

It was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

Listen, you can either let your brain be a thermometer to tell you how you're

feeling and let that dictate how you need to behave.

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I'm grumpy. I'm going to have a bad day.

Somebody said this to me and therefore I have to be angry. Somebody sent this

email or this text or somebody cut me off in traffic or somebody overlooked

me or somebody didn't give me credit for this and therefore I have to be hurt

and sad and angry or I have to,

and I had a bad mom and she was passive-aggressive so I have to be passive-aggressive

too and I've got to pass that on to my kids.

You can either let your brain be a thermometer to tell you how you're supposed

to feel and react and the problem with that is it's not very reliable.

Your brain will tell you what you feel and you think feelings are real and our

whole society right now is telling you stick your thermometer into feelings and believe them.

Our society is saying people ought to believe their feelings and eight-year-olds

ought to believe every feeling they

have and go have surgery if they feel different than they look, right?

Pay attention to this. If you believe your feelings, you're going to have a

world of misery and you're not going to be happy or at peace in your life.

You will chase that feeling and it'll never lead you to satisfaction.

But if you rather decide that you're going to be a thermostat and you're going

to tell your brain to shape up and change how you feel by changing how you act,

by starting with how you think,

then you'll no longer conform to what you're feeling, as Romans 12 says,

but you will transform your life.

And the thermostat, you can set it where it ought to be and watch how your life changes.

My friend, this is powerful stuff. It's important. It's Self-Brain Surgery Saturday.

We're going to do it every week. Just wanted to give you an introductory thought.

Are you going to let your brain be a thermostat and be in charge of how you

feel? Or are you going to just be a passive thermometer to find out what you're

supposed to feel like today?

To find out how you're supposed to react. Am I grumpy? Am I sad?

Am I tired? Am I hungry? Am I scared?

And then let that play out and be real. Or are you going to challenge every thought?

Paul says in 2 Corinthians, take captive every thought. Take captive every thought.

How powerful is that? If you could learn how to do that, everything pops into your head.

2 Corinthians 10, 5, we take every thought captive and subject all thinking to Christ.

What if you could do that? To no longer just wake up and stick a thermometer

in your brain and say, how am I feeling today?

But instead, I'm going to capture these thoughts. I'm going to transform my

mind. I'm going to renew my mind.

I'm going to take captive my thoughts. I'm going to tell my brain how to behave

even give it marching orders instead of listening to it and doing whatever it

says, because your thoughts are not very reliable.

Feelings are not facts, my friend. They are chemical events.

You know what? What if one of our 30 good decisions for September was that I'm

going to be a thermostat and not a thermometer?

How much would that change your life? How much would it change the life of those

around you? How much would it break generational curses?

If you taught your kids and your grandkids, you don't have to feel what you feel.

You don't have to believe every thought that pops into your head.

You don't have to be stuck with the thoughts because your brain is the most

intricately designed, interconnected network of supercomputers that the world

has ever seen. And you're the programmer.

Believe that. You're not stuck with letting the world stick a thumb drive into

your computer and tell you what program you have to run today.

You are are in charge of it, my friend, and you get to transform your mind and

you get to change your life by thinking differently, by being in control,

by being a self-brain surgeon.

We go to medical school and one of our oaths that we take is first no harm.

We decide, we commit and promise to our future patients that we will first not do harm to them.

I'm just telling you as a self-brain surgeon, that needs to be your oath.

Relentlessly refuse to participate in your own demise.

Or the demise of those around you. You are not going to anymore allow your brain

to be in charge of you. You're going to be in charge. You're the programmer.

You're the self-brain surgeon. Do not conform to the world, but be transformed. How?

By the renewing of your mind.

You're going to take captive every thought. You're going to become a master self-brain surgeon.

And you're going to start today. There's a song by Mercy Me called Shake.

It's a silly little song, and the music's kind of silly, and the video's silly,

and everybody's dancing. I'm not a dancer, by the way. I'm a terrible dancer.

I've only danced publicly a couple of times in my life. One was at my wedding

with Lisa because I was so happy. I didn't care what anybody thought about my dancing.

I just was wanting to dance with my beautiful, incredible new wife.

And I'm going to dance next month at my daughter's wedding. Kaylin,

our last child, is getting married.

And I'm going to be there, and I'm going to dance with her. And I'm not going

to worry about it. But when I was growing up, we were like forbidden to dance.

There was an old joke in the church that I grew up in. Why is the church against

premarital sex? Because it might lead to dancing, right?

Dancing was like forbidden. So if you grow up believing that if you move your

foot the wrong way, you're going to go to hell, then it's hard to overcome that

thought process when you're older.

But this video, it's silly, and everybody's dancing around, and it's silly,

but the lyrics are about what happens when you're transformed.

Transformed, and in the context of the song, it's about what happens when Jesus

saves you, when he pulls you out of the miry clay and sets you on a new path,

and your life is better, and you've been transformed, and you have hope now.

What's your response? King David in the Old Testament, he danced so hard his

clothes fell off, and he was like, I will dance even harder to rejoice before my God.

And that's what this song shakes about, not dancing until your clothes fall

off, but about the idea that when you're transformed, and when you're renewed,

and when when you're saved, and when things are better because you're not stuck

with the massive things dictating how you feel and behave for the rest of your life anymore.

It ought to change how you feel and move and how you navigate through this world.

It ought to make you jump for joy that you're not stuck with the way it's always felt.

And so this song, Shake, just gives us that idea of what do you do when your life has changed?

When you finally say, hey, I changed my mind and that's allowed me to change

my life and Jesus is the reason I was able to do that.

What do you do when you put those two things together? Well, you shake.

You throw off all those chains that are hindering you. You run your race more

effectively if you want to put it in the metaphor of running.

We talked about Hebrews 12 yesterday.

Cast off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and run

with perseverance the race that's set out before you.

Friend, you can change your mind. You can renew and restore and grab onto hope

again. To do that, you're going to learn how to do self-brain surgery.

The great physician is going to teach us every Saturday we're going to have

self-brain surgery Saturday. This is just a little introduction to that.

Are you going to be a thermostat or are you going to be a thermometer?

And more importantly, my friend, are you going to start today?