S10E
· 47:24
Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. I'm doctor 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?
Dr. Lee Warren: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 on to faith when we have faith and doubt and the things we think we know are challenged? And we're almost at a 1000 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 2 shows now.
Dr. Lee Warren:Not 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 we're gonna have spiritual brain surgery episodes. There are some of them are gonna be our quiet times, our Bible studies, our prayer times, our Tuesdays with Tata's, things like that. Some of them are gonna be guests that are more focused on spiritual and church related things, spiritual growth and and your relationship with God and prayers, things that are not so sciency but are more specifically related to our faith and how do we hold on to faith when life gets hard. And then the doctor Lee Warren podcast, the SOPE Brain Surgery podcast, we're gonna continue this journey of smashing faith and science together.
Dr. Lee Warren:There's 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. And 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 gonna give you a place to ask honest questions and find answers. It's gonna be a place filled with hope.
Dr. Lee Warren:And I couldn't think of a more perfect guest for the last episode of season 9 of the podcast than our guest today. We're gonna 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 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, 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 1000000 of years.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 them. In fact, some scientists, famous people like Hippocrates, for example, said everything you are is your brain.
Dr. Lee Warren:Like there's nothing else about you other than your brain. You're all about your brain. Well, Sharon Dirks is a PhD who who received her PhD from Cambridge University in brain imaging. She's right up my alley because she looks at functional MRI scans and ask 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.
Dr. Lee Warren: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. It's a really successful book.
Dr. Lee Warren:And then in 2019, she wrote, Am I Just My Brain? And that's the book we're gonna talk about today. Her most recent book is called Broken Planet. It's about suffering and natural disasters. Very fascinating book.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 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.
Dr. Lee Warren:I'm here to tell you that the more we learn about physics and imaging and biology and 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 gonna give you some unbelievable conversations in the coming season with scientists who like Michael Gillen recently, doctor Michael Gillen, the cosmologist astrophysicist, and we're gonna have John Lennox coming up who's a famous Oxford mathematician who's debated people like Richard Dawkins and and has has really stood up for the faith. And today, we have Sharon Dericks who's doing the same work. Incredible. She's speaking and 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.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 between how your creator 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.
Dr. Lee Warren:And we're gonna teach you all that because you need to know. 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 Dierks is gonna help get that done as we finish season 9 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.
Dr. Lee Warren:We're gonna start the spiritual brain surgery podcast on Tuesday 30th January and that's gonna be the first episode with Alisa Childers and 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.
Dr. Lee Warren:I'll be giving you some older episodes that'll so you'll still have some things hit your inbox and hit your podcast listening apps so you won't 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 gonna take a little break. I'll let you know when we're coming back. It's gonna be a couple of weeks before you have new content.
Dr. Lee Warren:And we're gonna be doing some work in the background that will really help season 10 blow you away. We're gonna 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 Sharon Dierick's conversation today, am I just my brain? I just have one question for you, my friend.
Lisa Warren: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.
Lisa Warren:Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place, Self Brain Surgery School. I'm doctor 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.
Lisa Warren:This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time, my friend.
Lisa Warren:Let's get after it. Friend, we're back, and I'm so excited to be with you again today. We're gonna do a little self brain surgery around the conundrum of the mind and the brain. I've got an incredible guest with us today. Doctor Sharon Dirckx is with us today all the way from Oxford, England.
Lisa Warren:Welcome, Sharon.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Hi. It's great to be here.
Lisa Warren:So glad that you took the time to be with us. And tell tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Yeah. So I I live in Oxford with my, husband and 2 children. I have a background in the sciences. I'm I work now as a, I guess an apologist, speaker, communicator. But originally I studied biochemistry.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 that covers, a few decades just there in those few few sentences.
Lisa Warren:What it 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?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Well, it started off by, my my kind of pivot from neuroscience into, apologetics began with actually being in a lab in 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 realised 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 the the centre that I ended up becoming part of and and ended up working for and teaching on staff there for for 12 years.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And that was OCCA, the Oxford Centre For Christian Apologetics. And so I I received that training myself, and so it was born out of that 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And it's a way of capturing something and capturing, you know, one's voice. And so, yeah, I I I really enjoyed and really had a sense of it being very right to to write my first book, which was on personal suffering. And that was very much born out of our personal experiences of of struggles with with health, in in, my marriage to Conrad. And so, yeah, that that was kind of the beginning, and and then the other books have sort of come from there.
Lisa Warren:So is there a moment did you grow up in the church or in faith, or did that happen later in your life?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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'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 Grilla Christian, which was where there were 4 Christians and, a roomful of people.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And you could ask them any question that you wanted. And 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 undergoing processes and process, programmes, beneath Microsoft Office that enable it to run.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 realise 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. It led me to grill a lot more Christians and ask a lot more questions and over the course of the next 18 months and it was in the middle of my 2nd year that I didn't think I had all of the answers.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 in the debt, decided to follow him. I was about 20 years old.
Lisa Warren:Wow. And did the 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? Was it purely kind of a spiritual exercise?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:I 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, and I'm in the UK. And, 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And I remember being really surprised and thinking, this feels like the world's best kept secret. Why 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 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.
Lisa Warren: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 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 astound astonishing from a historical point of view. It's 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.
Lisa Warren:And we have way more copies of those early manuscripts of scripture than we do of those early Greek and and historical documents. So that 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. So that's neat that you told that. It's it's always fun when we do a podcast and we find ourselves going into areas that we weren't planning on going back.
Lisa Warren: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 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 membrane?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Well, so, 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, I began to just think about the area of neuroscience, which is a particular branch of the sciences. And 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 I actually don't think you 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 to read even if you don't consider yourself an expert in this area.
Lisa Warren: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 to, give us just a, I guess, for somebody who hasn't read the book yet, most of the listeners 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.
Lisa Warren: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Yes. Well yeah. The I mean, I think you hear quite a lot, that it that it said that, you know, whenever you do something, this is your brain doing that thing. Yeah. As if, and perhaps put a little bit more strongly, you know, there are people like, Francis Crick who would had had you know, was kind of famous for saying you're nothing but a pack of neurons that Yeah.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Really, everything that determines who you are, the choices you make, the personality you have, the behaviours you exhibit, they're all driven by the, the chemicals and neurons inside of your skull. But, of course, that that's only part of the picture because we don't just have a brain. We also have a mind. Yeah. We have a sense of self.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:We have an inner reality. There is 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 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:But, of 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 because the person expressing that view was saying, my perspective on the world is that there is no first person perspective on the world, which collapses into incoherence.
Lisa Warren:Yeah. You can't
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:and 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, 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 2 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And philosophers of many faiths and all faiths and no faith agree that, you know, 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 as a neurosurgeon, you've seen some very interesting things in in clinically.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And I think that's one of the most powerful sets of data in this, in this case to say that we are so much more than just our brains because people are strange. And they they they and, clinically, they they could do some very interesting things. But anyway, before we even get to that, you know, 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And here's a variety of other ways of describing the mind brain relationship that work better than this one. And I 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 mind 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And that's interesting. And, but the the question that people holding that view have to answer is how on earth do you get, mind from nonconscious neurons? You still come up against this problem of you've got human consciousness from a nonconscious system of atoms and molecules.
Lisa Warren:That's right.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 nonconscious neurons because god exists. So that's how they would get round that. And then there's the position that the mind is beyond the brain, that we actually have a physical brain and a nonphysical mind.
Lisa Warren:Right.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 2 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 reconcile that with neuroscience, which is showing these two things to be so closely integrated, which they are.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And then there's another view that says that, 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. Yeah. 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And that's a very, a growing view. More and more people are talking about this. But, of course, the the challenge that panpsychists have to answer is how do you explain the very different levels of consciousness 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 that human beings have. How do you explain that?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Yeah. So every view has its challenges.
Lisa Warren:I think this is the this interesting thing. I thought there's a scripture in 1st Corinthians. I can't remember where it is right now, but he says, when someone thinks they know something they do not yet know is 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. Right?
Lisa Warren:I think materialism basically thought that brain did what it did and all that. But instead, as the quantum physicists have started to teach us, like, the mind is nonlocal. Like, there there's a lot of connections between my mind and your mind, and and electrons can be entangled with one another across fast distances and faster than the speed of light. All these crazy things that 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.
Lisa Warren:And 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. Right?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And I think that what the science has, 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 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:But in making that judgment, we've actually moved out of the domain of the sciences and into philosophy where
Dr. Lee Warren:That's right.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:We're taking a philosophical position and imposing that back on the data. You know, I 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. Right. But, actually, there's no scientific study that can tell you that network interactions create thought.
Lisa Warren:That's right.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:So this is a fascinating area.
Lisa Warren:That's why we slipped from science into scientism, like sort of the religion of science and how we think we think we know things and how science can explain all knowledge eventually. I think that's the that's the difference. It's is we we redefine terms and we start calling what's really the 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 the presupposition that material is you know?
Lisa Warren: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?
Lisa Warren:And and what can you say to somebody out there who might be a little bit of a doubter or a little bit on the fence? Like, as a person who's looked into this deeply as a scientist, like, how does this boost your faith bolster your faith?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Well, I would say that, 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? Yeah. Why do we think at all? And I even remember asking that question myself as a, like, a 10, 12 year old, one rainy day looking out of the window. I began I became aware of my own consciousness.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Why do I exist? Why am I here? And, you know, those questions do bubble to the surface Yeah. Sometimes in us. And and, actually, you know, if there is no god and if the material world is all that there is, then what explanation do we have for for why we can think?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And I suppose where it lands with with that view is that somehow, conscious human beings have arisen from a nonconscious universe. Yep. And that's not impossible, but it's kind of surprising. You know? It's kind of not consistent with the starting conditions.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:But if god exists, then we've actually lived in a conscious universe all along. That's right. Because god is a conscious community of father and son and holy spirit. And 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?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 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 we're why are we here?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Yeah. 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 realise 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.
Lisa Warren:Wow. That's beautiful. I I can't listener, I can't encourage you highly enough to read this book, Am I Just My Brain? We we talk on this podcast all the time, Sharon, about the the fact that the work of people like, Newbur Andrew Newberg and Jeffrey Schwartz have shown us that you can change your brain by changing the things you think about. And there's this fascinating work on, looking at the hippocampi, the volume of the hippocampus and people who pray and meditate.
Lisa Warren:And it gets bigger when you change how you think. And I've I've I've drawn the analogy of, you know, I have an old iPhone. It's an iPhone 11. I can plug it in at night, and it can do a software update. But when it when I wake up the next morning, it has new software, but it's still an iPhone 11.
Lisa Warren:It 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 the things that we think about and how we think about them. And so what does that say to you? I mean, as a neuroscientist, like, how do you how do you reconcile the fact that the mind can actually change the structure of the brain?
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:And that it's actually an argument for why the mind is just as important as the brain. And and in fact, as you say, it can bring about changes in the physical brain. And, yeah, I think that it's a 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:You know, where your, 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 That's right. There's kind of severe pain in a part of the body that has actually been removed, and, 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 that prayer. Just like, 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 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 experience of love isn't genuine. We come back to this qualia.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:You know? The experience is very different to the networks that the 2 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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. And, that's a that's a great thing. We should be more concerned if there was nothing happening in our brain when we're praying.
Lisa Warren:That's right. I find it I find it highly encouraging. You know, Paul told us 2000 years ago that, hey, if you wanna 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 in a very direct pathway. But when you're engaged gratitude and things like prayer and gratitude, the circuit goes to the frontal lobe and get your thinking involved and and calms things down and lets you make executive decisions before you decide what emotion means.
Lisa Warren:Right? So it's it's to me, it it says that the scripture told us what was gonna happen in the neuroscience and why it was helpful to us 1000 of years ago. It's it's corollary to me. I love it.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:It's very classic.
Lisa Warren: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 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Oh, yeah. So my first book, was written in 2013, and that was about personal suffering. Both books such and my second my 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.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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 been, whether 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 Yeah. That came to us all, actually.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx: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.
Lisa Warren: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 gonna make an impact for our listeners. I I just can't thank you enough for your time here today, Sharon.
Dr. Sharon Dirckx:Thank you so much, Lee. It's been an absolute pleasure to be here, and thank you for your ministry as well.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 gonna be a mind bending conversation.
Dr. Lee Warren:You're not just a bunch of cells for you didn't just evolve out of the sludge into some organism that somehow attained something that you believe is consciousness. So you are an incredible, well designed, well constructed, ever changing, ever healing, ever improving structure that your creator has made you in his image. 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 the incredible gift of epigenetics. So you can engage your frontal lobes for selective attention so that you can stop thinking about harmful, repetitive automated things. You can create new synapses.
Dr. Lee Warren:You can harness Hebb's law and the quantum genome effect and make new structural connections between different parts of your brain. 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 wanna 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
Lisa Warren:at the Good Book Company.
Dr. Lee Warren:And we have amazingly, they've donated 3 copies of Sharon's book, Am I Just My Brain, that will be able to give away to listeners. So the good folks over 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 Dierke's incredible book, Am I Just My Brain, send me an email lee@doctorleewarrendot 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
Lisa Warren:her book from the Good Book Company. Get that
Dr. Lee Warren: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 it's well written. It's accessible. It's not over your head even if you're not into science at all.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 to 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@doctorleewarren.com.
Dr. Lee Warren: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 gonna 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@doctorleewarren.com, and we'll choose 3 of those winners to send over to the Good Book Company, and Abigail will send you a book. God bless you, friend.
Dr. Lee Warren:I'm so grateful for the ground that we've covered here in season 9. 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 gonna 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.
Dr. Lee Warren:It's just the incredible skill of our designer, creator, God, how we're put together. And we're gonna smash all that together in season 10 and in the spiritual brain surgery podcast in a new way. We're gonna 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
Lisa Warren:today. Hey. Hey. Thanks for listening. The doctor Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.
Lisa Warren: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 audiobooks. Hey, The theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker, available for free at tommywalkerministries.org. They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the most high god. And if you're interested in learning more, check out tommywalkerministries dotorg.
Lisa Warren:If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at wleewarrend.com/prayer. Wleewarrend.com/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 doctor Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, Frank, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
Lisa Warren:And the good news is you can start today.
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