You Cannot Be Reduced to Genes or Trauma, and That's Good News (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee. It's good to see you today.

It's good to see you, too. Will you help me with something? Of course.

I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It's Frontal Lobe Friday,

one of my favorite days of the week.

And I've had a rough week. Lisa was sick last week. Tata and I were kind of

puny over the weekend. But then midweek, it hit me full force.

I actually missed a day of surgery and a day of clinic. and it's been a morning

this morning with sneezing and coughing and I'm not sure I'll get through this,

but it's the first day of a new month and it's Mind Change March,

one of the most important months for the podcast.

So I have to bring you something new today and I've just got a couple of ideas

that I wanna give to you to get your mind right on the start of a new month.

I've got some incredible hope for you, okay?

There's some things that you've been taught, the things that you've heard,

things that you hear in the news and things that you see in the magazine while

you're getting your hair done, things that you read at the barbershop.

There's things that you hear that don't sound very hopeful, and I'm here today

to change your mind about that.

It's Frontal Lobe Friday. We're going to get our brains engaged and get after

it. I want to remind you I'm Dr.

Lee Warren. I am a neurosurgeon and an author, and I try to come here every

day to help you, to provide you with some tools to help you change your mind

and change your life to help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

There's immense power that can be found by smashing faith and science together

to release the energy that you need for your life to get it done.

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

Before we get any of that done, I 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.

Music.

All right, let's get after it. Hey, Frontal Lobe Friday.

It's the day of the week where we focus on our incredible ability to switch

our attention from one thought to another, to switch what we think about, to switch how we behave.

We are not animals that are fixed on a physiological reaction and reactivity to things.

We have been given an incredible gift by our great physician to decide that

when something, thing and when a train of thought is not helpful to us,

when an emotional impulse is not helpful to us, when a feeling is not,

in fact, helpful to us, we can choose to change our minds about it.

We can think about different things.

And as I'll show you in coming episodes and hopefully all throughout Mind Change March,

I will show you that changing your mind is good for your life,

that that's how you actually can pull this hat trick off of becoming healthier,

feeling better, and being happier in spite of the fact that life gets really hard.

Don't forget, we always talk about, especially over on the Spiritual Brain Surgery

Podcast, we talk about the fact that Jesus came and said two things that seem contradictory.

He said in John 16, 33, in the world you will have trouble.

He said in John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and kill and destroy.

So the front half of both of those verses have a lot of potential mayhem, right?

We're going to have trouble. Somebody's trying to steal and kill and destroy

from us. but the back half is where the power is.

John 16, 33, in this world you will have trouble, but take heart, my friend.

I've overcome the world, Jesus says. John 10, 10, the thief comes to steal and

kill and destroy, but the back half, here comes Jesus, and he says,

but I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.

So quantum physics tells us that two things can be true at the same time,

and that's where we live.

We live in this place where two things can can be true at the same time.

Now, I read a book the other day by a pretty famous theologian,

one of the guys that people go to when they want to untangle something from

the Bible that's hard to figure out.

And he has written a ton of books. I'll try to get him on the podcast one of

these days. He's been kind of hard to nail down.

He's great about writing back, but he always says he's too busy or he's got

this going on or that going on.

So, so far, I haven't been able to get him nailed down to the podcast.

But he said in one of his books that he is the least bereaved person that he knows.

He said he just hasn't had any tragedies in his life, hasn't had any big problems.

His parents lived to a ripe old age. All his kids are healthy.

His marriage has been solid. He just hasn't had any major tragedy.

Well, I'm grateful that there are people like that out there,

and I hope that you're one of them.

But unfortunately, many of the people listening to this podcast,

and I hope it's not you, but if it is, you're with me.

You're in the camp of you've been through trauma or tragedy or some other massive thing.

Life's been hard for you, and that's probably why you're here.

A lot of folks get to my books or get to my podcast because they're searching

for hope because something's happened and has left them with some big questions.

And it's those big questions that produce doubt and can rock our faith and can

make us wonder what's going on, what's happening here, and what What can I do to find my way back?

Where's God in all this mess, as I say, over on Spiritual Brain Surgery?

And so that's what we're going to get after this month. I want to help you change

your mind about how far you fall when things get really hard.

There's some great news.

And the great news is that we, the scientists, had a lot of things wrong about

a lot of the things that we thought were sure, that we thought were true.

We had a lot of stuff wrong. And the problem is once science gets something

out there into the popular culture, the popular press, it takes decades to unwind it.

Once we understand that we weren't right about something, it takes generations

before we can convince people that we were wrong and the new way is the right way.

And so I'm going to try to give you some ideas in coming weeks about some things

that we were wrong about.

In fact, I'm writing my new book, The Self-Brain Surgery Manuscript,

and we're starting with that place of a bunch of stuff that we got wrong.

Because this stuff, friend, if you're going through something hard or if you

have something hard happen, this could literally save your life.

We got an email from a woman the other day whose husband took his own life.

The most tragic thing that can happen, right?

And she thinks if he had had some of this information that maybe he would have had hope.

And that's why I'm motivated. Even when I'm sick, even when I'm having to pause

the recording five times in a row to try to clear myself so you don't have to

hear me hacking and sneezing and all that.

That because I want to give you this information that could literally save your

life. It's not hyperbole. It's just a fact.

There's 20 years, 24 years now practicing neurosurgery and this information,

and I'm going to share with you, could literally save your life because it saved

mine after we lost our son.

It saved mine in figuring out how to put myself back together after the Iraq

war and all those things that I've talked to you about before.

We're going to have to learn some of the things that we were wrong about and

eat some humble pie so that you can have the hope of knowing what's true.

Because when you know what's true, you can move forward.

Okay, we have this cultural moment here. I think it's always been,

but right now there's this popular thing, you do you, I'll do me,

follow your heart, you know, live out your feelings, whatever feels right to you.

You find your truth, I'll find my truth, all that stuff.

But let me just tell you of something. If you're really hurting,

a truth, your truth, my truth won't help you.

Only the truth will help you.

But we can have all these philosophical debates about how we all ought to let

each other, you know, do our own thing and follow your heart and live your truth and all that stuff.

But the fact is, if you're desperate for hope and the things you've been doing

aren't helping, and you keep wondering why it's not working.

It might be because you are operating out of a system that just isn't true,

and you can't find hope there because it's not true.

And so we're going to find the truth going forward together, okay?

And wherever that leads us, we'll be good scientists, and we'll ask good questions.

And when the experiments seem to show a different answer than we thought,

we're going to modify our hypotheses, and we're going to use the scientific

method to our own advantage, and we're going to find what's really true, okay?

Because I want to show you how your brain works, how your mind interacts with

it, and how to operate them both to radically transform your life, okay?

Now, I want to talk for just a minute about something called reductionism.

Reductionism is a philosophical idea, and it started back 600 years before Christ.

Thales of Miletus is one of my favorite philosophers. Thales is the guy that

when they came and asked him what's really hard and he said to know yourself it's really hard,

And they said, what's really easy? And he said, to teach people.

It's really easy to tell other people advice. It's really hard to know yourself.

That's Talos. But Talos got something wrong, and it led to a whole bunch of mess for centuries.

And even still now, Talos had this idea that the entire universe was made of

water, that everything would be broken down to water, that water was the basic

component of everything in the universe. That turned out to be wrong.

But he reduced the universe to one thing.

A thousand years later, Descartes, who you know from the famous I think therefore I am philosophy,

Descartes suggested that we could understand everything in the world by taking

it apart like a clock, looking at the pieces, and basically everything,

including you, is just the sum of its parts, that we can reduce everything to

the list of parts, and therefore we can understand how it works,

and how to put it back together, and how to operate it more effectively.

This idea of reductionism worked its way into medicine.

And throughout the 20th century, we practice in this strongly reductionist mindset.

Bodies are just machines. They're made up of a bunch of parts.

If we understand how the parts work, then we can understand how the machine works.

When something isn't working, we can swap it out or just get rid of it.

And that's had some great successes, right?

If part of your body is hurting you, the appendix is inflamed and infected,

go cut it out and get rid of it.

You don't really need it. the infection is worse than keeping whatever the

appendix does and we just get rid of it right if

your colon isn't working we can cut it out

and give you a colostomy make it work some other way we can reroute the

parts that's great it does work right if your

kidney's not working we can swap it out literally give you somebody

else's kidney just like trading a new set of tires off your car and that reductionist

philosophy does have some benefits okay but it's led to this laser focus focus

on defeating disease that sometimes leaves a person disabled and devastated

by side effects and sacrificing quality of life for survival.

Look at oncology. The reductionist approach says this.

Yes, chemotherapy and radiation kill skin cells and hair cells,

but you got a lot more of those than you do tumor cells.

So if we just go scorched earth and we give you this chemo and radiation,

we blow that tumor up and burn it and cook it until it's all gone.

Then as long as you have have some skin and hair and bone and joint and you've

got a heart beating and you're left and you're left alive then the treatment

is worth it right that's the idea.

And so that works. I mean, cancer treatment does work, but the concept is reduce

it down to its component part, find the thing that's wrong and get rid of it,

fix it, and whatever the cost is, it's worth it. That's the reductionist idea, okay?

Now, closely linked to reductionism is the doctrine of determinism.

Once we reduce something to its parts and understand what those parts do,

then we know how the system functions.

Now, here's the problem. Watson and Crick in 1953 1953 figured out the chemical

structure of DNA molecule.

And shortly thereafter, biologists established the relationship between DNA

and the inherited characteristics that old Gregor Mendel,

the monk, was talking about back in 1865 when he showed us the famous model

of how genes seem to be passed or characteristics seem to be passed from one generation to another.

How you can combine two plants and get the one that you want can make one stronger

or taller, more green or more yellow or flower more often or reproduce more quickly.

Genes were Mendel's idea that basically the beginning basics of genetics.

But once Watson and Crick came along and taught us about DNA,

then the molecular biologists pretty soon understood exactly what the nature

of inherited characteristics were and its genes encoded for by DNA.

And the science of molecular genetics went crazy. And for the rest of the 20th

century and the first two decades of this century,

the media and popular imagination were enamored with the idea that our genes

determine most of who we are and what happens to us in our lives.

Headlines told us about genes that seem to make diseases like Alzheimer's and

dyslexia and breast cancer inevitable.

And they even hinted, you'd see it in the news, hinted that perhaps things like

criminal behavior and sexual orientation and religious belief and athletic performance

are encoded in our genes.

We can't do much about it. We just inherited it. We all love a simple explanation, right?

And essentially everybody from the press to the medical schools and the guy

at the corner store agreed, hey, it's not your fault. You were just born that way.

She's beautiful because she won the genetic lottery.

I'm never going to be able to accomplish that because my parents weren't tall

enough. I didn't have the right genes.

It's not my fault. I was born that way. Now, eventually, in my new book,

especially, I'm going to try to get to the problems, the whole host of problems

that reductionism and determinism create.

But I also want to point out, it's not just the molecular biologists that got

it wrong, it's also the neuroscientists.

I was taught in high school, college, medical school, and residency,

and I taught patients and students in residence all the way up to about 2004.

That you're born with all the brain cells you're ever going to have. We really believe this.

We thought we didn't, that human neurons did not reproduce, that you couldn't

make new neurons. You were stuck with the brain that you had.

And our ability, you know, this idea, you've got all these neurons that you're

born with, and every time you injure one of them, or every time you drink alcohol

and kill a bunch of them, or every time you develop a disease like Alzheimer's,

or have a stroke, or get a head injury, you lose neurons.

And it's basically a race to how many neurons you have left as to how well you're going to age.

And our ability to be highly functional old people someday would purely depend

on how lucky we were genetically,

how careful we were with our brains, and if we lose too many neurons to accidents

or alcohol or atrophy or drawing a bad handful of genes from mom and dad,

then you're destined to be demented at a young age.

You have a stroke or too many concussions and you're just hosed.

You're going to have a, if you got a brain injury, we were told that it's mostly

permanent. Strokes are mostly permanent.

You better load up on that ounce of prevention.

Because the pound of cure isn't going to help you if you have a broken brain.

That's what neuroscience got wrong.

Because the problem is, my friend, between genetic determinism and the idea

that you're just stuck with the genes that you have, and the problem with the

fact that the brain doesn't reproduce, is that it's just wrong.

Science has shown now, conclusively, that we do, in fact, make new neurons.

And much more importantly, we make new connections with new neurons,

and we make new connections with old neurons every second of every day,

either passively or actively.

And our genes don't turn out to be the thing that tells the whole story about

our lives. In fact, genes don't determine very much of anything.

There are some things that genes definitely strictly encode for.

You can't change your eye color, the quality of your hair, you're going to have

curly hair or straight hair, certain things about your bones and how tall you could potentially be,

and certain things about about inherited genetic disposition to certain diseases

are coded, sure, they are.

In fact, most scientists now think it's about 35% of stuff in your life that's

just out of your control.

But that means 65% is not, and guess what it turns out?

It turns out that the ultimate power over your health and well-being is not

in the mystical and unchangeable realm of molecular structure.

But it's in your control through lifestyle, thought, emotion,

faith, decisions, nutrition, things you can influence and control.

And unfortunately, for those that want a simple answer and for those that were

comfortable with the idea that it's not my fault, I was just born that way,

or it's not my fault that person did that thing to me when I was eight.

It's not my fault this trauma happened.

It's not my fault I was abused. It's not my fault I come from a family of alcoholics.

Well, if you're comfortable living as a person who's been inalterably hurt,

by something that happened in the past, if you're comfortable living in the

fact that you don't feel any hope around potential change, then I've got some

bad news for you. That model isn't true.

The truth is, my friend, you do actually have the power to change most of the

things that you you experience in your life, the tools of your consciousness,

your beliefs, your thoughts, your intentions, your faith,

your prayers have been shown in numerous studies now to have more high correlation

with your health, longevity, and happiness than your genes do,

than your experiences do.

The decisions you make about how you want to think have more power than your

genes do or anything that's happened to you in your past life in many areas.

In fact, there's been some studies that show that how you think about your health

is actually more important in predicting how long you live than your actual

health. That sounds really weird.

But it's been shown conclusively. People that generally feel positive about

their health and they make decisions based on that and they decide what they're

going to do based on that,

they live longer and they feel happier than people who feel like they don't

have a good body or feel like they can't change anything.

They don't live as long and they're not as happy. So what you think about your

health is an accurate predictor of how healthy you turn out to be.

That sounds like the quantum Zeno effect that we talked about the other day, doesn't it?

The more you observe something from a particular point of view,

the more true that becomes in your life.

So this idea of a genetic disposition went from the laboratory to the press

to the public knowledge, and it's entrenched in our public culture,

but it turns out not to be true.

So I just want to give you one idea today. I want to give you one little thought, and it's this.

Don't worship your genetic genetic makeup. Don't put it up as an idol in front of you.

Don't put your trauma or your tragedy or your massive thing and the way that

it broke you or you feel like it irreparably harmed you.

Don't put that up as the biggest thing, the most powerful thing in your life,

because you have the tools inside you to change your response to those things.

You don't have to live in the shadow shadow of

your parents genetics or the things that happened to your mom and dad

the generational issues that came from them you don't

have to live in the shadow of the trauma because trauma is not what

happened to you that would be hopeless trauma is your response to what happened

to you and even at the level of the transcription of the genes in your body

you can turn those things on and off with learning how to think differently

about them okay don't put that don't put your genes don't Don't put your experiences,

don't put your past, don't put your parents up as something bigger than God.

Romans 1.25 says, don't exchange the truth for a lie. Don't worship the created

thing rather than the creator.

Genes are a created thing. Your genetics are not bigger than your God.

You can turn them on and off. It's just absolutely true.

Another important scripture I want to give you is 2 Peter 1.3.

His divine power has given us everything we need.

Pertaining to life and godliness, his divine power. We always talk about science

and faith smashing together.

And the other day I told you about super colliders, these machines that they

build that shoot electrons towards each other and these particles fly towards

each other nearly the speed of light.

And when they smash together, they release incredible energy and the fundamental

particles from which they're made.

And that type of experimentation is what led to atomic bombs and nuclear power

plants and computers and cell phones and microwave ovens and all that stuff

that's been learned from quantum physics and particle accelerators are a big part of that.

But if you take science and faith and you smash them together,

when they release that energy,

you can learn the truth about how your brain and your spirit are wired and how

your creator and your great physician want to communicate with you,

and you can learn the truth about how your body works and how your mind is really

the captain of the ship in terms of what your body does.

And how your body and your mind and your brain respond to your mind,

and how your genetics passed on to your next generations respond to your mind

and your decisions about how you respond to your circumstances,

then all of a sudden you go from this reductionist, deterministic,

sort of hopeless state where it's not your fault, you can't do anything about

it, it just happened and now I can't change it, it's just the way I am. That's hopeless.

But it's also not true. Because what's true is His divine power has given you

everything you need for life and godliness.

And may I say it, He's given you everything you need to perform self-brain surgery,

to change your mind and change your life and become healthier and feel better

and be happier. He keeps His promises.

And when the great physician says, I've got an operation for you that you can

use to change your mind and change your life, He's telling the truth.

Don't worship the created thing. Don't put that genetic makeup.

Don't put that experience. Don't put that trauma. Don't put that massive thing

up as being something that's inalterable and bigger than God is.

Because the fact is, you can change it. You can control it. You've got the power

because he's given it to you.

And he's right there holding the knife, waiting for you to give him consent

to perform the self-brain surgery that you need. And he's just waiting for you,

my friend, here on Frontal Lobe Friday on the first day of MindChange March to start today. day.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering

from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold. And I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,

Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

and 60-plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.