Conversations with A Brain Surgeon With Dr. Lee Warren - Part 2: Neuro-feelings

gotten downward spirals, we're going to dive into that. So before we get into some of the cause and effect of it, when you talk about self brain surgery, what do you share with your listeners about the feeling side of it, Because obviously we can take ownership of our brain, So where do the feeling side of this come into play because I think there's a lot of people that feel like they're almost a victim to their emotions.

a human to feel. And so what that means is there's no discernible difference between what you feel internally, mentally, or physiologically when there's a real threat to your life. Say you know, a bear runs into your living room and trust to eat you, or you wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if you're going to get fired the next day at your job, and you get afraid, the same set of feelings right, the hair stands up, your heart races, you feel cold. All

that stuff happens because physiology is triggered by feeling. Feeling is a chemical event in your brain. So the most important thing to realize is that the things that I feel do not automatically deserve to have credibility as representing actual current events that are actually happening. Most people don't recognize that. In our society right now, we're inundated with this idea that what you got to follow your feelings and follow your heart and you fight for your feelings

and all that stuff. And I'm just telling you from a compassionate physician standpoint, that's a terrible way to live your life because if you try to believe every feeling that you have as if it's tied to something that's real, what you're going to find is you're pursuing a lot of things that don't pan out to be helpful to you.

And that's that's just a fact. So the way you deal with it, the way we deal with it anyway, and teach people to deal with it, is to say understand that the way your brain is wired, feelings jumble up with thoughts in an area of your brain called the basal ganglia, and it's like putting a fuel injector in your car and adding an additive to the gas. Like,

once they mix up, you can't unmix them. So feelings and thoughts tie together and you can't separate them, and you have a part of your brain called the hippocampus that ties in all these different areas that attach meaning to the raw chemical signal of what you feel. So

basically you have a feeling like anxiety. For example, something starts to physiologically make you feel like you're anxious, and you basically pull in a memory and attach a meaning to that chemical trigger, and you tell yourself you hear an internal thought. And we already covered last week and the idea that thoughts aren't always true. So you tie in a previous experience with a similar feeling and you attach a meaning to it as if it's the current experience.

And so basically what you're doing is you're not careful and discerning about it is you'll start to think that every time the hair goes up on the back of my neck it means I'm about to be abused, or it means I'm about to have this problem occur again, because that's what it meant the first time I felt it. And so if you're not careful to say, wait a minute, there's a real difference. And I know there's a difference because intellectually, if you get your fronel lobes involved. You know,

let me give you a scenario. You feel you're heart racing, you feel a little bit tingly, the hair stands up on the back of your neck. You find your mouth drying out. And it could be that you're about to open a love letter from somebody that you hoped was going to fall in love with you and find out that your life's dream is about to come true, that

this person's going to marry you. Because that's a feeling and a bunch of physiology that happens when you're anticipating something wonderful, it could also mean that you're about to find out that you're having a heart attack. Right, the same set of chemical physiological things make you feel two different things. It's the meaning that you attach to them that tells the truth of what's happening, or that could

potentially tell the truth about what's happening. So the important thing to learn is that physiology is triggered by the parts of our brain that generate feeling, and we attach meaning to them based on prior experience. And the discernment piece is where we have to say, wait a minute, this feeling right now and this particular circumstance doesn't necessarily mean that that previous bad thing is going to happen again.

really couldn't tell the difference between the two. I was experiencing them very similarly physiologically. But that's what happens too when we think we're in danger, if we've fired and wired, you know, food, sugar, Netflix, whatever it is online shopping wine to be the thing that fills those voids of those feelings. Again, that hippocampus, I've heard it described as the elephant that never forgets right until we change the picture, until we change that fired and wired experience. So can

you just talk a little bit about that. So if somebody has felt something for so long, and their brain goes into a threat and they believe, they truly believe, and again coming back to the thoughts that they're believing that food and sugar is the only thing that will make them feel better. You know, can you just kind of tell us a little bit about what that looks like to break that pattern through your eyes?

It's like when you drive to work. The first time, you have to think about every turn that you make, But after you've done it a few times, you can make that drive almost in your sleep because you've synaptically wired the steps that you need to take to get that drive done. So that's Heab's law. But the way that synapsis can be broken and retrained and repurposed to

make new ones. To make new feelings and new connections between those feelings is to apply two other elements, and one is called attention density and one is called the quantum Zeno effects. These are big words, but basically in quantum physics, there's a principle that the more you look at something from a particular point of view, the more it stays fixed in that state. And so what we know is it's like having one of those cameras with

a really fast shutter speed. You can take a picture of a hummingbird or something that looks like it's in slow motion. Right, the more you look at something, am I still going to be pleased by this food choice? Am I still going to be comforted by this alcohol? And if I do this and feel this and recreate that thing, is it going to make me feel that comfort that it always does. The more you look at

it from that point of the more true it will stay. Right. So, then when you fix that thing in a state of being true, and then you wire it with Hebb's law into this idea that I'm going to make a synapse where now the next time I feel that anxiety, I'm just going to eat the thing and I'm not going

to process it mentally. I'm just going to find myself with the bag of Cheetos and the red stuff all over my fingertips, and I don't even remember it happening, but it happened because I wired that in because of quantum zeno effective attending to it over and over and Hebb's law, I've now wired that into a synapse. And the third one is this thing called attention density, which means the more you pay attention to something from a particular point of view, the more you can't stop paying

attention to it consciously all the time. So basically, when you think about something so much that it becomes the thing that you think you have to think about, then your front lope says, Okay, I guess it's my job to think about this all the time. So I'm going to think about when do I get the next meal. I'm going to think about when do I satisfy my

craving again. I'm going to think about when this person lets me down inevitably or stock up on the thing that I eat or drink or Netflix or whatever it is that I do to make myself feel better about that, convince myself that that's a better way to feel. So you've taken these three scientific principles and you've turned them into ways to harm yourself. We talked last time about self malpractice, and the way to fix it is the

very same process. Is we stop believing the automatic thought that this action is going to produce a better feeling for me, because I can see that it's harming me. So now I'm going to have to really get some

attention density working on my side. Now I'm going to have to choose to pay attention to the new thing that I want to create significantly over and over and pay attention to it and wire it together so that all of a sudden, I'll start finding that I've got a better habit, i start finding that I've finally overcome a little bit. And the problem with synapses is they're

like ruts in a wagon trail. Like it's really hard once the tires get down in that rut, it's hard to get them out, and it's easy for them to fall back in. The ruts don't go away really fast. So we've got to really diligently make ourselves create these new thought pathways that will eventually wire and create new synapses and well over time will deepen those ruts and make new wagon trails that are better than the old ones.

And then the neat thing is there's something called microglia, these little cells in your brain that chew up synapses basically, so that over time, if you create a new habit and stop the old one, you will start to break down those old wagon trails, and those those ruts will get shallower, and it'll be harder and harder to fall back into that old habit, and you'll literally recreate your brain in a healthier way by learning how to harness that helps law for your benefit.

still right by thinking. You're saying don't think about it, don't think about it, instead of like you were talking about giving it a new way of thinking. I call it air attention intention repetition, because you need to have a new way of thinking to replace it with. And you just spelled that out so beautifully, and I really feel like anybody who's listening can see that picture. I

can see those grooves in the wheel. But what you just spoke to is really the importance of if you missed last week, go back and listen to the concept of paying attention to what you're paying attention to and thinking about your thoughts because it all revolves around that making the unconscious conscious. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we get to the neuro beliefs side of it next week, But in the meantime, first of all, thank you so much for being back here.

You are just such a wealth of information. And I love how you speak to us in you're a neurosurgeon, but I love how you also break it down in an are you smarter than a fifth grader kind of science kind of way. That's how I love it. So I'm just so I feel so grateful that you're here. Where can people find you? Where can they google? Stock? You? You have podcasts, you have books. You have a weekly newsletter that you send out, so where can they find you?