Professor Norman Rosenthal. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
It is very nice to have a distinguished professor of psychiatry tell us about your time working at the National Institute of Mental Health. Are you're still there? I still associated with them.
No, I was there for twenty years, but it's been a while, and so I think I did what I needed to do there. I basically described or led the team that described a seasonal effective disorder or SAD WOW, and did the original work with light therapy, which was considered as a joke by a lot of people, but then it got replicated all over in the United States and Europe, I swear, and then it became widely accepted. So that was the main thing that I did there.
I did a lot of other things, but that was the big, the big thing that I came there for and that it gave me the opportunity to do so.
And that was a pretty big contribution to science. And actually because of that, when I travel to international travel, I have a little light box that I actually bring with me just to help me to set to the time zone. So the power of light is pretty amazing, isn't it.
Yes, But that was not understood you know, up until the late nineteen eighties. Wow, And you know, so I came in on the crest of the new science of light and the fact that it doesn't just help you see things, but it actually enables you to sleep well, feel good all year round, et cetera.
Yeah, and look, we will dig into all things light a little bit lately. But something I noticed in your bio is you talk about the gift of adversity, and my letters will know that that certainly appeals to me. I'm a big fan in harnessing discomfort. I've written a book called Death by Comfort, So talk to us about the gift of adversity. What's that all about from your viewpoint?
Well? It actually I'm so glad you're asking me, because
it's really one of my favorite books. It's a personal narrative, except I've used my capacity as a psychiatrist and thinker to try and see what did I extract from a series of events that go all the way from childhood in South Africa to adolescents in South Africa and then to the United States, where I came to do psychiatry at New York Psychiatric Ensuite Columbia, And then I talk about heroes of mine and how I learned from their adversities, and then the process of saying farewell to some of
the important people you encounter, which is an adversity that we all have to deal with if we live to a certain age. So I came into it thinking of I'll write down all the lessons that nobody ever taught me, and then as we looked through what those lessons were. They always were lessons that happened when things went wrong, and they could have gone wrong because you make a mistake, or it could be because of bad luck or all
of the above, and whatever the reason is. Not only do you need to overcome the consequence of the adversity, but then once you're over or that acute phase, to say, okay, so what have I learned here? And how am I going to take that going forward and not repeat it.
It reminds me of the quote from the great Stoic philosopher Seneca. I pity the man who's never faced adversity, because he has never faced an opponent, and no one, not even he knows what he's capable of. I take it it's kind of along those veins, those lessons that you talk about.
You know, I have never actually encountered that particular verse, but it since chills down my spine when you read it because it's so true, and it shows you how truth endures over millennia when it's profoundly stated and it's just stated as a fact, and actually it is a fact. Yeah.
And Epictatus also says that we must all undergo a hard winter training and not enter into lightly that for which we have not prepared. And he was obviously talking about life when he said that, So, so tell us there is there in your view as a psychiatrist, the war is the line between when adversity is actually good for you and then when it becomes bad for you. And I presume I'm guessing that it depends very much on the individual and their psychological attitude and maybe some
encouragement of others. What sort of factors go into whether some people benefit from adversity and some people can get broken by the same adversity.
Well, the first thing is that you've got to live to tell the tale. That goes without saying. But when you live, what do you take away from that? And part of that depends upon your own strengths and assets that you bring to bear, your ability to connect with other people who can help you get out of the adversity. You know, as I'm giving you these examples, I think
of cases in point. For example, I got hooked into a scam, which is a horrible thing to happen because the first thing is you lose much more money than you want to lose. Not that anybody wants to lose any money at all, but usually if anybody's gone to the trouble to scam you, it's not for a couple of dollars, it's for a goodly sum of money. And through connecting with various people who helped me, I got out of I got all that money back, which was
really unusual. And so use your assets and use your connections and use whatever you can to overcome that adversity. And then don't let it happen again, because somebody who's
been scammed once can easily be scammed again. These people are very clever and they'll come at you with different approaches, even something as simple as a text it arrived today on my cell phone saying there's a parcel waiting for you at the at the that's came through customs and it's waiting for you at the Federal Express or whatever, and all you need to do to reclaim it is click on this link. And there's many variations of it.
And you know, you think the parcel. Could it be Aunt Tilly who has finally sent me the gift she's been promising me. You know, your mind can go off in funny directions and you're not as skeptical. And I have seen really clever people being scammed. Someone I know, very smart fellow psychiatrist got scammed and was told, you know, you're going to be in big trouble if you don't go and get some money orders and take it to the cashier over here at this best Bishop or something.
And it's all just a scam. So be very wary of people who are trying to do you a great favor who come out of the woodwork. Usually they're trying to do themselves a great favor. So you know, I mean, But there's endless examples in my book of different kinds of things, and I've classified them are things you do because you made the mistake, things you do because they were really bad luck. But in many of the examples that give from our own life, I had a role
in those bad things happening. And you know, sometimes people people can be very kind. I remember I was. I was with a girlfriend in a car late at night in a shady lane in Johannesburg, bad idea. I got attacked and assaulted and I arrived in the hospital. You know, they got me around, They transfused me, got me around. Yes, I later I got hepatitis see from the transfusion. But I survived that. And I had a wonderful Latin teacher who came to visit me, and she said, you know,
how are you feeling? And I said, I'm feeling really stupid. I shouldn't have been there with a girlfriend late at night in a shady lad And she was so sweet. She said, ah, but that is life. She was Italian ship with a thick Italian accent. Oh, that is what life is all about, is being in a car with your girlfriend late at night. And Lee's later. I went to Naples and I was walking with my friend through a dark street and there were all these cars lined
up with newspapers stuck against the windows. They were all so she knew what she was talking about. It made me feel a lot better.
So how much in benefiting from adversity. And what springs to mind as you were talking about this stuff is Victor Frankel and man search for meaning and particularly when we get into severe adversity, finding meaning in that and how much does this play a role.
Well, I'm so glad you mentioned him because in Gift of Avarsity under my section on my heroes, he's one of them. And I actually had the good fortune to
meet him, Oh wow in Vienna. Yeah, he was in his nineties at the time, and I met him at his summer house in Vienna, and he was unable to see at that time, but he was ramrod straight in his posture, and he talked about his huge adversity was that he was the head of a neurology ward in Vienna when the Nazis invaded, and he was in such a prestigious position that he didn't believe he could be captured in the net of the Nazis, but he was,
and he landed up in Auschwitz. And of course Man's Search for Meaning, that first part where he talks about how he survived was really a remarkable book, one of the great books of the century. And he told me all about it, and it was really, it was really fascinating to listen to him and hear what he had to say. And one of the interesting things to me was how he differed from Sigmund Freud, whom he had met because they were both in Vienna at the same time.
Freud was much his senior, and he was a great believer. He was a neurologist. So he said, if something is hurting you or bothering you, shift your mind to something else. Don't kind of dwell on that thing that's worrying you, because it will only make you feel worse. So I was just thinking of him and thinking of that. You know, I'm fretting about the forthcoming election here in the United States, and I said, well, you know that's something I can't control.
There's your Epictetus coming back again. Yes, you're fond of the Stoics. Yes, so Epictetus comes back again. And he really was the original inventor, if you want to call it that, of what became the Ceenity prayer. Yes, like, you've got to decide whether this is something you can control or something you cannot control, and then decide if you can't control it, then just accept it, and if
you can, then do something about it. Well, the election, other than my one miserable little vote, is nothing that I can control. So here we are talking about life, talking about important things. Maybe somebody will hear and that'll make a difference.
Yes, indeed, so that dwelling. And by the way, I'm very jealous that you met Victor Frankel. I read his book as a seventeen year old and I got to say it has had a profound impact on my life. But you were talking there about Frankel talking about dwelling, and so let's bring that into the whole mental health field.
So I'd love to get your opinion on you as a psychiatrist with people, particularly when we think about depression or mental health issues and room in the issue and thinking and being asked constantly about their mental health and thinking about their mental health, does there become a risk that there can be too much talk without action associated with it.
Well, yes, of course there can be. And I think a bad therapist would let somebody talk and talk and talk and talk without saying, well, you know you've complained about it, but what are you going to do about it? You know, that would be just an obvious thing to say. Is there or is there anything you can do about it that would make the matter better? No, I did this, I did that, I did The other said, well, how
long did you persevere with that? Sometimes these things don't happen that quickly, you know, you know, so, so I would combine talking and action. But talking alone, of course, is often not the best strategy. We want to talk, we want to act, We want to feel. What are you thinking, what are you feeling, what are you doing?
These are all crucial functions of the human mind, and you want to kind of blend them together like a symphony and get somebody feeling what they're feeling, thinking what they're thinking, and then deciding what they want to do about it. Yeah.
I think that's the key thing is is taking action despite your circumstances.
But too much action, too quickly is not always good.
Yeah, it's going to be considered action. Right, So let's let's talk about seasonal effective disorder. So tell us just give us a little bit of history about you. You know, you said you joined the National Institute of Health. Was that specifically, that was the role that you were doing was around seasonal effective disorder and how.
Into it hadn't existed when I joined the National Instrumental Health. Nobody had defined it, nobody had recognized it. There were a few case reports in the literature, but in terms of bringing a group of people together and saying these are the characteristics that you need to look for, it was not on the charts at all, and it had not been described, it had not been defined, their name didn't exist, etc. But I was see when I was sixteen years old, I wanted to be a psychiatric researcher.
I wanted to probe the mysteries of the mind. So the first thing is, well, where am I going to be able to do that? And I thought, well, America seems to have the most research money available, and they seem to be the place to be. And I went to Columbia, which is a terrific university. But I was told, if you really wanted tremendous training in psychiatry, you go to the National Instrumental Health, and that's where I headed.
My family was good enough to accompany me or back me in that decision to move from New York, where we were rather happy, and so I joined a group of really innovative psychiatrists who were dealing with rhythms. They were dealing with circadian rhythms daily woods, and the idea of seasonal rhythms being of any consequence was not on the map. And then one of them had found that bright light suppressed the hormone melatonin, which is secreted at night.
It was never previously known that it did that in humans. They knew it did that in animals, but now it was shown that if you made the light bright enough, it would do that in humans as well. So I had come from South Africa, which was very sunny, to New York City, which after daylight savings time suddenly very very dark, very very early, and I felt my mood declining, and then back it came in the spring again, and
I observed that in myself for three cycles. So when I came to the NIH, I encountered a patient who had that much worse than me, and we gave him bright light in the middle of the winter, and he came out of his depression. And so I said, look, we can't study this unless I collect a group of these people. I thought, you know, the Washington area has
got a lot of people here. Maybe I can find a handful of people and I can do some systematic studies so with the help of a friendly Washington Post journalist, we put an article in that profiled one or two people who had felt this kind of problem, and I thought, well, we'll get a couple responses. We got thousands of responses across the country. Everybody said the same kind of thing. You know, when the days get short and dark, I slow down, I don't think as well, I'm not as enthusiastic.
I become a little depressed. I eat more, especially sweets and starches. I ain't wait. I'm sluggish. I fall behind in my payments, I four behind in my relationships every year. And it was clear to me I had a syndrome there. So we collected a group of people in the summer and we who had this history and watched them through into the winter, and they were just cheerful as can be in the middle of the summer. And one of my colleagues said, what will happen if they don't get depressed,
won't you feel kind of stupid? I said, you know, I don't think so. I think they're going to get depressed. And you know, if I feel stupid, it's not the worst thing that can happen for somebody to feel stupid, much worse things can happen, And sure enough, one by one they became depressed, and we put them in a light study comparing brightlight with dim light, and the bright
light was better than the dim light. That was the first article forty years ago that was published and the first description of said and the first you know, demonstration that brightlight could bring people out of their depression. And then I worked on that for twenty years.
I tell you what, as somebody who's not doing a PhD and doing research, I am both excited and jealous in equal measure that you actually discovered something pretty new and that was affecting so many people. When did you know in your gut that you were onto something. Was it kind of straightaway because you'd felt it and then you'd started to see it in people. Were you kind of like, there's something here, I'm sure of it?
First of all, just to say I was very, very lucky, because it's hard to discover something new in this age when there's millions of people working on problems. But in our first study, we used ceiling fixtures that we brought horizontal onto the desk. So I took one of these ceiling fixtures and I put it in the bedroom standing up, I can still see this huge thing, and put it on a timer to come on at seven o'clock in the morning. And wow, I felt it myself. I felt
so energized and so activated. That's why I could say to these people who questioned it, they're going to get depressed and the light's going to work. So and then, you know, I could see it right. I could see it right at the very first few subjects, because it was a blind study in that the people rating these patients they did not know if they were on a bright light or a dim light control. And I remember one of my colleagues who was the blind writer, saying,
Missus Smith, I'm just making up the name. Missus Smith came in today. I don't know what she's on, but she's blossoming like a rose. Wow, that's so cool, you know. And so I write at the very beginning, I wanted to seguay a little. There's another book of mine called Poetry RX. And in that poem. In that book there is a poem by Keats much Have I Traveled in
the Realms of Gold? And in the end it talks about In the end, it talks about the thrill of discovery, the thrill of discovery, and the thrill of discovery, and the end is let me read right at the end of the of the book, he talks about all these people who discovered things and then felt, I like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his can or like start Cortez, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a
peak in Darienne. So in the book which I take, I take the poems and I extract psychiatric or life lessons out of them. I said, look, when this woman became so transformed by the bright light therapy, I said, you know, everybody was staring at each other, maybe not with wild surmise, but at least with a lot of excitement that something really special, what's going on here?
That is very very cool indeed, and I love that. But that that poem where it brings in the explorers as well, because when I was young, I was traveling all around the world and went to and this is like angle wat and was like, how amazing would it be but to explore and find these places and then realize the only way to do that sort of stuff today is through science. Right, it's the same discovery process.
Yeah, but you know, you know, I love that you focus on the explorer because I've always been an explorer and my explorations have really paid off. Well. Now, I don't say explore by going into a shady lane at night in a dangerous town. That's the wrong kind of exploration. The right kind of exploration is to well for me, it's the exploration of the mind. So I've done it with the light, I've done it with poetry. I've also done it and with adversity. So there are all these things.
But one big way of exploring has been with meditation. I have a longstanding practitioner of transcendental meditation, and I've written two books on that subject, Transcendence and Supermind. And what that is. It's an exploration of how consciousness can evolve under the influence of a certain Eastern practice, and so exploration. If you want one word, is my it's my theme song. Yes, it's my brand.
And tell me that's not just to get your professional opinion on this, and and probably opinion rather than evidence based, but because I've been thinking about this, Like, curiosity I think is a hugely important trait for good mental health. I mean, it's linked to the psychological trait of hardiness and the commitment orientation of people being highly engaged in life.
And I've just sort of observed that that people who tend to be curious and engaged in things seem to have a better overall life and they're just they're they're kind of got more energy about life. Is this something that you have noticed at all about this sort of curiosity and being engaged in life being important for good mental health and overcoming adversity. It's just a little hunch that I have.
Well, I think curiosity is a very valuable trait. Let's put it that way, because you know, to ask what's going on here? Why is this causing that? Whether you're trying to troubleshoot your cell phone or your computer, or whether you want to know why the door jams shut every time you try it? You know, whether it's very simple things of everyday life, or whether it's a complicated thing like I've got this little piece of DNA, how can I sort of make a big batch of it?
And then you get polymerase chain reaction, you get that guy coming out or somebody looking at I remember reading an article they asked great school kids to take household objects and try and turn them into inventions. And one little girl, maybe it'd been five, she took a wire hanger and she said, we turn it upside down and then you can hang your rubber bands on that. But he said, well, how did you come up with that idea? And she said, I think'd it up in my head.
So you know, it can be at a very elemental level, or it can be at a very profound level, but I think and it can be cultivated. You can cultivate people to question. And I I wore my mother out with my curiosity. She was not pleased about it. And you know she was not pleased about it. My endless questions is stop already, I'm exhausted. So but yeah, I look, I just.
Think it's it's such an important trait. But let's get back to seasonal effective disorder. Sorry for the rabbit holes, but so let's talk about You mentioned a couple of the symptoms, but what are the sort of typical symptoms that people should be looking out for?
All right, So the first thing that I must say or else my publisher is going to kill me. Is I just published recently a book called Defeating Sad, where I try and present in one place everything that you need to do to do your best week. That's it there, everything you need to do to overcome sad. But let me give you the cliff notes here. Firstly, as we talked, bright light is an important element in that process, and you know how to give it. Morning is a good time.
How to time it. You can add to the evening, like right now, we've had daylight savings time change, so you're getting an extra hour of darkness in the evening, So that's when you need to replace more light. But the morning is no good to you unless you get out into the sunlight, which is earlier maybe than you used to. So you've got to go out earlier. You've got to add a little bit on if you've got these symptoms, what are the symptoms? I told you, I'll
tell you again. Symptoms have sad And this is the winter variety, because there's a summer variety as well. When the days get short and dark, low energy, increased appetite, especially for sweets and starches, weight gain, withdrawal from friends, and family, lowering of mood, increased sleep. Those are the key elements of the syndrome. And then you can use light. Starting early now would be a good time, and you can use the light, and you can also get exercise,
which is terrific. You can combine exercise with light by going and walking outdoors and not putting your bar bushka over your head so that you don't get any light in or your sombrero or anything cuts up all the light. You want to get to see people around with these dark glasses on winter days, and I wonder whether that's a good idea. So exercise light, dietary control, and then keep active, keep engaged, you know, go opposite to what
you feel like doing. If you feel like lying in bed with the covers over your head, put take off the covers and get out of bed, get out of doors. You feel like sitting on the couch and eating a couple of twinkies, don't get off the couch. Go outside, eat salads and try and have fun, Try and stay engaged with friends and family. Your efforts will be rewarded.
Now you did mention there are a winter version and a summer version, which I'm obviously not familiar where talk to me.
But the summer version, Well, when we originally asked for these winter people who have trouble in the winter, maybe fifteen percent of our responses said, you know, I've got exactly the opposite problem. I go down in the summer. It turns out that a significant number of people, albeit is not as common as the winter type, at least at this latitude, that they have trouble in the summer. And so we have studied that, and there's a different
pattern there. They eat less, they don't eat more, they sleep less, they get agitated, they don't get lethargic, and they're more vulnerable to suicide. Oh wow, that's the summer version. And that's, as they say these days, it become a thing in its own right, an entity.
And is that due to too much light?
Eat? Probably the heat, but the lights you can do it as well. The heat causes people to be lethargic. The causes people to be agitated. So you've got this kind of mixed picture of somebody who's restless and irritable but not able to get much done. And it's very undiscomforting, very unpleasant.
And I take it that the two don't go together like, Wow.
Yes, some people have both, but oftentimes one has just one or the other. Wow.
Well, the people who have the summer one should just go and move to Northern Ireland and not but sort it all out, because there's not much like there in summer.
I remember reading something by your playwright sing that that, you know, the misery of those misty, foggy, dark Irish days is enough to drive a person nuts.
You know, that's right, that's only in summer normal.
The susceptibility is the variant of the clock genes involved in this, and you know who is more susceptible to the others?
Is it all genetics? Are? Is there any difference in races?
Well, there certainly seems to be a genetic component because it runs in families women much more than men. And it seems to be happening to women in the reproductive years. That's when it happens, which suggests that it's a hormonal effect that's playing a part. So there's a genetic effect,
there's a hormonal effect, there's an environmental effect. So in other words, I've seen maybe a woman who's a nurse and she has said and she's got to get up and get into the hospital to do her work, and every winter she struggles and then she retires and is able to sleep in in the morning and it doesn't have the same level of demands on her and that
can be helpful. So it's an interaction between the season, the light, the season and the light, the genetic loading, and gender is a biological loading, and the stress stress is a very big factor. Now. Yeah, so when you say which genes, We've looked at various genes. We looked at one gene that affects the molecule that zerrato that well, that zoloft acts on or prozac acts on this molecule in the brain, and we found that people with SAD seem to have a different variant, seemed more or less
of a variant than regular controls. Nobody replicates of that, and so it is that many genes have been studied, none has been replicated, So we can't say any gene is predisposing, although obviously genes must be involved.
Yeah, but it's a complex mix, isn't it. And And does do you know the whole idea of alt and larks of early morning and late at night people that does that play a role at.
All really great question. I don't think we've really made a clear connection there, Okay, but I think if I would guess, I would say that owls would be more susceptible simply because they're exposed to more hours of dark because they they are sleeping through the morning light. Yes, and so they're up when there's not a lot of light around. So that could be my guess. But it's
actually a beautiful question, and it's very studiable. You know, which researcher always say is, yeah, it's a great question, but how would you study it? This one would be easy enough. I don't know any study that has looked at the outlock questionnaire which exists in sad patients versus controls. You'd make a good scientist.
Yeah, it's going to say there's a there's a topic for a master student out there.
In psychofinitely, definitely yes.
And now, so let's I'm really interested in your alternative ways of helping people with their emotional difficulty. So you've written a book about about poetry to help people, and I'm a big fan of reading philosophy for helping people around it. So, so tell us some of the things, some of the different approaches that you have for helping people with their emotional issues.
Well, I'm also a great believer in the whatever works school. So you know, if somebody says, you know, I'm absolutely tone deaf. I have no interest in poetry. I won't even try, you know, because I don't want to. I want to pursue a promising angle. But you know, if somebody always loved poetry and I say, oh, really, well let's talk, let's talk about something, you know, the idea that poetry can help. I know, it's helped me personally. It's helped me personally. There's one of my poems in here.
It's a very obscure poem. It is called Letter to My Mother. It's by a man named Salvador Quasimodo. He got the Nobel Prize for literature that year. So you know, look on these works. He mighty and despair. You know, here's a Nobel Prize winner. Nobody's heard of him.
Wow.
So you know, and this is a man who's writing. He is Northern Italy. He's gone to the north for his probably professional reasons, and he's writing about his poor mother who was left behind in Sicily. And now she's getting old and she's not going to be around for
much longer. And it's a plentive verse. And before I left South Africa, I would read this poem again and again and I never quite realized at the time, but it was because I was leaving my family, my mother, my father, and yes I would see them hopefully, but it would be sporadic and not like in the daily way that I was used to. But the poem is somehow the fact that this person had shared this experience and now felt so sad at the loss of that was very meaningful to me. And so it is. All
of these poems are chosen for a reason. That is why they can really help you, and they have. I've used them myself with my patients. So there's the light therapy, there's the poetry, there's the meditation. I've always been you know, if I'm a person that I'm looking at a picture in an art gallery, I always look what's at the corner of the picture. What did the painter want to conceal? This is what he wanted to show, but what was
there in the background. And so I guess that my focus has often been the things that other people haven't really gone for because I always thought that was where you would get the pay dirt. You know, yes, that's what's happening.
So tell me where are you spanding? Whereas an explorer like you, spanning as professional time these days is particularly with the benefit of all of those years of research and study. What's interesting you now?
Well, I love my work as a psychiatrist and coach. I love to try and help people be the best that they can be and use all my own skills of innovation and exploration and curiosity to put them at the disposal of other people who can then take them and use them in their lives. So that's my clinical work. You know. I've studied many forms of different therapy, and I don't feel wedded to anyone. It's just whatever. I've
got this big box of tricks. Well it calls psychoanalytics psychotherapy a trick I guess somebody would be offended, or cognitive behavior therapy or whatever kind of therapy works family, you know, getting people to talk to each other. And I often reference there's a poem by Rumi, the wonderful Persian poet that let me read it to you. It's it's maybe I've got two people, husband and wife, maybe they're fighting with each other. You're wrong, I'm right, you're wrong.
Everybody is fighting, but who's right who's wrong? They turned to me like I'm a judge in a courtroom. Listen to this, and I say, here's what Rumy has to say. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there when the soul lies down in that grass. The world is too full to talk about ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. And then they look at me and they say, what's that got to do with our situation?
But I've broken the set of the two of them. I said, well, let's think about it. Here. Here are these two people. Maybe and he's saying to one saying to the other, you know, regardless of who's right and who's wrong, let's find a field where we can lie down, we can look up at the sky. We're in the long grass, and then we get back in touch with what drew us to each other in the first place. Once upon a time we loved each other. And look at all the squabbling that's come in the way. Can
we find a little bit of that again? That's what the poem is saying, So the poem becomes a vehicle to distract. I don't do it all the time, you know, It's just one in a bag of tricks, the light, the therapy, the cognitive behavior therapy, the analytic therapy, etcetera. So that's the one thing I'm doing is I'm still excited about helping people because I see them change, I see them grow. You know, my own son is grown and he's a psychiatrist himself. So we've done our job
by by him. We're working on our grandchildren now, of course. But that's the one thing. The other thing is in the TM world, I've done I've done Transcendence, I've done Supermind. I've got a third book that I'm working on in that trilogy. Right now.
I knew there was going to be another book. That was what I was going to ask you.
The third book in the trilogy, And it's what happens when you expand as a human being and you become more connected with everybody. You know, right now we're talking, I feel really connected with you. Now. We may never talk again, but this particular connection has a value regardless of where it ends up going. And so it is if I meet somebody. If I friendships, acquaintances you feel, and even people you know and love, you can expand that until you feel like you're very full and you've
sort of expanded into a connection. Because we're all going to go, that's right, that's right, We're all going to go. But while we're here, let us experience the fullness of connection with others, connection with the universe, connection with everything that can bring good to ourselves, to other people as well.
That is a brilliant quote for ending the podcast. So where can people find out more about you and your numerous books on transcendental meditation on side on poetry. Where can they go to find out more about your work in general?
Yeah, a couple ways. I mean, firstly, I feel free to go to my website Norman Rosenthal dot com, and of course I have a page on Amazon which will list all my books and how easily to obtain it. Most of them are available on audible as well as unaudible, as well as in printed form or on kindle, So whichever method works for anybody, there there are this availability for that. So that's how they can find out more and allow me to say that it's been really a great pleasure to speak with you.
I have thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, Norman, and it's been great to chat to an explorer who has done some great stuff and touched many people, and actually will continue to touch many people when you have left this earth through your books, which is quite cool, eh.
Thank you, my friend. You take care, congratulations on your podcast, and continue to thrive.
Thanks Lor