How to Get Better Results with AI & The Science of Healing Trauma

Expiration dates aren’t always what they seem. While most packaged foods carry them, some foods — like salt — can last virtually forever. In fact, there’s a surprising list of everyday staples that can outlive the labels and stay good for years. Listen as I reveal which foods never really expire. https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/long-term-food-storage-staples-that-last-forever/ AI tools like ChatGPT are everywhere, but to use them well, you need more than just clear questions. The way you prompt, the way you think about the model, and even the way it was trained all play a role in the results you get. To break it all down, I’m joined by Christopher Summerfield, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford and Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s also the author of These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means (https://amzn.to/4na3ka2), and he reveals how to get smarter, more effective answers from AI. When does a tough experience cross the line into “trauma”? And once you’ve been through trauma, is it destined to shape your future forever — or is real healing possible? Dr. Amy Apigian, a double board-certified physician in preventive and addiction medicine with master’s degrees in biochemistry and public health, shares a fascinating new way of looking at trauma. She’s the author of The Biology of Trauma: How the Body Holds Fear, Pain, and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It (https://amzn.to/4mrsoIu), and what she reveals may change how you view your own life experiences. Looking more attractive doesn’t always come down to hair, makeup, or clothes. Science has uncovered a list of simple behaviors and traits that make people instantly more appealing — and most of them are surprisingly easy to do. Listen as I share these research-backed ways to boost your attractiveness.https://www.businessinsider.com/proven-ways-more-attractive-science-2015-7 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Your new Dell PC with Intel Core Ultra helps you handle a lot when your holiday to-dos get to be…a lot. Upgrade today by visiting⁠⁠⁠ https://Dell.com/Deals⁠⁠⁠ QUINCE: Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:42Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:23Mike Carruthers?

  Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 1:45Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, why the expiration dates on some foods can be completely ignored. Then how to really get the most out of AI tools like ChatGPT and the tricks that make all the difference.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Well, let me tell you a secret. You do actually get a better answer out of ChatGPT if you're polite to it. So in society, if you are root to someone, you're less likely to get a helpful answer. So the model simulates that. And if you're root to it, it doesn't give you such a helpful answer.

• 2:14Mike Carruthers?

  Also, simple things you can do to be instantly more attractive. Plus, a fresh look at trauma. And does trauma truly shape your future forever?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  That is a myth that these experiences that we have will somehow negatively impact us for the rest of our life. The body and the mind have such an innate ability to heal all of these experiences that we go through.

• 2:38Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now, here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place.

• 3:22Mike Carruthers?

  So, instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something you should know. With Mike Carruthers.

• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Almost every food you buy in the store today has an expiration date on it. And some of those expiration dates are very important. Some not so much. Hi and welcome to Something You Should Know. So you know it when milk goes bad. But other foods may leave you wondering, "Well, exactly how long are they good for?" So here's a list of foods that you really don't have to worry about for a very long time. And salt is pretty high on the list. Salt has been used to preserve other foods for centuries. So it should come as no surprise that salt itself will last a long time. Apparently, adding iodine to salt does shorten its life a little bit.

• 5:06Mike Carruthers?

  So if you have iodized salt, it should be good for five years. And other salts will last even longer. Now, honey is supposedly the only food that lasts forever. It's highly acidic and low in moisture, so bacteria can't really grow. The oldest jar of honey ever found is thought to be about 5,500 years old. So any honey you have is probably OK. Sugar. Now, sugar manufacturers are required to give sugar an expiration date, but you probably don't need to pay much attention to it. Keep it in an airtight container, and it will last almost forever. And even if it gets hard, it's still edible when you soften it.

• 5:51Mike Carruthers?

  Maple syrup, like honey, will last pretty much forever. Now, it can develop surface mold. And when it does, you skim it off. You boil the syrup, skim off the mold, and the syrup should be fine. Hard liquor. Now, cream liqueurs do have a shelf life, but hard liquor will last a long time. Now, the flavor can change. It seldom changes for the better, but it doesn't actually go bad. And dried beans. In a study at Brigham Young University, 30-year-old dried beans were still acceptable, according to tasters. So the beans you have are probably just fine. And that is something you should know.

• 6:39Mike Carruthers?

  Over the last several months, I've gotten more and more into AI and ChatGPT, in part from doing some of the interviews here that I've done on Something You Should Know with people who are really into it and have studied it and written about it. And the more I learn from them, the more I want to learn because I'm pretty sure I have a long way to go to really understand what it can do and how to interact with it to get the results I really want to get. One person who has some great insight into this is Christopher Summerfield. In fact, he's one of the smartest people I think you will ever hear talk about AI in a way that we can all benefit and understand.

• 7:21Mike Carruthers?

  Christopher is professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford, staff research scientist at the pioneering Google DeepMind, working in the field of AI research. And he is author of a book called The Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means. Hi, Christopher, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So I would guess that most people who listen to this podcast have, by now, have dabbled with OpenAI or ChatGPT to get a sense of what it's about. And I use it a lot. I mean, I just, and the more I use it, the more I really like it and like to experiment with it.

• 8:06Mike Carruthers?

  But I have to admit, I don't really understand it. I mean, I know the principles. I've heard, I've talked to people here about it. But can you explain it in a way that maybe dives a little deeper, but not too deep, but really gives a good sense of what goes on when you type in a prompt to ChatGPT or OpenAI? How does it work?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, so AI technologies have been around for a very long time. And the dream of building a system that can interact with people in the way that we interact with each other has been the kind of north star of computer science and AI research since like the 1950s, the immediate post-war period. And what happened in about the 2010, around about 2010 or 2012 was that the coincidence of two things, also number one, we developed some new algorithms for processing data that allowed us to develop systems that rather than kind of just being out of the box

• 9:11Speaker 01

  able to think and reason like we can, what they could do is they could learn from large quantities of data and gradually through that training process get better and better at doing tasks that we had set them. And so that coupled with the emergence of like lots and lots of data on the internet created a revolution which people call the deep learning revolution. But everyone said, well, how far is this going to go? What can we really do with this? And then around about 2019 or 2020, people started to build very big models and those very big models started to learn to produce language in very similar ways to the world. The outputs look very similar to the outputs that humans produce when generating language.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And so ChatGPT, which you mentioned, is just one example of a language model. That is a model that can respond to your utterances with outputs that resemble what another human would say.

• 10:08Mike Carruthers?

  And so when I type in a question to ChatGPT and get a response, what happened in those three seconds? Where did my question go? And where did the answer come from? What was used to create that answer?

• 10:24Speaker 01

  So the keystrokes that you made were converted to something called tokens. So tokens are just like digital representations of words or bits of words sometimes. And those digital representations were fed into a, they're sent to a data center and fed into a computational stack, which is based on an algorithmic tool that's called the transformer. And the transformer, which was developed around about 2017 and is actually the kind of, it's really the workhorse of modern deep learning. It's the reason that it's so successful, at least in the last few years. What that transformer does is it essentially tries to work out, if you've got a long list of tokens, like a sentence or even a paragraph of text,

• 11:10Speaker 01

  it has been trained to work out which bits of that input are related to which other bits. So to give you a very simple example, if you say Peter and Jane walked down the street, he, and then you want to understand what the subsequent words in that sentence are, you know that he is most likely to refer back to Peter and less likely to refer back to Jane because it's a male sounding name and a male pronoun in English. So you can make that relational connection because you've learned that. That's how language works. So language is full of cross references. And so the transformer is very good at learning those relations.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And in fact, it's very good at learning those relations, not just for elements of a sentence like he and Peter, but actually for elements of all data that you feed to it. Including, for example, you know, if you fed it a whole book, maybe something that happens at the beginning of the book is related to something that happens at the end of the book. And the model has been trained to understand those relations. So it can process all of those. That relational information and it uses that to make a prediction about what's going to happen next. And that prediction is then turned back into a token and fed to you as the output. So even though it feels like the model is responding to you as if it was a person, it's not actually responding to you as a person.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  What it's doing is it's saying something that it is predicting that another person would be very likely to say in response to your query.

• 12:43Mike Carruthers?

  But often I will ask a question of a person and the answer is, I don't know. But I ask GPT and it always knows. It always has an answer. It finds the information. Where does it find it?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so humans, of course, are overconfident. I'm a psychologist, so I can tell you this. So humans are overconfident on average in their replies, although, as you pointed out, we're usually quite well calibrated. So we usually know when we don't know something and we know when we do know something, although not always. The models are much less well calibrated and they tend to be even more overconfident than we are. So even if they kind of don't know an answer, they'll very often give you an answer. So the question is, why do they do that? And the answer, there are many answers to this question, but probably the easiest to understand is the models are, one of the ways in which the models are trained by the developers,

• 13:40Speaker 01

  so ChatGPT is trained by a developer called OpenAI. One of the way in which they're trained is they're trained from human preference data. And so what that means is that the model will generate, during training, the model will generate two candidate answers, like, you know, kind of answer A and answer B. And then the developer will ask a group of people, who are usually crowd workers, will ask them, do you prefer answer A to answer B? And what they'll do is they'll use that preference data to train the model to make more answers that people prefer. So in theory, that should be a good thing. Models respond in ways that people like. That's, you know, in theory, means that they're going to be a better product. But of course, what people like is not always necessarily what is true.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So people like it when you give a confident and eloquent answer to a question. And so, lo and behold, they will choose the confident and eloquent answer. And they might choose it even if it's wrong. And so the model is trained to produce confident and eloquent answers to our questions. And it does so very, very effectively, but sometimes at the expense of truth.

• 14:49Mike Carruthers?

  But when you ask it a question, I have a certain kind of stove and it has this kind of light and it and the light's doing this thing, what could be wrong? Where does ChatGPT find that information? Where it's fine to predict, but but it's got to be based on some knowledge. Where's the knowledge coming from?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the knowledge comes from different sources. So the most important source of knowledge, the kind of foundational knowledge in the model, comes from the training data. And so I mentioned that the models are very, very big, meaning they've got lots of kind of what what computer scientists would call trainable parameters. That means that there's basically lots and lots of things that you can change in them in the model to to change how adjust in the model to change how it works. But the other way in which they're big is that they have been trained on lots and lots of data. So it's you sometimes hear people saying, these models have been trained on the entire internet. And that is that is not exactly true, but it's sort of an approximation to the truth.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  So what the developers have done is they've taken enormous swathes of text that you and I have written on the internet, whether that's like, you know, blog posts or social media posts or, you know, kind of books or news articles or just everything that's on the internet. And they have used that data in this predictive way to train the model to to say the next, to produce the next token. Now.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Humans know a lot of stuff. There's eight billion of us. And so collectively, the information that we have put on the internet encompasses the vast majority of the things that we could, that we need to know about. And what's more, the way the transformer works, it allows it sometimes to stitch together bits of knowledge that even people haven't stitched together yet. So it will take knowledge about one bit of, one field or discipline, and it'll kind of combine it with something new, in a, very much in a way that a human might, and come up with something that is unique and different, and maybe even hasn't been said or thought before.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And so the combination of this vast training data with the computational power of this transformer architecture allows the model to answer questions like the ones, the one you articulated, if you ask it how to fix your washing machine, even if it hasn't seen that specific washing machine, or you haven't, nobody has phrased that specific query in that way before, it'll usually be able to tell you something reasonably sensible.

• 17:28Mike Carruthers?

  We're diving deep into how to use AI more effectively, and my guest is Christopher Summerfield. He's author of the book, The Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means.

• 17:43Speaker 04

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• 18:10Speaker 05

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• 18:15Speaker 05

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• 18:40Mike Carruthers?

  So Christopher, do the different ones, there's, you know, ChatGPT, but there's a, there's a million of them. Well, there's probably not a million of them, but there's a lot of different interfaces that you can go to. If I ask the same question to several, do you generally get the same answer? Or everyone has its kind of own personality?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the models do differ in their training data, and that means both the bits of the internet that they've been trained on. So we call that the pre-training data. And then also, different developers do different things at post-training. So they might, when they're measuring those human preferences that we talked about, they might instruct the raters, the human raters, to behave in different ways. And that will imbue the models with slightly different values. So there's been a lot of work to show that the different models have slightly different preferences over kind of social or cultural or political values. And that's because of

• 19:41Speaker 01

  the way they were trained. So famously, some models like OpenAI's models have often been found to be slightly more libertarian and progressive on the political spectrum, whereas XAI, XAI's model, Grok, is often like a little bit more on the other end of the political spectrum. And that's because of the way that they've been, the models have been trained. Very importantly, even the same model will not give you the same answer every single time you ask the same query. And that's because there's a degree of randomness in their outputs. So just like if you asked me the same question twice in a row, I probably wouldn't respond verbatim exactly the same thing. Neither does the model.

• 20:22Mike Carruthers?

  I've had the experience, and I know other people have talked about this too, that when I type in something into ChatGPT or OpenAI, I feel like I'm talking to a person. And it's very different than, say, when you type in something to Google. That never felt like a person to me. But there is something about ChatGPT that feels very much, even though I know it's not a person, it feels like a person.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yep, that's absolutely right. And, you know, we have known about this phenomena actually since for a few decades. So some of the earliest AI systems which generated language, they did so in a very, very kind of rudimentary and stylized way by basically, you know, you can simulate a conversation by just always asking a question back at the other person. And so early chatbots did this trick. It's basically, they're basically just a bag of tricks. And yet, people felt drawn in by these tools, even many decades before we had actually good conversational AI. We also, I think, just generally have a tendency

• 21:34Speaker 01

  to impute intentional states or mental states to complex systems. So, you know, when your computer shuts down or goes wrong, you get annoyed at it, right? There's no reason, it's just a lump of metal, no reason to get annoyed at it, but you do. And philosophers have called this, they call it something called the intentional stance. So we have an intentional stance towards machines. We believe that they have mental states. We're prone to believe that they have mental states. So ChatGPT, of course, is just waiting for us to, you know, treat it like a friend.

• 22:10Mike Carruthers?

  Right, almost to the point where you think if you're, if maybe if you're rude to it or you're not polite, you you won't get as good an answer. Like you feel like you need to nurture the relationship.

• 22:22Mike Carruthers?

  And there is no relationship.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Well, let me tell you a secret, which is that we know that you do actually get a better answer out of ChatGPT if you're polite to it. And the answer to why that happens is actually, if you recall that these models are essentially predictive machines. So they're trying to predict the answer that another person would be most likely to give. So in society, if you are rude to someone, you're less likely to get a helpful answer. So the model simulates that, and if you're rude to it, it doesn't give you such a helpful answer.

• 22:57Mike Carruthers?

  But if you're nice to it, does it give you a better answer than if you're just neutral to it?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  It does, yeah. So be nice to ChatGPT.

• 23:06Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that?

• 23:06Speaker 01

  And the other model.

• 23:07Mike Carruthers?

  I don't think people know that. I think people would almost like to believe that to be true and act that way, but I bet most people, if you ask them, would think, well, no, I know it's, it doesn't matter what I say to it, but that's not what you're saying.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  No, it does matter what you say to it. And so another example is that if you simply tell the model to think more carefully about the answer it's about to give you, it will also give you a better answer.

• 23:37Mike Carruthers?

  No, really?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  If you ask it to solve a reasoning problem and you just present the reasoning problem and say, what's the answer? Then, you know, maybe it'll get it right, maybe it'll get it wrong. But if you present the reasoning problem and you say, please think about this problem step by step, then the model is much more likely to give you a better answer to the problem.

• 23:58Mike Carruthers?

  What are some other ways? Like, when you said be polite to ChatGPT and you'll get a better answer, I mean, that just, I never thought of that. But what other things like that, if there are any suggestions on how to interact, how to prompt AI to give you more of what you really want based on all the knowledge you have?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm sure there are far better answers than I can give to this question online. There are millions and millions of websites that give you tips and tricks for using language models more effectively. But let me just say one thing that I think is a sort of general principle. ChatGPT or other language models, I don't think at the moment we should think of them like we would another person. So your friends and family will have distinct personalities, they'll have distinct character that help you predict how they would behave. And people tend, most part, people tend to stay in character. So their character doesn't swing wildly from one day to another. ChatGPT is not like that. So what it does is it assumes

• 25:04Speaker 01

  a character which is based on the context that you've given it. So depending on the way that you interact with it, it will instantiate a context and it will start to behave like people would behave in that context. Right? So if you start to talk to it using lots of slang and swear words, then it will, well, actually, that's a bad example because it's been trained not to use swear words. But like, if you start to talk to it using lots of slang, then it will talk back in a way which reflects that, it reflects who, what you think, what it thinks you're trying to achieve and how you think it's, and that sort of mode of behavior. So you should be aware when you're interacting with the

• 25:47Speaker 01

  model that in a way you are guiding it. So the tone, the demeanor of your replies, the topic of your replies is setting the context for the model. And it doesn't have a unique and different character like other humans do.

• 26:01Mike Carruthers?

  And it doesn't remember your character from the last time? So you would have to reestablish it every time?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, so that depends on which model you're using. Like I said, these, modern models have these memory features. One thing that you can do is, that's kind of fun, is you can ask the model to generate, and you can do this with ChatGPT and probably other models, you can ask it to generate an image of what it thinks you look like. That's a fun trick. And so you might find that it's surprisingly accurate because based upon lots of information that you've given it, it might be able to make a guess about various aspects of your, your age, your gender, maybe your ethnicity. And so the model is always

• 26:50Speaker 01

  kind of like adapting to you and how you respond to it.

• 26:54Mike Carruthers?

  So really, it's up to the user. I mean, how the user uses it determines the results you get. What a fascinating conversation. I've been talking with Christopher Summerfield. He is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and he's author of a book called "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means." And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And Christopher, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for the opportunity. And yeah, do reach out if you want to know anything.

• 27:30Speaker 04

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• 27:57Speaker 05

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• 28:30Mike Carruthers?

  Trauma. It's a word we hear constantly. We talk about people with traumatic childhoods, friends who have endured traumatic experiences, or even our own traumas. That word carries weight, suggesting something far more lasting than just a difficult time. But what really is trauma? Does it always shape our future, or does it depend on how we define it in the first place? To help clarify and explain what's really happening in the body when we experience trauma, I'm joined by Dr. Amy Apigian. She's a double board certified physician in preventive and addiction medicine with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health. She's

• 29:15Mike Carruthers?

  the author of a book called "The Biology of Trauma: How the Body Holds Fear, Pain, and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It." Amy, thank you for coming on. Welcome.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike. It's really good to be here.

• 29:28Mike Carruthers?

  So let's get a working definition of what trauma is, because it seems to be, I don't know, different things to different people. Some things are traumatic for some people, and for other people, maybe less so. And so what is trauma?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and I had the same question. And in fact, it was until I developed health conditions that I knew were related to childhood trauma that I really questioned that, because I was not one that had seen trauma in my childhood. And so my definition now of trauma is focused on the body's experience. And there are very distinct physiology changes that happen when the body goes into a trauma response that makes that be a trauma. Up until that point, it's just a stress. Not that stress is always great. Sometimes it is good, and sometimes it is exactly what we need. And sometimes it just is chronic

• 30:25Speaker 02

  stress that is not helping us. But there is a very distinct change in our physiology that makes that stress turn into a trauma. And the inner experience in can be simplified down to anything that, for any reason, at that time overwhelmed us and our ability to respond.

• 30:46Mike Carruthers?

  And so an example, just a quick example of that, I don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole here, but just a quick example of, like, attach an example to that.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I'll share the story of my patient, Elena. And Elena came to me after she developed autoimmunity in her late 40s and she had had a car accident a year prior. She had not made that connection at all, but me knowing the nervous system, I started to ask some questions. And it was not surprising that she had had a childhood where, again, she also would not have said ever used the word trauma for her childhood. But as I'm asking her about when she had experienced overwhelm and when she could look back on her life and think that that was a moment in which I didn't know if I was going to be okay. And I just felt like something inside of me

• 31:40Speaker 02

  shut down and broke in order to keep going. And she described an experience, multiple experiences, actually, growing up with a single mother who she was always afraid of, are we going to have enough? Am I too much for my mother? My mother's already got so much on her plate. I need to not have any needs. And she became hyper responsible, even at a young age. And so even though this would not be a typical event per se, like the car accident that she had, though we can also look at that. It was the experience, it was the inner experience of that was too much for a young child to understand,

• 32:20Speaker 02

  to be able to process and know how to respond in, in a way that was productive. She was a young child. How would she know how to navigate adult problems? But that's exactly what happens to a lot of people is that they are faced with a situation that they just are not equipped to understand enough or have the time or have the space to be able to respond in a way other than to just kind of shut down.

• 32:49Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, but here's the thing about the word trauma that, that I think most people would agree with this, that one of the things about a trauma is it's going to affect you for the rest of your life. That that's the difference. You break your arm. You go to the doctor, he fixes it and, and maybe that's a trauma, but it's certainly a, a trauma to your body. But it's fixed and life goes on. But the kind of trauma that you're talking about, we often assume that because they went through this trauma, somehow that's going to mess them up for the rest of their life.

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Well, let me challenge that for a moment, Mike. Because as we look at how does the body heal a trauma to the bone? A break to the bone is a trauma. It breaks the bone. It doesn't grow the bone, doesn't strengthen the bone. It broke the bone. Can I talk about a patient, Kenneth, who came in? He was a veteran. He was coming into the VA hospital where I was a general surgery resident. He had broken his bicep tendon. Rather than being attached to his shoulder, it was sitting in the middle of his arm. That is breaking something because we've exceeded our capacity. That is the same thing that happens to us in any other of these other, maybe more emotional traumas

• 34:08Speaker 02

  or psychological traumas that we want to associate that word with. And yet for the body, it's the same principles. It's the same thing to ourselves of this is more than I can handle. And so rather than completely die, I'm going to just break the bone. I'm going to break the muscle tendon so that the rest of me is okay. And then I can heal. And that's what we see in the body. The body heals the bone. The body heals the muscle as long as it has what it needs to heal. And I think we can all look at people who've had some broken bones and they've never really healed well from that.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  They still have chronic pain. It lingers. They've got issues. Same thing with that tendon with my patient, Kenneth. If we had not done the surgery to reattach his tendon, yes, he would have survived. Yes, he would have been able to go on with his life, but he'd forever have one arm that was really weak because his bicep muscle wasn't working. So the body needs certain things in order to be able to engage its own healing strategies. And it is no different than any other traumas that we want to say. The body is designed to actually heal from those traumas. The fact that it doesn't and the fact that we haven't moved on

• 35:30Speaker 02

  is actually a sign that we have not given our body what it needs to do its own innate healing.

• 35:37Mike Carruthers?

  But many people break bones, have traumas, and they're not bothered by them anymore. I broke a bone, I broke a bone in my arm from rollerblading many years ago. It affects me in no way whatsoever. So, so give me an example of a trauma that you consider a trauma that goes through a process and heals and it's fine.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  You can look at an example of a car accident. That can be a trauma for some people because in that moment, they can be so overwhelmed by what's happening that sometimes they can faint, sometimes they can lose consciousness. This is the body's way of showing, this is way too much for me to be able to respond to, I'm just going to check out. And how do we then come through those experiences? How do we actually give the body what it needs afterwards? This is where a lot of people are unaware and so unintentionally keep their body in a sense of danger. What we actually need is first of all, to return to a complete sense of safety. You'll see this in nature all the time.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  So, one example is a turtle. And when a turtle experiences overwhelming danger, not just a stress, overwhelming danger, they just retreat inside their shell. They pull their head in, they pull their legs in, and there's no way that they're coming out of that shell until they've sensed that they are safe to do so. Well, in a trauma response, our body is essentially doing the same thing. Our body is essentially saying, this is not just stressful. If it were stressful, I'd keep trying to run away. I'd keep trying to fight. I would keep trying to respond. But this is so overwhelming that I'm just going to shut down.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  I'm going to retreat, I'm going to pull into my shell and just go into full protection mode. And as long as we are living protected, we can still function, but there's just this background sense of the danger might still be there.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  We always have that sense of the other shoe might drop. And even when times are good, we are waiting for the next bad thing to happen because we know that it's coming. We know, we know that we don't deserve good things or deserve to be happy, or we can't experience that joy as long as our body is like, hmm, I'm not sure that that danger ever truly went away. So that is why actually knowing, having the skills and the knowledge for what the body needs to know that a danger is truly over is the first step and the essential step to actually moving on in a way that we have healed from our past and not just bringing it along with us.

• 38:30Mike Carruthers?

  But I want to go back to this idea and have you address it very directly, that people have this belief, and I can give you an example.

• 38:39Mike Carruthers?

  I know, I know someone who, when he was 10 years old, saw his father die. And there's this assumption that this will affect him for the rest of his life because it was so traumatic. Is that necessarily so?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  It is not necessarily so. That is a myth, that is a misconception, that these experiences that we have will somehow negatively impact us for the rest of our life. The body and the mind have such an innate ability to heal and not just move on, not just push through, but actually heal all of these experiences that we go through. We just haven't known how. So I've had many patients who come to me and they almost bring their scorecard with them. This is what happened to me. This is what happened to me. This is what's happened to me. And it's a lot. And I look at these and I've even worked with people who have children

• 39:38Speaker 02

  who saw their sibling or someone else get killed and they haven't spoken in six years. And, and this idea that how do you ever recover from something like that? It is actually possible. The, these are not life sentences. And that's the first belief that I get to challenge with my patients is your past is not your life sentence. And as a physician, what I'm focusing especially on is the resolution to our physical health. Because a lot of people will tell me, look, I feel that I understand why I am the way I am. I can look back at my life and the experiences that I've been through and I can explain and I understand my triggers. I understand all of

• 40:22Speaker 02

  that, but my body is still living under the impact of the past. My body will still not only have reactions like when I'm around my family, for example, that's a common example, but it also has an autoimmune disease. It also has digestive issues. I also have sleep issues and ongoing anxiety issues. So my body is somehow still remembering the past, even though I feel that intellectually I know all of this stuff and I've been able to move on.

• 40:54Mike Carruthers?

  But given your definition, everybody could have a different road to get to where you want to go. Some people would have the same experience and not be traumatized because they don't fit your definition of being overwhelmed.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And this is where we can see two people go on the same military excursion and one comes back and it can assimilate with society and enjoy their family and not have illogical reactions. And another one is stuck at home in fear with PTSD symptoms. Same excursion, same experiences, same environment. What was the difference? The difference was that for one, they went into that more resourced. They went into that so that when they experienced those, whatever it was that they saw, whatever it was that they did, whatever it was that they experienced, they were able to keep it at the stress level or experience that trauma response

• 41:56Speaker 02

  and resolve it at that time, whereas someone else wasn't able to.

• 42:01Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't one way, though, to address it, to just leave it alone, not leave it alone, but that time will, time is a tool that, and again, I use the example of, you know, when you lose someone, if someone dies who's very close to you, it certainly seems overwhelming. It seems like you can't sleep, you can't eat, it's horrible.

• 42:25Mike Carruthers?

  But eventually, time fixes that. That human beings go through the stages of grief and come to acceptance, and life goes on. And there was no direct intervention to deal with the trauma. You just figured it out, worked it out, accepted it, and moved on.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  100%, Mike. And this is what I hope that everybody hears, is that the body has the innate capacity to move through even the hardest of experiences and have resolution. So for those people who have not had resolution, that's what we get to become curious about. And why not? Why did the body get stuck in that grief? Why, five years later, are we still ruminating about that person? Why, five years later, are we still having sleep problems? Why? Why has our body or our mind not seemed to fully recover when time should heal?

• 43:30Speaker 02

  And that was one of the first lessons that I had to learn with trauma. I became a foster parent. This is directly working with trauma. Anytime that you take in a foster child, you are working with someone who's been through trauma. I was under the assumption, Mike, that time heals all wounds, because that's what I'd been taught. Time heals all wounds. All I needed to do was provide the love, provide the stability, the security, and then just give it time. Well, this is what I did, and time was not healing. In fact, he was progressively getting worse, and I'm trying to understand why, because I've created an amazing place for him compared to his past.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  But he was still so stuck in his past that he could not, could not be actually present and relax into the security, relax into my love. He wouldn't even let me let my love in. And by the age of five, he was talking about how he would want to kill me, and this is how he would want to kill me. And it was obvious that time was not healing.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  So I was missing something. I was not giving him something that he needed to allow time to be healing. So it's not just that time heals everything. Time only heals when the body has what it needs and then you compound that over time. And yes, the healing and the resolution will come.

• 44:58Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah. So when people stay stuck, when the guy comes back from military service and can't get on with his life, when you lose somebody and you can't, time doesn't heal that. When your foster son does not get better, what's this trauma work that you've mentioned? What is it? Specifically, what, so you wake up some morning to start your trauma work? What is that?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  I don't think it's what people think it is. When I talk about trauma work now, what I'm really talking about is I need you, I need a person to be able to open up and feel and then be able to move through those feelings, not stuffing them back down, but move through those feelings to a sense of I am safe enough, I am secure enough, and now I can keep myself open to the world. Anytime that we find ourselves still guarding our heart, still protecting ourselves, that's how we can know whether I know that I had trauma or not. I'm actually, my body is showing that it has these patterns of trauma.

• 46:06Mike Carruthers?

  But it starts by doing what? You call somebody? You talk to a friend? I mean, when you say, you know, move through it and, and feel your feelings, a lot of people don't know, what, what, what does that mean?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and I wouldn't have known what that means either. So what I start, what I start people with is feeling sensations in their body, because I need to get that connection of their mind and their body. Part of living with chronic trauma has been a disconnection of our mind from our body. So we tend to be more in our head. We like to think about everything, analyze everything, understand everything. We sign up for more courses, we read more books. But we actually don't know. How to be with these feelings in a way that will be productive. So I start people with having them feel different areas of their body. And sometimes that can be, I want you to feel your pulse. I want you to actually feel your heartbeat and whether we go to the neck and the artery, we go to the wrist and feeling their artery.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  But this is starting to form that ability for them to connect. In science, we call this interoception. Your ability to sense and perceive your inner physiology and state. Most people can't. And yet, what the research shows is that, looking at mothers specifically, if they don't have that ability to know and read their own inner state and physiology, they're not able to do that for their babies. And that's how then we pass on what you might call generational trauma, is because a mom doesn't know actually how to connect with her own body and sense it, and thus doesn't know how to connect and be able to hear the real messages behind what her baby needs.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  So this idea of connecting with our body and that it, that can be so vague. And so I've made it very practical by saying, we are going to see how we can create a felt sense of safety right now. And I have people put a pillow or a blanket or a book or a purse over in front of their stomach. And this seems really weird to them at first and they're like, why would I put this over my stomach? And I'm like, just do it and then we'll see if this is helpful or not. And as soon as people do that, you should see it, Mike, their shoulders drop, their face softens, their abdominal muscles just also kind of relax. And they're like, oh, I feel, I feel like I can take a breath.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And I'm like, this is why it's important to just do some of this connection exercises at first. Because if I had told you that you were tense before, you would have been like, no, I'm fine, because this is your normal. It's not until we actually can create a change in our inner physiology that we're like, oh, now I can feel the difference. And if this is what safe actually feels like, I don't think I've ever felt safe before. And that is when the real change starts to happen, Mike.

• 49:03Mike Carruthers?

  So if you had something happen where you had that reaction, you felt overwhelmed in your life. And so that's by your definition, trauma. But now you don't feel overwhelmed. Time fixed it. That it seems like it's in the past where it belongs. And so are you no longer traumatized?

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, my response to that would be, are you still going into trauma responses? And it sounds like from your question, you're saying that no, this person is no longer going into that sense of complete overwhelm. And so they are no longer under the impact of that past trauma.

• 49:45Mike Carruthers?

  Well, given how much we talk about trauma and traumatic experiences and the effects of trauma on people, I really appreciate you weighing in and giving your take on this. I've been talking to Amy Apigian. She is a double board certified physician in preventative and addiction medicine. And she's author of the book, The Biology of Trauma: How the Body Holds Fear, Pain, and Overwhelm, and How to Heal It. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Amy, thank you so much.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you so much, Mike.

• 50:21Mike Carruthers?

  If you would like people to think of you as more attractive and likable, here are some solid suggestions backed up by science. First of all, be funny. People with a good sense of humor are considered to be more social and more intelligent. Surround yourself with other people. Studies show that people look better in a group because unattractive features are less noticeable. Get past the small talk. People feel more connected to someone who asks deeper, more sincere questions. Get a pet. It shows you're a nurturing person and able to make long-term commitments. And smile more. A happy face can compensate for attractiveness flaws.

• 51:05Mike Carruthers?

  The stronger the smile, the more attractive the face. And that is something you should know. We have a great team of people working on this show. Our producers are Jeff Havison and Jennifer Brennan. Our executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 51:27Speaker 04

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