Brain Surgeon: Dream Patterns, Liminal States, & Subconscious Exploration - Dr Rahul Jandial

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Dr Rahul Jandial is a brain surgeon, neuroscientist, and an author. Why do we dream? For centuries, people have debated their meaning. Are they hidden messages, random brain activity, or something else entirely? Today, modern neuroscience is uncovering how the brain creates, processes, and remembers dreams, and what they may reveal about the inner workings of the mind. Expect to learn why we dream and the evolutionary importance of dreaming, what predicts a good or bad dream, and if there are any types of universal dreams we al have, what fuels erotic dreams and what effects does porn have on our dreaming abilities and content, if there is any practical science behind lucid dreaming, the biggest myths about the brain and the best diets and exercises to keep your brain healthy, what role lifestyle really plays in cognitive decline and how much is genetic, and much more… - 0:00 The Importance of Comfort in Your Working Environment 5:09 Things You Believe are True But Can’t Prove 10:13 Did Freud Get Anything Right About Dreams? 13:41 Why Do We Dream? 20:50 Why are We Conscious of Our Dreams? 28:22 Why Do We Have Nightmares? 35:51 Should We Remember Our Dreams? 39:21 Do Our Dreams Correlate to Our Overall Health? 41:20 How Real is Dream Interpretation? 44:54 What Do We Know About Erotic Dreams? 57:54 How Does Porn Effect Our Dreams? 01:01:40 Where Does Inspiration for Dream Material Come From? 01:05:47 How Can We Activate Our Imagination? 01:09:07 Transcranial Electric Treatments 01:14:39 The Benefits of Awake Brain Surgery 01:20:29 How Dreams Differ in Brain Injuries 01:22:42 Can Thoughts in Dreams Be More Real Than Waking Thoughts? 01:26:12 Brain Myth-Busting 01:30:53 Is the Neuroscience Industry Overselling Tech? 01:34:07 The Contributing Elements of Cognitive Decline 01:45:22 The Impact of Stress on Brain Aging 01:57:29 Mind-Blowing Scientific Scenarios 02:00:51 Lessons Learnt from Terminal Patients 02:04:36 Find Out More About Rahul - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You just taught me there are left-handed surgical instruments. What's that mean?

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Um, for left-handed surgeons, the, the way some of the graspers click, um, it's released with a maneuver where your thumb pushes something outward. For left-handed surgeons, that can be sort of clunky, so they make instruments where it's outward. For the left-handed surgeon is actually inward towards the midline and for the right-handed surgeon is this way. So there are left and right handed instruments for different surgeries. Needle drivers really, where you click onto a needle and it clasps. So you don't have to keep pressure on it, then you can do your maneuver. Steak knives also have serrations that lean one way or the other. I just learned that.

• 0:42Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know about that at all.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I didn't, I don't know. I was just looking at it because I've, I've got a buddy who's left-handed and he's like pointing all this left-handed stuff out in the world.

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  Don't use that one. It's going to cut completely incorrectly. What I did learn was, um, when you have a steak, I mean, I have to imagine this is slap bang in the middle of your area of expertise, but you want to never cut with the grain of the meat. You want to be cutting cross grain.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that, that, that takes me to what's beautiful about surgery is like, it's, it's not like Legos. It's not like, you know, hammers and chisel. It can be with, you know, orthopedic surgeons and spine surgeon. But when you have somebody who can lightly with a, with a tweezer, a pickup, we call it, lift something up and you see some membranes that are holding two planes together. All right. Let's say you have two planes of tissue and they're held together with this fine web of membranes. You lift it up and you take a scissor upside down and you just spread lightly and the membranes fall apart and the tissue comes apart. You're not really trying to tug and pull. If you do that with finesse, when the patient wakes up, they feel less injury, they feel less pain, less anesthesia.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  The operation goes better, less blood time. So everybody thinks surgery is all the same steps. Do these 1,000 steps. No, it's sculpting. It's art. There's a finesse to it. And at some point, uh, when you see somebody who's good at something, it's, it's like ballet. It's like something's being released. They're not like, and now I will do this step. And, uh, that's the part I love about it is talent. It's more, it's more talent than smarts.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  I love watching people in between doing the thing that they're supposed to do. So a good example of this is drummers. If you're ever watching a drummer play live, he loses a stick or he snaps or something like that. And he'll just immediately switch and he'll be playing with one hand and he'll just reach over and he'll grab another one. Or if a guitarist's playing and bing, off goes a pick like that. And you'll watch him without even thinking about it. He'll do something, grab a pick from there, roll it between his fingers and go back. And it's that liminal space. It's, I'm just so comfortable with my working environment.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  And that's really cool to see.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  So that word, that's an interesting word for me, liminal, because that's kind of the thing I've been thinking about a lot. It's not the easiest thing to explain to people, but I think that in nature. Let me, let me give you an example of what I call a liminal space. I was, I used to dive a lot. I gave it up. I had a scary accident. I almost, I almost ran out of oxygen, real deep off of Asia, Asian coast there, Palau. And it's, I was like, I've got kids. I'll do this when I'm older. Now I'm older and I'm like, ah, I'm, I'm, you know, I don't have the energy. But the place that I love diving the most was the cenotes of Yucatan. Like where it's all flat, maybe the asteroid landed there and killed all the dinosaurs and that kind of thing.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  But they have caverns and there, there are river, underground rivers that meet the saltwater. So when you go from freshwater to saltwater in our bodies, saltwater is a massive thing that has to do with cognition and balance. And a lot of fundamental things are controlled just by the salt in our blood and brain. And but when you, when you're diving and you're in freshwater and then it's called a halocline and you're now freshwater is meeting saltwater. There's like five yards, it almost feels like five meters where it's blurry. So the transition from one state to another, at emical, psychological, it doesn't happen in a millisecond. There's a liminal state. And so when you take a look at the brain in 24 hours, I see at least four or five liminal states. When you're falling asleep, it's not a complete.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I'm awake and now I'm asleep. There's a little window there, about fifteen minutes. Lucid dreaming, when you're asleep asleep, and I can verify it. And you have a little return of awareness. To me, those hybrid liminal transition states give us an insight. I mean, it's hard, right? Because I'm a brain surgeon. This is, people expect everything from me to be proven. But I'm finding a lot of insight and understanding from these different liminal states. And then you can bring narcolepsy in the middle, where people suddenly fall asleep. They have interesting thoughts. When you wake up, a third of the world feels, you know, sleep paralysis and have like these feelings of a goblin on their chest. Enough to where the stories are built around different cultures.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  So to me, those transition hybrid states of cognition, of feeling, of experience. I think that's where the, that's where my head is really at these days.

• 5:09Chris Williamson?

  This might be getting you out of your skis a little bit. But someone asked me this question the other day, and I thought it was such a great question. What is something that you intuit or act as if is true or might believe? But you cannot prove with evidence or science? Is there anything that comes to mind with that?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, for me, the first thing that crossed my mind was love. It's this, you know, the term used to be ineffable. And so like beyond explanation, but you know it's true. Beyond articulation, but it really motivates you or touches you. Spiritual experiences, right? Epiphanies, a hunch. Like, these are repeated experiences that people are reporting, right? And dreams could fall into that a little bit. But there are repeated things that we are writing about through history and time. Aristotle wrote about lucid dreaming. Now, that sounds like, well, come on, lucid dreaming. But it's rigorous.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So Aristotle wrote about it thousands of years ago, a return of awareness within a dream. Which sounds like, how could you ever prove that? And twenty, thirty years ago, and increasingly now, lucid dreaming is being proven rigorously in sleep labs. So that, I think that's one example. But what, when I hear that, what it tells me is, don't deny those insights. Don't rely on them blindly. Don't be manipulated by somebody trying to dazzle you with those kind of things. You know, cults.

• 6:44Chris Williamson?

  Sexy rhetoric.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, cults catch you in a vulnerable moment. My patients are vulnerable. The sexy rhetoric isn't just, you know, that this will heal you, but I was, you know, there were, there were a lot of like stem cell clinics that, that, that were affecting children's hospitals in San Diego. Children's Hospital of San Diego is real close to Mexican border of Tijuana. You know, we're, we're in Austin, so you're familiar with that. And there, there were patients, families who were going there to get stem cell treatments that were, it wasn't that they were proven, we knew they were sham. They weren't hurting them, but they weren't helping them. And sometimes those moms and kids would choose that over therapy that was moderately effective.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  So I think there has to be some, there have to be some safeguards to vulnerable people being manipulated. Yet I'm fully ready to embrace intuition, hunch, those kind of things like where my, my dog has an instinct and hunch that comes from our limbic system that exists within us. Sort of the emotional centers of the, of the brain, the deeper structures of the brain, that we shouldn't deny those and creative people learn to tap into those. So the, the challenge for me is always how to liberate our understanding, my understanding, without it getting too woo woo and leading to fluff.

• 8:04Chris Williamson?

  Such a good point, man. It's such a good point. I, I really think about this a lot. The, what level of rigor and skepticism should we have? Without closing ourselves off to alternative approaches to things. And I, I would say I lean on the rationalist, materialist kind of evidency side of stuff. I tend to have a, a real anti-conspiratorial leaning to me. But that's been to my detriment a lot of the time because I think my, I've probably said no to stuff that my gut would have convinced me of saying yes to. Like my brain has overruled my intuition and I'm kind of trying to allow that to be tapped into a little bit more. I'm trying to get that to reverse.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Well, and so that's interesting. So. Um, liminal states, these hybrid states that exist in nature, deltas where salt water meets fresh water, where a waking brain goes to our dreaming brain. That's a cognitive delta, if you will. That's a theme that I'm working on in my mind. The other thing I'm working on is, is what, what we're discussing now is that to look at, to look at our capacities as, as a thermostat, it's a modulation. Inflammation's bad, bad, bad. And I say, that's not true. We need some inflammation to fight off bee stings and other things. But how was that thermostat set right for our lives?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  We fight off infections, uh, but if the inflammation is too strong, it's like friendly fire can cause autoimmune disease. So rather than saying inflammation is bad or good, that this product is anti-inflammatory. No, I actually need inflammation sometimes. I need stress sometimes. I need these capacities that have kept my, our species going, uh, sometimes. But when they're running rampant without the necessary stimulus for them, then we have to identify and use our coping strategies and maneuvers and the things that the wellness industry is presenting to bring them back into the ecological validity, which is real world scenario, where should my thermostat be?

• 10:13Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned dreams then. Is Freud totally obsolete? Did he get anything right when it comes to dreams?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  He got one thing right for sure. Um, and before, before him, it wasn't really clear that dreams were coming from the brain.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a cool story too, because, um, so he's about a hundred, a hundred and ten years old. But before, he was the one like, like it's your desires gone wild, your dreams, it's, it's just freaky time in dreams. And it's, but it was coming from your brain. And it was only, at that time, it wasn't clear that.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  This creature, this human being lying on the ground, mostly limp, body is cool, brain must be off because they're not moving. So how could that inactive flesh? How could that inactive, like the hibernating screen on your laptop, right? Like, how could that conjure up all of that crazy, wild, adventurous dream state? Dream experiences? So it was a guy named Berger. He was looking, he was trying to actually understand. So like the, the, the old school people who are trying to understand things, they were open to hunch and instinct and not necessarily paranormal, but something that they liked exploring things that couldn't necessarily

• 11:36Speaker 01

  be fully articulated, but that didn't stop the exploration, the search for the meaning in it. He felt like there was this potential for mental telepathy. And in looking for that, he put stickers on the surface of patient's scalps. And at that time, they were just learning that like a wire to a sticker on, on your scalp didn't, didn't mean you had, you couldn't just, you could just send electricity in, but you could also record. And so he's the first one that came up with the EEG that later turned into the EKG. And EKG is the three main nerves on the surface of the heart. Giving you a squiggle, we're all familiar with. And EEG is 96 stickers, recording the electricity generated by 100 billion neurons. They're like microscopic jellyfish, right? It's just a recording of the electrical phenomenon going inside.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  And when he, when he recorded that EEG, he didn't, he let her run and at night, surprisingly, there was still electricity. And that sat for like 20, 30 years. But that was the first time people were like, wait a second. The brain is still going off when we sleep? So much so that at certain parts of the day and at certain parts of when we're in our sleep dreaming brain, the electric, the electrical activity is so strong that they call it paradoxical sleep. That while you're asleep.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Just based on how wild your electricity is, you can't actually tell if you're asleep or awake. It's that hot. So it's not a quiet time. And so that's what Freud did was say, dreams come to the, come to the brain. And now we've come to understand that the brain is always on. It's on a 24 hours roughly cycle. You go into a cave and you get it, the people in the cave, and they're still on a 24 cycle, right? Circadian rhythms. Like, we're all built on this rotating planet. Like Venus flytraps open and close, tides open and close. We're on a 24 hour cycle, but the brain, electrically, physiologically, the amount of glucose usage, when we sleep, the brain is not resting. And now that allows us to say, well, what is it doing? The most vibrant thing that the dreaming, sleeping brain is doing is conjuring up dreams.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay. Why do we dream then? Well, that's a massive question, you know? I mean, um,

• 13:48Speaker 01

  I would say the answer should come from the information we now have. Okay? So it's not chilling out. It's burning hot. And this one, I gotta unpack it a little bit. When, I just said, look, the waking brain and the dreaming brain are equally vibrant electrically, but they must be different. So one of the main things that happens when you go from the waking brain to the dreaming brain state is certain continents in our, in our brain, not like a spot, but a network called executive network. Now they're trying to call it action network, but this is a very specific part of the brain, of the prefrontal cortex, and it needs a little bit of explanation. It's called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The frontal lobes are like this.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  It's kind of on the outside. It's the executive network. It's the conductor that coordinates it all. It's responsible for calculation, processing, quick judgment, not a lot of instinct. Hmm. That, and, and it tamps down other regions, such as the imagination network and those deeper limbic structures that are, are hunch, are how our, my, my dog can tell when I'm trying to say, yeah, um, come here, you know, like trying to give him a treat to trap him, to put him back in his pen because we're going out for the night. That instinct comes not from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or of the prefrontal cortex. So, so when you go from the dreaming brain,

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Back to the waking brain or waking brain to the dreaming brain. That region is dampened. It's never on or off. It goes from being like fifty one percent active relative to the imagination network to forty nine. So the dreaming brain has a dampened executive network and a liberated imagination network and movement regions and emotional networks. So when we see the shifts and as the executive network comes down, it's compensated by the imagination network. So you get that equivalent electrical activity. So when you think of it that way, dreams, why we dream, has to be explained with what is going on with the dreaming brain.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  It's hyper visual, it's hyper creative. It's, uh, it goes into tremendous social situations. And my big idea about it is it, it's not what others have said, like it's threat rehearsal. If you run from a woolly mammoth and you're, and you're dreaming, you're better off if you ever encounter one. Or it's a nocturnal therapist, we work out our emotions at night. That doesn't make, it doesn't fit the complexity. We have PTSD flashbacks. So what I think is happening is certain regions of the brain that are generally tamped down for us to perform the tasks of the day are allowed to be liberated in the safe space of our temporary paralysis of our dreams. Because in the brain, if you don't use certain neurons in certain capacities, they will wither.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  If I patch a kid's eye for therapeutic purposes, where it lands in the occipital lobe will physically wither. And so I think the, what we dream to maintain our emotional and creative complexity as a systematic process where the brain takes turns in a twenty four hour cycle, being executive network dominant and imagination network dominant. So all those, all those capacities are there for us for the next environmental event we're not prepared for.

• 17:09Chris Williamson?

  So if you spent your entire day as a caveman, logging all of the different fruits that you'd gathered over the last week and making sure that your cave is clean and working out where you're going to go to catch the next mammoth. All of that is very executive, it's very top down. It's creative in some ways, but not intuitively creative. But you have. Maybe not given yourself, the urgent always overtakes the important and the urgent is very rarely going to be a creative pursuit.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Task on versus task off.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Task on is outward and that's the executive network. Of course, it requires a little imagination and everything to navigate. That's why it's never completely on or off. And then task off is daydreaming. Dreaming itself is the most task off thing and the brain wants to run rampant. I mean, it's wild. If you look at some of the electrical activity, the glucose usage, it is not a quiet time. And so we can't deny that a process that makes us lie down, burns that much energy when energy is hard to get. It is sent and it's lasted through generations and generations is essential. So my feeling is that any collection of neurons, whether in a dolphin,

• 18:27Speaker 01

  like dolphins do one brain at a time, well, half brain at a time. So they can keep paying attention. They'll, they're, they'll sleep one hemisphere at a time.

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Penguins do like, they do micro naps. They do like ten.

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  Flamingos do something weird with sleep as well.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Well, the, all the creatures, they have different ways, but when you get a collection of neurons, they gotta sleep. And what happens when you sleep is not rest. It's a different type of neuronal activity. The, your body might be resting, your heart might slow down a little bit. The liver's cool, body's cool, but the brain's on fire. And just to, just to put it out there as a surgeon, when I've moved livers between moms to kids, you can, you could take a piece of liver from a mom and move it to a kid. I've transplanted hearts in training. We're not really reconnecting the nerves again. The, the, the bodily tissue is a little bit autonomous. Sleep is not really for the body. I'm not saying that sleep isn't good for you. I'm not saying sleep shouldn't be a performance goal. I'm not saying that.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  I'm saying when our bodies sleep, it's our brain that builds the sleep pressure. And when we sleep, what does the brain do that's the most vibrant thing it does? It dreams. So I think dreaming is an essential feature of preserving a healthy brain and healthy mind.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

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• 19:53Chris Williamson?

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• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Is, is there something interesting about the fact that we're conscious of our dreams? Because you could imagine a world in which the body shuts down, the brain shuts down, and you don't have any conscious recollection of the fact that this thing happened. It was kind of, I guess, what you're suggesting is there are certain capacities that the brain needs and may need in future that may be not quite as common as some other pathways that we use more frequently.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

  And dreaming is one way for us to ensure that those Myelin sheaths are kept nice and lubricated. They're moving quite.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Accessible when we need them. They don't wither, they don't atrophy.

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  However, the fact that we're conscious of this, the fact that we can recall it, that there is a phenomenological emotional experience of going through this, is that bit adaptive in your opinion? Or is that some spandrel side effect, like a light bulb that gives off heat as well as light? What do you think about the fact that we actually know that we have been through this thing? Because I could imagine a world in which you could retain the capacity without having the experience of being through it.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, it's a massive question. It's a fantastic question. And my opinion is to tell a few stories about how some of these things happen. So.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Back to liminal states. I don't think any process in the brain, waking brain, dreaming brain, is a rigid on off process. So my feeling is when we remember some dreams, they're like solar flares that have leaked into our memory. And we wake up, we're accidentally sort of holding on to the residue of massive dreaming activity. That's my hunch. And the way to think about that is the concept of self and autobiographical memory. So when people talk about self, self worth, self this,

• 22:59Speaker 01

  the concept of self is created by a type of memory. This procedural memory, tying your shoelaces, semantic memory, stuff our phones record, you know, dates and stuff. Episodic memory, like the episodes of our life. And what happens is they're stitched together by a capacity called autobiographical memory. And the thought here is from people who have certain types of psychoses, when they can't separate out their dream and waking state, certain patients with schizophrenia, it becomes quite confusing for them. So I think the dreaming process is richly active in all of us. The degree of recall is different between us and different in different stages of our life.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  And so when we do remember a dream in the morning, or we wake up and we remember a dream, go to the bathroom and sometimes fall back into the dream, that these are just sort of the the residues of a vibrant dream state that is breaking into our consciousness. I don't think that it's by design. I think it speaks to the capacity that we're never fully dreaming and never fully awake. And the best example of that is not sleep entry that Salvador Dali talked about, or sleep exrid. We talked about sleep paralysis. But in the middle, certain drugs that we give our patients for Alzheimer's will make them have more lucid dreams. So the awareness of the dream state can happen when you're falling asleep.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  When you're waking up and you're holding on to some of the dreams and there are habits you can do to hold on to them more. But also in the middle of a dream, people can train to lucid dream. I know that sounds like, okay, there's a neurosurgeon talking about that, but it's rigorous. Galantamines and acetylcholine antagonists that we give to improve certain functions in Alzheimer's patients. And they report a dose dependent increase in lucid dreaming. So I think the dream state and the consciousness state, they're like two dimmers and they're overlapping a bit. And so when we remember something in the morning, rather than thinking that it's by design, I think it's sort of like an opportunity to have an insight into ourselves

• 25:12Speaker 01

  at a very emotional, very visual, very sexual time.

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, why did dreams often end up being so emotionally intense? Do you think?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Well, because when you look at the areas that are activated, preferentially in the dream state, it's the limbic system, which are the emotional centers. When you look at the dreaming brain, the regions that are activated, if you will, it's the visual centers, it's the imagination network. And then equally, you're dampening, you're dampening the executive network. So these big jumps of ideas and creativity and associations are not discarded by the executive network as they would be during the day. It allows for that. Let me give you one specific example that I thought was really fresh. When, when I was asked to prepare this book was,

• 26:00Speaker 01

  when you look at thousands and thousands of dream reports, not yours or mine, but like mine feel wild, yours must feel wild. But you start to see that very few people report doing math in their dreams. I'm not saying like, somebody's gonna call in or write in and say, yeah, but it's not like nightmares, 100% reported. It's not like erotic dreams, sexual dreams, over 90%. Teeth falling out, being chased, flying, these are common dreams, right? Math is very rarely reported. And what I like is, okay, if I take hundreds of years of patterns of dream reports, basically surveys, or Aristotle's comment about

• 26:38Speaker 01

  lucid dreams, now with modern neuroscience, they make sense. If the executive network is dampened, that does calculation, it kind of makes sense to me that very few reports of math. Occur in dream reports like that fits. Executive network goes down, reports of math go down. Imagination network is liberated. People report creative and wild dreams. So it ties together what people are reporting for years.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  Why teeth falling out, falling, flying? You know, three dreams that I would guess almost everybody listening to this has had.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And before electricity and after electricity from the, from the, you know, horse and carriage all the way to the electric car.

• 27:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  And

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  It's like we needed to wait for airplanes to be there to think that I could fall out of an airplane. Or for buildings to be sufficiently high that you would fall from a skyscraper.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that, so if we're getting mental health. Is tied into certain families. Nightmare, one type of dream nightmares clusters in families. So nightmare disorder can happen.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  Terrible.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Well.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Or, you know, it, that's, that's, that's a complex word. I mean, you, you can have things cluster. I mean, you know, maybe those people are living in difficult situation. I, so it's hard, but there is a dream that clusters in family, just like certain mental health conditions would. And the fact that we share the same dreams with people living in wildly different cultural times. Something's built in. And that, that again speaks to, I think. The new understanding we're having in the last 20, 30 years as we can have people be in brain scanners and fall asleep.

• 28:22Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea about what makes for universal nightmare? Is this just something?

• 28:29Speaker 01

  I got a big, I got a big theory about it. And so.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  So, you know, this book was.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  This book was important for me. It was, I had written a few others. One was, you know, and then Penguin UK in London said they've always wanted a book. That looked at dreams and dreaming from a certain perspective of somebody with a complicated life story, somebody who's had the professor chops, but also could tell a story. And I, I really took it, you know, it was a, it was wonderful, actually. I, it kind of liberated me. Part of that process was me rolling around Dodger Stadium in LA, going to pubs in London and sort of throwing this out because it had to be for everybody, right? It can't, it's not, and the question I would get asked the most like, if dreams, wait, if dreams are good for us, why do we have nightmares?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  It was just sort of a, you gotta, and so that was chapter two. Nightmares are, it's a tough thing to explain because it obviously like, why, you know, if, if, why would he, why would he cook that up? And so the way I think about it is, um, you have to look at the mind as, um, something that needs cultivating in children, just like walking and talking. And so just like we're not fully formed and we have to be taught to walk and challenged to walk and talk and engaged, at the same time in the mind, there are certain cognitive developments that are happening.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  So in, they're called longitudinal studies, they had families allow their children to be woken up for like 22 years and report like what they're dreaming about different times. And like when they were two or three, like it's just like, it's a blanket. It's, it's not very dynamic. It's not, uh, not a lot of movement. And then around four and five, six, nightmares arrive for every child. It's rare to find, I did a lot of pediatric nursery, still do, I have three sons in their twenties. They have to be told that nightmares always arrive in children, healthy children, unhealthy children. Some of my patients who, who had, you know, brain injuries, it seems to be a part of

• 30:52Speaker 01

  the mind's development that's built in. It arrives for everybody. And then almost invariably, very few kids have nightmare disorder. It doesn't linger into the next day and ruin their day like it does for adults. So it's sort of like a wave. Of thinking that a species of dreams that arrives. And then around eleven or twelve, you have erotic dreams that arrive. Whether kids are having sex or not, or teenagers are thinking about sex or not, they arrive. And and the last one I see is sort of the maturation, like adolescents. The brain looks the same, but we change who we are. So I think there are three waves of sort of the development of the mind. And what happens around that age of four, five and six is also the development of something called the default mode network.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Like until then, children have a hard time reading minds. They can't tell if smiling uncle means well or means harm. And that capacity arrives at the same time as nightmares. And so my big hypothesis, it'll be hard to prove, is that nightmares create a sense of self versus other by having these harrowing, difficult experiences. It sort of creates that the world around me is separate from who I am. And this engagement with monsters and different things creates this default mode network that allows us to start to see ourselves as separate from the world around us. And to be a little bit more critical in evaluating the threats and the people and their intentions around us. That's my big thesis.

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  And that would make sense adaptively because before age four, five, six, kids are so unindependent that the need to be able to distinguish between I am here and that is something else is kind of pointless because you're not let out of the sight of mom or dad.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're you're in the rap still. You're very close. You're not being led. I mean, I think that's a good point. The other point is that

• 32:47Speaker 01

  that it's just like every, every, every kid has to be told it was only, it's only a dream. It's only a nightmare. And that there's this, just like we talked about liminal states in the beginning, like in psychosis, people can't separate out, you know, awake versus dreaming. And that to stitch autobiographical memory, we need to know these are awake thoughts and these are dream thoughts. And dream thoughts should not disrupt your awake thoughts. That there are these things that happen in your mind, but they're not actually the the daily steps that link your life together, right? That in children. Um, I don't know if before nightmares, they know the difference between uh waking thoughts

• 33:27Speaker 01

  and dream thoughts. Like, maybe nightmares inform the child, it was only a dream. So it's always been a puzzle to me. Until then, do they not know that what they experienced in their thoughts while sleeping was actually not real?

• 33:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, it could be discarded. I guess that the creativity networking kids is so much more alike, even when they are awake. You watch, in the space of an afternoon, a child's a firefighter and a postman and an astronaut and a sports star and a rock star and asleep and then awake again and back to being a postman. And yeah, I, I dream of being able, I literally do dream of being able to have that level of creative access again.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And I think so that nightmares are serving something fundamental because they arrive in all of us. It is the universal dream. We can all talk about what, what it, what they serve and the purpose. And the last thing I would say about that, to be a nightmare, it has to wake you up. It's not a bad dream. Like, you wake up the next day, you're like, ooh, that was a rough night. Nightmares have to wake you up, sear your memory to be considered a nightmare. It's the, it's the dream that has to wake you up and be vividly remembered. So I think there's some mental cultivation going on with this process that we all share.

• 34:39Chris Williamson?

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• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  flavor in a cold glass of water is unbelievably good. Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want, and if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Do you think it's important to remember our dreams? Have they got deeper wisdom to tell us? Or should we just allow them to be a sandbox that sort of lives on its own?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I I I think based on what I've learned, I I think I think it's the it's the ultimate wellness habit that goes uh underutilized, you know? Uh, because um first, uh, and just to give you some examples that, you know, the sleep entry period, this liminal state where based on measurements, we can show you're kind of awake, you're kind of dreaming, sleeping. I mean, people like Edison in Inception, Inception, the movie was with a falling chair, was a concept based off of Dolly or Edison where they'd be working on some creative project. And uh, uh, and they'd have a key in his hand, a little metal basin.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And when he'd fall asleep, uh, on the rock while rocking on a chair, he'll fall forward, the key would drop, and then he'd write down his thoughts. He felt that there was uh something that could be extracted from that dream entry, sleep entry state. Lucid dreaming uh is something, you know, we could talk about later. But that seems to be something that people report wellness with, people, athletes, people who are visual spatial tend to have more lucid dreams. I think that's an interesting thought that we can um uh, we can learn that ability. There's a little bit of sleep disruption about it. And then when we sleep exit, which is a time I use quite a bit, is I have the luxury of not always hitting the alarm.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And I take those last five, 10 minutes of thoughts and I write them down first uh before going on social media or looking at my email. And that seems to be an idea generator for me. I think there's sort of those practical elements that you can do. But if for me, just at a philosophical level, when my brain with my memory, with my imagination, not somebody else's memory, not somebody else's imagination, runs in a different mode. Hyper emotional, hyper imaginative. And something leaks out of that that I can hold on to. I think it's worth taking a look at, and even just the process of reflection. I I think could hold some insight, but I would tease that out. It would be that the dreams that leave a strong emotional residue with a central image.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I think it's okay to say, why did I have that dream? You know, be your own therapist in that capacity. Because it's coming from your imagination and your mind. This concrete example I will give is some people who are feeling well, feeling like they're coping well. Will have a return, will have nightmares pop up in their lives, which serve as sort of a thermometer. And so the nightmares, if they're progressive, like headaches. Occasional nightmare is is whatever it is. Occasional headache is whatever it is. But if there's a progressive uptick in nightmares, that can happen. While the patient is having, the person's having such a fantastic life during the day. So that can be sort of a warning sign. Or a signal that maybe you're not coping well.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  So I think we're just starting to get into those features of maybe people's dream life should be. Part of the vital signs. When I started training, it was like blood pressure and temperature. Now we ask about pain. We ask about wellness. We ask about living situation at home. I I don't think in the world of mental health, it would be. It would be a stretch to start asking and and engaging people with their dream life.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Are dream experiences predictive of something in health? You mentioned that an uptick in nightmares across the whole board. Somebody is dreaming more, dreaming less. They remember it more, they remember it less, more lucid dreaming, less, whatever.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Question.

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  More nightmares. Are there any correlations between that and someone's overall health?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Good question. The dream pattern related with overall health would be nightmares. So two types of nightmares. Pediatric nightmares, we talked about age four, five, six, which I think are cultivating the mind. They don't really lead to nightmare disorder where the next day is ruined. And then nightmares in. Uh, in adults, they can happen once in a while. That doesn't seem to be a problem. But four or five percent have nightmare disorder where it disrupts the next day. And in that situation, whether it's in PTSD or whether it's in trauma, or whether you're going through a difficult situation, tracking nightmares, their uptick or their improvement can be sort of a

• 40:21Speaker 01

  a measure of how people are doing. But as far as uh, what I've read about dream recall, dream patterns, that changes throughout our lives. So uh, a lot of adults say they don't remember many other dreams. My cancer patients, when they get to end of life, uh, they tend to have these things. Genre dreams are called end of life dreams. They tend to be of reconciliation. They tend to be more hopeful than you would suspect after getting surgery and chemotherapy. So your, your dream within our lives from nightmares to erotic dreams, uh, to the way we dream as adults, to drugs that change the way we dream and how much we remember, all the way to end of life dreams.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  If you don't think you have a lot of dream recall now, that doesn't mean it won't be there for you. It can't be cultivated. You just have to track dream experiences and, and prevalence throughout a whole lifetime. And you start to see uh, that they come in waves, which I find, which is, you know, which is interesting.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  How real is dream interpretation?

• 41:22Speaker 01

  I don't think it's real at all. I mean, because I, you know, I mean, I can't do it for myself, you know, like.

• 41:29Chris Williamson?

  So what hope is there of a lady in a shawl being able to do it on your behalf?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think just we have to look at it conceptually. And I think we were just talking about that. It's my imagination. It's my memory. So like, let's.

• 41:40Chris Williamson?

  How do you know what this snake means to me?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Not just what it means to me, what it meant to me five years ago. I'm not the same person I was five years ago. Like a bridge, let's take, let's take a bridge, for example. For some of my patients, it's uh, you know, uh, they might be thinking about suicide, or it could be reconciliation with a loved one. It could mean so many things within that context. How can a bridge for you and me mean the same thing? But past that, a bridge for me means very different things within the context of my own life. I don't think a static symbol can uh, reveal a dynamic mental life.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, this would fit in with your perspective that it's kind of a gymnasium, training ground, sandbox for the mind that.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  High intensity training for the mind.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that we.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Maybe we shouldn't give all that much credence to it. Maybe the brain is just kind of running away with itself. Because isn't it strange? People have intrusive thoughts all the time. They see somebody stood next to the edge of the road and they think, I wonder what would happen if I pushed them in. I mean, I'm not going to do it, but.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  I wonder what would happen if I pushed them in. Oh, God, this would happen and that would happen. Wouldn't that be thrilling? You go, OK. Are you making some sort of inference about the sort of person that you are for having had that thought? Most people would say, no, you know, I just have intrusive thoughts that occur during the day. And you go, OK.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Can't go to jail for thoughts.

• 43:05Chris Williamson?

  So your intrusive thoughts, when you're awake and conscious, are not that indicative of the sort of person that you are.

• 43:14Chris Williamson?

  And yet you're telling me that the dreams that you have when you're not conscious are worthy of interpretation. That I've never thought of that before, but yeah, we're prepared to give. We're prepared to dissect something which we have way less control over when we're asleep. But then, on the other side, you know, the devil's advocate position would be there are very few windows that we have into the subconscious. The subconscious can often tell us things about ourselves that maybe we have repressed, not been prepared to feel. And perhaps there is some deeper wisdom to be gleaned from when we're asleep.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  I agree with that. But I don't agree that, you know.

• 43:59Chris Williamson?

  The lady in the shawl.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  I don't agree that it can be made universal. Right? I dream of a bridge. You dream of a bridge. And it's filled with emotion. It's a vibrant bridge. OK, go ahead and explore it. You explore it for yourself within the context of your, your life. And I'll explore it in the context of my life. For me, it might mean suicide. For me, it might mean San Francisco, where I went to college. For you, it might mean something else. So I think the explore, the, the, that the dream residue being a window to our own individual at that moment, subconscious, hyper emotional, hyper visual, hyper sexual state, yes.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  But a symbol that captures it between two people, let alone between your former self. I just don't understand how that can happen conceptually.

• 44:55Chris Williamson?

  What about erotic dreams? What, what have we come to learn about?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  I welcome, yeah. I mean, why not? I mean, it's firing. I mean, you know,

• 45:04Speaker 01

  why not? That, I mean, that's a, it's, this is, that was chapter three. Because I remember we were talking about like, I wanted to hit everything up, up, right off the top. Why we dream? Nightmares. Really? Nightmares? And then erotic dreams.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  It's fascinating because it's another thing that happens before the erotic act. Kids don't have, kids who have never seen a monster and have a puppy, they'll have nightmares that are wild. That's, that's, that's coming, that's descending through our psychological inheritance. Erotic dreams, people have them before the erotic act. It's almost like an instruction guide. And, and what's fascinating to me is the, there's not a lot out there. Ninety something percent, when you go from sexual dreams to erotic dreams, over ninety percent report having them. The terminology. Difference?

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Well, I don't know. I think it's more inclusive. So when you start, uh, when you do surveys in other cultures, they're more willing to sort of say yes. Erotic dreams. Sexual. The term seems to be more, it, it's easier for them to say yes to that. Right. Okay. Because it's. Little less porn vibe. Yeah. And it would also imply maybe. Hugging, cut, kissing. That they're not being. That's not. Exactly. They're not doing it with their partner perhaps. Well, and then the next thing is when you ask, and, and as we get into more online surveys, this is going to be great and more people are included. But like eighty percent report infidelity. And then the infidelities with a small group of people, like a repugnant boss or like family. It's weird.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  The tribe, uh, the characters, the characters in, in the, uh, the, you know, the, the cast and crew is narrow. The acts are wild. And so when you take that data, healthy relationships have infidelity dreams, unhealthy relationships have infidelity. That's, those are sort of the surveys out there. And that, that leads to a lot of cool conversations. But from a neuroscience point of view is,

• 47:05Speaker 01

  that's the part that really trips me out. Is, um.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Is that around the time of erotic dreams, even before, you know, the pituitary has dripped, the hormones that release all the hormones that cascade in our body that leads to the sort of changes of maturity, is that the same fingertips that do touch can now do caress. And it's not like a new nerve got built in there. It's the capacity to perceive sensuality changes where the sensory nerves land in the brain. It goes to the opposite side to a motor sensory strip in the sensory region. So around the time of erotic dreams, um, we developed the ability to have erogenous zones

• 47:54Speaker 01

  where a light touch on the back can be a turn on rather than just bumping into somebody in the subway. That capacity doesn't really exist at age six or seven, and no new nerves are being deposited. It's a perceptual change in the brain.

• 48:05Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so to me, I like thinking about, I don't have a, I don't have any big answers for that. I just want people to walk away from that and say, so those changes, the ability to be aroused, happens around the time of erotic dreams, and often it's before you're actually mature. So it just seems to me again that erotic dreams are arriving almost universally in adolescence to prepare for the act of procreation and to create the drive in our mind that we later carry out in our bodies. That's the way I see it.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether, well, I mean, this is almost certainly going to have been the case throughout history, if you've got a particularly um, prudish society, Victorian England.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  They still get it popping.

• 48:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, of course, you're not going to be able to, but I I wonder how many people that had these erotic dreams back then.

• 49:00Chris Williamson?

  Would have, there would have been a real source of shame for them because I'm cursed. My subconscious is contravening the norms of my culture and God is looking down on me, especially if you're told that, you know, God is watching if you masturbate, God is watching who you're attracted to. You know, infidelity is one of the worst things that you should ever do. You should be loyal to your husband or your wife.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And these dreams are like 80% infidelity and it's all with people around you.

• 49:30Chris Williamson?

  It's your mom, it's your boss, you know what I mean?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  It's the boss you hate, yeah. Yeah, I think it must have led to a lot of inner conflict. And so that when I write about erotic dreams and you look at it in different cultures, you know, my feeling is this is a way that are, just like we learn to walk and talk, nightmares do something because they're a universal dream. Erotic dreams do something. They happen in all cultures. They've happened over hundreds of years. They're happening within a porn, they're happening in Victorian ages. And then to really start to think of the patterns, the patterns of, our dreams are not infinitely wild. That's the, and then what really teaches me is the patterns of our day are not infinitely wild.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  We build and break habits in similar ways. We fail in similar ways, like the brain is not infinite. It does have some, some boundaries in the way it works.

• 50:25Chris Williamson?

  Or the very least guardrails.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, or for example, dreams are not infinitely wild in the sense that you, you don't do math in your dreams. So there is at least one boundary, right? And then they tend to have certain patterns. And now I'm using that to think about that we fail in different ways while we're awake in our lives. And if you look at 10,000 people, the ways that people fail and succeed also start to follow some patterns that I think can guide us to like, hey, our brains and minds work a certain way. And when we learn about that, then you can say, where are we in this? How is our thermostat? Is a victory today just getting out of bed? Or and not saying, hey, wellness, I gotta be, I gotta feel well, or just, I gotta get

• 51:11Speaker 01

  up at bed and get on the bus and get to the cancer center. Like, so I want to personalize that whether you're the addict, this is, this is a side drift, man. But whether you're like, there's this, uh, there are these people in recovery are really good with horses in the Kentucky Derby, whether you're into horses and racing or not, but some other horses can tell somebody who's been through something and has earned and trained themselves to be calm, like they have a better rapport with the animals. No way. Yeah, it was, it was featured when it came out. And so then, and then there's like, then, you know, like, I was in San Francisco, I saw this person really struggling to not use, you know, just really just fighting that. And then I got a buddy in London who runs like this North Saharan, seven marathons in a row, you know, just to show everybody he can.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  And, and when he's pushing to complete that seventh marathon, or that the person using is really pushing to not inject, I think it's actually the same brain processes and patterns that are working inside. And if we can learn how those work, how those can be deployed, how those falter, then we have a universal toolkit. And that's what this dreaming book, that's what I told you earlier was like, it's really important for me is because it's helped me actually understand that if the dreaming brain follows patterns, which seems infinitely wild, right? That you brought up, then, okay, so then our waking brain, we, we follow certain patterns. Um, and, and we're not incarcerated by it, but if we learn those rules, uh, rules of

• 52:37Speaker 01

  survival, rules of our, of, of how our day can be empowered, or watch out for that booby trap and that falter, and watch out for this attentional magnet because it's going to trip you up, like, you could have a, uh, you could have a toolkit, you could have a guidebook to your own, to your, to your, to your own mind. And I, that's where I want to take things, uh, going forward, and that's what the dreaming book has taught me.

• 53:01Chris Williamson?

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• 53:15Chris Williamson?

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• 53:59Chris Williamson?

  Plus, if you're still unsure, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it and try it for three months. If you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back. So you can do it completely risk free. And if you sign up right now, you can get a year's free supply of vitamin D3 K2, five free AG1 travel packs and the 90 day money back guarantee plus international shipping by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/modernwisdom. What do you make of the prevalence of the repugnant boss in erotic dreams?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's a power dynamic, you know, or it's, uh, you know, I don't know, or the family. I mean, my idea was sometimes, um, yeah, the repugnant boss, but what the, the, the narrow list of characters, I thought a hypothesis. Um, again, there's many things we can talk about that can't be proven, but evolution at bottlenecks, like there were times when like it's crazy if you think about it, like how many different, how many species there were at one time. And, um, maybe Homo sapiens were down to a few hundred thousand or a few thousand at that time. And maybe it was an evolutionary advantage to only procreate within the tribe.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Like that's a very hypothetical scenario, but there's, there's a field called evolutionary psychology that are cognitive archaeology, that the way we think.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Was an advantage that led us to

• 55:33Speaker 01

  to thrive in competition with other other hominids because you know, people like, oh, bigger brain, the brain is shrinking. Stop that. Neanderthals had bigger brains. But something with our minds was the advantage. It wasn't just the size compared to Neanderthals. And this, that's why I love like evolutionary psychology that and the way we're thinking now is something we've inherited that was advantageous hundreds of thousands of years ago. But we're but we have to now adapt that to the modern life.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so if we're thinking adaptively here, I'm also a huge EP fan.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  If we're thinking adaptively, the repugnant boss or the the family member very well, maybe we're not particularly well used to having 200,000 people available on Hinge or Tinder or in our local city that are our age and hot trot. There's usually only a very, very small group of people that are here. And perhaps the sleep dream of that is, well, what if I test this out? How how does that make me feel? What does that mean for me? Because there aren't that many other people that are available and probably should see if this is actually going to work or not.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I mean, that's possible. I mean, now

• 56:51Speaker 01

  as far as the characters in erotic dreams, whoever writes this book next is going to have a lot more surveys from a lot of different types of people, speaking a lot more openly about these things. And then they're gonna have to figure out like, you know, I mean, celebrities are part of the erotic dream. They're considered part of the tribe, like Brad Pitt or whatever, like celebrities show up, feel familiar.

• 57:15Chris Williamson?

  Something to do with status, maybe?

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Or familiarity that you see them so much, you feel like they are family. I I don't know. It's we're just riffing, but I'm curious to see that with with social media stuff. How influencers, do they show up in a similar capacity as conventional celebrities that I grew?

• 57:30Chris Williamson?

  Let me let me warn you right now. You do not want the pillar talk of a podcaster in your dream or not. You know.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  People gonna call in, they're gonna write in.

• 57:38Chris Williamson?

  No, thank you. No, thank you. Look, look, you went.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Repugnant boss, Chris.

• 57:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you slept with a podcaster. What did you expect to happen after? God, it's three hours and he's still going. He's still going on about the biggest gun of World War II. Will you shut the fuck up? Hey, look, I mean, you asked for that. You knew what you were getting into. On the erotic dreams thing, I don't know whether we have enough longitudinal data to work this out. I'd be fascinated to see what impact the prevalence of porn has had in changing the sort of erotic dream. Men cycling through even more partners in one sexual fantasy. Are they being influenced by what they see on screen? I certainly know that if I read it.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  Well, if I. That's a massive book. Get just 10 years, somebody just needs to rock that.

• 58:19Chris Williamson?

  I, I like to read fiction before I go to bed and I've been. I have an admission to make. I've been getting into chick stuff, a lot of chick stuff. Freedom McFadden, The Housemaid, Housemaid's Tale.

• 58:32Chris Williamson?

  Alex Michaelides, who wrote The Silent Patient. It's like thrillers.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Really by chicks, but not necessarily only for women.

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  Really good.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Insights come from everywhere.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Easy, easy read in. Usually a woman in her early 30s that's kind of lucked over, who fixes some sort of crazy murder thing that happens. That impacts my sleep like fuck, dude. Like, I go to bed and I've got, but it's usually.

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. It's a particular, so you think, okay, if the thing that I read before I go to bed, I'm also watching The Tour de France Unchained on Netflix at the moment. For some reason, I'm not having many cycling dreams. If these two things are happening, we have to assume that people who use porn a lot.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  The volume.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  How is that not impacting erotic dreams?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I think that's the. I think that's the experiment. That's, uh, that's ongoing and somebody younger.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Then me will see that that's the opportunity here to look at that. And in the, in the context of dreams, the, it's super physiologic stimuli is another concept. You know, you, you, the, the, you can't look away because it's just so, it's just like a coked up version of something. And so you may have some finesse and emotional regulation. And you may be able to sort of in your own competition or wants to be like, I'm not going to look over there because yes, I feel desire and lust for that, that image. But that pops up once or twice, but when it's just like on loop, uh, uh, and you can't. I'm surprised it's, porn addiction is only 5%.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  All right, given just the super physiologic stimuli that it is. But yes, the impact on dreamscape, the modern world's impact on dreamscape is as big as the, when there were rumors that when black and white television went to color, that dreams also became to color. There's some urban legend about that, like, I mean, the world was in color, but when, when color magazines and, and, and color TV came out, there are small reports that our dreams were more in color.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  So that's a, but the point is whether that, whether somebody can further explore that or not, but right now, this is, this is a, this is a PhD thesis for somebody right now, if they want to run it is.

• 1:00:54Chris Williamson?

  How unsurprising that the things you consume will influence the way that your subconscious works at night.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  But sometimes not.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Right? Like it's, it's an inconsistent process of feeding your dreams. And that's what I like about it is that you think like this, you, you think your dreams are only going to have the thing that you're worried about and it doesn't. So it has, it's metaphorical, like you're, you might have a lot of anxiety about, uh, something and then your dream is filled with anxiety, but it's like, it's like Vietnam veterans, when they were going through divorces, they would have their PTSD come back. They weren't, they weren't dreaming about fighting with their lovers or spouses. So dreams arise in a way that's metaphorical and requires interpretation, uh, by the person who's having the dreams.

• 1:01:40Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that says about where the inspiration for dream material comes from?

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  I think it's a constant, it's, it's so.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  So I think during the day, we are, just stay with me now. Um, if we took, if we took a brain and we flattened it out and we said, well, they were continents. Right? Thinking of the brain as this spot or that spot. Sometimes if we injure a certain spot, like a nail, I used to take care, I did a lot of trauma. Nail gun injuries, they come in with like a nail stuck in, you know? Or they'd have a fall and a blood clot would come out. You would say you take out a certain part and they would lose a certain capacity. You say, oh, this is what does this. It's not like that. It's like Heathrow or London. You know? If you have an issue at LAX, it's going to disrupt something globally. But it's not that LAX does flights. LAX is a hub that controls flight throughout the planet.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  Similarly, there are spots in the brain hubs that control broad processes throughout the brain. And, and what I like about it is that these injuries have informed us about how, how the brain works. And when you have an injury in that dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, which is these little spots here that, that's the conductor of your whole brain while you're awake. Those people struggle with math. And so it's okay. It plays a role in that. And if you flatten out the brain and you have these different continents and lobes and structures hypothetically, you have certain parts that are ramped up during the day during executive network. They're, they're not in one area. They're connected by a lot of things like, like where's the economy?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  I mean, is in the cities and Wall Street? It's everywhere, but there are some hubs. So the executive network is one. It's like, like in Las Vegas where Bellagio, where those waterfalls go up. Think of the executive network as those neurons and their connections. They're like 51%. They're running shit right now. And the imagination network is 49. And and when you dream, it it it kind of flips. You have forty nine fifty one hypothetically, okay? But when you're when the when you're daytime and it's executive network, you're still pulling from imagination to to run to get the task done. You're still thinking, if I went left, if I went right, it's called counterfactual thinking. If I go this way, last time I got hurt, you know?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  You're still imagining plus executive network. And what what happens with dreams is when the executive network falls back, your brain uses imagination as its own mental workspace. Uh, and the biggest example of that is dreaming. So think of the brain is always on. And there's always a there's always a there's always a balance between executive network and imagination network. And and the examples of the most dominant time when your executive network is happening is under threat when you have to navigate a crisis. And the biggest example of when your imagination network is is most dominant, let's say fifty four uh to forty six is when when you're dreaming.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  But everything in between is a dance between I, you know, of execution and idea. And what I like, this is this is just a side riff. Like they did this thing about analyzing uh poetry or book cover designs. And they would put these people in F M R I machines. And the idea generation is mostly imagination network. But to figure out if you came up with a good idea, you had to toggle back to dominant executive network. Otherwise, you just got a bunk idea, right? And so that what I don't want people to walk away thinking that we're liminal states, that we're all one or all the other. And it's a there's a thermostat in our life and how to cope.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  But there's also a a balance of of executive network and imagination network. And there are things creative people do to bring in the imagination network. But imagination requires executive function. And really great executive function still requires imagination.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the ways that people who want to activate their imagination network more effectively when they're awake can do that?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Oof, um, all right. So I I got some stories for this one. There are some examples. That speak to, again, a damaged executive network liberating a lot of imagination. One example is alcohol. It dampens the executive network. And some people feel that they're more creative on alcohol. And it's dose dependent, you know, not 10 drinks, not one drink. I mean, alcohol has to be really handled with care. At different doses, it makes you feel different things. Uh, number two, frontotemporal dementia that Bruce Willis has. These patients in Alzheimer's clinics, when they have a certain injury to that part of their brain, there are publications, if people go on and look it up.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  They show them, and they're like artistic abilities, they can paint a lot better. Dementia and injury to the executive network leads to a liberation of, uh, of, of hidden artistic, like painting, drawing talents. So those are two examples. Some people get hit with lightning bolts and even if it's one person, the, the electrical shift can release, um, can change that executive network to. No way. Yeah, I mean, they're, they're out there for savants and people could. So when I say this, I want people to look it up, you know? Uh, uh, and that's also one flew over the kooky's, cuckoo's nest where that movie made a portrayal of shock therapy is very negative and it generally was.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  But now we create, we send in electricity and create a seizure to break people out of suicidal thoughts and stuff. So there are a lot of thing, and those people sometimes have more creative ideation. So we know that there are hidden, uh, hidden creative abilities in all of us. And the executive network is, is, is reining them in to get the task done, to, to drive on the freeway, to be on the tube. So how can we extract those? I would go back to sleep entry, um, where that's a window where Salvador Dali thought you have good idea generation. Sleep exit is also an, is a time where the executive network hasn't fully come back online, if you will.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  So your ideas will, I have a lot of ideas during that time, bad ideas, good ideas, but it's an idea generator. And then during the day, what you have to realize is you're not going to hit a undirected thought is actually the thought you want when you're trying to be creative. It's hard to have a triple espresso and then drop creative stuff. Uh huh. It's, it's the liminal time, waking up, meditating, um, exercising.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Focusing on something like a flow state, partially, but not, you know, not exclusively.

• 1:08:34Chris Williamson?

  Driving, doing the dishes, playing pickleball.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  But partially engaged, and then something, and then some, and then it, you can't demand it. You have to cultivate it, get liberated.

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  You can't white knuckle creativity. It's highly, highly irritating.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Another espresso. Let's, let's.

• 1:08:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, running back. Fuck it. Um, yeah, that's, that's certainly something I've found to be true. Sitting down and demanding yourself to be creative is a reliable way to ensure that you're not creative.

• 1:09:01Speaker 01

  You have to flirt with it. I mean, that's why, that's why it's not a gift everyone has, but it can be cultivated, you know?

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  What's, you, you mentioned there about some of the transcranial electric stuff. As a neurosurginy person in that world, what do you make of? What do you, what do you make of this sort of new revolution? I know that depression, anxiety, some compulsions have been treated with this now.

• 1:09:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you, what do you make of this?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  It's real, right? But it's also very easy to go on Amazon and get one for four nine, $4.99 where they got the little headband and.

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Because being positioned in the same way. So the stuff where it's real is rigorous. It's intense. It's at massive elite centers.

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep. And we can. Usually 30 days of back-to-back treatment as well.

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they, and not a 30-day refund like on Amazon, right? So every time I, neurosurgery was, neurosurginy was a funny word. We have to be able to talk about things like instinct and hunch because that leads to the fullest capacity, right? Smarts plus instinct. Who doesn't want that? Sports has the best thing like, you know, under pressure, how people perform. That can't, that can't be white knuckled either. The, the brain has to be thought about in scale. You cannot answer all of these questions with the brain. Like, people talk about it, it's like, you can't, it's not a homogeneous organ. It's not a liver. If you dice up the liver at different areas and you put it on a magnifying glass, it's the same cell, essentially, for the most part.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  The brain has so many different cell types, so many different architectural components, floating inside a, you know, it's buoyant, it's floating, it's like liquid. It doesn't actually sit on the skull, you know? And like, so it's an ecosystem of little electrical molecular machines, like tiny jellyfish that are spraying electricity and chemicals at each other. And as we talked about before with those stickers, you can record electricity. You can also deliver electricity, and that would be shock therapy. And now, what's less disruptive is delivering using magnets. So, for people who are familiar with physics, I'm not. I took all the classes to go to medical school.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  But electromagnetic fields, they can influence each other. So you can pulse a magnet through the skull, and it can change the local electricity of a certain region. So you can actually put a magnet on the surface, no incision required,

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  and pulse to the motor strip and make somebody's arm move. Because, because back to, it's an electrical currency that leads to

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  dreams, you know? It's measured at night with dreams. It can be, it can be tickled. And so now, Stanford's doing some good stuff within other places is, well, what if you, what if you have obsessive compulsive disorder? Somebody else makes the diagnosis. The term is not used casually, let's say. It's not like, oh, I'm obsessed. But somebody really is like, man, I turned that doorknob 120 times today. So they're looking at, the pulse can be used to dampen the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. Oh, and it can be used to heighten. So if you pulse that area every day for 30 days, and you dampen it a little bit, and at the same time, somebody gets therapy,

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  and you do cognitive reappraisal, like the parts of therapy that I like are some of the ways where you're basically training yourself. And you say, hey, That's not dirty. Don't, don't worry about it. Or that door is locked. You don't need to wash your hands eighty times a day. Like you, you, you've been struggling with that fight the whole time. People with OCD, they know they shouldn't. And now if you pulse that area, that's kind of made it, you know, difficult for them to control. That combination is leading to results that we haven't been able to find by just giving medicine. Hmm. So it's real, but the thought that you can buy this and then do it for yourself. Self-administer. Yeah, or with, um, with the tech, with a device that looks the same,

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  but is not delivering the same technology. But that, that is the future of mental health is a combination of therapy, magnetic pulsing, occasional medicine, and that as a cocktail, not just like three different types of antidepressants, which were helpful in for people, but a mixture of talk therapy, a mixture of exercise, talk therapy, magnetic pulsing, all non-invasive. And if you can get a ten, twenty percent improvement in what we're already, what was going on right now, I think that's fantastic.

• 1:13:45Chris Williamson?

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• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  Just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. You've triggered dreams while people were awake during brain surgery. What's that tell us about?

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  I mean, this is how the, I mean, this was a story back in a, I noticed in my twenties when I was in training, so, um.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  So there's this thing, you know, some, some patients benefit from being woken up with, with their skull open in surgery. How could you benefit from that? Because whereas this dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, we kind of know where it is. Whereas the movement area, like the hand region, we kind of know where it is, you know, just based on an MRI. It's consistent in you and me and others. Language is in a neighborhood. It's in the left temporal lobe, right around here. And there is no, uh, there is no specific address for it. It's just different in both of us. And so to figure out, um, where language is, so you don't hurt it as you're trying to enter the deep brain through that area, you have to map the brain.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  And let me, and so what we're trying to do is to get to it. So, uh, the neurons, the bodies of the jellyfish, molecular jellyfish are all on the surface. And then their, their axons and tentacles converge into the middle of the brain. So the cortex, the canopy, the treetops is where all the, where all the thoughts are happening, if you will.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  And so what we're trying to do is identify the parts of the treetop right here, the cortex, that when you stun the activity in this tiny little area, it doesn't lead to any, any issues with them talking or understanding. And this is a, this isn't just like, they'll still be able to text. You can, you can hurt the whole capacity of language. So, uh, the only way to do that is to wake, wake them up in surgery. And there's a, you numb the scalp, you put them under anesthesia, you open the skull, it's like ice fishing. Uh, then there's a little covering on the brain called the dura mater. It's like a, uh, it's like, um, you know, like a sort of a, yeah, skydiving parachute material. You can pick it up and stitch it at the end. Uh, you open it up and then there it is. It's beautiful.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  It's stunning. It's white, speckled with blood vessels. And, um, and then you.

• 1:16:57Speaker 01

  Then you let them wake up slowly over thirty minutes. Uh, you know, the propofol is lightened. And then somebody engages them and you have them count and sing and sometimes even play the guitar. Like UCLA has got a YouTube video of somebody doing that, like bigger capacities, right? Um, not just like pinch your finger, but. And so they'll sing like they'll sing or they'll count and it'll do it in multiple languages. One, two, three, four, five, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. And then you'll, then you'll take a little spot, a little electrical pen. Faint as bit electricity. And the brain can't feel when it's being touched. It only feels through the nerves it sends out. So when you dissect the brain on an awake patient, they have no idea what's going on. And you tickle the, uh, you tickle the spot and they.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  And you stun those like collection of neurons there, maybe the size of like a tiny pea. And they keep counting, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, you say, okay. I can go through this little piece. To the deeper brain and I won't hurt their language abilities. So you put a little white piece of confetti on there or a number. Hmm. And then you go next to it. And then you'll find areas that cause speech arrest. You'll say, it'll be like one, two, three, four, you'll buzz, they'll go one, two, three, three, three, three, three, three, three. That's for real. You guys can look all that up. That's been going on for sixty, seventy years. And you said that caused speech arrest. You put a little red piece of confetti. So at the end, the surface of the brain. As you're going deeper, it looks like Swiss cheese and you've, you've identified the portals.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Through which you can dissect to take out the deeper tumor. Uh, and not injure their language. Why is language such an important indicator? Ooh, that's a big question. I mean, I think it's, uh. Um, I think it kind of makes us who we are. I mean, it was sort of a, a differentiating thing for, for mammals. Uh, is language and then all the complexity that comes with language, but. It, it is housed in a neighborhood. And unlike the frontal lobes, uh, there's not a lot of redundancy. So the motor strip is the same.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  Apes, you know, humans, the same. Language, it's kind of a fuzzy address. One frontal lobe can be injured with a spike, with a tumor. And people are mostly fine. I mean, they go home, they drive, they go to work. So there's a maximum redundancy in these. The prefrontal cortex is, it's, it's an important word. It's front of the front. It's the, the things that, that pushed our foreheads forward. And it has three very interesting components. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is mostly out here. Dorsal up, lateral, it's just fancy. Then there's an orbitofrontal cortex, which is sort of sits above the eyes. And that does a lot of like, when people are injured there, they can't change their political views or they don't get like social faux pas.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Like, there's a lot of complex social things that happen up here with a lot of redundancy. And then language and feelings of spirituality and stimulating here where people like have nightmares, smell burnt toast, that's temporal low. And that's, that's a fuzzy area without a lot of redundancy. And then the motor strip is a very precise area. So there, there are different regions you have to learn how to dissect around and through.

• 1:20:12Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. And some of them can have a little bit of damage and you still function relatively well. And some of them even a tiny bit of damage and it's, it's wrecked. Yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  And that's, that's the craft is how do I get to the deeper brain?

• 1:20:24Chris Williamson?

  Um, how do I, which, without damaging anything that doesn't have redundancy?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  How do dreams differ in people that have got brain injuries? Or really severe trauma?

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Um, that's a good question. The, um, the range of injuries vary. The range of drugs vary. I couldn't, I couldn't figure out like the dreams on drugs was just so wild. I couldn't find a pattern. I mean, you know, people smoke weed. Uh, they don't remember much. So are they having fewer dreams or fewer, less dream recall? And then there was stimulants and antidepressants and all the different combinations. I couldn't find a consistent pattern for it to become a chapter. I think that'll be for the next author. And similarly, in brain injury, um, um, there, there wasn't really a consistent pattern. With exception to one, the.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Uh, the thalamus is sort of like this, the pineal gland that they talk about being the third eye, we, we remove that, melatonin goes away, we remove that, patients are fine. So I'm not saying that people shouldn't believe in the, that concept and Descartes and the third eye, but the pineal gland is essentially a, it's like an appendix, but the central, like the size of an egg, there's something called the thalamus, which is sort of the gate for all the sensations coming up and it refines the movements going out. When you have injury in that area, uh, they tend to have a lot more lucid dreams immediately afterwards. So like, like it's, it's almost like, uh, there's too much arousal permitted in the sleeping state because the thalamus is injured, right?

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  The gatekeeper has stopped keeping the gate.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Right. Cause the gate is, again, nothing is ever off. If there's an alarm that goes off or you smell smoke, you're going to pop up out of your sleep and dreams. And that, what is let through, I think they do all kinds of weird things like have people sleep and they put their hand in a glass of water or a bucket and see what that changed. The point there is a thalamus is, uh, is the gatekeeper that lets certain things through. If that part is injured, uh, let's certain things through and says, time to wake up, there's an alarm. If you injure that part, you get a more, more lucid dreaming. Awareness seems to creep into the dreaming state, uh, a little bit more readily.

• 1:22:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Could you see in some ways the thoughts that people have in their dreams being more real or more accurate to their sense of self than their waking thoughts? They're unencumbered by the executive network, tamping everything down, their sense of self, the story that they have arced together. This is who I am and this is what it means to be me. Uh, I had a conversation with Dr. David Spiegel about hypnosis and it sounds not too dissimilar that maybe in some ways we're liberated. So yeah, I wonder whether, yeah, some of the thoughts we have in dreams could be more real than the ones that we have when we're awake.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  Well, um, I don't know, but I will tell you that, um,

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Some dreams require no interpretation, right? You're stressed out about giving a talk, you show up naked at the podium. Your end of life dreams, those tie up. But as we discussed earlier, let's not hold dreams to a a standard we wouldn't waking thought like we have all kinds of junk thoughts and thoughts that we don't want to hold on to. Those that don't reflect who we really are. Um, and I think similarly for dreams, it's, it's a wild landscape. What it is, is your brain in a hyper emotional, hyper visual, hyper sexual, hyper imaginative state that is creating experiences at the neuronal level, not at the, you're paralyzed, so you're not living them out. But it's from your memory, it's from your life story.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Right? It's drawing upon all of that imagination that's liberated from the bank of memories and experiences you've had. And I think in that way, it's personal, it's individual. And maybe it doesn't give a truer insight, but it gives a different insight. So you gotta think about your life when you're awake, when you're waking up, when you're falling asleep.

• 1:24:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Hold on to that dream that, that stuck along, stuck around a little bit longer. Um, and just use all those portals to put, to stitch the story of, are you liking where you're at and maybe you need to change or maybe you need to be at peace with yourself?

• 1:24:42Chris Williamson?

  I think the main thing that it makes me think is that it's a reminder, we have way less control than we think we do.

• 1:24:47Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:24:48Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the main thing that.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Shit is firing, we are not driving. I mean, and during the day too, right? I think that goes back to the, but if we learn the ways in which at this time, I have less emotional regulation. At this time, I have more emotional, right? Like if we knew, it's not that we have a lot less control, but it's almost like riding, it's, it's like the stream of consciousness. Like there are some boundaries and you are, you are sort of riding on a river. You're being tossed around, but you have some, you can drop a hand and control and pivot and move around a little bit. So I think if it allows for failure not to be permanent, allows for triumphs not to be permanent.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  And it allows for us to say, um, that it's okay to not have a linear goal of self-improvement and growth mindset. Like to me, it's cyclical. Uh, there's the winter in our life. Victory is sometimes just getting up. Victory is sometimes not, you know, just not falling apart. If you get a cancer diagnosis or your child gets ill. So I'm trying to come up with universal ways of understanding how our brains and minds work. So it applies to uh, the, uh, the elite, uh, nine hundred, running a hundred mile athlete, or the person saying, you know, I don't want to use this oxycontin that I got after surgery. I'm trying to give this up, you know? That it's the same universal processes at play. It takes a judgment out of it, too.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  Going a bit more broad than just dreams, someone that spent a lot of time looking at the brain. What are the myths that are widely held about the brain that annoy you the most? Would you wish people would stop believing?

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  That's a great, that's a great. I, I've, I wish they would start, uh, stop talking about it as the brain. That, as if it's a homogeneous singular entity, the brain, the heart. And I think it's, uh, I think it requires just one level more. And the way I would say is I'd love for people to have a sense of scale in their explanations in podcasts and stuff. Is it at the neuronal level? Is it at the network level, executive network or imagination network? Is it at the lobe level, anatomical level, temporal lobe and language? Is it at the global electricity level?

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Seizures, dreams. And so when people say, well, the brain prefers this, the brain thinks this, like the, I don't, it doesn't make sense to me because um, it's not descriptive of the tremendous diversity in this ecosystem in our skulls. I would, I would love to see one more level of. Not proof, but a little Detail or precision? Depth of explanation that goes beyond the brain as if it's like muscle or liver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So that then that way you'll know if people have really thought it out. Uh, that's one. And then the number two is this myth that we only use 20% of our brain. No, I mean, the whole brain lights up, but to do one thing, we may only use 20% because it's really an energy hog.

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  So the brain wants to be efficient and fall into patterns. Um, and the and the last one is that it's limitless, you know? Your body's limitless, your your mind is limitless. Actually, no, it's I I think you can be closest to limitless in your behavior. Um, if you realize that there are patterns and proclivities and tendencies that all human brains and minds have, and to try to identify when somebody does it well, what are their coping strategies? When somebody's struggling, uh, the way in which they falter with their goals. Um, maybe I don't, I'm not falling apart now, but there is, there's a lesson there for me. Because I don't know what's coming down the road. I haven't gotten knocked down yet, like,

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  and that's called ecological validity, where it has to constantly be tested in real worst scenarios. So to me, the the learning that the brain is not limitless limitless and the brain creates a mind that is reciprocal, brain makes the mind, mind can change the brain a little bit. And then the biggest conundrum is why the mind doesn't always translate to behavior. You're like convinced I'm not gonna do this or I'm gonna do this. You just can't get it done. That bridge between mind and behavior is also another an area I'm looking at, and that's where the coping strategies go, rather than saying, oh, don't drink, don't smoke. It would be nice to say, when the thought of smoking a cigarette comes in your mind, these are the processes going on.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Break it at the cognitive level with step one, two, three, avoid the intentional magnet, do this, don't look at it, definitely don't let that smell come into your nose. Okay, now it's in your body. You had a whiff of smoke that your partner's having. Now your body's jonesing for it, your your hair is Sticking up, bringing these strategies here, somatic therapies, deep breathing, like to know the ways in which we falter. And then to apply strategies because the brain has uh uh is not limitless. It it falters in a certain way, triumphs in a certain way. So a little bit more prescriptive to the way, what stage in your, you know, failure or triumph you're at. Would give a little bit more precision to rather than, because it could, it can get overwhelming.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  I would never tell my cancer patient, like, you know, just be well, or you can do it. They have to be coached through the process. So I'm trying to come up with a universal toolkit to understand. This is what I'm feeling. This is the way most brains and minds and people falter when at this stage of addiction, of desire. And at this step, I want to use these strategies. Okay, now I'm going to get the cigarette. Okay, now I want to use mitigation. Give away the pack. You know, like, but not to just give a global strategy, don't smoke. Don't smoke, but if you're being pulled in that direction, here's the game plan. Uh, that's what I want to build, a universal toolkit.

• 1:30:54Chris Williamson?

  Do you think the neuroscience industry is overselling some of the new tech? That's coming along, FMRI's, brain scans of all different types. We can detect onset of Parkinson's, CT scan with contrast, all of this stuff.

• 1:31:12Chris Williamson?

  Are we, are they making promises that the sort of insights can't cash?

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  I think so. It started like twenty, thirty years ago, we needed these scans to do surgery, to do brain surgery. So I'll tell you, this is another story. My professors, they, when you had a blood clot, they would see like somebody's eyeball was, you know, pupil was big. And they would call it exploratory trephination. With a hand drill just start with the patient's family's consent thirty, forty years ago, there were no CT scans. And they would just make random holes till they hit, hit blood, like drilling for oil. Then a CT scan came out and changed everything. You could see which side the blood clot was on. That's fantastic, right? They're coming out of hospitals for neurosurgery. Then we try to figure out like function. And that's where FMRI started.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  And because MRIs don't have radiation, you can elect to be in there. You can get MRI every day. CAT scan has radiation. And so neuroscientists started putting people in there. And what I would say is what's happened is the term is being thrown around, brain scans. But uh, the information, nobody's explaining it. Um, that this area is activated. But what if you activate the area that, uh, you know, stops a function? That's different than activate an area that grows a function, right? So that there's a modulation of the brain. You don't, not all activation is good. Not all inhibition is good, right? And so that, those nuances are not, not getting out.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  But the term brain scan can be used by any author now. And I'm not saying that, I mean, everybody's an expert in the brain, right? Cause we have one, so I don't, I'm not saying that we should limit that. But the question should be one step further. That, and what, what is the meaning of that? A brain scan shows this. And, and the way to understand, in my opinion, what the meaning is, i- is to ask, how was that experiment set up? Right? Like, just to say, so you have a thousand people who think of puppies in an FMRI? And then you have a thousand people who don't think of puppies and think of snakes in FMRI's? And then you're looking at the differences?

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Puppies affects on mental health versus snakes affect on mental? That experiment can't be set up. Cause you can't stop the person thinking about puppies, thinking about snakes. And you can't really control the person thinking about snakes, thinking about puppies. There's no way to set that experiment up. So when it says, "Brain scans show this," I think if I were an interviewer, I'd say, well, like, how was that experiment set up? And I think that way we would get past some of the fluff that's out there. Because uh, it has, there has to be an experiment that justifies the answer. And then just throwing out brain scan, I don't think is enough.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  What role does?

• 1:34:09Chris Williamson?

  Lifestyle really play when it comes to cognitive decline.

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Massive.

• 1:34:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm seeing a lot now. I'm big behavioral genetics stan as well. I think that heritability has got a fetid past, but it's real important. And I think that more people should learn about behavioral genetics than do. I think it's, there's a lot being laid at the feet of of lifestyle because it's something that we do have control of in a meritocracy, where people feel like they want to be able to author their own life. This idea that you are being purported by some stuff that happened literally before you were born, like as you were conceived, is very disempowering as an idea to a lot of people. But I also think it's super informative. And if you can kind of get past the initial discomfort of, ah,

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  there's some stuff that I didn't choose that I'm at the mercy of. But on the flip side of that, lifestyle as well. So talk to me about cognitive decline and its contributing elements, lifestyle, genetics. How do you come to think about it?

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  DNA is not destiny, especially when it comes to the brain and mind. Like, I mean, DNA might be destiny for like heart attacks or stuff like that, or certain, there are certain medical conditions that are very linked to genetics, epigenetics. But whether you have a proclivity or tendency to have Alzheimer's or dementia or not, whether you want to stave that off because you don't want to know based on a new Alzheimer's test, or whether you've been given a diagnosis and you're trying to work through it, the treatment is all lifestyle and behavioral. The medicines are limited. They're, they

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  exist for early diagnosis and Alzheimer's, but the treatment is all lifestyle. The way I, the way I think about it, there's five, five key things to do, or a handful of key things to do.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Is one, you gotta keep the arteries open. We've been talking about the, the, the beautiful brain. You have four arteries coming up. They, they get into this beautiful branching pattern. It's exquisite. Parts of them loop over each other. It looks like a chandelier. We call it the candelabra. And they get narrower and narrower. So you gotta irrigate the flesh. So whatever's good for keeping heart arteries open and kidney arteries open is also good for keeping brain arteries open. Exercise. Yeah, or taking the, the anti-cholesterol pills that are long established and mostly safe, like pretty safe, you know? So exercise, yeah. Uh, but exercise does a couple of them. So you gotta keep the plumbing open to irrigate these neurons. Um, number two is, uh,

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  you have to eat a certain way. And I know there's a lot of diet stuff out there and it's a whole theme. But the thing that over decades has been proven uh, to preserve or even increase cognitive health, cognitive function is um, is the mind diet. And which is the closest thing to it is pescatarian. It's mostly plants, fatty fish. And the reason fat, so I like to take it one step, one step deeper. The reason it's fatty fish and omega threes is you mentioned the word myelin before. And so the little, the, the neurons and the axons, the way they make the electricity communicate faster is that the cable is wrapped

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  uh, with a fatty sheath that's called myelin. And then the electricity actually jumps uh, across the little gaps they have. And it goes faster than if it is not myelin coated. Uh, and thought can actually deposit myelin, preferring that thought to happen again. Uh, that myelin sheath is made from omega threes. So you, there's a specific fat that's needed for myelin and that's omega threes and fatty fish. You can get in, in flaxseed and other things too. So keeping the plumbing open, giving the brain the material it needs. Now we're at the, at the scale level, right? Okay, and then you, then you go in a little deeper. Um, the timing of eating is interesting. I, I do think there's some pretty strong neuroscience evidence of intermittent fasting.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  I know there are a lot of diet things out there, but skipping, if, who, if you have the luxury of skipping breakfast, skipping, going sixteen hour windows will, uh, if you don't eat, you're not gonna just drop dead. And the brain, the brain is a, uh, a hybrid vehicle. The brain can live off of neurons can, you know, thrive and, and use glucose or ketones. And so after sixteen hours, your liver will, will churn out ketones if you haven't eaten. So that's how you live past, you know, the sixteen hour window if you don't consume anything. And that switching back and forth, um, in intermittent fasting, the cognitive tests now, now we're getting from flesh to mind.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Um, uh, people seem to have more focus, people seem to have more, it's not about weight loss, but intermittent fasting, it's letting the brain have glucose and ketones a couple of times a week.

• 1:39:16Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So your suggestion here is that all ketones, someone that's doing a full ketosis or carnivore style diet, or somebody that's doing a classic sort of omnivore style diet, which when you're grazing, typically you're not gonna drop into ketosis unless you forget to eat carbs for a couple of days or something. Uh, you're suggesting that there is a principal brain benefit and neurological benefit to the switching between these two fuel sources.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:39:43Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Weight loss is separate.

• 1:39:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and. Autophagy and the, the, the, the.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but also, I mean, there's a lot of ways to lose weight. Um, but this, this is, we're talking about how to stay sharp.

• 1:39:53Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Keeping the flesh healthy, keeping the plumbing open, those are arteries, you know, vascular health. Um, exercise could do that. What we eat, giving your brain the right materials and the mostly plants will clear out the sludge and the antioxidants. You know, the plants work because they got, they have antioxidants and, and tannins and these things that clear the sludge that these little molecular machines called neurons make, right? It's, that's why plants are good for your brain.

• 1:40:21Chris Williamson?

  Are there any that you prioritize?

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  In plants?

• 1:40:24Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't think it really matters. It's hard, again, I can't find the experiment where they got a thousand people eating spinach and they got a thousand. But I can tell you over thirty years, whether it's blue zones or the Mediterranean diet, now specifically called the mind diet. It's Mediterranean diet and those people, they get a lot less Alzheimer's than people who don't. So I, I can't distill it down to that, but Michael Pollan, you know, he's great, mostly plants. And some fish. And then the indulgence of the burger or the caviar or the, with a vegan, you know, burger patties. It's all, it's all up to you, but the staple is pescatarian. Then we talked about the timing of eating, what to eat, the timing of eating.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  And then, um, I think the other one that's.

• 1:41:11Chris Williamson?

  We're just on the timing of eating thing. Uh, outside of the intermittent fasting thing, is there anything else to say on that? It's primarily at some point, a couple of sixteen hour fasts.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Ketones.

• 1:41:22Chris Williamson?

  Couple of sixteen hour fasts per week is probably a good idea.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and relatively easy to do, you can have black coffee in the morning.

• 1:41:29Chris Williamson?

  I, I feel great when I do, when I fast, I, I feel really, really great.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, a, a, and, and that's another, another theme I'm trying to tie in, like things that have worked for the ancients, you know, whether it's again, back to Aristotle or fasting and different things. Again, for people with the luxury of this, right, most, there's a lot of food insecurity, I'm just giving you the conceptual answer.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  And then the, you know, the, the fourth thing is, is movement. So exercise is, is, is movement, but, uh, for my patients, what we've seen is that when you're vertical. Like people think like it's got to, you know, you gotta have, you gotta have the gear, you're out there, you're just, you look like you're auditioning for the Equinox commercial or whatever, like, that's great, I'm not knocking that. But for most people, just standing, for my patients, the trajectories of patients who can stand and get up from a toilet and stand and get to the couch is so much better. Being vertical requires postural muscle activity. So what I would say is walking. And movement are also cognitive protective.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  And you mentioned exercise now. So exercise and movement does a couple of things. One, it keeps those arteries open that we talked about.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  As far as the food, well, number two, what to eat pescatarian. Third, and mind diet, people can look all these terms up. Third, when to eat intermittent fasting for ketones and the cognitive benefits. Thinking benefits, not structural. Fourth is exercises that it that this ecosystem requires nutrients, not neurotransmitters that are being sprayed between neurons, but but in the milieu, in the garden, if you will. And there are things like growth factors. Obviously, B D N F is a popular one. I had a grant from the Department of Defense studying it. I'm familiar with it. What I want people to know is when you exercise, it's not like it's released from, you know,

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  like your thigh muscle and swims up to your brain and says, hey, I'm helping you out now. That these chemicals are housed in the brain. And exercise is the cue, is the signal for your brace, brain to release them on themselves. B D N F is released from the brain for the brain when you exercise. And I think that's, I think that's powerful. Outside of the cardiac and weight loss, I'm just talking about a little bit of movement a couple of times a week. And all of a sudden, it starts to feel like, hey, I could do these things. Yep, that pretty low bows to entry. But but high, high impact and proven. And then the last one is you got to think, man, you got to challenge yourself.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  I mean, if, you know, Usain Bolt, you know, you ask him how to run faster. So you train your, you train your biceps. I mean, it's, it's a thinking flesh. If you don't, if you don't push it to the next level of complexity and thought and challenge, not too hard where you quit, just like video games. If it's too hard to get to, if to level up, we tap out. If it's too easy, we're not engaged. So finding whatever you're engaged in, from puzzles to complex conversations, that it, it, it needs to be challenged with thought, with ideas, with creativity, with reading those novels you're reading at night. So the fresh content that's engaging and requires you to think.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Think differently, think wildly, think in ways you haven't before. I think that's an essential part of also. That doesn't mean everybody who was a professor lived longer, did better than, you know, people were just rocking out, not approaching it that way. But creative ideation, I think, is as valuable as just raw processing power. It's not all about doing math and puzzles. I think challenge yourself to be creative is an intelligence in itself.

• 1:45:22Chris Williamson?

  What about the impact of stress on brain aging?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, this is a, this is a big question now. So this whole thing about cortisol is like, okay. I don't have an answer for that. I know people who live in a constant stress. It seems like constant stress is bad for you in a lot of ways. I also know thrill seekers, surgeons, athletes. Every time they do something exciting, cortisol is up. Okay. And they don't have accelerated brain, you know, brain aging. So I don't have an answer for whether cortisol is doing it, whether stress is doing it, whether it's just a rough life, whether it's struggling with thoughts you can't control,

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  which revert back to your brain and injure your brain. I don't have an answer for that, but I think with the story I would tell you about that is there's a tumor called pheochromocytoma and it sits on top of the kidneys and it releases all this, all these what basically look like you're extremely stressed out.

• 1:46:27Chris Williamson?

  And is that how it feels as well?

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  That's the central question, my man. They don't come in like, ah. That is the central question, my man. That's a banger. That's total. I don't have the answer, but I'm leaving you with things. I hope, I want to know the answer, but the brain contextualizes all of this surge of stuff that's happening.

• 1:46:47Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Do you know Rick Hansen? Are you familiar with Rick? Neuroscience guy. He wrote Hardwiring Happiness. I read that and spoke to him and he became a good friend. And then the more.

• 1:47:02Chris Williamson?

  Neuroscientists that I speak to, the more I realize that a lot of the stories that we tell ourselves are kind of repurposing mechanistically what's happening in the mind. But the weird thing is, nobody talks about the story you tell yourself about your knee injury, right? You know, someone snapped their ACL, and it's not about thinking your ACL back into cont- we understand that there's a mechanism that's going on in here, and that that really needs to be fixed, and that there's a pretty well-established process that you go through in terms of rehab, and it's progressive overload, and tendons really love to be under time and detention, so you're gonna do this, and you're gonna get range back, and there's a combination of stretching that you get with strength, and the more range that you get, the less, you know, all of this, it's mechanistically very well-understood.

• 1:47:45Chris Williamson?

  But the thing is, there is no massively phenomenological sense of having an ACL. There is one for everything that happens in the brain. And I really got into psychology, human nature, you know, Angela Duckworth, or the James Cleers of the world, Morgan Housel, you know, a lot of people that write very astutely about human nature and about psychology, and I go into evolutionary psychology, which is even maybe one step further removed, right? That's like the source code, and that a lot of accusations of just stories and things like that. And that's really cool and compelling. The more that I spend time thinking about this stuff, the more I try and come back to

• 1:48:28Chris Williamson?

  mechanistically what's happening in the brain, because it really does feel like, for instance, with gratitude from Rick's understanding here, he basically sees happiness as your ease of access to being grateful about what's going on. And he has a very simple process that is well-understood and just reflects the mechanism of what goes on in the brain, of have an experience, enrich it, and absorb it, and it's just this little acronym that you go through. I thought, that's so great. That feels, to me, one of the problems that a lot of people have when they read stuff to do with human nature and psychology, is it feels so fucking wishy-washy. You're like, I, give me something to grab on to.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  It's like my puppy's example. But let me just jump in right there.

• 1:49:14Speaker 01

  I like that. And what really just gets me jacked in a positive way is when I see that our behavior and our minds work in a way that's actually reflected at the neuronal level. You know, so like if you stress stem cell reservoirs just enough, they'll make one of themselves and release a new neuron. So they're always replenishing them. They never, they're inexhaustible in that way, right? They're stem cells. But if you stress them out too much, they'll go into senescence or they'll die. And then you start to realize, wait, that's kind of how life is, right?

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Then you, then I like to take it all the way to like International Space Station. There's not enough gravity. Those bone cells uh in space, in our thigh bone, when they come back on, on the ground, they got to rehab for a week or two. The lack of gravitational stress leads to withering of osteocytes for astronauts. And so the same concepts in bone cells in space or stress in the human brain, that there is a necessary amount of stress that leads to growth, but if it's too much, we fracture. Yep. If it's not enough, we don't blossom. And I, and I, and I like to take those concepts to then coping. And so for example, like this thing about resilience was tripping me up for a little while, like,

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  what does that mean? You know, like be resilient, like I always try to think like, I gotta be able to say this to my sons. I gotta be able to say this to a newly diagnosed brain cancer patient. Yep. And, and what I learned from that is um it's sort of this systemic and processive uh resilience, which is basically like the resilience you bring to the fight, you know, the, the strength you bring to the fight. And then the process, what the fight reveals in you. And, and what I like about that is that each cell, each person, each human is in their own individual path and has accumulated a set of experiences. And my hope is Universal coping skills. And they're ready to engage the world in front of them. And that could be a lottery, that could be falling in love.

• 1:51:26Speaker 01

  That could be being diagnosed with cancer. And they're coming equipped with some skills. Uh, and in that cyclical nature of stress and growth. That happens repeatedly in our bodies. Like, that's actually what's happening in our lives. There's a cyclical nature of a springtime in our cells and our body. A winter in our cells and our body and life. And that there is no like linear trajectory towards wellness. Or a moment of arrival or of a final clarity. Cause you just don't know what the challenge or the gift in front of you is.

• 1:51:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, certainly one thing that I can say with almost absolute certainty is that you do not develop capacity to deal with things while you're dealing with things.

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:52:08Chris Williamson?

  Your capacity to deal with things is almost always developed in advance and revealed during. So, uh, it's one of the best justifications for mindfulness that mindfulness is preparing for the worst day of your life. That's what meditation is. Meditation is preparing for the worst day of your life. It's the day that you lose your job and your dad passes away on the same morning. It's a day that your partner gets a cancer diagnosis. And you find out that you're no longer employed, whatever it might be.

• 1:52:38Chris Williamson?

  If you're in the thick of it right now, I've been in the thick of it for a good bit of the last eighteen months. You're doing your very best to not go under.

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  And then you fight, fight, fight. And then when you get a break and it's really, actually, this is interesting. It's only difficult times that reveal to you, holy fuck, I couldn't really make much progress during that. I was just trying to survive. The urgent outweighed the important so much that all I could do was kind of try and hold it together. Okay, so what's the implication of that? When you do not have something that's super urgent in front of you, when you're not putting out fires, it's a really, really, really good time to develop some more capacity.

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  Psychological resolve.

• 1:53:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's the time that you try to get your meditation habit in. That's the time that you work on your health.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  You refine, you're training for the fight that has yet to come.

• 1:53:33Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  With a toolkit that I'm, I'll never finally make, but I, I mean, that's what I'm trying to get at. And back to the cells, cells go through a period of dormancy.

• 1:53:42Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  And at that point, not dying is, is actually the victory. And then there's a springtime, just like in nature, and this happens in our biology, and I think it happens in our psychology that you're talking about. And that, those moments, there's a temporal nature. Uh, there's like reflection and going back and saying, okay, what are the lessons I learned? How would I handle it better forward? I, I love all that. I'm actually trying to come up with, when you feel like you're drowning or about to fall apart, in that short temporal window, are, are there things we can do at that time?

• 1:54:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, how do we interject right then?

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the time sensitive maneuvers.

• 1:54:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I like, I very much like being able to step in on stuff that's acute. It's all well and good talking about building up your resilience and all the rest of it. But if you're in the fucking fight, you go, hey, I can't go back six months ago and start a meditation practice. Tell me what to do right now.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  Right. And so what I would say is, if, uh, you know, the, I would say is that, uh, urges that hijack the body are very fascinating to me. Um, when, when the thought is now recruits the body, there's a whole new fight. Now, whether that's addiction, whether that's desire. Because now, there's a feeling that if I don't go in this harmful direction, uh, that I will feel ill. So now you're not just trying to stop a thought. Let's take the example of having a cigarette again. It's not just, I don't have a cigarette, don't have a cigarette. It could cause cancer down the road. It's bad, it's bad. You promised everybody you wouldn't. They might smell it on you, whatever you're thinking. Don't look at it.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  Look at those shiny boxes of the gas station, right? But then, when you have that waft and it goes from the nerves in your old factory bulb to to your frontal lobe, and now you're just like, oh, man, that's reminds you of so much. People have physiologic changes. So now the fight is controlling your mind and body. And I believe the maneuvers are different when it goes from your mind to your body. And the management of bodily urges uh is uh requires bodily techniques. Uh, breathing techniques are uh the same ones I use in surgery. Sometimes when I was learning and you feel like that, ooh, around that corner, that tumor's gonna run away from you. I mean, you gotta, you you gotta not, you gotta, it's gonna, either you're gonna freak out, you're not gonna freak out.

• 1:56:06Speaker 01

  And the simplest thing I can tell you is like, when you hyperventilate, it creates a feeling of anxiety. Well, you gotta take it the other other way. The first maneuver is just control your breathing. Nobody knows, the room is just like da, da, da, da, da, da. And you're just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, this could, this could run away from me. And so I have my own maneuver that I do in that moment is just stop talking, you know, uh, and there's something I call out. I'd say, I need fifteen. And they're like, okay, everybody pay attention, back to, back to your positions. That he might say, I need this from the wall, I need this from the wall. And the whole thing is just, just get that, get that breathing paste. I'm not talking about one nostril, I'm not getting into all that.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  I'm just trying to tell you physiologically, if I pace my breathing, I can slow down this swell of fear and panic that's in my guts when things run away from me. I try to use the same thing with a lover and with a conflict. But that's a specific toolkit that has a physiologic basis that I can explain that the ancients use is is in the acute moment. And I'm hunting now, you know, the next year or so. But are there other maneuvers that uh that we're all equipped with that can work while you're uh, you know, while you feel like you're you're falling apart or you're drowning or you're struggling, you know, at that moment? Not in Riverview, not in the future, I will, right now. Right now, what do I do?

• 1:57:29Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything you've ever seen in surgery that shook your belief in science?

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  Not in surgery. Um, surgery's a physical performance, it's ballet. But um.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  I have had, um, I have had patients in psychological sciences. I've had patients where I just look, I'm like, I don't know. The, the, I don't know how the great majority of cancer patients get dressed, come in and are ready to get the worst news of your lives every three months when we do the scans. It's come back or didn't go away. I mean, it's just, it's just so heavy. And the, the, what the fight brings out in them or the coping skills they've brought. And it's inconsistent. I'll get to the, the more philosophical way. So it's inconsistent. Somebody comes in, they've got the wellness techniques, they're the CEO. They get hit with that C word. It's you don't know what you're gonna get.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  And then somebody comes in, they're struggling with something, they look disheveled. You're like, this person's not gonna handle as well. It brings out something in them. So I think this feeling that, that arrival in some sort of wellness and achievement or clarity, understanding of life is misguided because we don't know what's coming next. I think it's cyclical, develop your skills, time sensitive skills in the review, being prepared for being what's forward. That's the way I've been approaching it. And as far as shook my belief in science, uh, I would say something recently has, uh, liberated my view in science that it, it's through science we can have understanding that we might not. So there are these near death experiences, those electrodes are being recorded, people

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  in, uh, Canada and up, studies starting to come out that when the heart stops for the first few minutes afterwards, the brain just deploys all its chemicals and electricity. So whereas other organs whimper to death, like the brain is struggling, the heart stops. And then if you measure the electricity, because you can actually have a DNR, you could say like, if I have a heart attack, don't touch me. Do not resuscitate. And they're still monitoring, you still get a live feed of the brain electricity. So you would think the heart stops and the brain electricity stops, but it goes for a minute or two afterwards and it's wild. It's fierce. It's not like beep, beep, boo. It's a, so that's a measurement. What does it mean? That's for everybody to explore, explore.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  But to me, that's like, okay, so there's, there'll always be just amazing neuroscience information coming from hospitals and patients. That's a little bit more than just scanners. Right? And when those people are resuscitated. And why do they all universally say, I saw it's a film strip of my old life? And you know, there's a consistent pattern of what happens. If you drown, or if you have a near death experience and are resuscitated in whichever manner, they come back reporting the same thing. Film strip of their life, wide stories, they saw loved ones. And when you look at the electricity, it's very consistent with dreaming and memories. So to me, I love the fact that now we might be able to explain why near death experiences

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  are a consistent perception or experience for people. So I love seeing that stuff come out.

• 2:00:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm interested in what working with terminal patients has taught you about living life well?

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything.

• 2:01:09Speaker 01

  You know, it's thousands now. I mean, I'm fifty two. Massive experience, we have three adult sons, massive life experience. But since twenty five, I've been taking care of some of the sickest people in the hospital. Brain injury for ten years.

• 2:01:25Chris Williamson?

  Half your life.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a kid when I started, you know, I mean, I look at my, I look at people in their twenties. I'm like, oof. I was like twenty six or twenty seven. I wrote about it for a Vice article. I withdrew care. I mean, I helped families land their patients, I mean, their family members and remove the breathing tubes and say their last rights and wishes and all the different cultural elements that come into it in ICU. I was twenty seven years old and I started to see there were patterns

• 2:01:55Speaker 01

  in the ways the brain and mind respond when the finish line comes closer. It's not trauma. You're gone, you don't know it. It's okay, three years, two to five, seven, you can't quantify it, but you know it's coming now. It's in, it's in sight. And.

• 2:02:15Speaker 01

  They had a universal, all of them say the same thing again. When that finish line comes into view, and it's the lessons I think everybody else talks about, but they have a similar thing about reconciliation, forgiveness, about having spent more time with their children. Usually it was like busy, busy dads at that time, my twenties, you know? And I, and I incorporate that I had a lab, I raised my kids, didn't take them just to the baseball games, but the practices, spent a lot of time to them. And that they seemed unencumbered, they weren't so,

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  the little things don't get to them as much. And the question then becomes, how do we take those lessons without actually having, you know, if hypothetically the finish, God willing, is 25 years away from me, how can I actually live it like it's five years from now? And that's the lesson that my cancer patients had taught me is, one, um, start now with what you would if you had, you know, that you do a five year curse. And two, uh, build your coping skills. Uh, because the ones that I saw do well, uh, they had techniques. I mean, I'm just coming, coming back to this. And like I learned one from one, like every three months, the scans, let's just imagine brain scan, two, three hours, six hours.

• 2:03:36Speaker 01

  Who knows what's going to, you show up in clinic, it's another hour to wait to hear it for somebody. And they, so they would do this thing where like, look, the, the 11 weeks in between,

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  I can, I can hold on to myself and say, this is not the time to be stressed, but I need to have a week when I'm just completely losing it. Like you can't just not be stressed about that. But they were able to compartmentalize it to have like 11 good weeks and then another shitty week because, oh my God, I got another, I get a brain scan and see Dr. John Dill. And so I started to see those techniques that we're using, uh, to make the most of their cancer journey. Support network is nice, but, uh, the support network can be surprising. It's not always who you think it is, you know, once that cancer word arrives, relationships break up, surprising relationships form. And so, um, you know, no triumph is forever and no tragedy is forever. But if you come equipped with your own personal and psychological toolkit.

• 2:04:33Speaker 01

  You know, we make the most of this run. Heck, yeah. Dr. John Dill, ladies and gentlemen. Why should people go? You don't want to keep up to date with everything you've got going on. Just, I don't know, I just, just, you know, I'm a surgeon at City of Hope Cancer Center. I think that's the easiest thing is look up Dr. John Dill at City of Hope and then, you know, things will pop up. But appreciate you having me on. I appreciate you too, man.

• 2:04:54Speaker 02

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