Transcription
Dr. Warren, you are a neurosurgeon and a Christian, and you are the author of a book called *The Lifechanging Art of Selfbrain Surgery: Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life*. The book opens with a fascinating story of a doctor who was on an Antarctic expedition. Can you briefly tell us that story and how it pertains to the book?
Absolutely, Lori. It's good to be back with you today. Um, I open the book with the story, uh, from 1961 of a doctor named Leonid Rogazovv, who was a young Soviet general surgeon, and he was a team doctor for an Antarctic expedition. That 13 or so of them were deployed to the Antarctic to explore. And shortly after they got there, and the ship went back to Russia, and the winter set in, and the ocean froze over. So they were stuck there for the entire winter with no possibility of anybody getting in or out. And he was the only doctor.
But shortly after Dr. Rogazoff got there, he got sick and he started having abdominal pain and running a fever. And he quickly diagnosed himself with appendicitis, which, as everybody knows, if you don't have surgery for appendicitis, it's fatal. And so he was in a real problem because he was the only doctor there, the only person possibly able to take care of somebody with an emergency like that. And so since there was not another doctor, he was in real trouble. And it's fascinating to read his diary because he began to despair and he lost hope and he was just dying. And then he had an incredible insight. He he realized that he did know how to take care of people with appendicitis. And all he had to do was switch his perspective from this patient who was waiting for help from somebody that wasn't going to come to a doctor who knew what to do. He had an insight that he could take care of himself if he just put the thing together right. So he hired or taught a truck driver how to pass him instruments and taught another guy to slap him if he fell asleep or passed out from the pain. And he took his own appendix out and saved his own life. And I just start the book with that story to tell you that sometimes to change your life dramatically, you have to change perspectives from being unable to help yourself or looking for somebody else from the outside to take care of you to being empowered by your creator to have everything you need at hand to take care of yourself. That's where we start the story.
As a board-certified practicing neurosurgeon, how did you become interested in the dread, the defeat, and the despair that cannot be solved with a scalpel?
Well, it started early in my career when I would deal with patients who had malignant brain tumors or diseases that we couldn't always cure. And I realized that the patients that did the best in terms of their quality of life and their family and everything else were the ones that managed to hold on to hope or to have something to fight for. And the people that did the worst, even if they ultimately survived their disease, were the people that lost hope and and became washed over in despair. And so I started trying to study and understand the elements of what give people hope when they're suffering or dealing with hardship. And then while I was doing that, went through the loss of a teenage son. And our our son Mitch was killed in 2013. And that led me to a now 12 or 13-year-long study of how to recover myself and my family after that devastating tragedy. And I began to put together hopelessness and loss with faith and the elements of neuroscience that I could find that gave people hope and trying to understand how all those things work together.
Tell us more about your experiences. Not only did you have that tragic loss of your son, but you served in the Iraq war and really came home with PTSD, right?
Yes. In 2004 and '05, I was deployed as a neurosurgeon to a combat theater hospital in Iraq and spent five months there and went through 100 mortar and rocket attacks and did 200 brain surgeries in that tent hospital and just saw a lot of human despair and the hard things that people can do to each other, and as well as facing a lot of dangerous situations myself with those daily rocket and mortar attacks. And I came home really kind of kind of blown up emotionally and and dealing with that. And I sort of stuffed it down internally and didn't deal with with it for a long time. And then it came rolling out a few years later in the form of PTSD, which is when I really started writing and trying to understand all of that. So, yeah, as a as a doctor and as a person, I've been through a lot of personal things and seen a lot of things that have led me to this journey of trying to help people find hope.
And obviously, we often don't have a lot of control over the things we experience, but in your book, you say we do have more power over our experiences than we realize. Can you talk about that a little bit more?
That's right. Um, sadly, we've all been taught pretty much that the brain that we have in our head is what creates our capabilities and our personality and everything about us. We've been taught pretty much that the genes that we inherit and the family we're raised in and the things we go through make our brains behave a certain way and that our and we're kind of stuck with the brain that we have. But stunningly, 21st-century neuroscience is now aligning with what scriptures always said. That's pretty clear now that your mind, the part of you that's eternal, the part of you that's made in God's image, is not the same thing as your brain. And as soon as you understand that your mind and your brain are different, and what we've learned from neuroscience now is that the mind actually has top-down control over the brain. And when you change your thinking, when you change from thinking hopeless, despair thoughts or negative thoughts to more empowered ones that line up with God's plan for you, your brain begins to make structural changes that make it behave better and make it control your body better in real time. So your brain actually changes structurally from thought to thought. And that's the whole the whole idea really behind Philippians 4, which says if you want to be less anxious, be more grateful and think better thoughts and you'll actually overcome anxiety. And we've learned that that's now true on the neuroscience side, too.
Well, the subtitle of your book says connecting neuroscience and faith to radically transform your life. And you talk about self-brain surgery. Um, can you talk a lot of people look at that and think, self-brain surgery? What exactly does that mean?
Right. Well, I had this amazing experience. My my wife Lisa and I were in practice right after our son died. We lived in Auburn, Alabama at that time. And our practice was located on the university campus at Auburn. And the building our office was in also did world-class medical research on something called functional magnetic resonance imaging. Functional MRI. And functional MRI is actually a type of scan where you don't just look at what the brain looks like, but you can actually see what the brain's doing when people are moving or thinking certain things. And so we were invited shortly after our son died and we went back to work. We were invited to watch this research one day. And we were down there in our broken, despair-ridden brains. We were overwhelmed with grief after losing our son. And we were down there watching this research. And they put a woman in the scanner, Lori. And they asked her to think about something. They said, "Mrs. Johnson, think about the worst thing you've ever encountered. Recall your worst memory." And we saw her kind of wrinkle up her brow and think about that difficult memory that she had. And shortly after she thought about that, her brain began to react. And I could see as a surgeon and as a neuroscientist, I could see the parts of her brain that were activated were the parts related to fear and pain and emotional distress, like the amygdala and hippocampus. And shortly after she started thinking about that and her brain began activating those regions related to those things, her heart rate began to go up and her blood pressure went up and and her body began to resonate with that negative thinking. And then they said, "Okay, Mrs. Johnson, now think about the best thing you've ever remembered, your your favorite day, your favorite memory." And again, she sort of wrinkled up her brow and thought about that happier memory. And then the parts of her brain related to fear began to calm down. And the frontal lobes came online, other parts that are related to processing happy memories and peaceful thoughts. And then her blood pressure improved and her heart rate improved. And we saw in real time that when you change from one thing to another thing that you're thinking about, your brain does different things structurally. And as a scientist, I had this insight and I think the Lord revealed to me in that moment that when you purposefully change what you're thinking about and your brain then makes structural changes to itself to change how your body's working, that's the same thing that I do in surgery. When I take you to the operating room, I intentionally make structural changes in your brain for the purpose of making your life better in some way. And so this idea of self-brain surgery just was kind of revealed to me in that moment that that what you think about makes real change in your brain. It's not a metaphor. And so this idea that you can make changes in your brain that change how your life works out, that's surgery, just like I perform in the operating room. And we know now there's something called neuroplasticity, which is this process that God built within us, where the brain literally changes the way it connects to other neurons in real time while we're thinking about certain things. And that neuroplasticity process, this is the most important part, that happens every moment of your life, whether you're directing it or not. But if you don't choose to take up the knife, so to speak, and become your own brain surgeon, then what happens is you just keep recreating your brain in the same way that it has always been. So if you've always been anxious or afraid, or you've gone through something hard that's made you more abundant or depressed, your brain will just keep recreating synapses, connections that will reinforce that same thought process. And that's why we begin to feel stuck over time. We start to feel like this is just how I am. But the truth is, as soon as you're ready to change what you think about, your brain is ready to change. You're you're designed to heal. And there's tremendous hope in that.
That's fascinating. So, can you tell us about this thing that you refer to as the patient to doctor switch and why it's so important to your mind, your brain, your body, and your life?
Absolutely. So, just like Dr. Rogazov, the thing that made it possible for him to survive that appendicitis when he was the only doctor there. The thing that made it possible was not the surgical skill that he had. It was the perspective shift that he made. Cuz he never could have made that decision to use his skills as a doctor until he was able to stop thinking about the hopelessness of his situation and start thinking about the possibilities that might be there for him if he could think about the problem in a new way. And that's exactly what Romans chapter 12 tells us when it says, "Don't be conformed to the way the world wants you to think, which is think about your feelings, think about what you're going through, think about your circumstances." That's what the world tells us to do. But rather, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind." So this idea of switching from patient to doctor is the same thing that Rogazok did. It's saying, "Hey, I'm not stuck in hopelessness. I'm not stuck in despair. But if I stay here, I'm not going to be able to engage that process that God's already given me where I can change my brain and change my life. I've got to shift to that position of being empowered to operate the nervous system the way God designed it to be operated." So, what we've learned from neuroscience is if you don't operate your nervous system, it's going to operate you. It's going to keep running the same old plays and keep you stuck in hopelessness and despair and anxiety and depression and grief, or wherever it's been. And once you make that patient to doctor switch, you can learn, you can be trained to operate your mind the way it's designed. And that's what God wanted for you all along.
And you write that self-brain surgery isn't just about us, but it's about others in in the in the immediate in the now, but also in the future.
That's right. So I have the thing that's called the two-patient rule. And that's this idea that we know now there are all kinds of ways that our brains, our emotional states, the magnetic field that we put out, even affect other people. There's a whole system called mirror neurons that other people pick up on your emotional state and they begin to make structural changes in their brains to mirror how you're feeling and how you're behaving emotionally. And so that's that's the essence of what we call the Debbie Downer effect, where somebody in a really bad mood walks in the room, everybody around them begins to be in a bad mood, too. That's real power that you have to affect other people in your life, your children, the people around you, your co-workers. And then now there's another thing that we've learned about in the last 20 years or so called epigenetics, which is where you can actually start your life with some stress responses and some cortisol levels and some ways that you tend to react to things based on experiences that your parents or grandparents had. They've done incredible studies in Holocaust survivors that show that people who go through extreme traumas like the Holocaust, their great-grandkids have abnormal stress responses when they're born. And so that means, and we've we've also learned that when you understand those stress responses are harmful to you and you go through the work to learn how to change them, that your children and their children can be born with normal stress responses. So what that means is we can change the future of our family generations and how they respond to life by getting things right and doing the work in our lifetime. So that's this two-patient rule. There's immediate effects on people around us when we learn how to control what we think about and how we interact with our brains and our minds. And there's future effects in our generations that have incredible power and hope to break generational chains and curses. So things like if you were abused or your your parents were alcoholics, you don't have to be. You can change that in your lifetime and your children and their children will have a better starting place because you did the work in your lifetime to get it right.
You know, they say that pain, chronic pain, back pain, things like that, that pain is processed in your brain. And, um, and and so many people, they say an estimated one in five people suffers from chronic pain. They're always in pain. How does this self-brain surgery relate to people who are really in horrible pain and the the pills don't help and the surgery doesn't help? And then there's another kind of pain that people are always in, which is emotional pain. Let's say grief, the loss of a loved one, which you certainly understand. How does this self-brain surgery protocol apply to people like that?
Yeah. So, in the book, I give you 15 specific operations that you can learn. So, some ways to manage your own thought life and your brain to help you overcome those things. And just as an example with chronic pain, there's been incredible research to show that chronic pain is not actually mapped in the body or in the spinal cord. Like this idea that we constantly hear that trauma is stored in your body. It's actually stored in your brain. And understanding that you can rewrite some of the circuits of how your brain interprets and processes things. And that rewriting process begins as soon as you start thinking down different trails of thought. So understanding that chronic pain is not actually something wrong with your body, but something that's been stored erroneously in your brain and that you have some power and agency and learning how to unwind that and control it gives you hope that the future doesn't have to look like the past has looked. The same thing is true of our emotional wounds. Your brain actually doesn't know the difference between emotional pain and physical pain. It maps it and stores it in the same way. And so understanding that you can start to unlock that coding process and recode things to help you feel better in the future and actually become healthier and be happier and and you have some agency and some control in that gives you the power to believe that it doesn't have to be the same way tomorrow that it was yesterday.
Your book, uh, talks about the ten commandments of self-brain surgery and it's interesting. Number one is, "I must relentlessly refuse to participate in my own demise." Why is that number one?
It's number one because it maps what we learn in medical school. When you go to medical school, the first day you take an oath called the Hippocratic Oath. And that oath basically says that I will not commit malpractice against myself. I won't commit harm against my patient. And if you're going to make this patient to doctor switch and you're going to take up the the responsibility of participating with God to operate your nervous system to heal your body and change your life, if you're going to do that, the first thing you have to realize is that your thoughts have incredible power to help you or to harm you. And using your thoughts in the wrong way, training your brain in the wrong way is malpractice against yourself. Choosing behaviors like drinking too much or choosing behaviors to numb yourself so you don't have to deal with things, that's harming your body and your brain. And so learning to com to not commit malpractice against yourself is a part of that sacred oath that you take as a self-brain surgeon.
And you describe this process of critically examining our thoughts as a thought biopsy. Can you tell us what this procedure might look like?
That's right. So that's based on 2 Corinthians 10:5 that says, "We take every thought captive." Like learning to understand that about 80% of your automatic thoughts and feelings are false. That there's good research to suggest that now that a lot of the things that pop into our head and a lot of the things that feel so real to us are just not true. And so if you came into my office and you told me that you've been having headaches, if the first thing I said to you was that we needed to go to surgery and I needed to cut your brain open and look around to see if I could figure out what was wrong, you would say, "Wait, time out. Don't you want to do a scan or don't you want to get some information first before you start doing surgery?" That that's just to remind us that if we learn to think critically about our thinking rather than just reacting to it, then we can start to identify, just like I do with biopsies in the operating room. We can begin to identify that automatic negative thinking and those misleading thoughts and feelings that we have and then choose a healthier, more true response, especially something from scripture or something that's proven to be accurate. We can choose and transplant a more healthy thought in place of that automatic negative thinking and those automatic erroneous feelings that we have. And we can make better decisions, just like a surgeon does when we choose to do scans and biopsies before we react to symptoms.
You know, a lot of people think that there's a wide gulf between science and faith, but here you are, a a brain surgeon and a strong Christian. What have you learned about the relationship between neuroscience and faith?
Well, it might surprise people. Science was actually founded in the West mostly by Christians. And the reason they founded the process of science was to try to explain the amazing things that God did. Isaac Newton and Galileo and Copernicus and all those people were trying to illustrate what Psalm 111 says, which is, "Great are the works of the Lord; they are pondered by all those who delight in him." So the whole idea of science from the start was to try to understand and explain to people so they could be in reverence and awe of what God has done. And now we're learning as neuroscience plays out in the 21st century, especially with functional imaging, we're beginning to understand that just about everything in the B, well, everything in the Bible, when God prescribes something and promises us that it will lead to our flourishing, neuroscience is now backing it up. We know now, for example, that pondering negative thoughts leads to bad outcomes for your body and chronic stress and chronic disease, and pondering more healthy thoughts leads to lower anxiety. That's the whole point of Ephesians chapter 4 and Romans chapter 12. The idea that when you clean up your thinking, you clean up your body and your brain and your life. And so this this idea that neuroscience and faith are enemies in some way is actually not true. And the long arc of scientific history is validating the things that scripture said thousands of years ago.
Wow. Well, what else does the Bible say about self-brain surgery?
Well, I think Ephesians chapter 4 is a great example. You know, we look at people's behavior. We're always talking about behavior. And Jesus was constantly reminding us that what you think about is just as real and can be just as harmful and sinful sometimes as what you do with your life and with your body. So, thoughts are important. Ephesians chapter 4 gives this long list of things that what he calls the Gentiles, the unredeemed, unsaved people, that they were doing, that the debauchery and the adultery and all those things. And then he ties it all into Ephesians 4:17, and he says, "Don't be like them. They are lost in the futility of their thinkings." He ties everything negative that they're doing in their lives starts with negative thinking. And I would just tell the listener today, the watcher, that everything that's real in your life started with something you're thinking about. So thoughts become things. Thoughts turn into the real things in your life. So that's why Ephesians chapter 4 says, "Don't be lost in futile thinking." But 4:23 says, "Be renewed in the attitude of your mind."
Amen. Dr. Warren, any final thoughts today?
No, I would just encourage people to get the book. It's going to help you change the way you think about your thoughts and think about what's actually literally happening in your brain. It's not a metaphor. It's real. You have power and agency. And the social scientists teach us that hope is defined as having agency and opportunity. And you've got both, cuz God has built your nervous system to be operated in a way that will help you and not hurt you, as soon as you're ready to change how you think.
Well, once again, the book is called *The Life-Changing Art of Selfbrain Surgery: Connecting Neuroscience and Faith to Radically Transform Your Life* by Dr. W. Lee Warren. Dr. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you, Lori. God bless you.
God bless you as well.