Brain Surgeon REVEALS How To Heal Trauma & DESTROY NEGATIVE THOUGHTS! | Dr. Rahul Jandial

being in a better frame of mind exercising eating right being calm stressed all of that changes things physiologically that make your whole body better at fighting cancer that we we agree on that's measured now let's go back to the brain i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome you've worked as a brain surgeon and neuroscientist for for a while now so you're an expert on all things the brain and also the mind which i think is kind of fascinating or you're in a constant studying process of it i'm

curious the first question i have is what do you think is the the biggest factor since you've studied both the brain and the mind what is the biggest factor that holds us back from thinking in terms of abundance and thinking in terms of positivity why do we stay stuck on negative thinking negative thoughts and limited mindsets so much yeah that's a big question so the simple answer is that the um stories we've been told about what's going on in our skull they're just wrong interesting okay so the first thing is there's no wires we're not

hardwired they're no gears so let's go backwards way back when like ancient egypt they thought it was just like flan or something and the soul was in the heart and i believe you know i can see that i hope i've opened chess before for cardiac surgery and it's fierce and what they would do is stick a straw up the nose and slurp out the brain just get rid of it so for a while i could understand the complete misunderstanding then when sort of like you know speak easies and industrial revolution all the pictures about about

the brain you see them as gears and but modern time we're starting to think about it as wired i'm wired for this i'm wired for that you're not wired for anything it's an ecosystem filled with throbbing 100 billion microscopic jellyfish sparking electricity at each other trying to approach each other shaving down pruning branching arborizing so when i use those words like arborization pruning those are neuroscience words in rigorous neuroscience journals but it hasn't sort of made it to pop culture so i think part of what keeps us stuck is that we think i'm wired this

way or i have to rewire and it's too on off rather than flows right it's not um freeway from a to b it's the way you see a school of birds flow uh-huh they roll over each other aurora borealis that's our thoughts and that's how feelings float through the ether of our minds when you start to understand it like that then you know every day something new is possible is it easy no but it's possible wow that's the that's the real way to think of your brain mind and behavior that it's completely plastic in the

sense that you're uh never the same person just from a moment ago since we've met that's a good introduction to this i'm curious because you you do surgeries on a weekly basis where you open the skull mostly the top of the skull well all different areas it's like ice fishing so we make holes wherever we need to get we make the hole underneath it so we can get there so it may not be a full top of the screw that's inhabited so you're taking little little little holes the slickest brain surgeons meaning who can do

it the best make the smallest hole to get right where you need to the smallest incision and do the most uh you know the least amount of uh damage i guess to the whole skull have you ever had to take off the top the whole top no but in trauma after boxing sports car accidents sometimes we take off two big pancake sizes on the left and right so when the brain is throbbing yeah you take the lid off really but you don't take the whole thing off because you got a giant vein coming down the

middle so that's you can't do the mohawk part so you take two straight sides yeah so if you look at when i travel through south america you look at the trefonations the holes in the skulls they're always on the side you can't make holes in the middle and still live a giant vein splitting the two hemispheres oh so that's just in the movies yeah okay yeah that's that's the silence of the ladder exactly but that's a good question though that there's a it's a targeted approach interesting you want the patient to feel it the least

right and that's the best right of course what did you what's been one of the biggest realizations from studying neuroscience but also studying the brain and actually opening up pieces of the skull looking in there surgically doing things to optimize it what was one of a big aha moment for you of studying both areas where you're like wow there's something that i didn't think was possible that is actually possible for human beings to do yeah yeah a really good question it ties back to your first question about what holds his back so the thing that

shocked me was that we could actually remove parts of the brain and people would go home a week later i'm not saying there isn't some subtle neuropsychiatric issue but for example i had a guy come in he's a framer and you know they have the the pneumatic you know it's not hammer nails as many people conceive it to be but a lot of times when a real quote recoils back they'll pop a nail through the orbit or nose into their frontal lobe this happened and they drive in with their nail in their yeah brain right

so that's the first thing i was like wait is no totally i got pictures on my phone that we're not going to show anybody but you can have a penetrating injury to certain parts of the brain of the brain and you drive in holy cow so so that's the first thing i realized was so there isn't a a region in the brain for creativity there isn't a region in the brain for this so the first thing i had to realize was no this thing is working in a as an environment as an ocean filled with

like a kelp forest and jellyfish so if you drop something into the ocean you're not going to disrupt there's no spot for something and that ties back to what you know what i want people to walk away with is that you have to think of your thoughts and feelings and the working of your flesh inside your skull as a garden as an ecosystem just because you have one weed or one spike doesn't mean the harmony is disrupted so for example one frontal lobe we can surgically remove if needed after trauma or tumor and patients function

they drive they talk on the phone again you don't want this one occipital lobe doesn't leave you blind it's that people think occipital blindness no if i take out a tumor from the right occipital lobe i just can't trust my left rear view mirror when i drive it's a it's a field cut your world goes from this to this so when i when i first started seeing that because i assumed you hit any part of the brain it's your dust because because people will say like the left side of the brain is for this and

the right side of the brain is for this and no i use more of the right side of my brain and that's why i'm creative or whatever it is or i'm more analytical because i use this side of the brain or my my fear-based side of the brain is is heightened so no so you're saying if one part of the brain is under attack tumor trauma a nail whatever it is something happens that part of the brain it may not hold you back from your creativity or your critical thinking potentially no it because the rest

of your brain can compensate now let me give you now that's not true for the entire brain so let me just go backwards a little bit but those were the aha moments i had i mean i've been i've seen bowels had taken care of patients aids was you know going crazy in the 80s i'd seen a lot the first time i saw somebody do brain surgery i was like is that possible first like can you even remove the skull and they're like yeah and then they were you know can you remove that tissue to get

to the tumor they're like yeah you just have to understand how the whole thing works globally in harmony now the way i think of the brain is like a mushroom and so you've got the canopy and all the magic and the thoughts spark from the top the surface and then they send things down to the stalk which comes you know deep to your mouth and comes out of the bottom of your skull and then turns your spinal cord wow so if when i want to move my left hand my right brain says move your left

hand it sends down signals they come under my armpit they come into this nerve and that's crazy right now so what is all the lower parts they there is some you hit that you lose something something down here the reptilian brain the spinal cord every millimeter does something because it's a lot of think of it as cables even though it's not wires but they're a lot of become tracks t-r-a-c-t-s a lot of tracks that are communicating the things that the canopy thought of and in that area if there's a nail injury you do get a

certain deficit but in your thinking your feeling your emotions your love your fear it's not a fear spot or a love spot it's it's sort of again the aurora borealis and the worlds of of of a school of birds just flowing in different energy right so that fish a square fish or something yeah yeah exactly that's fascinating that's that's i want people to walk away with okay so what that leaves people with is the fear i have is real but it's not fixed it's not wired it's not permanent and through effort through exposure therapy through

whatever it is whatever your process is that that that school of fish can flow in a different way that's to me that's that's infinitely powerful that we are new every day that also gives us the responsibility to hold on to our positive attributes that we can spiral away every day and we can we can spiral downward and we can spiral upward any day wow and so have you studied brains where someone came in at one point and then maybe a year or five years later you saw them again and you were able to look inside

their brain another good question and what did you see different um with the brain i wonder can we enhance our brain by the way we think and our behaviors and our actions and our and the way we love ourselves and treat ourselves internally and emotionally um or can we hurt our brain by doing the opposite uh that's a it's a profound question so again let me start with a a very sort of um dramatic example to set the point to the larger takeaway on occasion for epilepsy that shuts down kids we have to actually take

away half of the brain it's called the hemi you know hemispherectomy you have to take out how we remove we it's you got everybody can google it this is not it's not like it's something we invented today it's been going on for decades yet because a lot of the people in this space are are not actual brain surgeons we're not getting a lot of those stories from there but there's a tremendous story there that when there's a medical need and the parents ask for it and it helps the child we can actually make a big

incision and take away a frontal lobe of parietal lobe and occipital lobe that's sparking seizures and when they wake up that left side doesn't work three years later when you see them no they're yeah this this is not even sci-fi they can move they can function fully again so the remaining hemisphere can reorganize the linebacker can also be the defensive end should also be sometimes even on offense the different roles those neurons yeah so the and how do we know that by because you've removed half the brain is still functioning and we took a picture

three years later and that half of brain was still gone still gone yeah it didn't sprout back it's not like a liver where we cut half of it off and the mom grows some back you take a chunk of me you put in the kid so that part is still missing yet that function has returned that's crazy so that's what i mean about different players on the team can cover for each other so i want people to know that that that's true plasticity and it's not rewiring it's not regrowing it's actually whatever you have is

repurposed and how do they do that well through the electrical flows of the mind there's um wow that's so not the electrical flows of the brain right the electrical flows of the mob the mine so what does people like okay now he's gone now he's he's got he's selling crystals in malibu no no stay with me um when you walk what you played right and we talked about that briefly eddie know that about you it's fascinating i think there are a lot of parallels with surgeons and uh athletes i think surgeons want to be athletes

they became surgeons yes the um when you walk up to a stadium there's every single you know so i was at uh so fire that's incredible now i've been there it's unbelievable i don't think people understand it's the world's largest pit you come in near the top because of the lax flight path and i you come in and and you look down they dug deep i know it's amazing it's good to be in my hometown yeah when you walk up and you hear you you see where you see the pieces 70 000 fans think of

those as neurons we have 100 billion those little magical sparks from the jellyfish that i described because they look like that they're not squares so you can talk people are talking and moving that's how people conceive or conceptualize the brain um but what happens when they they roar together that's what i mean by the electricity there's an energy right there's an energy you feel it it's an epiphenomena okay now you now let's build an engine the parts are there you fired up and there's a hum right that's more than just the engine and the pistons

uh a symphony you've got the musicians i'm less familiar with this but they create something bigger that's what i mean about the mind that it's not a it's not a forward backward electricity zinging around on wires it's that thing that happens when you have a hundred billion um throbbing growing branching neurons and it's electricity based you can put a sticker on and light a small light bulb really yeah and so that's how we measure for have we done this before oh yeah but this is but this is decades old this isn't like yes so what

i want people to say is like understand is when we remove the right hemisphere and the patient comes back three years later kids and they can function again no new wires sprouted nothing was spliced what remained created a new roar created a new hum created you know recovered the function so it's not always easy for people to understand but that's the truth and that's your current understanding of how the brain leads to the mind wow yeah can the brain function without the mind if you get knocked down the ring you're not thinking right and if

we put electrodes there's dampened electricity but that stock remember i mentioned the mushroom that can still keep you breathing and protect your airway and keep your heart still going so the reptilian areas of the brain the ones that we share with many animals well functioned will function without a mind without that what if you expect mind with consciousness thought love emotion wow so so it's like the babushka dolls where you have so it can function but it's not it's not um it's it's baseline function yeah it's keeping you breathing high level cognitive function that way

so the mind is really what's keeping everything activated that's what yeah that's in concert right right the mind can think down the heart rate that the reptilian brain keeps going if you get knocked out so they're they're integrated uh and so you put it nicely the mind can keep things going um but if you have brain death then there's no mind there's no electricity the brain brain death so unfortunately what's that mean meaning sometimes the heart the body's alive but the brain has died how does that happen well we'll get into some some i think

it's important for people to understand so car accidents uh brain swelling those 100 billion neurons they burst from smashing into each other we we put a catheter in the thigh and we we squirt dye and we see there's no blood going into the skull oh it's a dark vault so it's raining if it's so much swelling the blood can't flow there's so much inflammation that's hard for blood to flow instead of a heart attack you've had a complete brain attack can you encourage it for a day no no you can't recover from this not even

miracles you've never seen 100.00 out there's never anything left but for a for a day the since the heart nerves have their own pulse yes they're pumping when we can put machines and things and to keep people going for a day or so that's where the world of organ transplantation comes in so a lot of a lot of guys a lot of people who uh ride motorcycles they have that kind of injury and their or their bodily organs are healthy and they they often are you know the ones that provide transplants for other other people

their brain is brain functioning body is alive in that setting there's no mind there's no electricity coming out so when you're asking god about mind and brain um and so that's a fascinating area for people to know those examples to understand themselves better right and it comes back to that we are electrical currents we're not wires we're not switches we're not gears spots we're not gears electrical currents yeah they're flows that's the what is that so like uh you go to a lake and you drop a big you jump in there whatever right yeah yeah

there's a wave that moves through the lake but the water molecules didn't ride with it right right right so that's the the hum the symphony the roar the electrical global waves that are pulsating through our brains and when people say they're in the zone or they're in a flow state or they're in a meditative state that that global energy flow those waves they're different they can be measured and categorized really yeah so what does that mean when someone's in a flow state in terms of the mind brain connection what is happening yeah are these 100

billion jellyfish like in symphony and they're humming at a high level they're working in context right there actually that's perfect actually you would think that if somebody's about to hit a game-winning shot their best performance is when they're at a high level meaning wild frenetic actually no whether it's super calm somewhere in between okay so not asleep right but not hey i'm on my third espresso just taking in stuff in the morning focused focused but relaxed and there is a measured state for that and it usually has to do with sort of medium brain waves

that's something i'm writing about right now and and whether you meditate or you're under that the two minute drill in football or you're a ballerina and you have that that perfect you know dance routine coming up or maneuver um you are actually disengaging some of the things that would get in the way of you releasing a performance so you're not thinking the performance you're getting out of the way you're being you're just yeah and that has a different measurable electrical flow state you know and it's not revved up it's not hyper active it's somewhere in

between above calm but calm it's not fifth gear it's not idle yeah they're at their best and they've seen that in athletes and different things what's the fastest way for a human being to get into a flow state uh for that in my opinion there are no shortcuts because what it takes is a lot of practice and it takes is a lot of learning and then when you're performing and being confident in your abilities and yeah yeah but it's executing you know i don't think you can get no i'm not be wrong but when i

see my kids i don't think you get into a flow state just rolling through instagram right it's actually delivering a skill you've trained for so you have a craft that you've trained for and you're performing it at a high level so you see race car drivers talking about stuff like that so it is sort of a your craft performed just at the edge of your comfort level like video games if they're too hard kids will check out if they're too easy to check out so something about it tends to be a physical maneuver i always

find that fascinating where um you know you could think i guess you could think yourself into one of those states but you see it a lot with people who do a physical task that's challenging rewarding something they're engaged in and at the level of their performance um um you know it's a two-minute drill at the end of a football game yeah it's go time man yeah did you play football no i love sports though because i think there's a lot of parallels yeah of course uh the challenging thing is i don't know if i'd i

don't have kids but i don't know if i let my kids play football after all the head trauma that i took i mean every day we were just taught back in the late 90s to just lead with the head hit with the head now it's illegal you can't hit the head monday night football used to open up with the two helmets crashing yeah i remember that and the trauma that you know i feel like i've had to heal for the last 15 18 years now i don't know if it's worth it i think i guess

if you're not hitting the head anymore it's different but there's still going to be clashes and i got a couple of thoughts about that i mean one thing that i didn't like about it was i think they knew this was bad for us and they kept trying to hide it from us of course hey just tell us it's bad just tell us smoking's bad we know boxing's bad nobody goes into boxing and says i don't know yeah but you you held information uh that you know traumatic head injury in football was sort of messing people

up that's one of my things with it on the other side is if if it's something you love and it's an opportunity for you to advance in your life who am i to say no as long as the risks are made aware like yeah hey uh if you banged your knee against the wall 30 times a day for 10 years your knees gonna be jacked up yeah it's no different for your brain got it i still want to play that's you know what i mean it's more about that to me not we all live in

different worlds and safety and yeah risk and what's what's um my plans didn't play though they could have but they didn't they didn't yeah they played flag and they all played baseball yeah that's probably safer so the brain has the ability to heal from traumatic from trauma then physical and emotional trauma because i feel like the emotional hidden trauma can be more painful and harder to recover for some the psychological emotional trauma than the physical trauma you can you can see it you can treat the physical trauma in a sense but depending on how intense

it is but the emotional psychological hidden traumas i feel like are invisible and people don't think they need to treat it because they don't see a broken arm and say i need to go to the doctor because my my bone is sticking out let me put a splint on it and heal it up we're not trained that way there is no easy answer yeah but what i will say is that um trauma this is just these are my concepts they're not i'm not yes there's therapeutic trauma and what i mean by that is resetting a

bone after it's broken the pain of a cancer surgery but then you know that your cancer has been cut out like that that's good pain right and we're just talking about physical trauma yes then there's emotional trauma if when if people are attacked that's also intimately connected to emotional trauma right so the the people who don't have memory after certain uh injuries or operations they never have ptsd because they don't remember it so the emotional context and memories related to trauma be it emotional physical or a combination requires memory that's cool right i like to

think about like as a concept i don't have a solution for i don't hey don't do these three things you'll be better sort of not my approach because when people did that with me i was like how do you know what i'm going through man you look at me you think everything's good are you sure are you sure i wasn't attacked last night are you sure i didn't find out that my patient didn't do well last night are you sure i didn't find out a loved one was diagnosed with something you know like i just

don't want to put people in the in in boxes in fact i want people to know that they are new every day i'm not even the same version of myself i was before the last few years how can i be understood as a a group of people a man or a surgeon you know i just want people to think as of each other's individuals dynamic that said i never judge people's trauma to be better or worse people are looking or stronger or justified they're looking at everybody's going to have a traumatic event in their life

whether it's a car crash or hearing it's unavoidable it's partly because we put ourselves out there it's partly because the way we approach the world is to be completely um adaptive right if we're rigid then there's less chances for trauma but but that's a life less well lived so when you put yourself out there traumatic experiences are unavoidable right that said okay so that said yeah you get a bruise what i'm hearing you say is but what i hear you say is that if we don't have the memory of the traumatic event we don't have

ptsd we don't have trump we don't have a trauma detail right so that that's the that's the concept that people that i want people to walk away say memory is important memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic or whether it's painful still for you so let's get into that so we just need to heal the memory of the trauma that's exactly where i'm taking it um very good the so memories are not uh files in a cabinet and actually in the brain yeah how is memory categorized again it's there are some

regions that we if we remove them you would lose memory but memory is not only there it relies on pulling from memories of smell to new like for example smell is very interesting it's one of the five senses that we can't tamp down with our thinking so the perfume or cologne smell and memory are intimately intertwined and so you're pulling from all different parts of the brain again memory is a certain electrical flow in the brain um but it's not it's malleable it's moldable just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that

experience good or bad will remain good or bad our pop our positive vibe right now can be made negative our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day today so when you see memory that way then you then you say okay wait a second i was attacked or i was hurt or something really traumatized me and i think of it when i smell that smell when i see that color i'm i'm traumatized again i clench up i have like stress or fear anxiety yeah so the emotional the emotional

context to a memory is what you can change you don't want to you don't want dementia you don't want to delete the memory because that's a different problem yeah you don't want to block it you don't want yeah but you what you want to do is change the emotional context attached to that memory what happens if we you hear this from people a lot who might have been traumatized as kids where they forget they kind of blocked the memory and then they whenever they research it's very raw but they've stuffed it they've blocked it they've

numbed it addicted it whatever you want to call it driven into addiction but yeah exactly so so what happens when i don't know i i don't know about the kid stuff as much because that that's a different space and i don't want to you know i want to stay where i feel real comfortable with what i've been reading and learning so emotional context to memory for adults in the right setting with the right person through ex you know they have their techniques you can actually work through the trauma of the memory and the experience by

going to certain therapists who help you get better with that so process the memory yeah just to take take the emotional pain right the emotional trauma and dampen that so you can say for example yeah i was you know i'm just bringing examples from my world yeah when i was i was diagnosed with cancer that's a traumatic event and then you see my my patients you see them over time through different ways when they say they say i was you know i was diagnosed with cancer and i did this their face is different describing it

later than it was immediately after receiving the diagnosis so through that that is that's a real life example right i'm not it doesn't have to be all the stuff uh you know related to violence and all that issues the traumatic experience of a cancer diagnosis and how patients cope with that immediately and then you see them months later years later because i'd be a mess right i'd be like okay this is i wouldn't be able to cope but they surprisingly not some of them most of them cope they get dressed they come in for their

three-month scans which to me would be a traumatic experience every time is this guy gonna tell me it's back or it's bigger i mean think about like getting that did nothing in your mail or email i gotta go in for this scary muse again but somehow they cope and that's where in in life on a nice edge i learned so much from them that it's possible to cope with traumatic experiences i'm not saying you as an individual can i'm not saying i can but when you look at a group of cancer patients and most of

them wow cope live move on from very traumatic uh emotional experiences as well as physical experience of cancer pain and cancer surgery right that's the lesson i want everybody to go through um in their mind when they're dealing with their own challenges wow what's the biggest lessons you've learned from the cancer patients you've treated on the way they process and handle their journey from first hearing about they have cancer in the brain or tumor or something to recovery what's the biggest lessons you've learned there it doesn't all end well some some suffer many suffer you

know in their own ways so it's not this you know nobody wishes cancer upon somebody else or on you know so it's not like you know it's not like this thing like it's not an opportunity and i don't want to ever present it that way but those that have coped well they invariably say i wish i would have lived live my life the way i am now after a cancer diet oh man like i wish i would live my life having seen the finish line relatively because it changes how they live and they're not sad

it's a generalization like i said some have suffered many have suffered but they they wish that they would have made quality of life a priority throughout life not after the cancer diagnosis something about seeing the finish line on the horizon makes people go uh i don't like that guy i'm not gonna see him much this is something i enjoy i wanna you know they get they get they get after it they get to they get to the business of living in the way they want to deep down inside but often have been encumbered by the

the weirdness of interpersonal relationships pressure and everything else how do you show up in your personal life after seeing all this for the last couple decades or i guess that's a heavy question you know i can't i can't say that i've always dealt well with it the human stories were important but i was just i was going for perfection of the craft you were trying to be a precise surgeon just trying to remove it and heal it fix it yeah and and then and then you're just connected to the human stories you were just like

yeah i wouldn't say i was disconnected but right the the the sec the from the fifth to the tenth year approximately when the craft became uh occupied less of my uh my mind because it was more automatic obviously everyone's specific but it's more automatic yeah and um i actually enjoyed the challenge and that's what you want as a cancer surgeon who's trying to be the best for you and be the best for them at this craft that's an interesting intersection they want me to be the best they want me to have ambition at being the

best surgeon which means tackling the biggest cancer and my the people who chose me to perform their surgery have the fewest complications biggest mountain fewest complications that's a personal ambition that aligns with what the cancer patients wanted so that that was an interesting thing um you know it was it drove me and at the same time i could see that since i take care mostly of stage four cancer and there's no stage five really that stage five means what there is no stage five that means death okay so stage four is the word terminal is

not fair but stage four is the most advanced cancer so all my patients live a few years let's just say that but that means you know after a while you know i was like i just i've cared for like over a thousand people and they're no longer alive wow and i started to mess with my head man and um because stage four there's no way to cure it is what you're saying stage four by definition other than in blood cancers is not curable so the question is can we can we get out of school in

life yes and and quality life during that time oh my god that's what i mentioned yeah so after a while i was like man i got a i got a i got a drawer full of um invitations to funerals oh my gosh and i just stood back a little bit and i was having some struggles with my own in my own life and uh so so the answer to your question is for those for those who are involved in cancer care to um to make yourself vulnerable to actually um sort of in piecemeal go on

their difficult journey with them it can be hurtful it was raw the last five years the last three years i've been able to take that and write about it and see that like i have been fortified by by letting them teach me and the privilege of them saying come along with me my difficult times this airplane must crash and you will ride with us we choose you to ride with us but you have the parachute at the end and after i was to tell my kids that man i just feel like i'm doing i'm crashing

a lot of planes and so it went from not noticing it to noticing it and having it mess with me to wait a second that might have been the biggest gift of my craft is to learn from the people in their most difficult times and how they remain optimistic in the face of calamity so i i'm in a different space about the last couple of years um but that that's probably the best question anybody's asked me in the last couple years of course man wow so how do you personally manage your mind and your brain

health knowing that i mean is there any i guess survival rates after a few years of any patient that you work on a few yeah so maybe it's a it's more of a stage three cancer i guess or it's yeah yeah the earlier stages have cure cure potential yeah when they come to see me you're at the same time it's usually that it's spread to the brain from a cancer in the body that's gotcha that's broken out gotcha and is there no way to see to do a surgery on a brain that has less cancer

on stage one or two and and remove it fully is that possible some or is it hard to see that yeah let's there's two types of brain cancers one that grow from the flesh of the brain and they come in different stages and more commonly are those that spread to the brain jimmy carson or excuse me jimmy carter president is 90 something and he's got melanoma that's in the brain but it was you know so it's not always but for breast cancer or lung cancer that spreads to the brain it's sort of the uh the

the final manifestation of the cancers right man now but those are heroic stories to me right that oh man that look you gave me that was me five six seven eight years ago like man this is yeah you know but the last couple of years it's man they made it to the graduation they made it to you know moms are always like i just want to get to where my kid is out of high school and there's something these are kids with it no moms who have breast cancer 15 year olds in ninth grade in

there but so when you see them it's uh like i said it's i don't it's not sad at all for me anymore right it's actually how rare of a gift that i can see people at their most valiant oh my god and so now now it informs me but back to your original question there was about five years where i was just messing with my mind you know how does someone this is more of a educational question i guess for people how does someone prevent cancer you know and where does most of these cancers come

from is it random that people just get it if they're whatever genetics is it's their environment their levels of stress their food intake is it you know anxiety they're dealt with trauma that they're not processing what is the the cause of most cancer there are cancers we potentially give ourselves from our bad choices really give me smoking okay yeah okay um but not everybody has smoke gets it right and 20 of lung cancer people never smoke so really right then where do they get lung cancer from if they're not smoking so uh do you remember

i was talking about the brain being this garden and stuff like that well our bodies they're not an interesting garden in my opinion you know but they're their garden too their skin is shedding off liver cells grow so when things grow they can sprout weeds so area parts of the body that don't ever change like strangely heart never gets cancer you know so things that don't change don't sprout cancers it's a byproduct of constantly having cells in our bodies die and regrow and when you do that regrowth process you're going to spin off something that

doesn't behave so when how do you spin off things that are healthy and uh you know flourishing as opposed to little weeds here and there how do you how do you well you're doing your bubbles how do you do oh yeah so i'm talking physiologically before we get to the mind yeah it's an interesting point thoughts can be thought of that way too uh the body when it um it's 99 of the time it's doing the right thing we're both here but when you do it with a sheer volume of a lifespan and you do

it over seven billion people you're going to sprout some cancers so you get cancers in the body cancers in the brain can our thoughts become cancers that's a provocative and can our thoughts heal cancer that's a very provocative thought i have not seen um positive thinking there's no i'm not saying it's not possible and i encourage people to do it but i think positive thinking um meditating um ultimate cultivating optimism all of these things they do change the global physiology of your body okay i think we're not just the brain but the body right and

that in turn can affect what's going on the brain but i don't know if a thought can send an electrical zap to a tumor and hurt the tumor but a certain way of thinking can make you have a certain physiologic response which there in turn could you know get in the way of cancer's progression that's why i mean i feel like if we're for breaking this down from what i'm hearing you say there's a garden in our brain there's a garden right and how think of it as a garden oh think of it as a

garden or a school of fish you know working on harmony yeah all these different things right so if our if we have a level of thinking that is let's call it positive let's call it beautiful thinking as opposed to suffering based thinking beautiful thoughts joy gratitude happiness peace appreciation acknowledgement self love and love for others let's say those types of thoughts versus the the opposite of suffering type thoughts if we have those thoughts on a consistent basis in the mind would those then in fact penetrate the brain to flourish more healthy uh to nurture that

part of the heart the 100 billion jellyfish floating in harmony would they be in more harmony and healthier as opposed to penetrating it with these suffering-based thoughts and then in return with the brain activated and flowing and not having these breaks and blocks then it's signaling down to the body to send a more healthy uh ecosystem throughout the body and then returning the body back to the brain and back to the mind and having you more let me unpack that for you because i've got that's a enormous question that i think i have a very

specific answer because i think when we were talking about this earlier language can be confusing if it's if it's used too casually but let's let's take the cancer part out for now yes um but but yeah being in a better frame of mind exercising eating right being calm all of that changes things physiologically that make your whole body better at fighting cancer uh that we we agree on that's measured now let's go back to the brain uh as a garden yes so can we cultivate uh that part of the garden or can we cultivate a

garden that lean towards a positive mind frame right yes because if if bombs are falling even the most optimistic garden will go into a threat response right you don't all you don't only want to be chill you don't only want to be possible you want to be aware you want to be yeah you want to be flexible you want to be all these things so let's say there isn't external stress around yet you're too jacked up you're too stressed that's the common ailment of city life at least here where we have safety this is really

fascinating it's one of my favorite things that i that i love talking about uh you remember we talked about the reptilian brain you get knocked out and stay you stay awake and we talked about the mushroom canopy well there's another one in the middle called the limbic system but i call it the emotional brain categories are not that simple but it's got its own little anatomy like if there was a slice down the side of my head you actually see the mushroom canopy and you'd see some unique star wars looking structures in the middle and

then you'd see the reptilian brain like the stamina yeah the stance that was the reptilian reptilian brain and in the middle is the limbic system and on top is the mushroom right that's the cortical we call it the cortical canopy we used we use like ecological terms to describe it in journals yeah so the cortical canopy and that emotional brain the limbic system they have branches towards each other measurable and so when somebody goes from age 16 to being wild to being 18 and more composed let's say adolescence the structure of the brain hasn't changed

it weighs the same it looks the same on mris but the person's totally different right well because of the cultivation of thought from the cortical canopy the mushroom cap to the emotional brain as they integrate more you're able to say hey maybe no we're going to cross that freeway or right right maybe wear that seat belt so it it it's learning it's but it's interacting with emotions at the same time you don't want to be emotionless so emotion is making a push back to thought like no love is an emotion this pain i'm feeling because

mom is sick is an emotion i don't want to be spock about it or tap it down so that cultivation of thought and emotion is what is is the the most lush way to live because then you're adaptive to stress like hey this is actually something dangerous going on thought is coming in emotion is going on but at the same time you have this internal what they call emotional regulation like nothing's wrong and you're just freaked out and that's where those branches thought meditation therapy counseling hugging your puppy it it creates a better balance between

thought and emotion and that that tone not on off thanks for asking this question i love this the tone is what life is about you know you you you become a new parent let that let that emotion run rampant cry you're about to go see your boss and you know it's not going to go well and you're starting to do things that you know is emotion running rampant then use thought and breathing exercises turn the volume down just just set the tone a little different on that and then go and see your boss or your

lover or some conflict situation you're in that is what we're doing throughout life and the example of it is adolescence where it happens most for most of us automatically but then we stop like we're grown-ups that that that tone is something you cultivate through the experiences of life and then when you get older or when the next trauma comes you're you're better braced and positioned for how to cope with this a little more thought because i'm running hot on emotion or like man i'm too cold about this right now it is a raw situation i

need a safe place to let my emotions run wild right a safe environment yeah that's that's the way i approach uh the intersection of thought and emotion yeah i think uh you said emotional regulation i feel like is for me one of the most powerful skills that someone can learn in relationships and career in driving you know on the street with other people around emotions are dominant by them yes which is great but so it's usually emotional regulation not thought regulation right but learning how to have emotional regulation is such a powerful skill for each

individual um and we're never done because you don't know what's coming right but it's it's the it's the it's the tending to the garden yes it's the lifelong cultivation um because what's happening if we allow our emotions the limbic part of the brain is the emotion based part of the brain thought is the no exact regions but there is some anatomy relative yeah it's the more of the main focus of the brain obviously if it was taken out it would regulate but um emotionally if the emotion is if you're always in reaction mode you see

something ah you're in freak out mode you're in screen mode you're in i'm a defensive attack mode you're i mean someone's hurting me mode if you're always in that space what happens to the brain uh physiology what what happens to the actual physical aspect of the brain and how does that affect the body and the mind if your emotions are always running high oh i love this question i'm happy because this when i was reading about oh that's god i know no because this is this is what this is this is what can empower people

is an understanding of of how things lean yeah and how things they can be modified otherwise it's just i mean i can't tell my cancer patients just try not to stress out right it's just it's hollow it's shallow it's rude actually yeah so i think there's too much of that advice going on what i want to show people is how we're sort of designed are natural inclinations and then you come up with your approach i'm telling you how can my my my son got a puppy in the pandemic that man that's my therapy dog i

didn't even understand the con i hugged that animal and you brought so much peace and love you just what i'm telling you my physiology changed calm yeah it just so everybody's got to have an individual approach to that so here's the two things about emotions there's uh we could cut out the thinking just to put it coarsely you can cut out the thinking brain and you'll still be alive you if you somehow were able to take out that middle part of the brain there is no life left there's the consciousness relies on emotions on emotions

consciousness relies on emotions yeah because they spark through right remember the branches frontal lobe deeper branching intersecting the global waves of electricity that's why there's something called deep brain stimulation just let me riff on this go for it so what we want people to not wash their hands 150 times a day or have tourette's or sometimes depression or sometimes a drive for obesity or certain tremors we take a little catheter and just the tip isn't covered in in in plastic and we put it into the emotional the limbic brain the limbic brain you stick it

down through the top of the mushroom what do you call the cortisol cortical canopy yeah cortical canopy you can push through that you punch through that and it doesn't affect you you guys can look it up deep brain stimulate dba it's around for 40 years yeah yeah so you put it through so those drives that like tourette's uh the ocd we don't tickle the cortical the thought you're not just tapping them off it's an emotional drug oh my gosh so you're sticking it in through the middle of the brain and what happens and then the

tip with just a little pulse like the brain's pacemaker and it changes the electro so it's not it's not brand new i understand but why would it work you can pulse the limit brain how long do you do this for five minutes an hour what is this process they wear it under their they want they wear it under a clavicle like like grandma with a pacemaker a grandpa so you're keeping it all the time yeah you were right here and what what do you do i mean you just push a button when you're freaking out

and it kind of relaxes you or so the waves on that lake yeah if i also jumped in on the other side when those waves come towards each other sometimes they negate each other right similarly the right electrical pulse can reset the electrical waves in your brain that we were talking about earlier that's how deep brain stimulation has worked for 40 years so how do we create brain stimulation on our own oh that's a good question let me let me answer the first one i'll get back to that deep brain stimulation on our own is

through paste breathing let's get back to that one breathing meditation and i'll show you i'll show you the anatomy for that but because you know as we talked about i need to i need somebody to explain it to me i can't just say do this emotional regulation is tricky in two ways hot emotions lead to high heart rate surging blood pressure lots of things being released we've already heard about them so you're running your body in overdrive for no reason you're wearing yourself out that makes sense to people okay that's a good reason to be

physiologically not stressed if you can and you come up with your coping maneuvers what's more interesting is with the intersection of the uh the frontal lobes the thinking brain and the emotional brain is that emotions are they're coming in favored they're always hot this the thinking brain has to do more of the work and at some point if you are not able to cultivate emotional regulation it becomes a feed forward thing because the connections start to sever and then you start having this emotional brain that's no longer being tapped down or paced or controlled by

the thinking brain so emotional regulation is the life skill to deal with the trauma coming up to rev your body down but if you don't try to cultivate it you'll actually lose control of it and as you get older you'll have more rampant uncontrolled emotions and not not be approaching life the way you want to so that's the answer about emotional regulation do emotions have more power over thoughts or thoughts but have more power over emotions we start off with uh the emotions are generally on overdrive compared to thought so thinking through emotions thinking which

emotions have earned the right to be there is that lifelong process and people are like what does that mean well take adolescence teenager goes from 15 to 19. very different person yeah and that's all emotional regulation right uh thought was losing teenagers i miss it actually it was a wild time yeah but then thought comes into balance emotion your reflection and thinking yeah so take that thing that you know happens take my explanations if they if they're of value to you and then say let me now let me take the wheel of that thing that

happened without me actually choosing or driving right that maturity happens on its own now let me take the wheel of that process and try to do it for the rest of my life every year every moment and not just say hey whatever i got at 18 19 is is who i am going back to your first thing you're new every day so it's a responsibility to cultivate that emotional regulation through thought and through certain behaviors for our whole life because you never know what's going to happen pandemic war and you want you know you want

to be best braced for that and not approach that as a 15 year old right you want to have more awareness and well if you want to call it control but i think you want to have control over your emotions and not let your emotions control you so that that the emotions are mostly based in the limbic part of the brain right obviously it's all connected in certain areas but if you're talking about an area and so what's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain so so that we are in we

have a personal power over it that we're into control that we that we have or or more yeah it depends on the situation we can turn it up or turn it down and we depending on the depending on what's going on yeah maybe we need to be a more emotional in a moment and not be chill and relax when you're in that time maybe the moment is so big man it's of course you're just emotionally over the top and we know that's what's been going on the last couple years and even today so but that

but that leaves you a flexibility and it also leaves you without feeling bad like oh i was emotional then now i'm not i'm not a person that has emotional regulation you don't have this brain the same forever it's a constant trimming of the sails modulating tone to me it's a little bit of work if you're in a good spot like hey don't this ain't guaranteed yeah but it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're if you're uh not in a good spot like tomorrow can be better and if not tomorrow than the month

or the year after right so emotional regulation um the shortcut so now we're getting to like is there a tip you know because i hope people feel like wait a second this everything is possible but it's going to take a lot of work okay that's really what i was trying to get out for the first part but are there shortcuts because i love shortcuts with la freeways or whatever right ways that's good yeah but there are there is one that has stood the test of time and that i can now explain to you based on

on things that we do as surgeons uh and that's i refer to as meditative breathing in in in my first book but really it's it's pacing your breath and so what does that mean something you study with actual uh scans or no no no it's even it's wild if you have aberrant brain electricity and we check a scan and there's some funky marble type tough to brain tissue that doesn't look right we know like that's the epicenter that's where the that's where the electricity is sprouting from but some people they have it some kids that

have it some adults that have it there isn't a there isn't anything wrong with the scan right yeah the scan looks pretty brain looks perfect but the electricity's off right that's what epilepsy is all right that's yet another seizures one seizure uh two seizures is epilepsy then you get the diagnosis but yes seizures is aberrant electrical activity of the brain the same things we've been talking about um so when we don't know where it's sprouting uh because if it's from a small space we can dissect it out and take away the the epicenter right you

can take it away you can cut it out we can cut it out and the patients are seizure-free really yeah now but what if there isn't a spot that we find and their seizures are horrible and it's well before thinking about removing half the brain so what they we would do is we make a reverse question mark incision it's just scalp it's not very tender that's what they tell me under the ribs are more tender is what they say uh patients then we make our little ice fishing hole are they numb when they're taking this

this is for this one they're asleep there's other weight do you numb the skull the skin you just cut through the skin no numbing they're they're fully asleep oh but when they're awake then at the very end i inject the cut so the numbing lasts the longest numbing gotcha yeah um you're not just sitting there away they're just cutting it off that's that is an operation we do but that's a different story yeah the so you take the skull off the brain has a covering you don't see the brain right away there's like a sheath

um like a like skin like no it's like almost a nylon material you can pick it up and stitch it that's what keeps the water inside the skull it's not the bone yeah brain sac there you go it's a brain sac right it's like it's nylon it's pretty and we cut it and then the clear water pours out you can see the surface of the brain and water's coming out yeah because the brain is floating in an aquarium right it's crazy yeah it's fl it's buoyant your brain doesn't sit on bone it's it's floating again

jellyfish it's water so when you're hitting when you're having a lot of fast actions and you're hitting something is it hitting yeah your skull stops and then inside it sloshes into the inside that can't be good for you is it well that's where all the cte and football stuff is the issue is it's a sudden stops repeated sudden stops with the brain sloshing and hitting the inside surface of your skull that can't be good can it well people are pretty people get by but we're seeing that if you do it too much with kids and

nfl people but so you got to open then there's a little size of a deck of a card it's got a little 96 or different electrodes on it you put the deck of the card on the naked brain you take those wires you pop them out with little needles through the back almost like like yeah and then you put the bone back on and you stitch up the scalp and then you put some numbing medicine and you you put put on a head wrap and they hang on the hospital for weeks because you're waiting for

the seizure to happen so you've got a pad on the brain a grid so when the seizure sparks we can see uh it was it was like in connect four or battle battles that was that board game battle yeah it's in it's in two you know where it's at yeah you know where it's at two six because that way you know where you're gonna so there's a there's a mesh uh pad electromagnetic pad or something that can track with wires that are coming out of the back of this this connected to the monitor that are

connecting the monitor at all times and they're there for a couple weeks it's insanity because they're emotional they're happy they're fine like us hanging out yes give me some ice cream play some video games watch some tv so what happened was a bunch of wires coming out of their necks yeah but uh the scalp yeah but yeah we have things people you know you'd be surprised with what we can wrapped it up what kind of devices we put in and dangle from people that's cool you know from broken legs they come up with those little

metal grids and they move around so so then after a few weeks you you wait till a seizure happens and then we know where under that grid where it's where it's sparked we found the epicenter and then from that you've tracked the data you have the recording of the data and then you can go in and then tweak it or you remove that little part that's and then they're done they don't have seizures anymore sometimes or they're reduced now here's something that's more interesting for for you and your audience well that's a boring couple of

weeks so a bunch of cognitive science students and brain students and all they come in and they started hanging out with them and they said hey can we go through these lessons of pace breathing and meditative breathing uh-huh can we do this without removing it yeah well completely unrelated to the clinical work well we're hanging i've got a direct feed of the true electricity from the surface of your neck breathing yeah let's what they're sitting there so they do something new with them they teach them meditative breathing come on what is what are you seeing

on the the brain activity recordings the same thing that we see when we give valium which is an anxiolytic their anxiety level goes down their electricity goes from fast to medium remember we started this and we're talking about athletes not wanting to be in fast we want to be in the flow state meditative breathing led to direct changes in the electricity of their brain as measured not with a sticker on the forehead but with a grid on the surface of the naked brain it's on the brain it's true measurable changes in the electricity there for

the mind so meditative breathing that for thousands of years people have said can help you chill out is an anxiolytic and break anxiety well we have proof of that now and i think that's important for people to know that it's not just some you know it's just not a concept that's being thrown around too casually that through awake um direct electrophysiologic recording of seizure planning surgery at elite centers while looking for the seizures there's a lot of data coming out about let's play video games let's do meditative breathing let's read and then what changes and

so that's what i love in book one that i shared was that's raw data that's real data and there's an explanation behind how that happens and so what i would say to people is that's something you have that's free because i'm not selling anything breathing and the pace of breathing and what's the pace that works best i mean there's lots of different techniques of meditative breathing they found you know it doesn't matter you know people say through your nose or mouth and that's kind of the confusing stuff that's out there well the nose and the

mouth connect before they get to the trachea and it goes to your lungs so it doesn't matter how but it's about slowing the cadence and making the cadence more methodical a deep breath you know deep breath in and a deep breath out it's no different than what we do in surgery when you feel the case getting a little out of your control what do you do well at first the first thing is i just slow my breathing down and that doesn't mean the solution will arise but i know that puts me in my most calm

and focused state to find the solution for the problem in front of me and likely that's what athletes at thrive do as well you don't want your brain surgery well exactly right that's what stress does it makes you hyper mentally right absolutely wait if you do that's that's a great point if you just hyperventilate just because you're just doing it as just whatever for whatever reason you get physically jittery yeah you will give yourself anxiety by just doing that yeah i thought that just for a second i'm showing you the proof on the other side

do the opposite of hyperventilation and you'll make yourself less frenetic will that solve your relationship problems no i'm not sure will that make you not want to get in a fight with your boss i'm not sure but you should know that that puts you at your most in command of your emotions your emotional regulation that's a great great question the emotional regulation it sounds like a big part of the the the health or the lack of health of our brain and our bodies is what i'm hearing you say the emotional regulation is at the center

of our potential let's call it sprouting of healthy brain activity and connections and also healthy cells throughout the body and organs or a lack of emotional regulation could potentially damage the brain activity or it could have it so up and down as opposed to a calmer activity and the body as well to create potentially more i would call it cancerous cells but you wear yourself out yeah you let the emotional stress anxiety depression all these different things you wear yourself out what i'm hearing you say is emotional regulation is at the core of these things

i think so and it's the rarest skill to cultivate in the most important one and it's in your control and but it's not easy it's not easy it's taking me a long time to learn this process so we've got thoughts do thoughts come from the brain or from the mind that quite that that's a deep question um and it's the mind but the mind is only activated when the brain is activated it's like saying does the roar come from the person in the stadium you know or is its own thing you need the neurons to

to roar to connect with electricity to have the mind the mind is that roar outside the state of the stadium interestingly they tried to they did this experiment again with direct like i need some i need hard science i don't know i don't want fluffy language somebody says in the next five minutes decide to decide on your own at your own whatever you want that you're going to move you're going to grab this coffee cup and then they're measuring me the electricity pops before i report wanting to move this coffee cup what do you mean

meaning that that the electricity happens before you make a move uh before i think i'm ready to make a move you know the ambition comes from the electricity it's not like i'm going to grab this coffee cup and then electricity it's the electricity i think i'm going to grab this coffee cup really yeah so this is something that i can't explain yeah it comes first you've scanned this you've seen this more than scan right because a lot of brain scans going on these days everybody in a car accident with a headache is getting a brain

scan i'm talking about direct electrical measurements you mean with on the brain yeah yeah yeah so the electricity is the thought so before i move my hand to grab this coffee cup there's an electric i can measure i can measure a little like your light bulb i can measure something before without you telling me when so so you can tell me when i'm going to move for it based on i can tell you when electricity changes i can't tell you your intentions i can't read your mind gotcha but the electricity pops before you actually think

i'm having a thought the electricity is you having the thoughts what does that mean that's crazy but that's measurement that we can that we can we can uh you know it's uh that's why it's fascinating the inner you know let me tell you something about this man the electric we are electrical beings yes like eels and right you can the nerves to your legs you can put electrode in there you know we're we're electric um we're flesh we have chemistry right electrochemistry like there's a battery um and you separate these little ions and what's what's

a battery we are batteries are those neurons are essentially batteries they're things that are separated that currents can run through and people say oh man that sounds so i know i said i know we're measuring it seizures are aberrant electrical activity without any changes in brain anatomy i'm trying to get people out of flesh people out of being wired to electrical flows and then think about this in a bipolar disorder when you can be really manic or really depressed the treatment is an ion lithium it's it's bipolar wow and for decades it's on the periodic

table next to all the other ones like hydrogen and it's an ion it's it's stardust star dust lithium it's cheap right it's a pill and it can bring down your mania and it can lift your depression really so there are i'm seeing a lot of different things that point to uh that we are electrical flows our thoughts our feelings our emotions and behaviors because that's what we're talking about today right like the bigger stuff um not how do i move an arm or how do i write right right and again um if you see if

you see your thoughts as billowing through your skull if you see them moving like aurora borealis like a school of fish or birds that that leaves us with potential that uh we can think differently we can feel differently yeah that we can transform that that takeaway is for you to make but i'm trying to give you a lot of evidence that the world of neuroscience is starting to see things that way yeah um and not about gears or wires so how do we train our brains and our minds to live a more abundant life you

know everybody's got their own drive i mean i've got people who don't like to be on lithium because they think they're more creative when they're manic you know so i'm not i can't i don't judge um i inform you yeah it's ever up to people what they want to do but i guess abundant and peaceful loving life you know like all that well i mean i if that's your ambition i think you would you know because it isn't for some actually they want a wildlife or they want it right you know they're you know they

take risks they climb mountains here they like the thrill you know i don't uh that's up to you but to optimize brain function i think in whichever direction you want to steer it is to first look at the flesh because it is flesh and so keeping the arteries open and irrigating that garden that flesh is important something's good for your heart keep the arteries open and your brain you know you want blood flow going you want water go in your garden that's easy enough and you get that through how uh the same things that uh

keep your hard arteries open exercise uh exercise has double benefit but yeah but you know you're if you're my age 49 cholesterol pills you know you got to keep the plumbing open exercise eating right keeping your cholesterol down all those things they tell you so you don't get a heart attack well keeping those arteries open on the surface your heart also keep these arteries open to the into the into the garden of your brain so that's easy for people to get like okay heart health is good for brain health well heart health is good for

brain flesh we are more than flesh right and so then you have to leave the world of of heart behind um and come more into sort of the mind then there's thinking thoughts not just brain health but thinking health yeah i like that exactly because it's not a pump you know right it's thought health yeah i like that and now before we get to the electricity up here that we've touched on a lot we've talked about now heart health is good for brain flesh health yes there's something in between that we haven't touched and that's

the chemical that there are chemicals neurotransmitters often used i hate the word you know but dope oh it's a dopamine hit it's not that simple um so now there's chemicals there too so in this garden the piece that i didn't tell you about is that those hundred billion neurons when they are trying to branch with each other when successful um they never actually touch there's always going to be a gap and in that gap they spray chemicals at each other so you have electricity coming down this neuron and to get across this cleft to the

other neuron it sprays dopamine and spray serotonin it sprays other things gaba and so you are electrochemical and that's why things like prozac as an antidepressant is out there that's where lithium works you can change the global electrical pattern and flows of your brain by modifying the chemistry in those little clips so we'll give you a specific example selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor a lot of people are antidepressants when serotonin is sprayed the reuptake inhibitor is a little vacuum and it doesn't clear the cleft of serotonin you're messing with the vacuum so there's more serotonin in

the cleft that tends to work as an antidepressant so chemicals have to be thought about also there's the flesh there's a chemistry and then there's the electricity what seems to help everything and people aren't going to like this answer but it is is uh exercise right yeah of course and exercise on um in a way where you're also thinking there are these cool things like they had people running on a treadmill and and dodging wild games like thought you know thought and movement together uh so like uh i mean like a racket sport where you're

like hand-eye coordination you have to move ping-pong tennis pickleball's amazi i just started playing last year i've only played like five times i'm like this is an incredible sport i played with my sons we were dropping them off in san francisco for berkeley and we they got it i hadn't played dude it might be my son's life this is why dad you don't play board games with us or sports with us because you're insanely competitive i was just like okay that it's it's a fun game yeah yeah but so but that's powerful right because people

sit at home don't want to hear man get on your treadmill get active get engaged go out and do stuff yeah board games moving thought so the the thought cultivation is really important so uh brain you know the keeping the flesh going but once you get out of thinking just about the flesh it's about engagement it's about stimulation it's about you know the results don't happen the next day it's a yeah it's not knowing how to play the violin but trying to learn how to play the violinist no you don't have to learn the second

next language right just got to try you just got to try to pull from all the corners of that garden as a habit i'm not saying 100 i'm not saying all day every day but that nobody told us those habits should also be introduced and we told us to cultivate our thought is something kids should learn something we should have dedicated time to we're going to learn a lot about heart health you know and now it's time to get on to brain and mind health especially with the pandemic especially with other things that are going

on is that so i think um when i was in medical school it was just heart heart heart all the time right in fact heart surgery uh was one of the most the second most competitive along with brain surgery in the last three decades as they've gotten better with catheters and stents and the pills have been better heart surgeons have significantly been reduced because there isn't the need for it and i think when you look at the dent that has been made in cardiac health through a couple of decades of messaging mean you go in

there they check your blood pressure they check all this stuff for your heart but nobody asks you how you're doing right the emotional right therapeutic side of the mind health yes and so so emotions is mind health well i think it depends so some people let's stay with that for a second because for some people the lack of emotional regulation is leading them to suffer or not have the mind help they want but they're feeling it in their body the emotion when you think about emotions you feel like that book is continued to do well

the body keeps score so it's amazing yeah it's it's especially in these times it's number two on the best seller list and i mean new york times bestseller lives but right but that that space is true but there's also other people whose mind health is a lack of focus or attention like they feel good they just can't get the words out and so my cancer patients that have chemo um they can sometimes develop chemo fog and there's things like you know covered brain fog yes so so yes mind health and emotional regulation likely the the

most important thing but also other things like concentration and attention uh is is all under the umbrella of mind health so like if i had a attention coach when i was younger i could have done better in school i see my boys my one of them i'm just like you're the sharpest you're the sharpest tool in the shed you just can't you know look at a problem for longer than 20 seconds right and then you're distracted so stay in the stay in the striking distance when that naturally comes to you in your 20s you're going

to be the boss man and so realizing attention and focus is one part of mind health realizing emotional regulation is one part of mind health realizing that if they eat a certain way uh and you teach them to eat a certain way there is a there is a proven mind diet its mediterranean mostly plants fish if you put these habits in them now think about where they will be at age 49 having the tools some of the tricks having had the diet that has preserved their flesh the best likely to have staved off dementia a

little bit like those things we do now as a less in my opinion that's a lesson for the panda let's not wait to see how this pandemic has just rocked the kids minds right let's put this stuff in now let's front load this and get and then let them develop and see how this all this generation happens um after this you know cataclysmic event as a parent of three boys and after all the information you've learned personally from life experience but also as a surgeon brain surgeon and neuroscientist if you could only share three pieces

of wisdom for parents today to raise their kids to have an optimal life what would you say with the three things you think they should do the the answers i give i want to back it with i'm sure the the even now saying the sciences um doesn't mean as much as you use the science is fluid yeah it's like always evolving and changing right i want to back it with an explanation okay that you can understand and uh take home and grasp um the third thing is just what we talked about i'd love to equip

them with mind health tools um so that would be a certain type of diet good food i'm not talking about being skinny or fat or heavy or obese or or under i'm not talking about any of those things the things you eat regardless of your weight can help preserve the flesh of your brain and that's the mediterranean diet so i would have added salmon a couple of times and if you're vegan um you could there are vegetables that add that that sort of omega-3s in there yeah i would have said look this has to be

a part of what you eat even if you're eating french fries every day yeah i'm not telling you what not to eat yeah right so make sure you have this at least yeah this vitamin is nature's true vitamins right for your brain i would have taught them that and that and and sort of the emotional coping skills um and now we've gone over why that's important that for these things to work they're a multi-decade they're a glacial process it's not can what can we take tomorrow can i take this pill and i'll fix everything if

there was one i'd be taken and i'd share it with you i'm not against it actually i just there isn't one and when you think of the brain and the ways we've tried to conceptualize them today you can imagine one pill ain't going to fix all of that the other thing that i find interesting is when they're born they actually have more neurons than they hold on to and that was one you know when you said in surgery like there was an aha moment i was like can you do that well in neuroscience there was

this one aha moment for me it's like they have more of those neurons those jellyfish when they're young than when they're older so you're born with the biggest block of marble wow and you shave you shave off what you don't use because the brain is an energy hog right so it wants to be efficient so if you see that there will be a pruning of the diversity of neurons and then certain things will be have better connections and and and stay in there if you know there's a a culling coming for the diversity of neurons

the the most broad types of neurons um i think it's important to let them have the most broad types of life experiences so they hold on to those as they get older and then they can choose what they want to do and shave off a few they ain't using anymore right right so that it's called pruning huh um okay the human brain in kids will go through pruning and people like what does that mean well you know we're born and we can't walk and then we learn to walk so some changes are going on the

changes are also going on up here you're born with a lot and you're shaving certain things down diversity of experiences i think are very important so i took them traveling with me all around the world like each of them eight trips to eight trips around the world each wow um and that's when we did all our vibing bonding talking hanging of course took them to all the practices and games and stuff like that you know but the diversity of experience is important to me that helps that could be with grandma or cookies different cookies i'm

not it does it doesn't have to be all that helps the brain and optimize the brain yeah so that helps um a diversity of experiences will keep will let them have the the widest repertoire of neurons as opposed to what limiting their experiences because then the brain will shave off the stuff it doesn't do if you if you tie one hand behind the back certain neurons will will fall away so we want to keep those neurons as long as and that's my second point i got a buddy who's an olympian in uh in um uh

in england he's at the uh pentathlete greg white and he he made a great point i was the catholic in college oh yeah it's just fascinating to see it was amazing man it's great i like the i've always tried to be sort of a decathlete in life yeah i want to be i want to enjoy it's not that i want to be good at a lot of different things i want to i want to see what it looks like when you get to be good at it yeah exactly get into different worlds like this one

right but uh the other thing is that um proprioception which should be cultivated in my mind which is the knowing your arm is up or down and so greg and i we talked about it it would be fun for everybody should play as much as their capacity because i know people have children with intellectual physical disabilities but similarly getting them physically is teaching them how to do somersaults putting them in a not that they're going to be gymnasts hand stands and backflips and but some sort of sporting they call it sporting over there like exposure

so they're fully coordinated with their bodies i think that's an important whether that translates to less falls as grandma when they become grandparents i don't know but the the full integration of of brain to physical coordination i think would be an interesting one you know using the mouse with their left hand using the fork with their left hand forcing forcing those uh those neurons to stay relevant yes so that's uh inexperiences and that's that number two i would say in movement and then number three is that you know what we talked about is teaching them

what should be eaten i i think it's easy to say i had this conversation with one of my sons you know that's like um try to eat this regardless of what else you eat right um because there are things in fatty fish certain vegetables and plants um that separate from the junk foods separate from all the other bad stuff you might eat or good i mean it's delicious man happiness important i eat some i eat some junk food but i have tried hard since i learned about this to to be on the mediterranean diet yeah

or to add to add plants and omega-3s and however you want to do that wow um as uh not to lose weight not not for all of that but to preserve the flesh in my brain so i think you know uh diversity experiences to keep your your neurons around lots of movement and coordination training to keep uh keep those neurons engaged and then um eat plants yeah to keep the flesh going what do you feel like is uh i've heard from one i've heard from different neuroscientists that tell me if this is accurate that the

bigger your body gets more obese it gets the smaller your brain becomes it shrinks the brain or there's a correlation there with obesity and brain size is that i haven't heard of that okay and just on a regular level i operate on patients who are obese and when i open their skull they're fine there's there's not oh i haven't seen that you haven't seen smaller or bigger yeah and actually that's that can be you know i have seen withered brains work perfectly really and i have seen juicy brains have issues with epilepsy or autism so

the flesh is the starting point but it's it's the mind and the function that's about it so fascinating so trying to oh you know if you're heavy and your brain is smaller brain smaller bigger this spot that spot uh hardwired not hardwired i'm geared for this i just but if you have a perfect looking juicy brain let's say right that you're like wow that's a beautiful looking it looks healthy and that's what epilepsy is most people it's just beautiful looking brain but the electricity that it's sparking is off and sometimes they pass out sometimes they

smell certain things sometimes they have visions well it's all from the electricity right like that's a real lifestyle i mean there's stuff about their like authors and writers that in this before having the seizures when they felt most connected to god so that's an electrical thing their brain mri looks the same as this brain mri i love this three pieces of advice you'd give to parents which is physically optimizing the phil physical body with coordination type activities and and doing that the second one diversity of experiences in life just providing a range of opportunities to

experience life at its fullest and then nutrition there for mind health mind health tools including nutrition and emotion emotional coping skills emotional regulation skills i feel like i could go for a few more hours with you this stuff is fascinating to me what do you feel like you're gonna be shocked to learn over the next five years as a surgeon and a neuroscientist with the capabilities of where you see the brain mind connect emotional connection heading the thing that has fascinated me recently um a bit out of my wheelhouse because it doesn't require a surgeon

which is good i'd love for my career to be obsolete you know if we can help people um without having to cut them open that's right prevention yeah yeah or non-invasive treatments like i'm i'm trying to invent those i'm trying to make myself obsolete but right now the stuff that some of the stuff you know the patients are they come looking for for surgeons i don't do the type of surgery where i try to offer you improved something people come to me with a scan or a feeling that say can you help me and i

have to decide if i can and i guide them through that so i i enjoy my craft but i also want to be a time when opening a skull is no longer needed that said um npr did so out of stanford or karolinska i'm not sure but i love the way science communicates you can see the you can see the work but the uh transcranial and again i these words can be easily manipulated so i'm trying to give you the explanation yes so when you read it when some other time you could say i remember

he was talking about the electricity of the brain they figured out the thing looks like the size of a camera and they put it you know it's on a frame on the outside of your skull and they pulse mild electrical currents not the sky-high ones from shock therapy like jack nicholas in one flew over the cuckoo's nest but the fact that if you understand that we are electric the same deep brain stimulation the little pulse the heavy pulse of many electrodes of shock therapy electro convulsive therapy the that they can do it at more they

could turn the the you know the voltage down and they can direct it more and recently in a rigorous journal they were able to get it down to five most of the day sessions and they had 80 80 reduction in in refractory depression so you're depressed you've taken all the pills things are difficult and you've considered suicidal thoughts or yeah well that's that's an issue let me get on that one just for a second because when when people have suicidal thoughts and they they go into a hospital they can't wait six weeks for the pills

to work if they work they need to leave now or in five days like with this kind of little just the softest shock therapy the patient's report feels like a woodpecker huh and so the brain on the brain that's not something a neurosurgeon will do but to me that is where things are headed wow i would caution don't buy the stuff from amazon with the gizmo there's always a there's always a dark side to being manipulated by some of these so what you're saying by technology they've already been doing studies on this where 80 reduction

on depression yeah powerful from just the electronic shock a gentle for what shock therapies for severe depression for what 30 minutes or five minutes is this 10 minute episodes space by time over most of the day but you know you got to spend some time but five days it's powerful and then and then it stays or it's for a period of time very good question if some of the patients found it to be durable maybe in that time the pills come in maybe that time therapy comes in interesting but the point is um and they

can do with magnets too so be careful uh on youtube with magnets can do but it's electromagnetic so um gosh that's fascinating yeah and it's not completely in my space that's why i'm also more fast i'm a surgeon i stimulate the brain i use electric wands i put electric pulses but the whole space of doing it from outside the skull is a non-surgical space but to me it's very fascinating it reinforces the concept that our highest levels of thinking feeling and emotions are all sort of electrical flows oh my gosh this is this is my

jam i love this stuff man i'm so excited but there's a lot of room for you know there's a lot of room for exploitation when you're cool language like that because it's easier to say gears and wired but it's not yeah otherwise otherwise you know doskiewski wouldn't report writing his best work the moments preceding his epilepsy right that's you talking about art and literature otherwise you wouldn't put a a little battery in the controlled medical environment and break depression and otherwise you wouldn't you know be in shock therapy it's still some of these centers and

it can be useful where you literally you shock the skull and people wake up non-suicidal even if it happens once right all three of these things from ancient literature and the world of epilepsy to new study uh modern science to modern but it's a lot the theme that connects it all is all juicy brains but all different people because the electricity that sprouts from those juicing yeah so it's a bit to to wrap your head around but that's our current understanding it'd be easier for me to come in there and say you're wired this way

you're wired that way change your wiring by eating a blueberry look it's just not it's just not where our understanding is this is fascinating man we're gonna have to have you come back on for part two sometime but i wanna ask you a couple final questions uh this is a question well actually before i do ask you a couple final questions i want people to check out your work you've got a new book called life on a knife's edge a brain surgeon's reflections on life loss and survival you've got a a number of books but

people can check out that one it's the recent one if they go to your website is what's your website where they can learn more about it all um obviously just i would just you know just google because you see a lot of different things like that yeah you know my website isn't really the conduit but i'm i'm a cancer surgeon at city of hope yeah and then there's different stuff i've been doing and are you on social media at all i am on instagram actually that's where i put my my good stuff okay cool so

we'll follow that that's doctor at dr john do you i am john deal yes j-a-n-d-i-a-l so go check you out over there um and the books on amazon and everywhere else but again check out the book life on a knife's edge this stuff's fascinating man i'm i'm so intrigued by this i feel like in another life i would have been a neuroscientist probably not a surgeon but a neuroscientist um because i just think yeah surgery for me that might be a little too much but i don't know how you do it man yeah i appreciate

it every week it's that's got to be intense but uh really fascinating stuff that you've been studying and practicing and i want people to to get the book and and learn more about you um how else can we best be supportive of you and what you're up to right now i mean this is uh i never take it lightly to have a voice and to share my opinions so that right away you've you know you've already done me a tremendous favor to invite me on your show so sure so we're all good um and i

think you know i i don't you know i don't ask for there's nothing i'm selling i don't have anything like that but i'm turning 50 this year and um you know my pops and other people i've seen you know this run ain't forever and um i think um i think i'm just super happy um that i'm still i'm exploring and investigating and tearing myself apart you know putting my soul work in this book and and just to have the opportunity to uh to have that as a component of my life is i never expected that

yeah and so by uh by being given that opportunity that's support enough brother that's cool man i'm excited i'm excited for people to get the book uh this question is called the three truths it's a question i ask everyone at the end of the interviews hypothetical scenario imagine you live as long as you want to live but it's your last day on earth you've accomplished everything you've done the stuff you want to do you have happy healthy life family all that stuff but for whatever reason you've got to take all of your message with you

to the next place it's your last day you got to turn the lights off there's no more electricity in the brain and you move on to the next place you take all of your work with you all the message the content anything you shared your lessons no one has access to anymore but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true three lessons you would leave with the world and that's all that we would have to remember you buy these three lessons what would you say are yours i think the first one

would be that life is short but art is long i never fully understood that but through the last few years where i've become an author i've realized i can impact a lot of a lot of people and then the words in this book and the the soul work in this book can actually last onward yeah so life is short but art is long and having an opportunity to leave a bit of art has been a tremendous opportunity and that would be a message i would leave the world the second thing i would say is it

really touched me i think people think he was being facetious but kafka said i think uh and i learned about these these you know these authors and stuff later i never read i didn't read much at all when i was just rocking out and then um but in the last four or five years of trying to put this trying to talk about the human brain and mind you have to bring in artists and literature but he said the meaning of life is that it ends my cancer patients have shown me that is when you get

that feeling of um mortality that it can be fuel for you to live absolutely so and um and the third thing is um if you can um this one's more mine if you're if you're fortunate enough to find true love um take care of it so um so you don't lose it that's on an interpersonal level between of course between friends and lovers and and parents even you know the children that's what i got baby man i want to acknowledge you for a moment for putting your message out there in a way that we can

understand it because i think it's it's confusing to understand the brain and the mind the emotions and how it all is connected and i think people are communicating in a way of rewiring i've said these things and it's understanding how do we start to change the language around this and understand the brain and the mind and the emotions and the body and the flesh and the electricity of it all and so you can you doing the practical work as a surgeon and a neuroscientist and bringing both fields together to then educate in more simplified ways

of something that's extremely complex that will probably never fully understand how it all works is really helpful and for me this has just been really inspiring so i appreciate and acknowledge your work and your ability to want to continue to grow as a human and serve people with your message it's really inspiring man my final question is what's your definition of greatness that elusive goal that no one achieves but keeps us striving for more my man thanks sir we have to change our narrative we have to forget what the world said about all these scary

words and see those as very helpful it's a complete 90 degree or 360 degree change despair anxiety shame thinking i am shame thinking i have no self-esteem thinking i can't do this that's okay