Loading summary
Transcript97 lines
- [00:01]
A
Everybody talked about it since I first moved to Oregon.
- [00:04]
B
The big one. The earthquake that trashed the whole West Coast. Total destruction.
- [00:09]
A
Officially calling it the largest natural disaster in American history.
- [00:13]
B
I just didn't know what would help me next. So I took it all. Even the gun.
- [00:18]
A
It was time. Cello see why American Afterlife is the number one fiction and drama podcast in America. Presented by pair of thieves. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite favorite shows. Available now. Mishke here, joining the GL world to pitch my new podcast, which now comes out twice a week, Wednesdays and Fridays. The show features an extraordinary array of exotic circus performers, forgotten Hollywood starlets, reclusive Fortune 500 CEOs, professional taxidermists. Wait a minute. That's a different promo. Where's the promo for G elers? Here it is. Let's try this again. Mishke here pitching my new podcast. We're out of time. Could I do it again?
- [01:04]
C
Garagelogic isn't just another podcast. It's a trusted voice with a loyal audience. Every day, listeners tune in and pay attention to the businesses we feature. When you advertise with garagelogic, you're putting your brand in front of people who listen and act. We're number one in Anguilla, and we'll make your business number one with G ellers. Here's what one of our clients had to say.
- [01:25]
A
Hey, it's Pete Arnold from Hire it Pro. And I've used garagelogic to promote my business for years, and I've seen great results and new clients for my services from the GL audience. I recommend it to any business looking for new customers. G l ers are pretty awesome. You just got to ask for an introduction.
- [01:39]
C
You just heard how garagelogic delivers results for our advertising partners. Now it's your turn. Reach our engaged audience of g allers and grow your business by contacting account executive mark ellis@mark.ellisbi.com that's Mark ellisbi.com Put your message where it belongs, right in the ears of listeners who trust Garage.
- [02:04]
A
You're a young man, newly married. Your wife is nine months pregnant, and you find out you have a brain tumor and it's going to kill you. The medical world does not have the ability to save you. So what do you do? My name's Mishke. The gentleman I'm going to talk to went looking for groups of people who would pray for him locally, regionally, internationally. He spent his time looking for prayers, and he believes it's those prayers that today has him with no tumor at all. For this was the only treatment he tried. Welcome to the program, everyone. I've got a scientist standing by, a professor of psychological and brain sciences, former director of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Indiana University, an internationally recognized expert and leading researcher on the neuroscience of higher cognitive function, with research supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. What happens when a guy like this gets a brain tumor? And not just any brain tumor, one that's sure to kill him. It's not one they're going to be able to remove, and it's not one they're going to be able to get rid of with radiation. What do you do when you're a young man with a young wife, nine months pregnant? Do you pack it in or do you go looking for a miracle? And I mean really looking for a miracle all over the country, even outside the country. The miracle of healing through prayer. This is Joshua W. Brown's story. His book is called Proving a Unlocking the Power of. Of Prayer to Heal. It's a study of belief, of the mind, of spirituality, of concentrated prayer. It's a story of a search for a cure. We don't fully understand the reason he's able to write this book. The tumor is gone. I. Welcome to the show. Joshua W. Brown.
- [04:52]
B
Well, thank you. Thank you, Tommy. Thanks for having me.
- [04:54]
A
Tell me about your brain tumor. How old were you when you learned you had it and what was going on in your life at the time you learned of that diagnosis?
- [05:06]
B
So I was 30 years old, and I was working as a postdoctoral fellow doing functional brain imaging. I was looking at, specifically at the frontal lobes, parts of the brain involved in higher cognitive function. That is how we. How we plan over longer terms, longer periods of time. And so I was. I was basically enjoying being a scientist and excited to study the brain. And my wife was nine months pregnant with our first child at the time. So we were both looking forward to being parents and having a growing family, and everything seemed to be going well. And, you know, I had just gotten a paper, a scientific paper that had been accepted in a very prestigious journal. So my career was looking up, everything was looking up, and. And then it all kind of came crashing down.
- [06:04]
A
So was this tumor inoperable?
- [06:08]
B
The question is, if I were to have surgery, what hope would I have that that would help? And so as I look through the literature, the scientific and medical literature, I realized pretty quickly that while even if surgery is an option, and I did talk to a neurosurgeon it wasn't clear that that would prolong my life. Having surgery or having radiation doesn't necessarily help you live longer because it's difficult, impossible to get all the tumor. And so it grows back and. And then that's it.
- [06:43]
A
What do you consider your options? You don't want to die. You're moments away from becoming a father. You have a wife, you're a husband. Do you say to yourself, there's a way out?
- [06:59]
B
I started to wonder if miracles happen, if that's even a possibility. And if so, how could I find one? Because I didn't really have medical hope of a cure. So I was looking for anything I could to try to find some kind of hope, some kind of help. So at that point, I began talking with some friends at my church, and they said, well, there's, you know, there's this group over here and they can pray for you. And so I started to just look into groups that offered healing, prayer, basically, because I didn't know what else to do.
- [07:36]
A
Where were you at in terms of your own belief in prayer?
- [07:41]
B
Well, I grew up in a church. Church that was Christian church. And I had heard stories of people being healed, but it was always kind of, either that doesn't happen now, or we'll kind of pray with the hope against hope, but not really expect that it'll work. It's just sort of a, well, hope, and it's couched in this theological language of God's will be done, whatever that is, which I get. But I was obviously hoping that it would go my way. And I didn't know what else to do. I thought, well, you know, I've heard stories here and there, people being miraculously healed. I've heard stories in the Bible. You know, it happened a long time ago, but I don't know if things like that really happen. And because I haven't looked into it or I hadn't looked into it at the time, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what's real. And basically my question is, what's real? Is any of this real? Is this all like smoke and mirrors? And because, remember, I'm a neuroscientist, right? I'm at that time and still in a practicing neuroscience, working in a neuroscience lab doing brain imaging. So I'm not going to just swallow something whole because somebody says so. So I'm motivated, I'm curious. But I also still have my critical thinking skills. And so that's kind of the attitude I went into this with it's interesting
- [09:07]
A
thinking about the way you put it earlier. I wonder how many God fearing folk out there say to themselves with all sincerity, your will be done, God versus I know your will may be different than mine, but could we go with my will on this one?
- [09:28]
B
Yeah, well, and there's a tension, right, because mostly I try to speak as a neuroscientist rather than a theologian, but I can tell you sort of theologically what was going through my own mind at the time. And that was on the one hand, yeah. If, you know, if you think that God is, is or isn't willing to heal you, then that has to carry some weight. And if you think God doesn't want to heal you, but you desperately want to get healed, then what do you do with that? And the attitude I took was, so there's a story in the Bible, what's called the Syrophoenician woman. And she goes to Jesus and is like, hey, can you heal my daughter? And Jesus is like, no. And in so many words he had to focus on the people in Israel there. And she wasn't part of that. And so, no. And I think at that point a lot of people in the churches I was in would say, well, okay, yeah, really sorry to bother you, Jesus, you know, we'll just kind of be on our way now. But she didn't do that. She just argued with Jesus. And eventually, you know, as the story goes, Jesus healed her daughter. So I thought, well, you know, that's good enough for me. I mean, if she can argue with Jesus and it goes her way, then I'm basically going to take the same approach. So I'm just, I'm just not going to take no for an answer. So I traveled like all over the US all over North America, all over the world looking for miracles. And I just didn't give up. And even that, as I kept getting more bad news, I just decided I wasn't going to give up.
- [10:58]
A
Now you had the extraordinary luxury, it sounds like, of being able to travel all over the world looking for miracles.
- [11:06]
B
Yeah, it didn't quite start that way. I mean, it started off as I had a real decision to make and that that decision is we didn't have a lot of money. Like being a postdoctoral fellow is sort of like an entry level job as a career scientist. And my wife had just started her job as a professor at another university, this was in St. Louis. And we had some money, but not a lot. So the question is, do I spend the time, whatever time I have left with My wife with my newborn daughter, or do I spend the money and the time and go pursuing a miracle when I have no guarantee that'll work out or not? It really was a choice. And I think there's certainly benefits to keeping hope alive, but there's also a cost to keeping hope alive. And I thought about that quite a bit, and I thought, well, if I can find some kind of help, it's worth paying the cost of keeping hope alive. And it's a financial cost, and it's also an emotional cost, because if you don't hope for anything, then you protect yourself because you can't be disappointed. You protect yourself from disappointment. So I was putting it on the line with the potential to be disappointed in addition to losing the money and the time. But I basically decided I had to pursue. I had to find out, is there something real? And I was willing to pay that price, and. And my wife was, too. But I think it's important to realize that there really is a cost to pay if you're going to go looking for miracles. And once, you know, as. As I began to see more happening as I traveled to some of these places, I saw things that sort of were encouraging. It became easier, but it wasn't an obvious choice at the time.
- [12:56]
A
So your first experience is just some group associated with your own church praying for you?
- [13:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, there was a group that was part of my church at the time who prayed with me, but it didn't seem to really go anywhere. But there was another guy at this church who caught me after a service one Sunday and said, you know, there's a group across town, and they. They seem to have more experience with this sort of praying for healing. You should go check them out. So I said, well, okay, I'm there. So. And I think that was the first experience that felt sort of powerful in a way that is a little hard to explain. But I walked in and they. They were like, oh, yeah, we heard about you. Yeah, we heard you had a brain tumor. And have a seat we can pray for. As if they did that all the time. And they just expected that this would work. And they began to pray. And it felt powerful. I mean, I felt sensations in my body. It's hard to describe. And by the end of it, I felt just really peaceful in a way that I hadn't. Right. Because peaceful is not how you'd imagine to feel when you have, like, this terminal diagnosis and you're looking at leaving behind a wife and a child. And so I think that was sort of the first clue that there's something here, there's something going on. And when they prayed, it wasn't like, you know, dear God, maybe if it's your will, would you mind healing Josh? It was more like they just expected it to happen. And. And so they were like, in the name of Jesus, we command this thing to be healed. And I was like, well, that's kind of an interesting way to pray. Like, where's the, you know, if it's your will sort of thing? So on the one hand, it felt kind of awkward, and on the other hand, I thought, well, I'm willing to feel awkward if this will help.
- [14:44]
A
Right away, we have something going on here that is worth noting. The idea that prayer isn't a generic thing that works or doesn't work. There are two different kinds of prayer going on here. One that really didn't have you feeling like much was happening at all. In fact, afterward, you weren't terribly excited about pursuing it anymore with these people. And then there's this second experience, which is very different because there actually is something that you feel. And this is something I think about all the time with prayer studies. Who's checking to see the quality of the prayer, the nature of the prayer, the intensity of the prayer, the feeling behind the prayer, the emotion behind the prayer. There's so much here. The idea that you can just randomly study prayer, as in this group prayed and this group prayed. What does any of that mean? That's just a word.
- [15:45]
B
Yeah. No, it's an excellent point. And turns out there's a handful of properly controlled scientific studies that have been done on the effects of prayer on health outcomes. And one of the things we found early on is there was a study of the effects of prayer on cardiac patients that was done about 20 years ago. And this was kind of a famous study. It was called the Benson study. And Dr. Benson looked at people who were going in for heart surgery, and he had two groups of people pray for them. And one group was a group of, I think, Catholic nuns, and the other was Unity Church. And they compared what happened to the patients in terms of their complications, if they were prayed for versus if they weren't prayed for, and also if they knew they were being prayed for. And what they found is that the people who got prayed for and didn't know that they were being prayed for didn't really do any better than those who didn't get prayed for. And the people who knew they were getting prayed for actually had worse outcomes. And so that was a surprise. And I think if you look at the groups that were doing the praying in their own literature, their own writings, they say things to the effect of, well, we don't actually believe that this healing prayer is going to work.
- [17:12]
A
So.
- [17:14]
B
So then you have to ask, well, okay, like, if you don't believe it, then, you know, why should we think that there's going to be any effect? And so this study spent like a huge amount of money, got a lot of publicity, and it was kind of a wet blanket on studies after that because basically seemed to indicate that there was no effect to the prayer. But it turns out that if you do these kinds of prayers, the way it's often done, which is in person, face to face, like they're right there in front of you. They might even put a hand on your shoulder or something. In that case, first of all, you don't have to necessarily assume that there's some kind of supernatural effect that's working in there because there can also be psychological effects. Right? In other words, if you, if someone prays for you and you have no idea that they're praying for you, there's no way that that could have a psychological effect on you. But if someone's right there in front of you, then you're in a sense interacting with them in this prayer. So in that case, it very much matters, like how they're praying because that could potentially affect you psychologically apart from whatever you think about supernatural effects. And the research that my wife and I have done and others now through our nonprofit research institute, the Global Medical Research Institute, has focused a lot on in person kinds of praying for healing, and we do find effects of that.
- [18:38]
A
Now, you didn't feel comfortable staying with where you were and prayer just being done there, you felt the need to travel.
- [18:49]
B
Well, after I had that experience of this group across town, and it seemed like there was something powerful going on. This was a group that sort of had loose connections with various other groups. And people in this group and others would say that different groups have kind of different specialties, as it were. They have different ways of doing things. Different. They seem to have different kinds of success with different kinds of conditions. Like in the same way that if you needed a particular kind of help, you might look for one doctor versus another doctor. It seemed to make sense to look at different groups to see if they had particular specializations or in the, you know, the Christian language, gifts, healing for different kinds of things. So that's partly what led me to explore what was going on with these different groups. I wanted to see what's the lay of the land here, and is there something somewhere else that could help me even more?
- [19:48]
A
How much travel are we talking about?
- [19:50]
B
By the first six months, I had traveled all along the East Coast. Well, really all over the US and then by February of the following year, I was starting to travel to Canada. I ended up going to Cuba with one of these groups. They were like, well, we're going to travel around Cuba and have these healing prayer services. And I thought, well, okay, maybe. Maybe I'll come out, come hang out with you guys. Because at a certain point with some of these groups, I felt that, first of all, they were gentle and they weren't doing. You know, sometimes things just feel weird in a bad way. It felt weird, but not in a bad way. And it didn't feel like they were trying to take advantage of me or abuse me. And so I thought, well, I like these groups. I want to hang out with them. And so when they said, well, we're going to go to Cuba and have these healing prayer meetings, I thought, well, maybe things will happen in Cuba. Like, I'll just go check it out. And so I did.
- [20:46]
A
I've never heard of anything like this, so I've heard of plenty of people. It's quite common these days to have people requesting prayers and to have people praying for others all over the place. I run into that continually. I've never heard of this idea of being kind of a prayer shopper or
- [21:09]
B
a groupie or something.
- [21:11]
A
Well, I mean, what's going on here is so unusual. It is as though you have decided there's nothing else out there for me, nothing medical. I could throw the Hail Mary, pardon the pun, and just go for it with this wild possibility that is at best a possibility, and really fully invest. You went for it. My sense is stuff was happening in these prayer gatherings to you that had you saying, I'm onto something. I think.
- [21:47]
B
Yeah. And I think this is where different branches of Christianity will view this differently. So there are certain. So you can. You can roughly distinguish, like, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism. And I think within Catholicism, there's a long tradition. The most obvious one is a Shrine of Lords. Right. People will go to great expense to travel to the Shrine of Lords because they believe that they have a better chance of finding healing there. Because, you know, there's a whole history with. With the shrine there. I think within Protestantism, it's more dominated by a history of the kind of Calvinist idea that God's going to do what God's going to do, and nothing you can do is really going to change that. And so if that's the case, then why bother, right? Why bother going to great expense and traveling to try to change what's going to happen? And I think part of what changed my thinking was early on as I. So I went to this first prayer group across town, but within, I think a month or two, I'd gone to another meeting on the east coast where they would pray with people. And afterwards they'd ask people, okay, so what happened? As if they expected healing to happen right then and there. So I thought, well, that's pretty bold. But then people would start to come up and say, well, I had this thing going on and now the pain's gone and now I can move my arm in a way I couldn't. And I thought, wait, you mean to tell me that you just prayed over these people and suddenly they're all better? So I talked to some of the people who had these experiences, and I asked them, so, like, tell me more like what actually happened to you there? And they would say things like, well, I don't know, but all I know is I had a car wreck like three years ago, and I had this metal plate in my arm and I couldn't bend my arm this way and it hurt. And they prayed for me, and now I can bend my arm in a way that I couldn't. And so when you start to hear things like that, they came across as, like, I don't know what happened. All I know is I had this issue and now it's better. So that kind of thing really piqued my curiosity, like, what is going on? And I'm talking to people, I'm hearing these stories, and they're experiencing healing. And I thought, okay, well, there's something going on here. And whatever they're experiencing, I want some of that, too.
- [24:16]
A
At any point, as a neuroscientist, did you say to yourself, well, there are quite a few documented cases out there of people whose health situation changed based on a belief they had that it would change. The idea being that separate from prayer, there is an extraordinary amount of evidence out there of people's health changing based on their belief alone?
- [24:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And so usually this question gets phrased as well, what about the placebo effect, which kind of becomes an umbrella term for a lot of different mind body effects, and those are effects by which what we believe can affect our brains, which in turn affects our bodies, and that can affect health. And so, for example, there's a study done by my colleague some years ago who took people and said, okay, I've got this special new analgesic cream and I'm going to rub it on your hand and then I'm going to electrically shock your hand. But the cream is going to make it not hurt as much. And in reality, the cream was just ordinary hand lotion. Right. But because he told them that this is a special analgesic cream and I'm a scientist, so I know what I'm talking about, this will help it hurt less. And 75% of the participants in that study reported that it didn't hurt as much when they put the special cream on. And they compared it with another group where they put the same cream on, but told them it was just ordinary hand lotion. So in other words, the mere belief that that cream can relieve pain was enough to cause it to actually relieve pain. Now, here's where it gets really wild, and that is that if you give people Narcan. So Narcan is this drug that blocks like it can save someone's life if they overdose on fentanyl or some other opiate. If you give people Narcan, it can save them from an overdose. But in this case, they gave the participants in this study Narcan. When they did that, that pain relieving effect, this placebo effect, was blocked. They felt pain even though the experimenter told them it was this pain relieving cream. That tells us something very interesting, which is that the placebo effect by which what you believe can improve your health, can improve pain, is not just something in our minds, it's literally biochemically in our brains to the point that you can block the placebo effect with certain drugs. And it turns out that that's just one example among many. There are other examples of placebo effects that can improve all kinds of symptoms with all kinds of conditions and through all kinds of different biochemical pathways. So, yes, absolutely, what we believe can affect our health, it can affect our symptoms. And, and this is a lot of what my book Proving a Miracle is about. I start off with exactly these questions. How does what we believe affect our health? And throughout the book, I go progressively deeper into these. But by the end of it, I get to cases where it becomes increasingly difficult to explain how these people improved. But absolutely, mind body effects, they're all very real, and I think they do have a role to play.
- [27:55]
A
I want to talk to you about something most of us never think about until something goes wrong, and I mean terribly wrong. By then, it's usually expensive or much, much worse. I'm talking about your breaker box, the electrical panel in your home. The central nervous system of everything electrical in your house. And if it's old or if it's overloaded or if it's just worn, it's not just an inconvenience, it can be a serious fire hazard. But here's the good news. May is National Electric Safety month. And Minneapolis St. Paul plumbing, heating Air and electric is doing something remarkable. To mark the occasion, they're giving away a brand new breaker box installed to one lucky listener. We're talking up to $7,000 in in electrical work absolutely free. Up to $7,000. Here's all you have to do. And it's so ridiculously simple, it'll take a minute. Snap a picture of your breaker box. Just pull out your phone right now. Snap a photo of your breaker box. Then you just go to Mishki Podcast.com in fact, go to Mishki Podcast.com breaker and you'll arrive right at the page where you upload the photo. Mishkipodcast.com breaker you'll see where to upload it. Put it in there. Add your name, you're in. They'll have a drawing and a brand new panel. Could be in your house. Making your house suddenly very, very safe. Very sound. You'll sleep better and you'll save thousands of dollars. Five of you who don't get the big prize will get a free full home electrical evaluation. An exhaustive professional assessment of your house's entire electrical system. That's a value of nearly 400 bucks. But this'll also be completely free. Snap that photo right now. Just go to mishkipodcast.com breaker Premier hosts
- [29:59]
B
on VRBO deliver quality vacation rental stays
- [30:01]
A
with fast responses and clear instructions.
- [30:03]
B
Oh, I had a question. Our host replied. So super quick premier move. Wish I had a premier group chat. They won't even write me back.
- [30:10]
A
Book a top rated stay with a premier host. If you know you've Erbo, you know anybody can sell you a car that's really easy. What's hard is finding somebody who actually cares about what happens to you after you drive off the lot. That's what sets Fury Motors apart. And it's why I send people there. Fury's been selling cars since back when Kennedy was in the White House. But honestly, the family's car selling DNA goes back further. Grandpa was selling Model Ts in the 1920s. Dad worked with grandpa selling cars. Dad started Fury Motors. These people didn't get into the car business. They were born into the car business. And that kind of legacy doesn't survive 60 some years without treating customers really, really well. They have the highest customer satisfaction rating you'll encounter in this country. Four locations across the metro. That customer satisfaction rating at Fury Motors earns them a spot at the top of your list of where you'll be stopping Fury Motors. The most ridiculous statement in the world to me is, oh, that's just the placebo effect. I mean, I'm no scientist, but I would feel comfortable sitting in a room full of scientists saying when a placebo effect works, something has happened. And it's your job as scientists to determine what that is. When you said earlier, it's not just that they believed it, there was actually a biochemical reaction happening. I think there's something happening in every case. I don't believe in miracles, in that a miracle is magic. In every case, there's something happening. The fact that we can't figure it out is all that's left. Even if it's happening on a level that is divine, there's still something happening. It's not like it's a world of rabbits out of hats.
- [32:21]
B
You're right in that. There's a whole lot that we don't understand about how these things work. And what I've done in the years since I experienced healing of this brain tumor is helped co found a research institute to study and look at basically how far do these effects go? And so we've looked at cases, we've tried to find cases that are as hard to explain as possible to really push into the question of how far do these effects go. So, like, for example, we found cases of people where the back of the eyes are destroyed. They've been examined multiple times. There's severe damage to the back of the eye. So the back of the eyes is the part that converts the light into nerve signals. And if that gets damaged, it just doesn't ever recover. It doesn't grow back. Like you got a cut on your skin and the cut healed. Once the back of your eyes is damaged, it just doesn't regrow. And yet we found a case where this woman went blind. The back of her eyes was severely damaged, and she was blind for 12 years. She went to a prayer meeting, didn't get healed. And then shortly after that, she and her husband were praying. One night she opens her eyes and she can see. And we even got pictures of the back of her eyes. And I asked a professor of ophthalmology to look at those pictures. And he looked at it and said, well, you can see where there is a little bit of scarring, where there looks like there used to be some damage, but it's all healed up now. But that doesn't happen. And yet it did. And so these are the kinds of cases that we started looking at now, like the most mysterious, the hardest to explain. Basically asking how far can this go and what can medicine say about this?
- [34:08]
A
Yeah, and I think you're at a point there where we're not skilled enough yet to know what to call that. Do you believe we can say what happened there? I don't think we have the ability to.
- [34:21]
B
We can say that back of rise was damaged and now it's not.
- [34:25]
A
No, I know that. But when you, when you, how that
- [34:27]
B
happened, how it happened, we have no explanation now. Now, maybe we will in the future, maybe we won't, I don't know.
- [34:35]
A
And even if, and I don't even have any problem, I never have any problem with any of this stuff. I don't have any problem believing it happened because of her husband's prayer. I'm just saying it still is the case, even if you go with that, that something then happened. A series of things happened from that prayer energetically on a quantum level, in the zero point field, in the realm of consciousness, in the realm of whatever spirituality is ultimately. I mean, I interviewed a woman who had a near death experience where she was riddled with cancer, tumors everywhere. She was saying goodbye to her family and she died on the table there in the hospital, had a near death experience, learned that she was going to come back into her body and not going to die at all from this cancer. And she came back into her body and within three weeks she was up and walking around and within a month and a half the cancer was completely gone. And she lectures around the world now and you just say, okay, there's something that happened that we can't explain but is explainable. That's, I guess what I'm arguing. There's much we can't explain, but none of it isn't explainable. For 2000 years, acupuncture has been used. They still don't quite know why it works, and they didn't believe it in the west until the 1960s when it was used on dogs. And they said, okay, dogs don't experience the placebo effect, but we still don't know what is this invisible energy acupuncture is working with. I mean, my insurance company pays for it now and they still don't even know what it is. I've heard people say to me in the medical field that in the future, way in the future, energy medicine is actually going to be the dominant healing power working with energy. Everything is energetic. Diseases are energetic, the body is energetic, and there are obviously alternative medicines that are in the energy field. Acupuncture is energy, but a lot is energy. Homeopathy is energy. So where do you draw all these distinctions between energy, God, spirituality, you know what I'm saying? All it starts to make me think is there's a vast world out there we don't know, we don't understand, we don't know fully how to work with.
- [36:52]
B
Yeah, absolutely. There's a whole lot we don't understand. And I think what I've tried to do is bracket some of those questions and basically say, okay, the first question is what empirically is true? In other words, what are the phenomena in the example this blind woman? The first question is what do we observe has happened? The second question is how do we explain it? Yes, something had to have happened, and we don't understand that currently. Will we understand it in the future? Maybe, I don't know. But I've tried to focus on the empirical evidence. In other words, what. What do we observe has actually happened? And, and to try to collect more and more evidence along those lines and then leave the question of what does it mean? You know, so on the one hand, I mean, I am a Christian. I believe all the basics of the Christian faith. But I think as a neuroscientist, I've focused my research on collecting this empirical data. So in other words, there's. There's the empirical data data, and then there's what, how you interpret that. That is like the theological lens or the cosmological lens. Is it energy? Is it God? I think those are all really important questions, but I think we have to start by collecting a lot of data to know what it is first of all, that we're even trying to explain.
- [38:13]
A
My hope has always been that we would arrive at a point, and we're not going to in my lifetime, but we'd arrive at a point where we quit separating religion and science, where we didn't have people saying, well, I'm a Christian, so there's that take, and then there's the science take. There should just be the life take. There's the what's happening in this great big crazy wild world? What's happening instead of all these divisions of, well, if you look at it from this angle, why are there Other angles. Why isn't there just the angle, the angle of what is truthfully going on?
- [38:47]
B
Yeah, well, I think part of it is there's a lot at stake in the answer to that question. So for example, like if you say, well, you know, this blind person got healed because there's this unknown biological process that somehow kicked in, why couldn't it
- [39:01]
A
be the prayer kicked it in?
- [39:03]
B
Oh, it certainly could be. I'm not saying it couldn't.
- [39:06]
A
Yeah, you don't have to, you don't have to delineate. You don't have to say, well it wasn't prayer, it was this scientific thing. That's what I'm, that's what I'm just wondering about. I mean, do you ever, do you ever. And I've been told by people that more and more science and religion are kind of coming together in the sense that sometimes in the quantum field, when they're studying it, quantum scientists, they run into this stuff that is almost in the world of miraculous, that is, they run into the impossible. They run into, this can't happen, this couldn't possibly happen. And sometimes I think what they're running into is what in other realms would be called the experience of touching the vastness, the divine, the extraordinary force that maybe is behind everything that we only are beginning to play with and maybe other religions have explored and gotten involved with. I just think if we start to get concrete cases of prayer working, then it's prayer working, then we could go further and say, okay, did some prayers work better than others? Which ones? Then we can say, okay, what was going on with the person there? What was the belief system? I've heard this, you can tell me if you've come across this with the placebo effect. It actually is affected as much by the care shown by the doctor delivering the placebo as the placebo itself. So you get a callous, uncaring, cold hearted sob to give you the placebo. It's not going to be as effective as a loving, caring, warm hearted doctor. And how do you begin to study that? In other words, the human quality of being cared for, which is also going on in prayer, you're being cared for. My personal belief, and this is my theology in general, is that what's happening is it's the extraordinary power of love itself.
- [40:57]
B
Anytime you experience love, concern, care, empathy from another person, I mean there's studies showing those have real effects in the brain and those in turn have generally positive effects on health. I mean there's, there's actually a large literature on the degree to which religious engagement and affiliation, for example, leads to improved health, like across the vast majority of studies. And a lot of those focus on things like community.
- [41:24]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:25]
B
So having a kind of supportive community, empathy. I mean, all of that can make a strong difference. I mean, loneliness as a risk factor for disease and ill health is. I've seen studies showing it right up there with, like, smoking.
- [41:41]
A
Exactly. Yeah. Right up there with smoking. A lonely person is like having 15 cigarettes a day. I mean, I've read the same thing. I had an MD on who didn't understand why all the people in her Chicago practice were doing everything wrong and weren't getting sick. And all the people in her San Francisco practice were doing everything right and were constantly sick. And what she realized is all the people in her Chicago practice lived a communal life. They had aunts and uncles living with them. They had cousins next door. They weren't terribly well off. Many of them were poor. But they lived a life of interaction with family and friends and looking out for one another. And in San Francisco, they went to the gym alone and did their workout. They did their yoga alone by themselves. They ate right, went to the store by themselves, got the right food, made sure they did everything right, meditated all by themselves, and croaked and croaked. And so what she did is took two years off to study the literature that's out there. And she said it was already out there. The literature was already out there. We didn't need new studies. The number one most important thing you can do for your health is interact with humanity, engage with people, be part of this world. And after that, eat right. And after that, exercise. But don't think you're doing anything for yourself. If you're doing all that stuff that you think you're supposed to do. Isolated, you don't have a purpose. You don't have a sense of what you're living for. You don't have a sense of caring for those around you. I know people who have been told. Who have been very, very sick, who've been told to go work with the homeless, and they've gone and done that as their way of healing. That was their ticket out of their health condition.
- [43:30]
B
Yeah, I've heard all kinds of stories like that.
- [43:32]
A
Yeah.
- [43:33]
B
Yep.
- [43:33]
A
So it's extraordinary to me, all of this, and to me, it's all working in a similar area. I don't draw any lines in it. I think we're working with forces that are very real. But I also can't believe we're not More curious. And by that I mean as a medical community in this country, I think
- [43:56]
B
that's changing, actually, because I start off my book with this, looking at some of the history of the relationship between science and faith. And historically, there's been a fair amount of animosity.
- [44:08]
A
Yeah.
- [44:08]
B
But I think as of about 20 years ago, that seems to be shifting to some extent. For one, you have more scientists who are themselves people of faith. And you have also this new ability with functional brain imaging to look at the effects of belief on brain activity and on health outcomes. And a lot of the points of contention, the sort of animosity, I mean, that goes back to things like creation versus evolution and really this power struggle between the science and faith communities over who has the authority to say what's ultimately true about the world. And the thing is, some of those, those culture wars, those have kind of receded in the last decade or two, and I think that's created more space for a fruitful dialogue. I mean, 20 years ago, I went to the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, and the keynote speaker was the Dalai Lama. And I thought, how do you have the leader of a major world religion addressing this annual conference for neuroscientists? Like, I thought those didn't mix. But from that point on, I think there's been a lot of interest in using scientific approaches to try to study the effects of religious practices, for example. So there's a whole lot of work now that's been done on the effects of mindfulness meditation on health. And I think I'm starting to see that more with other religious kinds of practices. And I hope there's going to be more research done along these lines, because I think as long as it's framed as a power struggle, like who's right? Is it the scientists or is it the leaders of the faith communities? As long as it's framed as, like, this conflict and a power struggle, it's harder to get research done. But if that gets set aside, then you can actually ask a lot of interesting questions. So that's kind of what I'm trying to do with a lot of these studies of healing through prayer and miracle claims and things like that.
- [46:11]
A
Well, you're the perfect person. You're blending all the ingredients. You've got. You can speak the religious language, you can speak the science language. You've got a curious mind. You're not somebody who's going to speak in absolutes my way or the highway. You've got exactly what we need for this. The Dalai Lama's favorite Subject, by the way, is science. He loves science. He reads about it more than anything else. It was also the case with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a Hindu guy, big, in the 60s. His favorite thing to study was science and to talk to scientists. And we don't need to think of these two things as separate. You mentioned earlier that a lot of scientists now are also people of faith. There was a website created in the 1990s. I interviewed the people who created it. It's the most fascinating thing I had come across at the time, because it was a website for scientists to anonymously post their spiritual experiences because they could not talk about those experiences with their colleagues. So I hope that's changing as well. But it was so strange to find a website where this was all anonymously posted just so the scientists could share it with somebody. If someone you love is living with Alzheimer's or dementia, you know how overwhelming it can be. The Wellshire Memory Care center, with locations in Medina and Bloomington, they do one thing. Memory care. That's it. No divided attention, no juggling different needs. Every staff member, every hallway, every detail of the building designed specifically around the needs of people with memory loss. The architecture alone is extraordinary. Built from the ground up with memory care in mind. They've organized their care into four households, each corresponding to a different stage of memory loss. So your loved one is always with people at a similar stage, cared for by staff who deeply understand where they are in that journey. And the staff, genuinely the most sophisticated memory care team in this region of the country. Compassionate, experienced, remarkably stable. The turnover issues you find at other facilities, you do not find here, remember it. It's the Wellshire Memory Care Center, Medina and Bloomington. If you're starting to have that conversation with your family, start here. There was a time years ago, I remember it well, when you knew your banker. My pop knew John Turner, he was his friend. You knew your banker and the banker knew you and your neighborhood and knew your business, knew your family. And when you needed a loan, you didn't just submit an application and wait for a number to come back from somewhere out of state. You had a conversation. This isn't nostalgia, people. This is today. North American Banking Company is here today. Six locations in the Twin Cities and they still do it the old fashioned way, community focused. Led by Mike Bilski, whose great grandfather was a banker, whose grandfather was a banker, whose father was a banker. This is not some job for these people. This is their calling. The big national banks will take your money. Sure they will. North American Banking company will care for your money because they'll care about you. Maybe it's time to switch to a bank where banking actually means something. Something that never should have gone away. Find them. North American Banking Company member, fdic. Equal housing lender. So you today, what would I see in a brain scan? Just some scar tissue.
- [49:55]
B
Yeah. I met with a neurologist and he said, well, all we see now is some scar tissue. I don't think there's anything more to look at. So unless you have any new symptoms, I don't ever need to see you again.
- [50:07]
A
I think the toughest thing that you have to deal with, and I'm sure you have probably had to deal with it, is there are all sorts of people out there, probably people listening to me right now, who have had loved ones dealing with horrible diagnoses, terminal illnesses, prayer all over the place, prayer at their local church, prayer within the family, friends praying. People are gone. Died anyway. Died as expected. Right on time.
- [50:41]
B
I am, and I certainly was aware of that. And the best man in my wedding, shortly after I was diagnosed, was self diagnosed with colon cancer. And I went to visit him and I prayed with him and I prayed everything I knew to pray. And he passed within a few years. You know, why am I still alive and he isn't? Why isn't it the other way around? Or better yet, why aren't we both still alive? I don't know.
- [51:06]
A
I knew a Canadian woman. I would love to find this story. This was way back. I interviewed her years ago. I think this also was somewhere around the year 2000. Her son had died in an automobile after the automobile had gone into a pond. She couldn't get him out of his car seat or seat belt, I can't remember what. And she screamed for other people to come help. Anyway, the upshot was they eventually got the kid out, but he was. He'd been under there too long and he was in the kind of state that most people would have disconnected him, unplugged the life support machines and let him die peacefully. The woman asked everyone she knew, and she knew a lot of people to take turns coming into his room. Not 24 7, because the hospital wouldn't have allowed that, but almost every moment that someone was allowed there. And she said, just do nothing but pour your love into that boy. And I don't know how long it took, but she wouldn't disconnect him. Then he came back. I guess over the years, I've almost made a hobby out of reading variations on this stuff. And it all speaks to me of something that I hope we continue to learn more about. I think we can hone this better. I think what seems to be happening out there is there's 500 different approaches to this thing because we really don't 100% know what we're dealing with yet. I think we could get better at it. And at the end of your experience now, I don't know if you're able to say, and I'd be curious to get an answer to this question, if you were to come upon a version of you, another version of you tomorrow. Somebody who got the same diagnosis even had a pregnant wife, someone who was young, had not only a long life ahead of him or her, but had responsibilities to take care of, a child to raise. And this person said, map me out a plan based on what you've learned over the years. I'm not going to pursue this medically. I don't think there are many good options there. I'm going to try this rough approach that you tried, but you were not following a set roadmap. You were kind of trying to make the roadmap. Make me a roadmap. Would you be able to make one for them that, to you would be the best you got for right now on it, based on everything you know,
- [53:43]
B
I've been asked that question by people who are very much in that kind of situation. So that one of the first things that I would say is you can't get something from someone who doesn't have it. So I would start, and this is basically what I did. I would start by asking, where are the claims of miracles happening? Which ones of those seem the most credible? There is really something happening. Then I would go there, which is exactly what I did. And I don't know if that's quite a roadmap in the way you're asking for, but I found there were certain groups that seem to have more success with things. And so that was who I. That was what I pursued.
- [54:27]
A
Certain groups around the world.
- [54:30]
B
Well, I started with the US but. But yeah, around the world. I mean, within Christianity, there's like Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and within Protestantism, there are groups that are Pentecostal and Charismatic. And those were the groups where I found like the most healing experience. And as I travel with them, I saw the most other people experience the same kinds of healings. I mean, these are where I found all these stories of. I mean, I personally watched people who are blind get their eyesight apparently restored, people have hearing impairments restored. I've seen A lot of this. And as I watched this, I watched how they prayed. You know, I got to know them. They're like, well, here you come over and pray for this person. And so I'm like, well, I don't know. You know, I still need healing myself. And they're like, I'll just pray for them. And I did. And I watched dramatic improvements. It's not like there's any one hierarchically organized group for these sorts of things, but I would say if you find. I don't want to put specific groups on the spot, but. But broadly, the Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, if it were me and I were doing it all over again, I would look into those. There are places called healing rooms, which are. They're. They're these little anything from like, something in a church building to something in a storefront. And they generally will just offer to pray with people for healing, generally at no charge. And I've been to places like that, too, and they've been. I found them to be helpful. So, you know, if there's a road map, it's that I would find these groups, track them down, go visit them, because that's basically what I did. I mean, I have friends who are Buddhist or Buddhist leaning, Muslim, Hindu, different faiths. And you can hear stories like this from different faith groups.
- [56:26]
A
I had a guy I knew who got a terminal cancer diagnosis and figured, well, I might as well quit my job. I got enough money for six months and got a little houseboat down on the Mississippi. I happened to live on the Mississippi at the time and got to know this guy, and he never died. He never did die. And a year later, they couldn't find any cancer, and he was just hanging out in his houseboat waiting to die, and it just never happened. And I know a lot of MDs, and they throw this all under the heading of spontaneous remission. Well, you know, you might as well say miracle. My guess is his cancer was being caused by stress. We're only beginning to know the horror show we do to our bodies with stress. And my sense is he became this relaxed, laid back guy on this boat, and his body said, thank you. But the spontaneous remission thing, there are people getting healed all over the place of terminal illnesses all over the place, and doctors are just throwing it in that category. The doctors I know aren't even curious about it. They just say, well, that doesn't make any sense. And I realize it's not like they have time to go study the guy. They have a family to go home to him, they get a full time job. But somebody should be sitting this guy down and saying, tell me about the last six months. Because these were the six months you were supposed to die within.
- [57:49]
B
These are great stories and I love hearing them. And there is actually some research on spontaneous remission. And part of the issue is because it's rare, it's hard to study. I've seen some evidence even going back to like the 19th century that that can be caused by provoking the immune system. In other words, trying to get the immune system to wake up.
- [58:12]
A
I think spontaneous remission is as unfortunate a term as placebo. They both are dismissive terms for something that's very real. I would argue, and I bet there are medical guys who would back me up on this, that stress itself suppresses the immune system. So if this guy. Oh yeah, if this guy was working 55 hours a week and he going to die of this cancer and he stops and relaxes for six months. You know, there's that famous story of that guy who got terminal diagnosis of cancer and rented Marx Brothers films and just laughed his ass off every day watching them and eventually no longer had cancer. Because it's incredibly healthy and helpful to your system to be laughing. The absolute opposite of stress is a belly laugh. There's just a lot here. And I think that what you're doing with Proving a miracle is when you say Unlocking the Power of Prayer to Heal, I think your book could have been called Proving a Unlocking the Fill in the Blank Power to Heal. Because prayer is a piece of the puzzle. I read about in your book. I also read about the mind and belief and mystery and love and other forces. And maybe you can tell me this as I wrap up with you, maybe you can tell me this. If there is an extraordinarily effective approach called prayer, if it's done the right way, in a certain way, then shouldn't we be setting up prayer centers in cities all over America?
- [59:44]
B
That is actually happening. So I mentioned the healing rooms. We just finished another clinical trial at the University of Maryland looking at the effect of prayer. Because I think part of the thing is if you're going to offer an intervention, you have to have evidence, like proper scientific evidence that it's effective. And there really isn't much of that for prayer, for healing, prayer. And so part of what we're doing is doing carefully controlled studies to provide that evidence.
- [60:13]
A
I think the study is going to be a dead end. And here's why. I think I'm on pretty solid ground saying the majority of treatments done in orthodox medicine in the United States for disease do not have double blind placebo controlled randomized studies to back them up. A percentage does, but I don't believe it's the majority. I had a medical researcher on named Lynn McTaggart one time who spent time looking at the actual science and using the gold standard science of double blind placebo controlled randomized tests. They are extraordinarily expensive, extraordinarily difficult to perform, and there's often the problem of that they can't be replicated. A second test doesn't show what the first test does. If we wait for someone to cough up the money for these tests, we'll be waiting forever. The reason the drug companies can spend the money is because they can make billions. It's like that thing I talked about about acupuncture. Who Tested it for 2000 years? It was like your prayer situation. It was anecdotal. You watched something happen and that was very powerful for you. And you felt something happen and that was very powerful for you. Do you need to wait for your study at that point?
- [61:30]
B
As a scientist, my question is, what's true and what's real?
- [61:33]
A
Well, what was true after you had that feeling? You had that feeling of peace? You were with another group where you watched someone who was blind suddenly see, those aren't studies. You're not studying anything. That's just your experience.
- [61:47]
B
I mean, the experience had a powerful effect on me, for sure.
- [61:50]
A
Well, you don't have a tumor anymore.
- [61:52]
B
Yeah, well, that's exactly right.
- [61:56]
A
So spontaneous remission.
- [61:59]
B
Well, the way medical literature works is generally you have to start somewhere. So you start with anecdotes. And so, I mean, the literature is full of case reports, right? It's a whole genre of here's this patient or a few patients, and they have this weird new set of conditions, and here's how it turned out. You take that experience and then you say, okay, well, can we do a systematically, carefully controlled study to try to figure out how that worked out and how likely it is to work out a certain way? That's the thing that takes you from what's possible, which you see in a case report, to what's likely, which is what you see in a clinical trial. In other words, it may be possible for you to get healed through prayer, but is it likely? And a clinical trial will tell you how likely that is. And that ends up being useful. Because if you have to decide, well, what am I going to pursue? It's a fair question, like, is this More likely to help me. Not just might it possibly, but is it likely? And so I think that's where these clinical trials become useful. Ultimately, it matters what's true because.
- [63:11]
A
Oh, it matters. It matters what's true. I'm just not confident science is going to get us there. I'll throw this out as a reason. I've known scientists who've devoted their life to science, and they say the frustrating thing about science is it's just a long progression of funerals. It's a constant death of one finding, killed by the new finding, which is then killed by the later finding and 40 years later by the new finding after that. On and on it goes. It's just endlessly. Well, we used to believe this, and now we believe this based on this other study. I used to read 57 studies that said red wine was great for you. Right? Now the worst thing in the world for you is alcohol. Give it 10 years. Give it 10 years. See what they say. Then they'll say, actually, it turns out if you're drinking in a convivial atmosphere with relatives and love is in the room, magically, it's healthy for you. I mean, I just think these things, number one to do a good study, one no one can beat up. Because what I also see every day is someone saying, well, look at how terrible that study was. They made a mistake here, here. That wasn't right. That wasn't right. Then I'll read stories about, well, this is a great study, but we tried to replicate it and couldn't. Okay, well, that throws it out the window because the whole thing with science is you have to be able to replicate these things. And then you look at the money involved, the millions and millions, and doing a study. Well, I just. Especially with medicine, when a life is on the line, when your loved one has a terminal illness.
- [64:40]
B
I mean, the thing about science, the way I see it is it's kind of a glass half full glass half empty thing. There's a lot of stuff we do know that is practically quite useful. I mean, you look at how life expectancy has increased over the last few decades, like, in part, that's because we can now cure diseases that we didn't used to be able to. So, you know, if the standard for medicine is. Or science is that we have to understand everything, then I don't know. I think that's too high a bar.
- [65:07]
A
Not that we have to know everything, but that if we don't make our decision for a treatment until we learn there was a solid randomized Placebo controlled double blind study. We are going to lose a lot of patients.
- [65:19]
B
Oh, yeah. This is why I went and got prayed for, even though there wasn't a lot of properly done scientific studies on it.
- [65:25]
A
You know what? That MD I interviewed, she wrote a book called Mind Over Medicine. The one who stopped her practice because nothing was making sense. Her practice in Chicago and California were just messing with her head so much that she thought, what am I doing here? What am I in this field for? How do I advise people when people doing things wrong are living longer and people doing things right aren't? So she spent these two years studying the literature and then wrote the book. At the end of my interview with her years ago, I said, I want to throw something out at you. What do you think the best treatment going out there is when it comes to something like cancer? What impresses you the most? What do you think is the number one best way to go with something like a cancer diagnosis? And she says, pick the treatment you believe in. Capital B. Yeah. Belief is half the game. Believe in the treatment. And you wonder sometimes in this world how much healing is being done right there with the belief in the healing that's being attempted.
- [66:36]
B
And that's the first two thirds of my book, the ways in which what we believe affects our health. So, yeah, absolutely. I think more than is often appreciated.
- [66:45]
A
It's a wonderful book. It is called Proving a Unlocking the Power of Prayer to Heal. Joshua W. Brown is the author. I think this should be something an MD reads, a patient reads, adding a new piece of the puzzle to how this existence actually works and how we can make it work a little better for all of us. Anyway, I am delighted you spent this much time with me. Thank you so much. Yeah.
- [67:16]
B
Well, thanks, Tommy. It's been great. It's been a pleasure.
- [67:18]
A
Best of luck to you.
- [67:19]
B
Thanks, Tommy.
- [67:20]
A
Take care. Bye.