← Something You Should Know
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- [00:02]
Mike Carruthers
The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring.
- [00:05]
Christopher Sommerfield
The excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables.
- [00:23]
Mike Carruthers
Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season.
- [00:28]
Christopher Sommerfield
At the Home Depot.
- [00:35]
Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know why the expiration dates on some foods can be completely ignored. Then how to really get the most out of AI tools like ChatGPT and the tricks that make all the difference.
- [00:49]
Christopher Sommerfield
Well, let me tell you a secret. You do actually get a better answer out of chatgpt if you're polite to it. So in society, if you are rude to someone, you're less likely to get a helpful answer. So the model simulates that, and if you're rude to it, it doesn't give you such a helpful answer.
- [01:04]
Mike Carruthers
Also, simple things you can do to be instantly more attractive. Plus a fresh look at trauma and does trauma truly shape your future forever?
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Dr. Amy Opigian
That is a myth that these experiences that we have will somehow negatively impact us for the rest of our life. The body and the mind have such an innate ability to heal all of these experiences that we go through all.
- [01:29]
Mike Carruthers
This today on something you should know One thing I've learned about running a business is just because you can run a business doesn't mean you're good at hiring. Hiring is a skill all its own, and if you get it wrong, it costs you time, money and momentum. I've been there. That's why I recommend Indeed because they make the whole process faster, easier and and they deliver better outcomes. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Instead of struggling to get your job post noticed, Indeed's sponsored Jobs helps you stand out. So what happens is your listing jumps right to the top of the page for the right candidates so you reach the people you actually want to reach faster. And the difference is real. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed can get 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. I mean, that's huge. And to give you an idea of just how fast it works in the minute I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed data worldwide. No wonder more than three and a half million employers already use it. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com something just go to Indeed.com something right now and support this show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com something terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Something you should know Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers Almost every food you buy in the store today has an expiration date on it, and some of those expiration dates are very important. Some not so much Hi and welcome to Something you should know so you know it when milk goes bad, but other foods may leave you wondering, well, exactly how long are they good for? So here is a list of foods that you really don't have to worry about for a very long time. And salt is pretty high on the list. Salt has been used to preserve other foods for centuries, so it should come as no surprise that salt itself will last a long time. Apparently, adding iodine to salt does shorten its life a little bit, so if you have iodized salt, it should be good for five years and other salts will last even longer. Now honey is supposedly the only food that lasts forever. It's highly acidic and low in moisture, so bacteria can't really grow. The oldest jar of honey ever found is thought to be about 5,500 years old, so any honey you have is probably okay. Sugar. Now sugar manufacturers are required to give sugar an expiration date, but you probably don't need to pay much attention to it. Keep it in an airtight container and it will last almost forever. And even if it gets hard, it's still edible when you soften it. Maple syrup, like honey, will last pretty much forever. Now it can develop surface mold and when it does, you skim it off, you boil the syrup, skim off the mold and the syrup should be fine. Hard liquor. Now cream liqueurs do have a shelf life, but hard liquor will last a long time. Now the flavor can change. It seldom changes for the better, but it doesn't actually go bad. And dried beans In a study at Brigham Young University, 30 year old dried beans were still acceptable according to tasters. So the beans you have are probably just fine. And that is something you should know. Over the last several months, I've gotten more and more into AI and ChatGPT, in part from doing some of the interviews here that I've done on something you should know with people who are really into it and have studied it and written about it. And the more I learn from them, the more I want to learn, because I'm pretty sure I have a long way to go to really understand what it can do and how to interact with it to get the results I really want to get. One person who has some great insight into this is Christopher Sommerfield. In fact, he's one of the smartest people I think you will ever hear talk about AI in a way that we can all benefit and understand. Christopher is professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, staff research scientist at the pioneering Google DeepMind, working in the field of AI research, and he is author of a book called these Strange New How AI Learned to talk and what it means. Hi, Christopher, welcome to something you should know.
- [06:52]
Christopher Sommerfield
Thank you for having me.
- [06:54]
Mike Carruthers
So I would guess that most people who listen to this podcast have by now have dabbled with OpenAI or ChatGPT to get a sense of what it's about. And I use it a lot. I mean, I just. And the more I use it, the more I really like it and like to experiment with it. But I have to admit, I don't really understand it. I mean, I know the principles I've heard, I've talked to people here about it. But can you explain it in a way that maybe dives a little deeper but not too deep, but really gives a good sense of what goes on when you type in a prompt to ChatGPT or OpenAI? How does it work?
- [07:38]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yes. So AI technologies have been around for a very long time, and the dream of building a system that can interact with people in the way that we interact with each other has been the kind of north star of computer science and AI research since the 1950s, the immediate post war period. And what happened in about the 2010, about round about 2010 or 2012, was that the coincidence of two things? Number one, we developed some new algorithms for processing data that allowed us to develop systems that rather than kind of just being out of the box, able to think and reason like we can, what they could do is they could learn from large quantities of data and gradually through that training process, get better and better at doing tasks that we had set them. And so that, coupled with the emergence of lots and lots of data on the Internet, created a revolution which people call the deep learning revolution. But everyone said, well, how far is this going to go? What can we really do with this? And then round about 2019 or 2020, people started to build very big models, and those very big models started to learn to produce language in very similar ways to the world. The outputs look very similar to the outputs that humans produce when generating language. And so chatgpt, which you mentioned, is just one example of a language model that is a model that can respond to your utterances with outputs that resemble what another human would say.
- [09:16]
Mike Carruthers
And so when I type in a question to ChatGPT and get a response, what happened in those three seconds? Where did my question go and where did the answer come from? What was used to create that answer?
- [09:32]
Christopher Sommerfield
So the keystrokes that you made were converted to something called tokens. So tokens are just like digital representations of words or bits of words sometimes. And those digital representations were fed into. They're sent to a data center and fed into a computational stack which is based on an algorithmic tool that's called the transformer. And the transformer, which was developed around about 2017 and is actually the kind of. It's really the workhorse of modern deep learning. It's the reason that it's so successful, at least in the last few years. What that transformer does is it essentially tries to work out, if you've got a long list of tokens, like a sentence or even a paragraph of text, it has been trained to work out which bits of that input are related to which other bits. So to give you a very simple example, if you say Peter and Jane walked down the street, he. And then you want to understand what the subsequent words in that sentence are, you know that he is most likely to refer back to Peter and less likely to refer back to Jane because it's a male sounding name and a male pronoun in English. So you can make that relational connection because you've learned that that's how language works. So language is full of cross references. And so the transformer is very good at learning those relations. And in fact, it's very good at learning those relations not just for elements of a sentence like he and Peter, but actually for elements of all data that you feed to it, including, for example, you know, if you fed it a whole book, maybe something that happens at the beginning of the book is related to something that happens at the end of the book. And the model has been trained to understand those relations so it can process all of those that relational information, and it uses that to make a prediction about what's going to happen next. And that prediction is then turned back into a token and fed to you as the output. So even though it feels like the model is responding to you as if it was a person, it's not actually responding to you as a person. What it's doing is it's saying something that it is predicting that another person would be very likely to say in response to your query.
- [11:51]
Mike Carruthers
But often I will ask a question of a person and the answer is, I don't know. But I asked GPT and it always knows. It always has an answer. It finds the information. Where does it find it?
- [12:05]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yeah. So humans, of course, are overconfident. I'm a psychologist, so I can tell you this. So humans are overconfident on average in their rep, although, as you pointed out, we're usually quite well calibrated. So we usually know when we don't know something and we know when we do know something, although not always. The models are much less well calibrated and they tend to be even more overconfident than we are. So even if they kind of don't know an answer, they'll very often give you an answer. So the question is, why do they do that? And there are many answers to this question. But probably the easiest to understand is the models are one of the ways in which the models are trained by the developers. So ChatGPT is trained by a developer called OpenAI. One of the way in which they're trained is they're trained from human preference data. What that means is that the model will generate, during training, the model generate two candidate answers like answer A and answer B. And then the developer will ask a group of people who are usually crowd workers, it'll ask them, do you prefer answer A to answer B? And what they'll do is they'll use that preference data to train the model to make more answers that people prefer. So in theory, that should be a good thing. Models respond in ways that people like. That's, you know, in theory means that they're going to be a better product. But of course, what people like is not always necessarily what is true. So people like it when you give a confident and eloquent answer to a question. And so, lo and behold, they will choose the confident and eloquent answer. And they might choose it even if it's wrong. And so the model is trained to produce confident and eloquent answers to our questions. And it does so very, very effectively, but sometimes at the expense of truth.
- [13:57]
Mike Carruthers
But when you ask it a question, I have a certain kind of stove and it has this kind of light and the light's doing this thing. What could be wrong? Where does ChatGPT find that information? It's fine to predict, but it's got to be based on some knowledge. Where's the knowledge coming from?
- [14:18]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yeah, so the knowledge comes from different sources. So the most important source of knowledge, the kind of foundational knowledge in the model comes from the training data. And so I mentioned that the models are very, very big, meaning they've got lots of kind of what computer scientists would call trainable parameters. That means that there's basically lots and lots of things that you can change in the model to change how, adjust in the model to change how it works. But the other way in which they're big is that they have been trained on lots and lots of data. So you sometimes hear people saying these models have been TR trained on the entire Internet. And that is, that is not exactly true, but it's sort of an approximation to the truth. So what the developers have done is they've taken enormous swathes of text that you and I have written on the Internet, whether that's like, you know, blog posts or social media posts or, you know, kind of books or news articles or just everything that's on the Internet. And they have used that data in this predictive way to train the model to say the next, to produce the next token. Now, humans know a lot of stuff. There's 8 billion of us. And so collectively, the information that we have put on the Internet encompasses the vast majority of the things that we need to know about. And what's more, the way the transformer works, it allows it sometimes to stitch together bits of knowledge that even people haven't stitched together yet. So it will take knowledge about one bit of one field or discipline and it'll kind of combine it with something new, very much in a way that a human might and come up with something that is unique and different and maybe even hasn't been said or thought before. And so the combination of this vast training data with the computational power of this transformer architecture allows the model to answer questions like the one you articulated. If you ask it how to fix your washing machine, even if it hasn't seen that specific washing machine or nobody has phrased that specific query in that way before, it'll usually be able to tell you something reasonably sensible.
- [16:36]
Mike Carruthers
We're diving deep into how to use AI more effectively and my guest is Christopher Sommerfield. He's author of the book these Strange New How AI Learned to Talk and what It Means. Introducing your new Dell PC. Powered by the Intel Core Ultra processor, it helps you handle a lot, even when your holiday to do list gets to be a lot. Because it's built with all day battery plus powerful AI. Features that help you do it all with ease, from editing images to drafting emails to summarizing large documents to multitasking. So you can organize your holiday shopping and make custom holiday decor and search for great holiday deals and respond to holiday requests and customer questions and customers requesting custom things. And plan the perfect holiday dinner for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, and Uncle Mike's carnivore diet. Luckily, you can get a PC that helps you do it all faster so you can get it all done. That's the power of a Dell PC with Intel inside, backed by Dell's price match guarantee. Get yours today@dell.com deals, terms and conditions apply. See Dell.com for details. As the weather cools, I'm getting clothes that are warm, durable and built to last. And for me, the only place to get them is Quints. They've become my go to for fall staples. My favorites their pants, cashmere sweaters and their polo shirts. I mean, the quality is first rate, and I find myself reaching for my Quint's clothes more than anything else in my closet. Their 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just 60 bucks, which is incredible when you realize how soft and well made they are. And their polo shirts, they just have a better fit than any other I've ever tried. And if you're looking for outerwear, Quince has classic fit denim, real leather and wool pieces that look sharp and are built to last. And I've got my eye on this suede trucker jacket. It's casual but still really polished, and it's perfect for layering this fall. Here's what makes Quince different. They work directly with ethical factories and top artisans, cutting out the middlemen so you get premium quality at half the cost of similar brands. And it's not just clothes. Quince has expanded into bedding, bath cookware, even travel accessories with the same focus on quality and value. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they look. Go to Quince.comSYSK for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I N C E Quince.comSYSK Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comSYSK so Christopher, do the different ones. There's, you know, chatgpt, but there's a. There's a million of them. Well, there's probably not a million of them, but there's a lot of different interfaces that you can go to if I ask the same question to Several. Do you generally get the same answer or everyone has its kind of own personality.
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Christopher Sommerfield
Yeah. So the models do differ in their training data, and that means both the bits of the Internet that they've been trained on, so we call that the pre training data. And then also different developers do different things at post training. So they might, when they're measuring those human preferences that we talked about, they might instruct the raters, the human raters to behave in different ways and that will imbue the models with slightly different values. So there's been a lot of work to show that the different models have slightly different preferences over kind of social or cultural or political values. And that's because of the way they were trained. So famously, some models, like OpenAI's models, have often been found to be slightly more libertarian and progressive on the political spectrum, whereas Xai, xai's model Grok is often like a little bit more on the other end of the political spectrum. And that's because of the way that the models have been trained. Very importantly, even the same model will not give you the same answer every single time you ask the same query. And that's because there's a degree of randomness in their outputs. So just like if you asked me the same question twice in a row, I probably wouldn't respond verbatim exactly the same thing. Neither does the model.
- [21:24]
Mike Carruthers
I've had the experience, and I know other people have talked about this too, that when I type in something into ChatGPT or OpenAI, I feel like I'm talking to a person. And it's very different than, say, when you type in something to Google. That never felt like a person to me. But there is something about ChatGPT that feels very much, even though I know it's not a person, it feels like a person.
- [21:54]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yep, that's absolutely right. And you know, we have known about this phenomena actually since, for, for a few decades. So some of the earliest AI systems which generated language, they did so in a very, very kind of rudimentary and stylized way by basically you can simulate a conversation by just always asking a question back at the other person. And so early chatbots did this trick. They did basically just a bag of tricks. And yet people felt drawn in by these tools even many decades before we had actually good conversational AI. We also, I think, just generally have a tendency to impute intentional states or mental states to complex systems. So, you know, when your computer shuts down or goes wrong, you get annoyed at it.
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Mike Carruthers
Right.
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Christopher Sommerfield
There's no reason it's just a lump of metal. No reason to get annoyed at it, but you do. And philosophers have called this, they call it something called the intentional stance. So we have an intentional stance towards machines. We believe that they have mental states. We're prone to believe that they have mental states. So ChatGPT, of course, is just waiting for us to treat it like a friend.
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Mike Carruthers
Right. Almost to the point where you think maybe if you're rude to it or you're not polite, you won't get as good an answer. You feel like you need to nurture the relationship, and there is no relationship.
- [23:26]
Christopher Sommerfield
Well, let me tell you a secret, which is that we know that you do actually get a better answer out of chatgpt if you're polite to it. And the answer to why that happens is actually, if you recall that these models are essentially predictive machines. So they're trying to predict the answer that another person would be most likely to give. So in society, if you are rude to someone, you're less likely to get a helpful answer. So the model simulates that, and if you're rude to it, it doesn't give you such a helpful answer.
- [23:59]
Mike Carruthers
But if you're nice to it, does it give you a better answer than if you're just neutral to does?
- [24:05]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yeah. So it'd be nice to chatgpt. Isn't that the other level?
- [24:09]
Mike Carruthers
I don't think people know that. I think people would almost like to believe that to be true and act that way. But I bet most people, if you ask them, would think, well, no, I know it's doesn't matter what I say to it, but that's not what you're saying.
- [24:25]
Christopher Sommerfield
No, it does matter what you say to it. And so another example is that if you simply tell the model to think more carefully about the answer it's about to give you, it will also give you a better answer. No, really, if you ask it to solve a reasoning problem and you just present the reasoning problem and say, what's the answer? Then maybe it'll get it right, maybe it'll get it wrong. But if you present the reasoning problem and you say, please think about this problem step by step, then the model is much more likely to give you a better answer to the problem.
- [25:00]
Mike Carruthers
What are some other ways? Like when you said, be polite to ChatGPT and you'll get a better answer, I mean, that just. I never thought of that. But what other things like that? If there are any suggestions on how to interact, how to prompt AI to give you more of what you really want based on all the knowledge you have.
- [25:24]
Christopher Sommerfield
Yeah. Well, I'm sure there are far better answers than I can give to this question online. There are millions and millions of websites that give you tips and tricks for using language models more effectively. But let me just say one thing that I think is a sort of general principle. ChatGPT or other language models, I don't think at the moment we should think of them like we would another person. So your friends and family will have distinct personalities, they'll have distinct character that help you predict how they would behave. And people tend, most part people tend to stay in character, so their character doesn't swing wildly from one day to another. ChatGPT is not like that. So what it does is it assumes a character which is based on the context that you've given it. So depending on the way that you interact with it, it will instantiate a context and it will start to behave like people would behave in that context. So if you start to talk to it using lots of slang and swear words, then it will. Well, actually that's a bad example because it's been trained not to use swear words. But if you start to talk to it using lots of slang, then it will talk back in a way which reflects that. It reflects what it thinks you're trying to achieve and how you think it's that sort of mode of behavior. So you should be aware when you're interacting with the model that in a way you are guiding it. So the tone, the demeanor of your replies, the topic of your replies is setting the context for the model. And it doesn't have a unique and different character like other humans do, and.
- [27:04]
Mike Carruthers
It doesn't remember your character from the last time. So you would have to re establish it every time.
- [27:10]
Christopher Sommerfield
Well, so that depends on which model you're using. Like I said, these modern models have these memory features. One thing that you can do is that's kind of fun is you can ask the model to generate, and you can do this with ChatGPT and probably other models, you can ask it to generate an image of what it thinks you look like. That's a fun trick. And so you might find that it's surprisingly accurate because based upon lots of information that you've given it, it might be able to make a guess about various aspects of your age, your gender, maybe your ethnicity. And so the model is always kind of like adapting to you and how you respond to it.
- [27:57]
Mike Carruthers
So really it's up to the user. I mean, how the user uses it determines the results you get. What a fascinating conversation. I've been talking with Christopher Summerfield. He is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and he's author of a book called these Strange New How AI Learned to Talk and what It Means. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And Christopher, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about this.
- [28:26]
Christopher Sommerfield
Thanks so much for the opportunity. And yeah, do reach out if you want to know anything you chose to.
- [28:32]
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- [30:37]
Mike Carruthers
Trauma It's a word we hear constantly. We talk about people with traumatic childhoods, friends who have endured traumatic experiences or even our own traumas. That word carries weight, suggesting something far more lasting than just a difficult time. But what really is trauma? Does it always shape our future or does it depend on how we define it in the first place? To help clarify and explain what's really happening in the body when we experience trauma, I'm joined by Dr. Amy Opigian. She's a double board certified physician in preventive and addiction medicine with master's degrees in biochemistry and public health. She's the author of a book called the Biology of How the Body Holds Fear, Pain and Overwhelm and how to Heal It. Amy, thank you for coming on. Welcome.
- [31:34]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Thank you, Mike. It's really good to be here.
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Mike Carruthers
So let's get a working definition of what trauma is because it seems to be, I don't know, different things to different people. Some things are traumatic for some people and for other people maybe less. So what is trauma?
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Dr. Amy Opigian
Absolutely. And I had the same question. And in fact, it wasn't until I developed health conditions that I knew were related to childhood trauma that I really questioned that, because I was not one that had seen trauma in my childhood. And so my definition now of trauma is focused on the body's experience. And there are very distinct physiology changes that happen when the body goes into a trauma response that makes that be a trauma. Up until that point, it's just a stress. Not that stress is always great. Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is exactly what we need. And sometimes it just is chronic stress that is not helping us. But there is a very distinct change in our physiology that makes that stress turn into a trauma. And the inner experience then can be simplified down to anything that for any reason at that time overwhelmed us in our ability to respond.
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Mike Carruthers
And so an example, just a quick example of that. I don't want to go too deep down the rabbit hole here, but just a quick example of like attach an example to that.
- [33:05]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Absolutely. So I'll share the story of my patient, Elena. And Elena came to me after she developed autoimmun in her late 40s and she had had a car accident a year prior. She had not made that connection at all. But me knowing the nervous system, I started to ask some questions. And it was not surprising that she had had a childhood where again, she also would not have said ever use the word trauma for her childhood. But as I'm asking her about when she had experienced overwhelm and when she could look back on her life and think that that was a moment in which I didn't know if I was going to be okay. And I just felt like something inside of me shut down and broke in order to keep going. And she described an experience, multiple experiences, actually growing up with a single mother who she was always afraid of, are we going to have enough? Am I too much for my mother? My mother's already got so much on her plate. I need to not have any needs. And she became hyper responsible even at a young age. And so even though this would not be a typical event per se, like the car accident that she had, that we can also look at that it was the experience, it was the inner experience of that was too much for a young child to understand, to be able to process and know how to respond in. In a way that was productive. She was a young child. How would she know how to navigate adult problems? But that's exactly what happens to a lot of people is that they are faced with a situation that they just are not equipped to understand enough or have the time or have the space to be able to respond in a way other than to just kind of shut down.
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Mike Carruthers
Okay, but here's the thing about the word trauma, that, that I think most people would agree with this, that one of the things about a trauma is it's going to affect you for the rest of your life. That that's the difference. You break your arm, you go to the doctor, he fixes it, and maybe that's a trauma. It's certainly a trauma to your body, but it's fixed and life goes on. But the kind of trauma that you're talking about, we often assume that because they went through this trauma, somehow that's going to mess them up for the rest of their life.
- [35:34]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Well, let me challenge that for a moment, Mike, because as we look at how does the body heal a trauma to the bone? A break to the bone is a trauma. It breaks the bone. It doesn't grow the bone, it doesn't strengthen the bone. It broke the bone. I talk about a patient, Kenneth, who came in. He was a veteran. He was coming into the VA hospital where I was a general surgery residential. He had broken his bicep tendon. Rather than being attached to his shoulder, it was sitting in the middle of his arm. That is breaking something because we've exceeded our capacity. That is the same thing that happens to us in any other of these other maybe more emotional traumas or psychological traumas that we want to associate that word with. And yet for the body, it's the same principles, it's the same thing to ourselves. Of this is more than I can handle. And so rather than completely die, I'm going to just break the bone, I'm going to break the muscle tendon so that the rest of me is okay, and then I can heal. And that's what we see in the body. The body heals the bone, the body heals the muscle, as long as it has what it needs to heal. And I think we can all look at people who've had some broken bones, and they've never really healed well from that. They still have chronic pain. It. It lingers, they've got issues. Same thing with that tendon with my patient Kenneth. If we had not done the surgery to reattach his tendon, yes, he would have survived. Yes, he would have been able to go on with his life, but he'd forever have one arm that was really weak because his bicep muscle wasn't working. So the body needs certain things in order to be able to engage it its own healing strategies. And it is no different than any other traumas that we want to say. The body is designed to actually heal from those traumas. The fact that it doesn't and the fact that we haven't moved on is actually a sign that we have not given our body what it needs to do its own innate healing.
- [37:44]
Mike Carruthers
But many people break bones, have traumas, and they're not bothered by them anymore. I broke a bone. I broke a bone in my arm from rollerblading many years ago. It affects me in no way whatsoever. So give me an example of a trauma that you consider a trauma that goes through a process and heals, and it's fine.
- [38:10]
Dr. Amy Opigian
You can look at an example of a car accident. That can be a trauma for some people, because in that moment, they can be so overwhelmed by what's happening that sometimes they can faint, sometimes they can lose consciousness. This is the body's way of showing this is way too much for me to be able to respond to. I'm just going to check out. And how do we then come through those experiences? How do we actually give the body what it needs afterwards? This is where a lot of people are unaware and so unintentionally keep their body in a sense of danger. What we actually need is, first of all, to return to a complete sense of safety. You'll see this in nature all the time. So one example is a turtle. And when a turtle experiences overwhelming danger, not just distress, overwhelming danger, they just retreat inside their shell. They pull their head in, they pull their legs in, and there's no way that they're coming out of that shell until they've sensed that they are safe to do so. Well, in a trauma response, our body is essentially doing the same thing. Our body is essentially saying, this is not just stressful. If it were stressful, I'd keep trying to run away, I'd keep trying to fight, I would keep trying to respond. But this is so overwhelming that I'm just going to shut down, I'm going to retreat, I'm going to pull into my shell and just go into full protection mode. And as long as we are living protected, we can still function. But there's just this background sense of the danger might still be there. We always have that sense of the other shoe might drop. And even when times are good, we are waiting for the next bad thing to happen because we know that it's coming. We know, we know that we don't deserve good things or deserve to be happy or we can't experience that joy as long as our body is like, I'm not sure that that danger ever truly went away. So that is why actually knowing, having the skills and the knowledge for what the body needs to know that a danger is truly over is the first step and the essential step to actually moving on in a way that we have healed from our past and not just bringing it along with us.
- [40:38]
Mike Carruthers
But I want to go back to this idea and have you address it very directly that people have this belief. And I can give you an example. I know someone who, when he was 10 years old, saw his father die and there's this assumption that this will affect him for the rest of his life because it was so traumatic. Is that necessarily so?
- [41:03]
Dr. Amy Opigian
It is not necessarily so. That is a myth. That is a misconception that these experiences that we have will somehow negatively impact us for the rest of our life. The body and the mind have such an innate ability to heal and not just move on, not just push through, but actually heal. All of these experiences that we go through, we just haven't known how. So I've had many patients who come to me and they almost bring their scorecard with them. This is what happened to me. This is what happened to me. This is what's happened to me. And it's a lot. And I look at these and I've even worked with people who have children who saw their sibling or someone else get killed and they haven't spoken in six years. And this idea that how do you ever recover from something like that? It is actually possible. These are not life Sentences. And that's the first belief that I get to challenge with my patients, is your past is not your life sentence. And as a physician, what I'm focusing especially on is the resolution to our physical health. Because a lot of people will tell me, look, I feel that I understand why I am the way I am. I can look back at my life and the experiences that I've been through, and I can explain, and I understand my triggers. I understand all of that.
- [42:30]
Mike Carruthers
That.
- [42:31]
Dr. Amy Opigian
But my body is still living under the impact of the past. My body will still not only have reactions, like when I'm around my family, for example. That's a common example, but it also has an autoimmune disease. It also has digestive issues. I also have sleep issues and ongoing anxiety issues. So my body is somehow still remembering the past, even though I feel that intellectually I know all of this stuff and I've been able to move on.
- [43:02]
Mike Carruthers
But given your definition, everybody could have a different road to get to where you want to go. Some people would have the same experience and not be traumatized because they don't fit your definition of being overwhelmed.
- [43:21]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Absolutely. And this is where we can see two people go on the same military excursion, and one comes back, and it can assimilate with society and enjoy their family and not have illogical reactions, and another one is stuck at home in fear with PTSD symptoms. Same excursions, same experiences, same environment. What was the difference? The difference was that, for one, they went into that more resourced. They went into that so that when they experienced those, whatever it was that they saw, whatever it was that they did, whatever it was that they experienced, they were able to keep it at the stress level or experience that trauma response and resolve it at that time, whereas someone else wasn't able to.
- [44:09]
Mike Carruthers
Isn't one way, though, to address it, to just leave it alone? Not leave it alone, but that time will. Time is a tool that.
- [44:19]
Dr. Amy Opigian
But.
- [44:20]
Mike Carruthers
And again, I use the example of when you lose someone, if someone dies who's very close to you, it certainly seems overwhelming. It seems like you can't sleep, you can't eat. It's horrible. But eventually, time fixes that. Human beings go through the stages of grief and come to acceptance, and life goes on. And there was no direct intervention to deal with the trauma. You just figured it out, worked it out, accepted it, and moved on.
- [44:56]
Dr. Amy Opigian
100%. Mike. And, and this is what I hope that everybody hears, is that the body has the innate capacity to move through even the hardest of experiences and have resolution. So for Those people who have not had resolution, that's what we get to become curious about. And why not? Why did the body get stuck in that grief? Why five years later, are we still ruminating about that person? Why five years later, are we still having sleep problems? Why? Why has our body or our mind not seemed to fully recover when time should heal? And that was one of the first lessons that I had to learn with trauma. I became a foster parent. This is directly working with trauma. Anytime that you take in a foster child, you are working with someone who's been through trauma. I was under the assumption, Mike, that time heals all wounds, because that's what I'd been taught. Time heals all wounds. All I needed to do was provide the love, provide the stability, the security, and then just give it time. Well, this is what I did. And time was not healing. In fact, he was progressively getting worse. And I'm trying to understand why, because I've created an amazing place for him compared to his past. But he was still so stuck in his past that he could not. Could not be actually present and relax into the security, relax into my love. He wouldn't even let me let my love in. And by the age of five, he was talking about how he would want to kill me, and this is how he would want to kill me. And it was obvious that time was not healing. So I was missing something. I was not giving him something that he needed to allow time to be healing. So it's not just that time heals everything. Time only heals when the body has what it needs. And then you compound that over time. And, yes, the healing and the resolution will come.
- [47:06]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah. So when people stay stuck, when the guy comes back from military service and can't get on with his life, when you lose somebody and time doesn't heal that, when your foster son does not get better. What's this trauma work that you've mentioned? What is it specifically? What, so you wake up some morning to start your trauma work? What is that?
- [47:32]
Dr. Amy Opigian
I don't think it's what people think it is. When I talk about trauma work now, what I'm really talking about is I need you. I need a person to be able to open up and feel and then be able to move through those feelings, not stuffing them back down, but move through those feelings to a sense of, I am safe enough. I am secure enough, and now I can keep myself open to the world. Anytime that we find ourselves still guarding our heart, still protecting ourselves, that's how we can know whether I know That I had trauma or not. I'm actually. My body is showing that it has these patterns of trauma.
- [48:14]
Mike Carruthers
But it starts by doing what you call somebody, you talk to a friend. I mean, when you say, you know, move through it and feel your feelings, a lot of people don't know, what does that mean?
- [48:25]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Mean, yeah, and I wouldn't have known what that means either. So what I start, what I start people with is feeling sensations in their body. Because I need to get that connection of their mind and their body. Part of living with chronic trauma has been a disconnection of our mind from our body. So we tend to be more in our head. We like to think about everything, analyze everything, understand everything. We sign up for more courses, we read more books, but we actually don't know how to be with these feelings in a way that will be productive. So I start people with having them feel different areas of their body. And sometimes that can be. I want you to feel your pulse. I want you to actually feel your heartbeat. And whether we go to the neck and the artery, we go to the wrist and feeling their artery. But this is starting to form that ability for them to connect. In science, we call this interoception, your ability to sense and perceive your inner physiology and state. Most people can't. And yet what the research shows is that looking at mothers specifically, if they don't have that ability to know and read their own inner state and physiology, they're not able to do that for their babies. And that's how. Then we pass on what you might call generational trauma is because a mom doesn't know actually how to connect with her own body and sense it's. And thus doesn't know how to connect and be able to hear the real messages behind what her baby needs. So this idea of connecting with our body and that it. That can be so vague. And so I've made it very practical by saying we are going to see how we can create a felt sense of safety right now. And I have people put a pillow or a blanket or a book or a purse over in front of their stomach. And this seems really weird to them at first. And they're like, why would I put this over my stomach? And I'm like, just do it. And then we'll see if this is helpful or not. And as soon as people do that, you should see it, Mike. Their shoulders drop, their face softens, their abdominal muscles just also kind of relax and they're like, oh, I feel, I feel like I can take a breath and I'M like, this is why it's important to just do some of this connection exercises at first. Because if I had told you that you were tense before, you would have been like, no, I'm fine. Because this is your normal. It's not until we actually can create a change in our inner physiology that we're like, oh, now I can feel the difference. And if this is what safe actually feels like, I don't think I've ever felt safe before. And that is when the real change starts to happen. Mike.
- [51:10]
Mike Carruthers
So if you had something happen where you had that reaction, you felt overwhelmed in your life. And so that's, by your definition, trauma. But now you don't feel overwhelmed. Time fixed it, it seems like it's in the past where it belongs. And so are you no longer traumatized?
- [51:35]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Yeah. My response to that would be, are you still going into trauma responses? And it sounds like from your question you're saying that no, this person is no longer going into that sense of complete overwhelm. And so they are no longer under the impact of that past trauma.
- [51:53]
Mike Carruthers
Well, given how much we talk about trauma and traumatic experiences and the effects of trauma on people, I really appreciate you weighing in and giving your take on this. I've been talking to Amy Apigian. She is a double board certified physician in preventative and addiction medicine and she's author of the book the Biology of How the Body Holds Fear, Pain and Overwhelm and how to Heal It. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Amy, thank you so much.
- [52:23]
Christopher Sommerfield
All right.
- [52:24]
Dr. Amy Opigian
Thank you so much. Maybe.
- [52:29]
Mike Carruthers
If you would like people to think of you as more attractive and likable, here are some solid suggestions backed up by science. First of all, be funny. People with a good sense of humor are considered to be more social and more intelligent. Surround yourself with other people. Studies show that people look better in a group because unattractive features are less noticeable. Get past the small talk. People feel more connected to someone who asks deeper, more sincere questions. Get a pet. It shows you're a nurturing person and able to make long term commitments and smile more. A happy face can compensate for attractiveness flaws. The stronger the smile, the more attractive the face. And that is something you should know. We have a great team of people working on this show. Our producers are Jeff Haveison and Jennifer Brennan. Our executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening today to Something you Should know. You know, a lot of the guests who appear on Something youg Should Know have their own TED Talk. And did you know that TED has a podcast that drops a new TED Talk every day? If you love hearing fascinating stories, insights about human behavior, and mind blowing concepts that weren't even on your radar before, I recommend you check out TED Talks Daily. You'll hear hot takes and deep dives from the world's leading thinkers and learn answers to questions like how do I stop caring about what other people think? Or is my partner the one do aliens actually exist? Don't miss out on your daily dose of inspiration. Listen to TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. I'm often asked, as you might imagine, what podcast do I listen to? And I actually have an eclectic taste and I jump around. Try different ones, but I will say that I have a couple I'm very consistent about, and one of them is the Jordan Harbinger Show. It's kind of a little like something you should know, but Jordan goes in interestingly different directions. I do know that we share a lot of listeners, a lot of listeners who like this podcast. Like the Jordan Harbinger Show, Jordan is really good at getting his guests to open up and share great insights. Recently he discussed modern romance scam tactics. I mean, that's the lowest of the low, but you've got to know about them so you can fight back against them. And another episode he did was about how society has engineered a generation of lonely men. The show covers a lot of great topics which, well, like I said, if you like this show, you're going to like his show. There's so much here. Check out the Jordan Harbinger show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.