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- [00:07]
Dr. Steve Peters
Journey on Magic lies within the trails we ride. You're listening to the Journey On Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warrick is a horseman trainer, international clinician and author who helps empower horse people from all over the world with the skills, knowledge and mindsets needed to create trusting partnerships with their horses. Warrick offers a free seven day trial to his comprehensive online video library that includes hundreds of full length training videos and several home Study courses@videos.warwick shiller.com.
- [00:45]
Warwick Schiller
G' day everyone. Welcome back to the Journey On Podcast. I'm your host Warwick Schiller and today on the podcast we have Another return guest, Dr. Steve Peters. And Steve was. He was in. He's in the first season of the podcast. I know because he's at the first podcast summit. So it was probably four years ago that I had Steve on the podcast and recently I got a message on Facebook from Steve and because of the message I asked him would he like to come back on the podcast and share what he's up to these days. And he agreed to. And he also agreed to me reading that message out here in the intro to you guys. So this is the message I got about six days ago from Dr. Steve Peters. The message said, I wanted to let you know what you helped inspire in me after we had your podcast together in which I discussed being an evidence based guy who was thinking outside the box. Well, I never went back in the box. I had to write the new horse book in evidence based fashion and it is strongly grounded in neuroscience. However, my connection with a higher intelligence, a felt sense, and connection with the universe has been a flow that I've been in for a while. I will be writing a book of neuropoetry where art is the medium in which those in their head can experience complex science through a felt sense through their nervous system. I'm following that up with offering a new way of thinking whereby we are more like vessels that receive and transmit intelligence, but the intelligence is not us. It will be sort of a neuroscientist invitation to connect with the universe. My reading list has been Hardwiring happiness, Unwiring anxiety being you, small arcs of larger circles braiding sweetgrass, the spell of the sensuous, your brain on art, the feeling of what happens Self comes to mind thinking in systems and the modern man in search of a soul. Oh, and sapiens. I actually think that a new way of thinking, connecting to the universe will be what saves our world. I of course haven't yet shared this with anyone. Most might think me Mad. But I know with you it is a shared resonance, a shared understanding. So I probably won't be writing about horses much as as much in the near future. But I wanted you to know what I gathered that I gathered inspiration and momentum from you after being in your podcast. So yeah, that was an amazing message to receive from Steve and like I said graciously, he accepted to come on the podcast and actually have a chat about it. So without further ado, here's that the following conversation, the conversation that followed that message with Dr. Steve Peters. Dr. Steve Peters, welcome back to the Journey on podcast.
- [04:02]
Dr. Steve Peters
I'm excited to be here, Warrick. We've talked about a return trip when you let me out of the box in terms of my, my thinking and I've never gone back in. So I think we have a lot of fertile ground to cover and far as far as journeys and exploration and self discovery are, are concerned.
- [04:26]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, it was really interesting the first time I had you on the podcast and that's got to be. You were in the first year. I forget what episode you were, but you were one of the earlier guests I had and I remember talking to you on the phone before we recorded the podcast and we were talking about all sorts of esoteric stuff that you said, you know, when you're on the podcast, that you're the science guy and you've gotta talk about things that have, you know, scientific proof. But sounds like you've been on a bit of a journey since then.
- [04:59]
Dr. Steve Peters
I have, but you know, I haven't let go of the fact that I'm a, a scientist. I just think that now I look at all things as science. So the umbrella has actually gotten bigger and some of those things may be things we haven't quite explained yet, but from a experiential standpoint, it's, it's all science to me. So I still hold by empirical rigor and the scientific method, etc. Except I kind of use that as my tether cord and then I allow myself to get out of the spacecraft and float around out there in other planets. And so that's where I've been for a while.
- [05:44]
Warwick Schiller
So. Wow. Okay. Before we get too far into crazy land, and it's not crazy to me, but I want to talk to you about your new book that you and Martin Black have coming out. So you guys wrote Evidence based horsemanship, probably 13.
- [06:04]
Dr. Steve Peters
Even longer.
- [06:05]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, 14, 15 years ago. Yeah, gotta be then. And it was funny, you guys had, had published some articles online, the collaboration of YouTube before that book ever came out, and in those articles, you got down to some nitty gritty stuff. And I was like, oh, my God, this is the stuff right here. Really helped me understand things deeper. And then when you publish the book, and I've told you this before, so it's going to be no surprise when you publish the book. I was like, is that it? Like, I was expecting War and Peace, you know, Like, I feel like I got a lot of stuff out of the book, don't get me wrong, but I felt like the book was going to be more like these articles that were really in depth. Anyway, you guys got a new book coming out called the Science and Practice of Evidence Based Horsemanship. And it sounds like this one might be a little more in line with what I was hoping for the first time around.
- [07:01]
Dr. Steve Peters
You're right. When we did the first one, we wanted to make it as usable as possible and, and consider the time frame. You know, about 15, 20 years ago, when Martin and I were observing horses and sharing his empirical knowledge with. With the science, you know, we even laughed. We. We said to each other, could you imagine horse people talking about things like dopamine? And, you know, that. That was. Wasn't even heard of back then. So we didn't know how well we'd be received. But we did feel we were coming on to some things that we felt the world needed to know. And Martin was a strong proponent in something usable, something readable, something you can put in your saddle bag. And I had a bunch of reference, a whole ton of reference material to go with it. And he said, you're gonna stick that on the back of there? And I said, well, you know, scientists are just going to criticize us if we don't, you know, add this piece on there. And he said, you writing this for scientists? And he said, you could make a really great book. And he was right. And it could sit in some academic library and get dust. And I could have 50 people say that was really a great book, or we could try to make it accessible. And that was what we did. But this time we have a warehouse full of reference material, so we'll satisfy anybody who, who wants to read. Who's going to read our book. What we did, it's the science and practice of. So it's a really a deep dive into the science. You know, it's neuroanatomy, neuroendocrinology, and then we go into the practical aspects and the horsemanship, what it looks like. We also enlisted Kim Stone, she's a photographer. But Also somebody who's worked as a, as a buckaroo. So she's a good hand. And she came out with us long ago and took lots of pictures. And the way we used to do things, like 15 years ago, we would just. I'd wear a GoPro and, and Kim would take all kinds of pictures. And then at night we'd sit down and I'd say, you see that little facial nerve there? That's activating. And Martin would go, oh, you mean that guitar string looking thing? So our language was different, but the observ innovations were the. Were the same. And if Kim captured them in her photographs, then we had a visual story to go with it. Well, that's what this book really is. It's. We've whittled it down to 300 pages and we're still playing with it. It'll be out in the fall, but it is chock full of, of illustrations. I've done so many brain dissections, you know, hundreds in my lifetime, but over the years that I point out and label a lot of structures that people, you hear people talk about, but I don't know that people have actually seen or understand how they interact and connect. So there's going to be a lot of neuroanatomy in terms of a picture. So I think hopefully it, it can work as a, as a reference guide to go back to. It can work as a textbook if somebody equitation, equine science department or veterinary group wanted to use it. But it's also written in such a way and with the photographs that, that it's once again for the lay public, for the horse owner, for the trainer. That's really who this book is written for and I think it'll be our legacy. Really.
- [10:58]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I'm excited for it because like I said, you know, that first one was. Just gave us a taste and then you guys made the, the, the, the film, the, the, the DVD of that. I suppose you can't call it a DVD anymore because you probably don't have those things. Who's got a DVD player in the house anymore?
- [11:17]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, so that, that's our book. And outside of that, I've been. I touch on it in the book. I touch on neuroplasticity, I touch on safety. I touch on nervous systems communicating with other nervous systems. But where I've been going after finishing my part of this book has been more a personal journey that I've decided to share with people. I've coined a new phrase actually. Well, gosh, I almost don't even know where to start. And I show me the new phrase.
- [12:02]
Warwick Schiller
First because I've got my pen ready. I'm going to write this thing down.
- [12:06]
Dr. Steve Peters
Neuropoetry.
- [12:08]
Warwick Schiller
Oh yeah, you did mention that in your. When you messaged me.
- [12:11]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, yeah, because I think a lot of neuroscience is, is top down. A lot of it is, you know, stuff that you would read, a lot of jargon, etc, And I wanted people to be able to experience things on a more felt level. So I experimented. I had some poems that I had written. I had a sketchbook that I, I'd kept over the years. And it was, for me, I never really thought that it would develop into anything. So I put out a poem or two on Facebook and I turn around and there'd be almost 2000 likes. And people would say, I never understood this until I read the poem. I never knew what all this neuroscience was until I experienced it in the form of a, a poem. And poems are images. Poems are, are felt clips. They're a different way of, of wording things so that you're really coming from the bottom up. If somebody feels something, then they can grasp it without even being able to articulate it. And so what I've done is I'm creating a book of neuro poetry for that very purpose. And I don't know, there's a phrase going around now called neuro aesthetics. And basically it's how art can, can make us healthier and how art can change our neurochemistry, how art can change our brains. And I. So that's exciting time. I think, I think there's some implications for psychotherapy. I think there are implications for, for healing with trauma. In terms of neuro aesthetics, I, I saw a study where these veterans were given masks and they were told to use these masks to get put out any expression that they wanted to, that they felt what might have been trapped in them that they couldn't work on and talk therapy. And so some people fragmented the mass, just smashed it. And this is my, my message. Others wrote scars on them. Some drew it right down the middle as if they were living in two separate worlds. But these weren't things that could be expressed in words. They had to be expressed. And I thought it was interesting that it was a mask. And really that's the mask. I think they didn't say so symbolically that they have to have to either hide or wear. So it's, it's very interesting. I think even medical technology will, will allow us to feel things as opposed to, to Think them. You know, I see lots of research, I read research all the time and I can see where there's a lot of jargon and a lot of written things and, and I wonder sometimes if these scientists have ever seen a horse or felt the things that go along with a horse. Ever scratched on a horse, ever smelled the horse's breath. You know, that may sound kind of corny, but that's part of our interaction with a horse. And I think it's a part that's missing. That's why sometimes science feels so sterile and out of touch, disconnected at times. So I'm hoping that some of the things that I do bridge that gap between, between science and real life, applicability and growth.
- [16:26]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, it sounds exciting. You know what's so interesting about. You're talking about top down and feeling things in your body and things like that. And it's, it's now a topic of conversation. So it was probably 10 years ago now that I kind of. And part of it was brought on by a horse I had, and part of it was bought on by a horse I had and reading evidence based horsemanship. So you guys got some skin in the game in my whole development. But I came to the realization that I'd spent most of my life in my head, didn't have many bodily sensations. And once I found that out, I thought that's kind of weird or strange or whatever. And then you realize, I mean it's, it's so common, you know, no one was really talking about it. But once you really under, once you start looking for it, you realize, oh, there was, there's so much literature about that and there's so many people trying to help people with that. But I didn't even, you know, I didn't even know that's how I was operating at the time. And when I did realize I was operating that way, I thought, I wonder if there's any help for me. You know, like I'm the only one who operates this way. And now it's like I've got a whole library of books here on, on how to not operate that way. And that's exactly what you're talking about here too, is getting people out of their head and into their bodies.
- [17:54]
Dr. Steve Peters
You know, if someone were to ask you what was your first language? You know, you probably say, well, it's English, but your, your first language was actually sensation. So that's how you saw the world and that's how you felt the world. Until you crept up into your head and then you created A narrative. And you believe the narrative that you create. But here's the interesting part, is that we have all created the story, the narrative in our head. And the world that you perceive out there is only the world that you've created. You know, we. We can. We can build our brains. We can create our brains. And to tell you how far off we are from what's really out there is that if you just think, for example, well, we can see ultra red light. Yeah. Ultraviolet light, infrared light. But if you look at that sliver within the light spectrum, it's a sliver. So that's where we see. And so we egotistically think that's the world. You know, if you. If you interact with your horse, they have a horizontal pupil that's looking 340 degrees around and picking up movement really easily. And if you think you live in your horse's world. I don't even live in your world, Warwick. We've. We each have. There's a guy, what's his name? Anal Seth, I think his name is, who wrote a book Being you, and. And he talks about what we have in our head as a controlled hallucination, basically. You know, our brains have never even seen the light of day. They're in a dark closet. They're in a skull. Everything that we perceive is because of the sensory system that we have. So we can't hear things that others hear. We can't see things that others hear. We can't smell things that others hear. We only have this picture. So we're in a dark closet with these little messages firing in at us. And we believe that what we've put together is. Is actually the. The world. So is that good for us to go on? Well, yeah, but if you really want to grow and get outside of that and communicate with the universe, communicate with horses, communicate with nature, you have to realize that you only bring one piece of the puzzle only. You're those guys that held on to the elephant. And you. You might have had. Just had the nose, right? You might have just had the tail. But you don't know what that elephant is. And you can't. You don't have the sensory system to do that.
- [21:06]
Warwick Schiller
It's like the allegory of the cave. Plato's, if you're familiar with that one. Yeah, it's like the, you know, the fish doesn't know what water was like because it's always in water. It's interesting you said about how much the actual light spectrum we can. We can actually detect with our eyes and It's a small part, isn't it? I'm not talking 30%. I'm talking a sliver.
- [21:34]
Dr. Steve Peters
A sliver.
- [21:35]
Warwick Schiller
And think about what we can see. And we can see a lot. Well, we think we can see a lot. I'm looking out the window, and I can see across the valley here. I can see the trees. I can see that. I can see lots of stuff out there, but there's so much stuff there that we can't see. And.
- [21:52]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, and. And because brains are designed to grow from experience and change over time, we. We are actually blind to the changes that we do make because we wake up and we think we're in the same body, etc, but we're firing different neural pathways and having different experiences. So we are people that are constantly changing. And so it always amazes me when someone is afraid to grow because they don't want to lose who they are. So they're going to confirm everything that they experience through confirmation bias. I just want to keep my world here. But your listeners who are listening to us now, they are different on to some degree than they were when they first tuned into this podcast, and they will be different tomorrow as a result. So you can change without knowing you're changing, or you can do even better. You can actually change with intention. You can actually craft your brain and get yourself out of trouble. And that's kind of where my growth has been. For example, being on the autism spectrum, I've always been hypersensitive. You know, I had to change shirts five times to find one. Ah, this one. This one feels right. So I was, you know, highly tuned into to sensory things. And I'd go to airports and there'd just be all this sensory stuff going on. And, you know, if I was late for my flight, I would get so aggravated that I. I would be a roller derby king working my way through, racing through the terminal.
- [23:59]
Warwick Schiller
I've seen. I've seen you at airports, at least people, you act exactly like that.
- [24:05]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, guy in the cart's going along, picking up all the dead bodies. Guys knocked out, pretty much awake. So I began to think, all right, this is what I'm now calling limbic echoes. These are our emotional artifacts that are just floating around, but if I'm not aware of them, then they're gonna repeat themselves. So when I get aggravated, if messages are going to the amygdala, if messages are creating cortisol, and I need to find a way to buffer myself. So what would happen was I'd start to put myself in situations that used to be aggravating. I. I was running five minutes late, I think, for my plane. Not outrageous. I knew I could get there. And I purposely said to myself, all right, normally I get really aggravated here. I get agitated and feel this pressure. Is this doing me any good? It's not doing me any good. So if I go through with this, I send neuronal messages through my brain, and it just puts more paving on that road so that the next time some shitty situation arises, it's going to go down that super highway that I've created. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to stop and reflect on this for a minute, and then I'm going to do something that's good. So I. I was running late, but I stopped and I turned around, and there were two women behind me. And I said, would you like to go ahead of me? And I made eye contact with them, and they went ahead of me. And I said, do you feel that? That felt pretty good. Take a moment and wire that. And I've begun to do that everywhere. Something good happens, because my brain, my world is going to be made up in how I wire my brain. Every time I feel something that I like, I took a shower. And I'm not taking a cold, cold water bath. I'm taking a. A warm shower and saying, I appreciate this warmth. I'm feeling it in my skin. This. This is tremendous. Wire that, Steve. Wire that in and take a moment to capture that. I. I hike up a mountain here where I live. You can kind of see the ridges back there behind the ridge. Yeah. So I hike up these ridges, and what I began to do is say today, see what your skin is sensing. So, oh, there's some wind here. And actually, to sort of help out, a small rain cloud came over and started to drip some rain on me, spit on me. So I put my hands out and I felt that the next day I went up and said, tune into your hearing. See if there's anything that you miss. So I'd hear the crunch of my feet. I'd hear my dog in the underbrush. I. I'd hear birds in the trees. Now go up the next day, same thing with. With vision. And if there's something especially moving, something especially beautiful, something you just enjoy, stop and wire that in. So messages go over that pathway again. And what I found that I've been able to do, because we know neuroplasticity exists, my life is getting much richer. I'm finding that things fire that didn't used to fire, I'm finding that things that used to upset me I can let go of. Anxiety for the future was a. Was a big one. And I started to catch myself and say, well, how is that helping you? And if I can find something counter, in fact, to wire in and I sleep on works, it works. I also know some things. It gets a little more complicated. And in fact, there's what I call the sweet spot. And the sweet spot is where there's enough sympathetic arousal to have me alert. And now if I'm alert, I'm aware. I'm more aware of things. And then I try to turn on my focus so alert enough where I can still stay focused. If I'm too alert, then I can't maintain my focus. So I need to be. And if I let the stimulation drop away, I'll. I'll lose my focus. So I try to find where's that little spot that's perfect. And I find the dopamine hits are the hugest if you can find that sweet spot. So that's exactly what I try to do, is find something challenging. You know, maybe I'll rock climb up the side of the mountain a little bit this time to raise that sympathetic arousal just enough so I have to pay more attention where I put my hands and feet. And when I get to the top, yes, I get this, this dopamine hit. So I try when I want to create something new for myself and create new wiring, I try to take that whole moment of what I did and just dwell on it. And this is similar to what I've always thought with horses and used with, with horses as well, except I'm a mammal and I carry a nervous system. I have the same neuroendocrinology, and if I can find an optimal learning place, so I'm having a conversation with my own nervous system. And sometimes I should, I, maybe I shouldn't say this, but I, I feel sorry for people that don't have brain biology as a touchstone, who, who aren't aware that they're actually organic living people, that they're not robots, that what you do say to yourself, the experiences you give to yourself are actually what creates the perception in your head. So if your world's a good place, you've probably experienced things to allow that to happen. But if you do that with intention, just think how great things can be. You know, when I hear people that have. Have dabbled a little bit in psychedelics, I. I haven't. But, you know, some things, some themes that I tend to hear are that one. I lose the boundaries. I, I kind of find that I'm freer in how I think and I'm not as restrained in, in my, in my thinking. Also they're better connected. They always say I'm connected to everything. I'm connected to the trees, I'm connected to the universe, I'm connected to, to everything. But then do they have to take that, that drug again to recreate what they were feeling? I think what I'm trying to do is create that feeling. So it's part of me. So it's nothing more than my being where I'm there all the time. Because that's how my brain will be perceiving the world. And once you find it, I mean, I think those that, that have maybe dabbled in psychedelics or, or find it in meditation or something where they cross this, this imaginary boundary. And I say imaginary because we put them in there. If we didn't put them in there, our culture put them in. If our culture didn't put them in there, our politics put them in, our society put them in. So there's all this that we think is built in concrete really. For example, when it's interesting. I'm going to Germany here in a couple of days actually and I had this image of going to Nuremberg stadium and I don't know if you, if you saw those old black and white films by Lenny Riefenstahl where she would take pictures of Hitler and there's a huge auto, you know, huge stadiums filled with soldiers and flags and drums and music and all this, all this stuff. And there was bottom up stuff so that, you know, the drums playing and all that to get people all psyched up and, and basically it was a hijacking of neurons. It was a hijacking of neurons based on firing up the amygdala. So fear creates this tribalism creates these divisions, creates hatred. And you could see it. I mean it's not just then that those things happened, right? And so I, I had an image of being back there at Nuremberg stadium where, you know, after the war they blew the swastikas up with dynamite. If you ever saw those standing up there and addressing a crowd, not about horses, but just saying you can create a brain that's more aligned with the universe and you'll know as you get aligned because things will become more cooperative, things will become more collaborative, you'll feel a better connection. And the things you feel will, even though it may sound corny, is love versus fear and hate and love is biological. You and I started this. We were talking about kids in Africa having a certain protein, and they had that protein. Do you want to tell that little story and then I'll add on to it?
- [34:39]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. So I've talked about on the podcast before, so if you guys haven't heard it, it's. I was reading a book recently. It wasn't about kids or proteins, but part of this book, they said they went around the world, they drew blood on infants and ran every test known to mankind on them, just to see the differences, the similarities and those sorts of things. And they found a group of children in Uganda that had a protein level that was off the charts, like abnormal, but abnormal in a good way. Like, if we all had those proteins, we'd be all healthier. And they tried to isolate what it was these kids got in their food that no one else was getting. They couldn't figure that out. So they observed this particular village for quite a while and realized that none of those children as infants are ever sat on the ground. They were always held close to a body for that first, you know, that first most important part of their lives. So the mother's not holding, the grandmother's holding them, the auntie's holding them. And it was basically the summation of this whole thing was that's how we evolve to be. So those protein levels are not abnormal. We're abnormal. And those kids have normal protein levels because they are. Their environment coincides with the way we evolved to work. So that was the story. You can take it from there.
- [35:59]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah. They've done these studies whereby they've taken rat pups that were nurtured by their moms that were. Were licked. And, And. And they felt there was a warm bond between mother and rat pup. There was a lot of licking taking place. And then they had other rat pups that they, they. They divided off their moms or the identified mothers that weren't as nurturing. So they looked at glucocorticoid levels. Glucocorticoid is what you know as cortisol. And they found that they were greatly reduced in the rats that had a lot of nurturing. But what they found was there were things called glucocorticoid receptors. So there are little receptors that these rats had a lot of. So that when. And I'll try not to get too far off track here, but. So when the. The HPA access h. Hypothalamus sends hormones down to the pituitary gland. Pituitary gland sends them to adrenal glands, adrenal glands, shoot out all this cortisol. When that happened in these nurtured rats, those glucocorticoids or cortisol fit in to the glucocorticoid receptors and were neutralized. In other words, they were highly resilient to stress because cortisol was not having an impact on them because they were nurtured. So they looked at other mammals and one of those mammals with prairie voles who mate for life, and they do a lot of hugging and holding of each other, and they're filled with glucocorticoid receptors. So saying that love and connection is not a part of our biology or is something that seems out there. If you look at the Romanian orphans, those orphans had every need met. I mean, their diapers were changed, they were fed. They just didn't have enough people to connect and touch. We know this with horses, too, with this new idea of the five domains by David Miller. So there's five dorm domains with. With horses. And a key component of that is the behavioral interaction. That's one of the domains, and it needs to involve touch. That's an important element. In fact, if I were to tell somebody that they had a. And I used to have to do this, tell people that they had a. A terminal diagnosis or something, that wasn't going to turn out well. As I started to talk in words, I explained it well. But I'd watch their eyes glass over and they really weren't able to comprehend or what I was. I was saying to the degree. So I. In those cases, I'd reach out and put my hand on their shoulder and I'd stop talking altogether. And later on they would tell me, I was glad it was you who told me about this. I was. I was glad that you understood. I felt that I wasn't alone. And it was when I shut up and actually touched that the electricity happened, that the healing took place. So there's something to be said for our sensory systems and nurturing our own. So I can feel things. I think more deeply, especially if I start to hardwire those things in. So if I say this feels good, it feels really good. And, you know, just to share from my personal experience lately, in the last six months, I don't know that my wife Michelle and I have been closer than when I've appreciated something. And you can say, I'm grateful for this, but you can also realize that if I take a moment to dwell and let my brain replay. And that's what happens. Your hippocampus will replay it as long as you don't interrupt it. You just let that, that reflection take place. You will strengthen those neurons that initially fired. So if you feel something good. Yeah, I want to keep that connection. You can, you can grow. You can actually do that yourself.
- [40:49]
Warwick Schiller
I've been taking, excuse me, I've been taking notes here, Steve, while you've been talking. And the first note I took was when you started talking about this a while ago. I wrote down self awareness. In order to have all this, this stuff happen, you've got to, you've got to be able to get out of your head and stop thinking about all the things and you've got to be in the moment and be aware of self. Something else that you said about going out in nature and today I'm going to listen to what I can hear and then other days I'm going to go out and I'm going to feel somatically in my body what I'm going to feel. I read a book a few years ago about beginning shamanism and the beginning things to be a shaman was that the instructions were go out in nature, sit down for 20 minutes one day and just observe what you can see. But then the next day you go out and you sit in nature and you just listen to what you can hear, what birds, what sounds. And then the next day you go out and you feel what you can feel on the outside of your body, like the wind, the rock you're sitting on, whatever. But then another one is you go out and you feel into your body what, what does this space feel like in your body? And this was beginning shamanism practices. And it sounds like that's what you've been doing.
- [42:20]
Dr. Steve Peters
It's neuroscience, it's not pseudoscience. You know, what it is is it's an expansion of science, not a collapsing of science. I feel like I'm not stepping away from science when I do this. I feel like I'm stepping into it.
- [42:40]
Warwick Schiller
I'm writing it down. It's not neuroscience. It's neuroscience, not pseudoscience.
- [42:46]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah. In this day and age of, you know, misinformation and, and disinformation, the difference being disinformation is a, a purposeful attempt to get you to think a certain way, knowing that it's wrong for profit or whatever and misinformation is just wrong. Yeah. I try to be very careful in my critical thinking to stay open minded. You know, I think people think that scientists feel they have to be right and good scientists don't feel that good. Scientists feel, how do I get closer to the truth? Because most of what we've ever discovered is based on thousands of failed hypothesis. So we ask questions and, but if I get, personally, if my self identity gets tied to something, then I'm in trouble as a, a scientist because what'll happen is then I'll, I'll try to get Orwellian truths to make up for the fact that what I've just said is, has been proven wrong. Orwellian truths are when you know something's false and you just try to create little truths to make up for it, to, to keep yourself sounding true. And, and you see it in society now. If you just keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again and hold your guns, pretty soon it becomes part of the, the culture and it gets accepted. So I don't know where I was going with, that's all right.
- [44:49]
Warwick Schiller
I was talking about the shamanic thing. Something else you talked about was the similarity in nervous systems in horses and humans. And you know, we're always told with horses don't anthropomorphize, so don't project human emotions and qualities onto horses. We're not horses. But I think what happens is the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater where we forget to mammalize, what I call mammalize, which is understanding that we have a mammalian nervous system. They have a mammalian nervous system and they pretty much work the same. And I think a lot of times, like I said in, in the, in the people observing the fact you shouldn't anthropomorphize, they, they, they go too far the other way. And we're, you know, there's a book by a guy named Carl Safina and it's about animal emotions. And there's three parts of the book. One is on elephants, one's on whales, I think, and one's on maybe wolves. And I forget the name of the book, but in that book he, he says that in the scientific community, he's a scientist. In the scientific community, as soon as you start to mention emotions to do with animals, they all go, they don't have emotions. And in that book he was recounting a story. Someone said to him, yeah, but he still met elephants, I think. And this person said, you have to realize they're not human. And he said, yes, but you have to realize that we are animals.
- [46:34]
Dr. Steve Peters
Good point. That goes all the way back to, you know, Descartes and all that stuff with the, with the church where we were. We're not animals. We are A higher being, so to speak. We, I like to think of it as our brains have been created evolutionarily to allow us to survive in whatever niches were put into. And so there are things that the horse's brain doesn't do that humans do, because it's not going to really pay off in terms of their overall. In terms of their overall survival. But do animals experience fear? Do animals experience contentment? Yeah, they do. So those are our emotions. You know, they have an amygdala. The amygdala has been related to fear and aggression. You know, if you were to stimulate that pathway electrochemically, elect, using electrodes, you know, oftentimes you get a rage response or you get fearful responses in, in mammals. Mammals nurture their young. We just talked about that. So I don't know that it's, it's, it's even an argument anymore whether they have emotions or not. I think that if we think we have to control them, if we even think we have to control ourselves, we lose the opportunity to connect. When we work with a horse, we're working with a, a different. We're working with a nervous system. Is the, does that horse have cortisol? Yes. Does the horse have dopamine? Yes. Does the horse have a basal ganglia? Yes. Does a horse have, you know, a cerebellum? Yes. It's operating a different anatomical makeup, but we all have those things in common. I think we do get in trouble where we take the worst elements of humans and then anthropomorphize and put them on horses. For other words, he's just being stubborn. He knows better than that. Right. So we tend, unfortunately, to use the worst of us and then project that onto the, onto the horse. But there's so many ways that we can connect. They're actually a little easier to figure out in some ways because some things are hardwired. You know, horses move together. You know, so if, if you let a bunch of horses go, watch how many have the same, same footfall, Watch how soon, you know, the foal gets up and, and the cerebellum's not myelinated, so they're really shaky. But within hours, they're almost moving with mom. And if they're out with other horses, they pretty quickly get moving out with the whole, with the whole herd. So this synchrony, this harmony, this movement is built in. Well, when we decide we're going to tell them what to do, we're going to make them do things. And we can, we can shape behaviors, but Wouldn't it be better if. Because the horse, I think, is always looking for some hint that we can speak the same language. And if we're speaking in that language of movement, for example, synchrony, then you can get with that horse. You know, these things are built in us. I'll give you an example. Our human heartbeat is a beat. We try to replicate that primitively with drums and dancing and, and why do we all dance in a tribe? It's so that our nervous systems will sync up and we'll be as one. It'll bond us. You know, our heart rates get the same, our respiration gets the same. So you, you kill that dance when you're yanking on your horse, when you're, when you're kicking on that horse, when you're making that horse do something, when, if you can just feel for that horse, use your rhythm with their rhythm, use their synchrony. They'll meet you, and that's really a magic spot where you meet each other and things are easy. So why make things, you know those old sayings, you know, make the right thing easy, the hard thing difficult. We do that with ourselves. We make the right thing so hard to find when it's biologically built in the nervous system. And horses, that's the language they speak. When we started and we said our first language, which was sensations, so is theirs. And so if we can speak that language and get in tune, we're communicating. We are communicating in a way. You know, if you yell English louder, it's not going to help your horse to comprehend that any better. But if, if you understand, they speak limbic, they speak nervous systems. Look at clever Hans for, for an example. That's how attuned they are. So if you dismiss totally your own nervous system and that method of, of conversation, you've actually decided you're not going to use their language book. And so do you know, some folks might want to say, well, I can't make my horse do things, then I can't dominate my horse. Well, that's not the way that nature tends to work. And if you want to have a dialogue instead of a monologue, if you want to be a dance partner that moves with your horse in synchrony, where each is understanding the messages the other sending, or you can grab on, lead through the entire dance or clumsily step on your partner's feet, which actually is, is an same analogy that you might use when, when riding a horse, if, if you know you're yanking on that horse or, or clamping onto that horse or breaking that rhythm. And to the horse's credit, they will still try to seek out that that rhythm. They will still try to meet you somewhere in. Even when you close the door to that. That's what I find find amazing. And I try to communicate nervous system to nervous system, which I feel is a real way to communicate with humans too. Now I've tried to move more away from. It was painful for me. Being autistic and trying to have small talk was not only painful for me, it was painful for the person who had to sit there and have a conversation with me. You know, I can only say, well, how's our weather? And did the Tigers win? You know, 14 times? And then what else do I add to that? Or I can get on my soapbox and talk about something I know until everybody starts yawning and moves away. But if I understand the nervous system and I can attune with that nervous system, then there's a connection there. Sometimes I don't have to say a word and that's. And it's very calm and I still feel I've communicated.
- [54:52]
Warwick Schiller
Yes, yes, that's all very good stuff. Have I was going to ask you about. You mentioned neuroplasticity before and some people might not be aware exactly what that means. Can you give us a definition of neuroplasticity?
- [55:09]
Dr. Steve Peters
Absolutely. We used to think long ago about. About brains in terms of. We'd use this map called Broadman's map, and it would have the frontal lobe and the, you know, the occipital lobe and Wernicke's area. And there are about 53 different areas. And we focused largely on those. But we learned that through experience and experience meaning how messages were sent to communicate back and forth between these areas. That. That was unique. William James, the American psychologist, termed it plasticity, which isn't really accurate. Plasticity is something that you can. You can warm up plastic and mold it and then it hardens back up again. What we know now is that those pathways of communications, those neurons are constantly wiring and rewiring based on our experience in the world. In fact, you might have heard Donald Hebb's phrase, neurons that fire together wire together. So we have. Let me give you an example of how you would rewire a brain real quickly. Let's say that I'm used to coming in the house on the right side of the house. And so after a while, my just walking over there and using that door develops a superhighway. In fact, my brain becomes hypofrontal it gets passed on to other areas of my brain called the basal ganglia. And these areas play it out automatically so I can think about other things. I don't even have to worry about it. And it gets to be an automatic pattern. I just going around to the. The right side of the house and using that door. So let's say the door gets jammed, and I can't undo the. The door. So maybe the first time or two, without thinking, because it's automatic, I'm now going back up to that right side of the door and saying, oh, crap, that's right, this door stuck. So I have to fire a different sequence of neurons to get myself over to the other side of the house. I might do that once. I'm still getting fooled because that old pathway is, is built in there. But the more times I go over to the left side of the house, pretty soon that becomes a highway because I'm sending more electronic electrochemical messages over that pathway. That firing actually excites these things called oligodendrocytes. They arrive, they get excited. Hey, this is a new firing pattern. They rush down there, and they start to wrap this fatty wrapping of myelin around that neuron. And now that neuron's becoming more automatic. So neuroplasticity is basically the ability to wire and rewire your own brain. And sometimes you may have these neural networks out there. A little bit of information here, a little bit of information there, some other information here, and you hear a third bit, a fourth bit of information, and you say, aha. Now I see. And all these neural networks start to come together, and it answers a big question. Aha. Nature set you up to get a dopamine release. Yes. That's that feeling that you feel. And now you actually have created new wiring in your brain. So if you think about it as wiring and rewiring, and then you think about that in, in how you work with your horse. And I know that this journey is not always about horses, but to go back to that, who is responsible for, for those wired patterns that are in your horse, and if you don't like them and they're not good for you or your horse, then we have to rewire, not call names, not beat somebody up. We just have to be patient enough to say, okay, I have to go back and rewire, because that pathway isn't working. The. The pathway itself doesn't know whether it's good or bad. I mean, if you took your horse into the back of the trailer and they knocked you down and Went out and ate in the grassy pasture and you put them back in the trailer and they knocked you down and put them back and it went out to the grassy pasture. They don't know that that's good or bad. Actually, they know it's good because they got a dopamine hit and they got some grass from. From mowing you down. So you probably want to find a way to rewire that pathway. Because good or bad is our frontal lobe assigning a label to things and then justifying calling a horse a name or punishing when. Well, who wired that thing?
- [60:42]
Warwick Schiller
You know, I sometimes joke at clinics. I say, I'm going to write an article one day that that's called. Do you complain about the things you taught your horse to do?
- [60:52]
Dr. Steve Peters
Exactly.
- [60:54]
Warwick Schiller
Um, it's interesting about this rewiring thing. You were talking about psychedelics before. And one of the ways I've had psychedelics described, you know, in a. In a healing sense, not. I've never done them for fun. I've done them for, you know, I've had a purpose to doing them. But it says, you know, you have think about your brain like a snowy hillside and you've been down it in this toboggan a few times and you've taken the same path, and that rut gets deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. And you couldn't steer the toboggan anywhere else if you wanted to. And what the psychedelics tend to do is give you a fresh pattern of snow, like give you a new snowfall to where you're actually able to. To choose a different path. And you were talking about psychedelics before, saying that you know something about they help you look at things differently and should you keep doing them. And I don't know if you know who Ram Dass is.
- [61:57]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yes, I do.
- [61:58]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. You know, Ram Dass did lots of LSD with Timothy Leary back in the the 70s sort of thing. And he said, at some point in time, I realized that doing LSD is not the point. LSD shows me what's possible. And then I had to figure out how to reach those places myself. And that's when he went to India and got a guru and, and, you know, became Ram Dass. But it's interesting. Yeah, he said that, you know, the, the psychedelics are not the point. They are to show you what's possible. And, you know, I don't know if I ever shared this with you, but. And you're a, you're a doctor, so what. I have done some healing journeys on psychedelics but the thing that got me to do it first, the first psychedelic was actually a doctor gave me. I didn't even ask for it. I was telling him what the problem was and he gave me a, a ketamine trip. And he said, what will happen is your, your emotions will go offline for about eight hours and then it'll give you a bit of an emotional reset, you know. Well, I didn't, up to that point in time, I really didn't have too many emotions. So the, the eight hours wasn't really offline, but probably it was almost 24 hours later. I had this sensation in my, I felt like Sigourney Weaver in Alien. Like I had this energy in my solar plexus moving around and, and I'd never felt that before in my entire life. And, and so, you know, I'm like, well, there's got to be something to these, this medicine if it can. A month, I mean, not a month later, a day later. So it wasn't like, oh yes, I just took the thing and now it's doing it while that's in my system. It would have been out of my system by then, but I had these sensations inside me that apparently they're called emotions that I'd never experienced before. And then probably, I don't know, it was six or eight months later after that, someone gave me some psilocybin, microdoses of psilocybin. And I microdosed psilocybin for 10 days. And we had a cat at the time, and she wasn't a sit on your lap kind of cat. And every night watching TV while I was microdosing the psilocybin, that cat would get on my lap and suck up against my body and like really push into me and not get off. And the only time she's ever done it was the 10 days I microdose psilocybin about five, six years ago. So it's, you know, it kind of tells me, okay, there's obviously some sort of a change there that even animals can, can detect, you know.
- [64:52]
Dr. Steve Peters
Right. And we go back to that story of clever Hans, the German horse that could supposedly count, but we found out that wasn't counting. It was actually attuned to nervous systems, very, very subtle changes. And so I think what they learned in, in psychology was that a lot of these talk therapies with people who had trauma, you know, veterans coming back from the war, that that basically to, to talk about them was to re. Traumatize them. To talk about them was to Put them in that same state so they almost experienced a flashback of what had, had happened. And if, if your perception is that my brain can only do this, then those patterns that are in there, those like I call them, limbic echoes, remain in there. And that's become a super highway. It's not going to take very much to send every single message down that highway again. And you may not have the wherewithal, the self awareness, the, the shift in perception to be able to send those, to rewire that way. But a shift in your thinking, which may indeed change your whole neurochemistry, but certainly will determine how you see and perceive where you're at. It may now be a portal, it may now open a new pathway and you can begin to rewire and heal with that. And so if indeed that was occurring in you and the medication has a half life of, or the drug of such and such, and it's out of your system and now something else is radiating there, a change in your nervous system that, that your cat picked up on that this felt more inviting to the guy with no emotions.
- [67:05]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. Speaking of cats, I, that, that ketamine trip that the doctor gave me the next day I was going to a horse expo in Washington state. And so it was three o' clock the next afternoon. I was sitting in San Jose airport when that thing happened, when that energy happened inside my body. But while I was at that horse expo, where this horse expo is, that county, everybody takes their dogs everywhere. So normally I go to a horse expo and I don't have my dogs with me, so I miss my canine interactions. And every once in a while there's someone with a dog there I can hang out with and say hi to or whatever. This place, everybody had their dog there. It was really cool. But there was one lady walking around with a cat on a harness, on a leash. Okay, I'm in the booth, sitting behind the desk in the booth in a chair, and that lady was walking past. And this is the day, two days after the ketamine thing, that cat made a beeline for me, jumped up on the table, jumped up in my lap and sucked up against me. And I talked to this lady for 45 minutes and the cat didn't move. And the cat doesn't do this like it's. She's never had the cat go sit in somebody's lap before. We talked for 45 minutes. She actually had to pick the cat up by the scruff of the neck because she needed to leave and the cat did not want to get off of my lap. And it was like, what the hell was that?
- [68:28]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah. And, and so here I think is where we touch on the woo woo. But to, you know, it's a discredit to, to the unknown, to, to call it the, the woo woo because I, I reframed my point of reference and knowledge quit being something that I owned. Knowledge was something that was transmitted to me. And this happened so many times in, in my life. For example, I would get in a trance like state when I would, I would pencil draw in my sketchbook and let me see if I have some. And so see these? But you know, I would watch.
- [69:34]
Warwick Schiller
Oh, they're beautiful. So guys, I'm looking at some sketches of Steve's here. Pencil sketches.
- [69:41]
Dr. Steve Peters
And because I was in a trance like state, because those pencil strokes are just hundreds and thousands of little pencil strokes, I felt like I didn't do the drawing. I felt that the drawing did the drawing through me. And that's the kind of intelligence I'm talking about that I believe people can call it current, a river, a field, collective unconscious, whatever. So my neuro poetry comes to me the same way. I just sit down and it just flows out. And then I realized after I've read it, what I've read. And so I felt guilty making myself the sole author. So the author of my neuro poetry is Dr. Steve Peters and the universe, because I don't really know what else to call it. So there is something that if we're open to it, that if we align with it, takes us to a different. A different level, a different level of intelligence that you can't get from reading a book. You get it from being open and letting it pass through you by more by finding the areas of resistance. I like to see if it's like a river running over. My only job is to find out where are the boulders that I place there that are getting in the way of this river flowing clearly through me. And that's also helped me inform me when I work with horses because I find if the messages that I'm transmitting are not clear, they're going to cause confusion and they're going to cause sympathetic arousal. And I can't blame my horse for that. I have to say, well, where is it in me that wasn't clear in that message that's caused this nervous system disruption? And if I can go back and rethink that and get rid of whatever the resistance was in me that created that choppy message, then I reduce the noise that my horse has to deal with. And I increase the signal. And if I can increase the signal, and I don't mean by spurring harder or the signal can then be a whisper. If I can deal with all the noise, then the signal can be something somebody doesn't even see. And it almost can feel telepathic at some point in time. And that's how people might think I'm telepathically communicating with my horse. Where actually what you've done is just got very, very clear in the message that you're transmitting. And they're always a receiver for it. So, yeah, I. I look when I do some of these drawings, sometimes I look at them go, man, I wish I could draw that good.
- [72:47]
Warwick Schiller
That's awesome. You know, it's funny you said that you're. You're this poetry, you kind of download it. I had a. I don't know how since you've been on the podcast, if you've kept up with anything, but I had a lady on the podcast here. She presented it last year's summit, so it was before that. And she is a Sufi mystic poet. And she's a. She's a mid-30s white lady from Oregon or Washington, I can't remember which, but she downloads mystic Sufi poetry. And it just comes through her. She doesn't think about it, she just feels it coming and she writes it down. And the stuff that she writes is just like hits in the solar plexus sort of thing. But, yeah, she. You. You're kind of doing exactly the same thing. You're connecting to source, whatever that source is.
- [73:40]
Dr. Steve Peters
Right. And I, if I wanted to, I could think my way out of it, but I don't want to. I want to be aligned. I think there are things even in our DNA, and people may say, well, that, that sounds a little crazy, but, you know, they used to talk about Darwin and it takes, you know, eons for things to get passed on. And then they've taken mice, had them smell cherry blossoms, and then giving them an aversive stimuli shock them and. Yeah. So then what happens is every time that mouse smells the cherry blossom, they go into a defensive response. They, you know, they try to protect themselves. Then they can take rat pupped or mice pups that came from that. That family, and have them smell cherry blossoms and they get that same reaction. So something is being passed along. There used to be a guy, Lamarck, and. And they would make fun of him in science. Back when I was an undergraduate, Lamarck said things like, well, giraffes, if they eat all the leaves when the leaves are only up high. They'll have to stretch. And each generation of giraffe will have a large, longer neck. And he was laughed at because no, Darwinian stuff takes forever. Now there are books, like, there's a book called Lamarck's Revenge, where actually we know things, things can get passed along. It's also interesting. Go back and if you look at. At Darwin's writings, where his Origin of the Species, we jumped on that and said, oh, survival of the fittest. Yeah, that's what this all about. Nobody read Descent of Man, his. His other book, in which he says, the highest forms of evolution, our cooperation, collaboration. And this is what causes us to our generations to move on. They're safe, they're cooperative, they're collaborative. And I like to believe that in rewiring my brain in good ways and looking for the good and finding rich experiences and making sure they get wired in that anything I pass, whether it's just in friendship with somebody else, but anything I add to the field out there in the universe is. Is positive. And I feel like if enough people thought about being intentional, about changing their thinking, that we could end up in a much better world as a result.
- [76:37]
Warwick Schiller
Have you ever heard of the studies they've done where they. They've organized like mass meditations around the world, and they've also documented crime rates in cities, whatever. And crime rates always fall during those mass meditations.
- [77:02]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yes. Yeah, it's.
- [77:08]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I think you're onto something, Steve.
- [77:09]
Dr. Steve Peters
So I think that. That if we think the perception that we hold in this little bony skull, which is. It's a hallucination anyway, you know, and. And the memories are nothing more than neural representations. That's why you can't be an expert witness and in a court trial. And they think, oh, this is. This is the way it is. You're telling the truth. You can put the person on the lie detector, but what they've crafted in their brain is something totally, totally different. So I don't think that we're held to this little. These little electric firings that have no output or connection with everybody else's brain out there. And I. I feel this. I mean, I do things at times that I feel are beyond what I could do without some sort of input from the universe.
- [78:22]
Warwick Schiller
Yes, most certainly. Ah, where was it going to go? I had a question for you about that, and I can't remember. You were just. While you were talking right then, I'm like, oh, yes, that's what I want to ask you. And I can't Remember what it was. Oh, go ahead.
- [78:41]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah. I was thinking that I think in the future with medical technology, that we'll eventually have wearable monitors, and our horses will have them, and we'll have them, and we'll be communicating where the horse actually has a voice, not somebody's interpretation of what's going on with that horse. And I think artificial intelligence will probably play a role in monitoring that horse and, and letting us know if you keep on this path, you will create a lot of stress. And we're getting to a point where the stress is going from acute to a chronic stress because we'll be able to monitor those. Those things. And I think the welfare of horses and of ourselves, we don't think about the 50% of the equation. And it's more than that because we're trying to control the horse, but of our nervous system coming into play with another nervous system. You know, I tell people, if you make a marker, let's say a mailbox that's a mile from the barn that your horse is at, when you drive by that mailbox, that's your signal to check in with your nervous system and say, where am I, Matt? Create some self awareness, because what you're carrying in is part of this whole equation. It's not just you getting that horse and doing something with that horse, and it's a communication on a different level.
- [80:15]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. One of our podcast guests, I think she came to the second summit, not the first summit. Her name is Beth Anne Standig, and she's a psychiatrist, does equine assisted therapy, but she has these things she calls the four awareness channels. Number one is what's going on with you. Number two, what's going on with them. Number three is what's going on between the two of you. And number four, what's going on in the environment. And I've talked about this at clinics quite a bit that most people are very aware of. Number two, what's going on with them bloody horse, and number four, what's going in the environment. That person over there sitting off the fireworks is an ass, and he's causing my horse to have a problem without ever thinking about, number one, what's going on with me, and number three, what's going on between the two of us. And yeah, when you realize, I don't know, when you. When you get to the point to where you really understand that and good at that, you can't unsee it. It's. It's not, you know, you can't go my nervous system state does not have any influence on them whatsoever. You know, you start to realize how much of an influence it has on it. Um, there's something I want. I'm going to back way up here to something you were talking about before. We're talking about the infants. Have you ever heard of a guy named Dr. Bruce Perry?
- [81:39]
Dr. Steve Peters
No.
- [81:40]
Warwick Schiller
He was the. When they. When they had that Branch Davidian compound thing in Waco, and they. There was a bunch of kids, they got out of there in the beginning of it. He was the psychiatrist that. That was bought into to help them. But he. He's written a book called what. What happened to you? I think it's called. But in there, he was talking about. He was talking about a child. And it's. This is almost like. About attachment and nervous system regulation. But if a child has a perfect first four months or four or five months of their life, they can then have all sorts of traumatic things happen to them and all. And whatever, and they still turn out pretty good. But you can have a kid not have those needs met in that first three, four, five months of their life and then have the perfect childhood and they are screwed up.
- [82:36]
Dr. Steve Peters
That makes sense. That goes right along with those glucocorticoid receptors. When, early on, if those are in place, you'll be more resilient to stress through the lifespan. That also makes you think about, I better lay a pretty good foundation and make sure that all my interactions with a young horse are. Are positive. Like Martin says, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. So laying that groundwork is. Is vital. That's the foundation on which you can. You can be resilient to the stress around you.
- [83:19]
Warwick Schiller
And another story that was in that book that I. I kind of thought of you when I read this. Not because it reminded me of you, it just reminded me of some of the things I learned from you. They had a. Dr. Perry was called into a hospital. There was a child, like a teenager boy, and he was in a coma, and he had been pushed down a set of stairs by his foster father. Okay. He was in a very abusive foster home, and he was in a coma, and his blood pressure and his pulse were kind of normal. But then they contacted the foster father, and for some reason, Bruce Perry was doing this experiment. He got an article of clothing from the foster father. So this is the. The father who. The foster father who was subjecting him to, you know, stressful situations once his nervous system had access to all the things. And so they put this cloth article of clothing under this kid's nose while he's in a coma, and his heart rate jumped up and his blood pressure shot through the roof. So he went into fight or flight while he's in a coma from this smell. But because he'd had. The reason he was in foster care is because his early birth parents, his biological parents, they didn't treat him very good either. And he had some very early adverse experiences, you might say, when he was an infant, before he had access to fight or flight. And the reason this interested me is because I've always had a. A degree of shutdown. And I realize it's come from early, very early hospitalization with pneumonia. So I was three or four months old and spent a week in hospital with pneumonia. And so, you know, you're this scared young child who has no, you know, your caregiver's taken away from you. Well, you don't have access to photo flight. You only have access to freeze. So I kind of developed a freeze response early on. But anyway, what Dr. Bruce Perry does is gets an article of clothing from the. From the biological father or mother, whoever. So this kid's in a coma. He's. They've taken the other article of clothing away, so his blood pressure and his heart rates come back down. Then they stick this article of clothing from when he was a tiny infant under his nose, and his heart rate drops and his blood pressure drops while he's in a coma. So he goes into freeze mode, because that's all he had access to in those adverse conditions. But later on, when he was older and he had access to fight or flight, he would go into fight or flight mode rather than freeze mode. And it was just from the smell. So he's in a coma, so he doesn't know they're running this experiment on him. I just thought it was fascinating that, that you would revert to either one or the other based on what you had access to at the time.
- [86:15]
Dr. Steve Peters
That reminds me of long, long time ago. I think it was in my. My residency, and I was. I was observing a neurosurgeon doing surgery on a woman. And he, I think a nurse said something a little disparaging about the patient. And he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We're going to talk good stuff here, and we're not going to talk about this patient. And afterwards, you know, in the lounge when we were discussing the surgery, he had told me that he let some residents close up in the surgery, and they had made fun of the patient and they had said disparaging things. About the patient. And he said I should have stepped in. But I just said, ah, these guys are just, you know, they're blowing off steam, they're having fun. And the woman who was operated on wanted nothing to do with the residents. She had actually gotten along with the residents and met them before the surgery and she couldn't explain why, but she had a very adverse reaction and I don't even want him in the room. And the surgeon believed, and that's an open minded kind of thing way back then, that I don't know how. They're definitely out. You know, I got a chunk of their skull removed and I'm working on their brain. And the anesthesiologist absolutely has this patient under. But something in their nervous system is still registering what's going on around them.
- [88:02]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, it's really interesting. The, the. I was telling you a doctor gave me this, this ketamine journey and I, I heard about him in a Tim Ferriss book. No, Dave Asprey. Sorry, Dave Asprey, the bulletproof coffee guy in his book. But anyway, the day we went into the to see this doctor, the first thing he did was hook me up to an IV of nad. Do you know what NAD is? It's a cofactor. It's got something to do with your gap, you gut hot brain superhighway. But we were in his office and there's a knock on the door and this beautiful woman comes in and he talks to her for a minute and then we, he introduces us to her and then she leaves and he tells us all about it. She is a neurosurgeon from somewhere in Texas, maybe Austin, something like that. She looks straight out of Gray's Anatomy central casting. Like she's this tall, beautiful brunette, very attractive woman and she's a neurosurgeon. I only thought that only happened at TV shows, but she does. I forget what it's called, like holistic neurosurgery or something like that to where her team meditates on the patient, about the patient before the surgery. And they make sure that during the surgery that they are speaking as though the person under is sitting there in the room with them having a conversation with them. So there's these affirmations. It was, but it was. I forget. And then she has a podcast. I've heard her podcast since then. I can't remember what the lady's name was, but it was fascinating about that same subject you're talking about there, about this still consciousness while they're out. And it's almost like if you, I don't know how much you've got into near death experiences, but people that die on an operating table and they're dead for five minutes and they, they come back and those people can, can recount exactly who said what during that time that they're supposedly dead.
- [90:16]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, but whatever they experienced, that's science. Just because we haven't explained it yet.
- [90:26]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, tell me, tell me about that. Because you've, you know, I know the first time we talked you'd, or when we had phone calls before. The first time you're on the podcast, you're talking about meditating and things like that have, how much stuff have you encountered that you cannot scientifically explain, but you also can't discount the fact it happened.
- [90:55]
Dr. Steve Peters
Being a scientist, a good scientist, lets you know, it's humbling because it lets you know how much you don't know. But the world goes on and phenomena still occur. Well, if we don't know this much and there's all this phenomenon going on, it doesn't mean, well, we're going to say it doesn't exist until we come up with a theory to explain it. We have to say something's going on here. Let's get curious about it. And so am I curious about lots of stuff that I've never been curious about? Well, when I had a day job and I had to see patients, then I, I didn't have as much time spending time in airports and spending time meditating. Now I have a lot of time to question all kinds of things. And like I said before, scientists, good scientists, aren't so concerned with being right. It's getting closer to the truth. And so you have to be open to what might be, what might be the truth. And so there's a lot of things that, that happen that I can't explain. But that doesn't mean that I'm not fascinated by it and I don't want to ask questions about it. Oh man. When we get really rigid, I'll give you an example. If I were to teach a class and I was to say the heart pumps blood and that's what I'm teaching because that's what I know and that's where we are right now. But let's say they came up with some experiments and they were replicated all over. People could replicate this. And now we had large numbers that showed the heart doesn't actually pump blood. Well, if I'm held to a rigid standard and people say, well, you said, but my identity is not in that, what happens for me is I get super excited and I can't wait for class the next day because I go, guess what, guys? That doesn't even exist. This is the way it is. And I think that if you think that way, then everything is, Is under science's purview. Whether you call it woo woo, whether it came from a shaman, whether it, you know, I think we get in trouble sometimes. Do you know about the. What do they call that? The dunning something effect.
- [93:49]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, Dunning Kruger fic.
- [93:51]
Dr. Steve Peters
Yeah, yeah. Where if you know a little bit about something or you think you know a lot, but you know just enough to talk about it, you. You climb. And these aren't my terms. You climbed the peak of stupidity. So you're talking more than you ever have in your life because you think you have a handle on this and you make the most noise. And then if you continue to study and you continue to really in earnest want to learn about what you're talking about, then you hit the valley of despair because you realize, I don't know. And then you slowly climb out of that and you sort of reach a. More of a plateau, but you're continuing to climb up. And as you climb, you're humbled and you say, well, that could be true. Well, that is interesting. How should I look at. At that? And that's a more solid grounding than where you were in the beginning. And unfortunately, oftentimes what we run into in social media are people who are on the very top of that peak. And, and sometimes I get pulled into criticisms that are just crazy. For example, my friend Sherry King. Dr. Sherry King, she's. Yeah, she's always talking about the baloney sandwich, whereby, you know, you take kernels of scientific evidence and then you wrap it in, in baloney. That's how you hide the baloney. So for example, if someone said, well, Dr. Peters, I. I heard you talk about action potentials being fired in the horse's brain. Yeah. And I heard you talk about synapses in my brain. Well, guess what, just what you were talking about. They now make a nanometer that I can sit in my bedroom and I even read about works off the action potentials in my horses and works off my synapses so I can set up with a remote and just train my horses without saying anything at all. So it sounds so, so real. But the nanometer would be baloney. Right. And yet people would say, Dr. Peters, I heard you talk about action potentials. It must have been the same sort of thing. It's a whole cluster. It's so much misinformation that it used to be you'd have to search out good information. Now you have to weed through all the bad to find the. To find the good. And holy mackerel, we are. So you don't know how damaging it is to be critical of legitimate information because there are few signposts that people can hang on to or. Or believe in. And if we say, I'm right, I am the source, and everybody else is, is wrong because I've read so many books, what we end up doing is. Is then nothing's legit. And if everybody's an expert, then nobody's an expert. And pretty soon we end up with just. We're just lost. So I think you have to be curious. Be curious and build good sources around you and create our own networks, not of a think tank where you're not thinking outside the box, but find people that have a different opinion. If you have a conf. Here's what we call this metacognition, where you just think above your thinking. So everything that registers with you, if you said, why do I feel that way about that? Why do I want to believe that so badly? Or why do I say that sucks when I don't really have information to show that that sucks? Right. So why is. What is it in my background, in my makeup, in my wiring right now that is not allowing me to meta think, and it's not allowing me to get up here above it all and think about my own thinking, what's causing me not to accept this information? Or if you hear some information that sounds really good but it's not accurate, why do I want to believe that so badly? So we all have biases. We only get in trouble when we. We don't acknowledge them.
- [98:48]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I think you're talking about, Steve, you're talking there about. You know, the term that I used to think was really cringey, used to really weird me out, is healing. But that healing is about, you know, unraveling some of the stories you've told yourself about yourself or about the world or whatever. And. And it's kind of clearing away some of the lenses you view the world in and view the world through. And when you, when you clear those lenses away, you can actually look at things differently. And once you do that, you. You can't unsee that. But if you still have those lenses with which you view the world through, because it may be childhood stuff or whatever, you don't even know it's there. But your, your whole, your whole view of the world is tainted by that stuff.
- [99:49]
Dr. Steve Peters
Right.
- [99:50]
Warwick Schiller
So what I was going to ask you about, because you kind of hinted down a minute ago, is you, you kind of challenging. You're kind of challenging the status quo. And you also mentioned social media. Have you had, have you had much like negative feedback on social media? And if so, how. How's that land with you?
- [100:16]
Dr. Steve Peters
You know, actually, I haven't, but I can also say I was going to actually create a. A podcast. And this podcast was going to be called the Skeptical Horseman. And basically what I was going to do is help with critical thinking. You know what, where's the evidence to support this? And where is the. And then I started to think of all the friends I have that live in worlds that don't have the scientific backing, and did I, was I ready to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by putting myself out there? And I thought, you know what? I, I rather just be a positive force than pointing out other things. And if I'm going to be a guide, be a guide in how to form your own impressions and see things, how to read science, then I want to be in focusing on the negative. So I haven't put on the boxing gloves and gone toe to toe. Basically, I say, well, thank you for your, Your opinion. And that's. And I borrowed something from you. That's where you're at in your journey. And that's really helpful to me because how can you expect someone to. Not saying one is higher than the other, but how can you expect to communicate when the, the world that you perceive and where you're at is not in the same place I am? And there may be enough of a discrepancy there that we can't quite find the language yet.
- [102:07]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah. And I find, you know, my growth, if that's what you want to call it, happened rather quickly. I kind of viewed the world the same way until I was 50. And then in the last 10 years, eight or 10 years, I've viewed the world quite a bit differently. But I remember before I viewed the world differently, I was right. Like, looking at, looking forward at me now, I would have been like, that guy's an idiot. And so I totally understand if somebody thinks what I'm doing is whatever their judgment is. I kind of feel like that's, that's fair enough. I'm, I'm not, I'm not bothered by it. You know, it's kind of like the political divide in America. One side's trying to Tell the other side they're idiots and the other side's trying to tell those guys are idiots. Whereas I don't think anybody actually takes their lived experience and go, I'm going to pretend none of that happened. I'm just going to have this opinion. I have no basis for. Like every person's opinion is based on everything they've ever, they've ever lived, including their traumas, which, you know, makes them a bit prickly in places. And, and I don't like, say, in the political climate. I don't see anybody on one side of the political divide changing anybody's mind on the other side of the political, I don't, I don't, I don't think telling others they're doing it wrong is any way to influence people. I feel like if you can share where you're at and how it's working for you, if they want to pick it up, they can pick it up. There's a guy on social media, he's a Native American kid from South Dakota somewhere. He raises bucking horses. His name's Dougie hall. And he says, he starts out all these little posts by, hey, it's your favorite Indian dancing, Dougie Hall. And he's always got a cup of coffee and he says, if, if you like what I say, use it. If you don't, it don't matter. And then he goes on and talks about what he's talking about. But if you like what I say, use it. If you don't, not my problem.
- [104:18]
Dr. Steve Peters
But the world you live in is, is for the most part the world you, you create. I mean, there are horrendous situations that are, are different, but there still are people that go to concentration camps like Viktor Frankl. There are people that, that somehow manage to create a different world picture that allows them to be resilient. And I know for myself, my world picture is more rich, more deeply experienced, less in my head and more full than it's been in the last five years. And that's because of my having intention to how I wired my brain.
- [105:06]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, you know, what you're talking about before with those intentions. It's almost like the anchoring stuff they do in nlp, you know, and they, they will, they'll do, you know, like they might touch their thumb to their forefinger or something or other and have an intention at the same time and pretty soon you can just kind of do, do that. And it's, it's an anchor for your, your, your body. But yeah, you were talking about, you know, that, that voice in your head. And I've become aware of certain. What would you call them? Self. Certain types of self talk that I have that I didn't even know was there and, and making sure they do affirmations daily to rewire. That seems like it's, it's part of the. It's. It's. It's one part of the. The puzzle. It seems to be helping things. You know, talking about. We're talking before about negative feedback in the public space sort of thing. It doesn't bother me as much anymore, but I don't think people are saying different things. I think it's just landing. I've got less prickly spots. I'm. I'm less. For me, I'd say it's. It's more. I don't need the external validation. You know, I. I feel like I've rewired some things in me to where I actually like me now. I don't need other people to like me for me to like me sort of thing. You know what I mean? And so it just. That stuff lands differently.
- [106:45]
Dr. Steve Peters
I know what you mean.
- [106:47]
Warwick Schiller
I can tell. I can see the look on your face. Tell us about some of your practices you had. Do you have a meditation practice?
- [106:55]
Dr. Steve Peters
I do, I do. But you know, I have. I try to create, like creating a poem. I try to create a mantra each morning and then I try to end the evening. I had one even, you know, today all you need to do is be a conduit of the information. You know, when you hook up with Warwick, just use him as, as a. A magnet to pull the transmission out of you. And pe. It will resonate with people if you try to add to it, if you try to intellectualize it, if you. If your ego's caught in it at all. So the mantra wasn't that drawn out, but it was just a few lines to just remind me to stay grounded. So I do those things quite often. I. Every day. I hike a few miles every day. If I'm doing a horse brain science clinic, I. The first thing I scope out before where I'm going to hook my projector up at is where can I walk to. So when the morning starts and the sun comes up, you know, is there a little lake? Is there a pond? Is there a park bench? Where can I go? And I connect myself to. I like to call it the universe. In fact, I talk to the universe. I say, you know, let's. I've even got into this discussion and I'm a neuroscientist I'm not going mad. I talk to.
- [108:45]
Warwick Schiller
I love that you had to explain that.
- [108:50]
Dr. Steve Peters
I talk to the universe and I say, how are we going to grow today in our co evolution? So I see that I can add to the universe and the universe can add to me. And so my connection daily with the universe is how can we co evolve today? What can I give you and what can I give the world and what can you give me to help me be better and to grow? And I think about these things and for me, it's a walking meditation. I'm not necessarily sitting under a tree, although sometimes I'll find a boulder and, and just get that far away look in my eye and go somewhere. But oftentimes it's. It's a walking meditation. And as these things go by my, my senses, you know, the center pine, that, that blue jay in the tree that, you know, my. Watching my dog run up the path ahead of me, it's just all those little things that register a little differently. And I try to let them register, just flow off me as part of a flow. But at the same time now I try to wire those in. So when I come down off the ridge, I'm not the same guy who went up and either is anyone else. If they listen to this podcast, they go to sleep at night. On a neuroscience standpoint, their hippocampus is going to replay this. They're going to develop a bunch of acetylcholine. It's going to go in and like a highlighter say, let's hook this to this to this. Aha, that makes sense. They'll wake up in the morning, they'll actually end up with more wiring in their brain, and some of these neural networks will actually be closer together and maybe even hooked together so that you wake up in the morning and go, I see what those guys are talking about. That's exactly what I was thinking. So knowing that you're constantly evolving and setting it up, I think meditation is good because what, not only do you become self aware, but I tell myself, how do I make the best landing pad for this knowledge to land on? So if the universe is speaking to me, what do I have to clear away in terms of clutter to create the optimal landing pad? So I'm going to. The knowledge is going to want to land in my pad.
- [111:25]
Warwick Schiller
So you had, when you messaged me the other day, you had kind of said, you know, going forward, I'm not going to be talking about horses that much. What's, what's the future of Dr. Steven Peters.
- [111:39]
Dr. Steve Peters
Look like, I think a lot of what we've talked about and we just kind of touched on the tip of the iceberg. I think I have something to offer in terms of. I'm still very science based, but I think I have something to offer in the neuroscientist guide to connection with the universe. That may not be the title, but that's going to be the direction. I always said my mission was to save as much brain tissue as possible. And I think my mission is, is gravitating towards different ways of thinking and just how powerful that is.
- [112:22]
Warwick Schiller
You're gonna still continue to do the. The brain dissections, the horse.
- [112:26]
Dr. Steve Peters
I'll still do the horse brain science things. I think everything that I really wanted to say up to this point in time has gone into the science and practice of evidence based horsemanship. So that has really been everything that I can say up till now about any kind of work that I've done and knowledge I have of horses from neuroanatomy, neuroendocrinology, learning, teaching, Even the gut microbiome stuff, the gut brain axis, what the future may look like. I've even conjectured on that in the book. So I think every. I've said everything I need to say there, But I feel some other avenues pulling me and calling me. I think neuropoetry will be. Can I finish up with just reading you guys a neuropoem?
- [113:17]
Warwick Schiller
I was just about to say, hey, you got a poem you'd like to share with us?
- [113:22]
Dr. Steve Peters
Okay. So I've talked about Marty Seligman's experiments with learned helplessness. And I've talked about, you know, what it means when a horse checks out or dissociates. And I'm not sure that everybody necessarily gets that. So I wrote a poem a horse remembers. She stood at the far end of the paddock, still frozen somewhere else, the same spot she returned to every day. To most, it looked like a simple habit, but to me it was a footprint etched into the nervous system. You see, a horse doesn't remember the way we do. There are no words, no timeline, no story. There's only sensation, emotion, a pattern. And when a moment is flooded with cortisol, fear and uncertainty, the memory is etched deep by the amygdala. Especially after being taught a lesson more than once. She wasn't just standing there. She was checked out, numbed out. Not living in the now, but trapped in the past. But there's hope with patience, softness, and the right approach through safety, consistency, and time. That memory can be reshaped, not erased, probably never completely forgotten, but softened, reframed, and rewired. That is the quiet power of working with the brain and the nervous system. Not command, but connection. Not force, but understanding. And sometimes it begins by simply standing still.
- [115:24]
Warwick Schiller
Thank you for sharing that. I did a post on social media here recently called Doing nothing is an action about that sort of thing, like being able to. You know, I had a. I had a lady at a clinic in Texas a few years ago who. She's a psych nurse in a juvenile psych ward. And she was telling me they get some kids in there that are just almost like catatonic sort of thing. They've had terrible things happen to them. And I said, well, where do you start? Like, what's the starting point? Like, if they won't communicate with you and any attempt to communicate and makes them go deeper inside, where do you start? And she said, well, we keep them. We have them in rooms that have, like, two twin beds, one on either side, but we don't put two kids in the same room. But she said that a lot of times they go in and they'll curl up, like, in the fetal position on their bed. And she said, what we do to start this communication is go up, go in and curl up in the fetal position on the opposite bed. And every time they change their posture, we'll change our posture to match them, like mirror neuron sort of stuff. And she said, there's two things going on. One is, you're telling them, I don't want anything from you. And two is, I'm very aware of you, but I still don't want anything from you. So just kind of being with them without asking for anything but communicating your awareness of them. And it kind of reminded me of that a little bit.
- [116:45]
Dr. Steve Peters
Well, what reminded me of that is, is I would go out and try to do that sort of thing with my horses. And then I saw where you were matching steps with your horses. And we're not asking anything of them. Right. We're just offering that up as. As a. A way of seeing them and a way of being with them, but not asking anything of them. And we goes back to what we were talking about does in their nervous system. The synchronies, the harmonies, the connections. So here it is just simply movement in the same beat in the same rhythm that creates the connection. And that is even more powerful than if I made my horse go from point A to point B.
- [117:41]
Warwick Schiller
Yeah, I don't know who it was. But I remember someone talking about, I was reading something or watching a video, but they were talking about, so, you know, there's five horses out there in the pasture, and one decides to go for a drink. He doesn't say, hey, let's go for a drink, but he makes that decision to go for a drink. And pretty soon there's a line of five horses going for a drink. And four of them didn't decide to go for a drink till the other one decided to go for a drink. And they synchronize. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's cool stuff, Steve. It's been great having you share what you're up to these days. Before we go, can you tell us when your book comes out, where will people be able to get it?
- [118:21]
Dr. Steve Peters
Well, you can go to my website, which is horsebrain science.info you can also go to Wasteland Press. You can also get it from Amazon and just about anywhere books are sold.
- [118:36]
Warwick Schiller
Excellent. I can't wait for that thing to come out. It's going to be so good and such a needed thing in the, in the horse community.
- [118:45]
Dr. Steve Peters
I'd also like to leave people knowing that some people are afraid to explore and go on the journey because they think of themselves as. I am satisfied with myself. I'm in this little package. I can deal with my world, but whether or not you know it, you are blind to self change. So you are not going to be the same person five years from now. You won't be the same person 10 years from now. Think of when you're 90, you will not be that same person. And will that same self yourself be talking to each other? So what I would encourage you to do is say, you know what, I'm changing anyway. Why don't I determine which paths I go down? Why don't I determine what I want to see, what I want to look at, what I want to experience and put those into your. Into your life because your brain is wiring itself anyway. Might as well you got this one ride that we know of. Might as well make it the best ride you can make.
- [119:55]
Warwick Schiller
Great advice. Thank you, Steve. So thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you're up to these days. I think it's. I think it's not only amazing, it's admirable. And when you reached out and messaged me the other day, I thought, whoa, this is groundbreaking stuff. And when you said that, I thought, I wonder if he wants to share it on the podcast. So I'm glad I asked. And I'M glad you said yes.
- [120:18]
Dr. Steve Peters
You know, I'm so glad that, that we've known each other all this time. I, I do feel like we're kind of allies in this trip through the, and in the universe and so it's always a pleasure to come on and, and get the sparks going.
- [120:34]
Warwick Schiller
Well, it's been a pleasure having you. Thanks so much for joining us and especially for what you're doing out there in the world. You really are making the world a better place.
- [120:43]
Dr. Steve Peters
So are you, Warwick. And thank you again. It's a pleasure.
- [120:46]
Warwick Schiller
Okay. And you guys at home, thanks for joining us and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Journey on podcast.
- [120:53]
Dr. Steve Peters
Thanks for being a part of the Journey on Podcast with Warwick Schiller. Warwick has over 850 full length training videos on his online video library@videos.warickschiller.com Be sure to follow Warrick on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram to see his latest training advice and insights.