← The mindbodygreen Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the MyBodyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wakab, founder and co CEO of MindBodyGreen and your host. This episode is sponsored by Prolon. Fasting may support everything from metabolism to longevity, but most folks can't stick to it. Prolon's five Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a stress free nutrition program that keeps your body in a fasting state and is clinically shown to trigger autophagy. Designed by longevity experts using Nobel winning research, the program works at the cellular level to support weight management, metabolic health and LE muscle. For a limited time, Prolon is offering MindBody Green listeners 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift. When you subscribe to their five day program, just visit prolonlife.com mindbodygreen that's P R O L O N l I f e.com mindbodygreen to claim your 15% discount and your bonus gift. Prolonlife.com mindbodygreen this podcast is sponsored by Advocare. Some days demand more from you. Whether it's a workout, back to back meetings or just staying present with your family. Spark Energy and Focus Provide stable, functional energy. Mix it up before a workout or even mid afternoon. When you feel that dip coming on, it's so easy. Shake, sip and within minutes you feel more dialed in. Not wired or jittery, just clear, focused and ready to power through. The drink has a well rounded and balanced formula that goes way beyond just a quick energy boost. You get 120mg of caffeine paired with amino acids and taurine so the energy feels steady, not spiky or jittery. It also includes Choline for mental focus and clarity plus B vitamins and L carnitine to support energy metabolism and vitamins C, A and E help support your immune health and everyday wellness. There's also zero sugar which makes a real difference on how you feel later on. Right now Spark Energy plus Focus is offering 30% off and free shipping. Go to drinkspark.com and use code mindbodygreen at checkout. That's code mindbodygreen@drinkspark.com Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney.
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Let's go get ready for a new case. We're gonna crack this case and prove we're victorious partners of all time. New friends. You are Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream Team.
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C
New Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
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You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. You're clearly working at Zootopia 2 now available on Disney. Rated PG.
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What if the most powerful drug in the world is the one your brain manufactures? When you truly believe in something. Joshua Brown is a neuroscientist at Indiana University and the author of the new book Proving a Miracle. He's also someone whose life changed at age 30 when he had a brain tumor diagnosis two and a half weeks after his daughter was born. He spent the years that followed traveling the world, investigating documented healings that science
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and I can't yet explain.
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In today's show, Brown walks me through the case of a woman who was blind for 12 years before regaining her sight. A monumental 2018 gratitude study, and the brain as a prediction machine framework that connects AI to chronic stress. This conversation broadened my perspective about what we consider medicine, and I think it'll challenge some of your assumptions, too.
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B
Let's dive in. So you're a neuroscientist who faced a life threatening brain tumor. How did that experience reshape the way you think about belief and healing?
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C
Yeah, great question. Well, and first of all, thanks for having me on the show. The whole experience was just so sudden. It was a shock. I was at the time 30 years old. I was a postdoctoral fellow doing functional brain imaging on other people, trying to understand the basic mechanisms of how the brain works. And I had grown up in a church and sort of believed the Bible, went to church, but I had never seen a miracle. I'd never heard people talk about miracles as anything other than that. Well, that happened, you know, according to the Bible, a long time ago. And so I really had no expectation of, you know, ever seen any, anything like a miracle. And. But here I was in this ironically desperate situation of, on the one hand, doing neuroscience research and doing images of other people's brains, and then suddenly I'm the one having images taken of my brain. And so at that point, I was my. My daughter was two and a half weeks old when I got the diagnosis. I mean, just as I started, just as I had my first seizure, my wife was just about to go into labor. My daughter was born four days later. And so my daughter was two and a half weeks old when I got the diagnosis. And it's hard to put into words. You're a new father. I was a new father. I was very much looking forward to having family and I had a promising career. And all of a sudden it just hit me. I mean, you know, I, I'm not a very good patient because I know enough about the brain and about neuroscience to know that as soon as I got the diagnosis, I realized it was bad. And. And in. In that moment, my life kind of crumbled. And I thought, you know, is this how it ends? You know, I'll be dead within a few years. And I most certainly didn't want to die. I mean, I had a lot to live for. And so I became desperate, and that desperation pushed me to look for anything that could give me some kind of hope. And it didn't take long for me to brush up on the literature and realize that while I appreciated the medical help, there wasn't. There was only so much medicine to do. And so my neurologist and the neurosurgeon at the time said, well, let's just watch and, you know, we'll take MRIs every three months and, you know, see where it goes. Because at the time, there wasn't really any clear benefit of having a more aggressive treatment, because it wouldn't be expected to prolong my life significantly. So we just kind of watched. And at that point, I had a friend at church who basically said, hey, you know, you might want to go visit this little prayer group across town, because they, you know, they pray with people for healing, and they, you know, seem to be able to help people. And so I thought, you know, it sounds a little about outside my comfort zone, but I'll try it. You know, I'm willing to. I'm willing to pull on this. So, you know, and keep in mind, the Christian groups I grew up in were such that you would. You would pray for healing, but you would pray as a sort of, you know, resignation, like, well, God, you know, we hope youe heal a person, but if not, you know, your will be done. And there wasn't a lot of expectation that anything would happen. And this prayer group I visited was different in the sense that they prayed as if they expected things to happen, that he expected results. And they talked about various people that they knew who had experienced healing through prayer. And so at that point, I got more curious, and I started traveling. So my wife and I ended up traveling all over the country. I traveled all over the world, really, over the next year and beyond. And I started going to places where there were these healing prayer meetings that. Where people would go and would claim to experience healing. I mean, there were claims that people were experiencing miraculous healings today. And I thought, well, I'll go check it out. And the more I did, the more I came across people who personally would. Would share with me their experiences of what seemed like miraculous healings through in these prayer meetings, you know, and some of them were just, I mean, you know, you have to remember, I'm. I'm still a scientist. I mean, neuroscientists. So. But I'm listening to these stories and trying to figure out what to make of them. So there were, There were people who would. I mean, I lost count of how many people would say, well, you know, I had all this chronic pain for years and years, and I got prayed for, now it's gone. Or, you know, I. I had an accident. I had a metal plate put in my arm, and I could not. I physically could not move my arm in a certain way. And I got prayed for, and now I can, and it doesn't even hurt. So. And I would interview these people. You know, I was trying to understand what's going on, like, and what's happening and how does this work. And. And of course, I'm also hoping to find a miracle for myself. And so this whole process of just traveling, pursuing, trying to find, trying to understand, just drew me deeper into this rabbit hole of, of looking at miraculous healings and claims of miraculous healings. And so that ended up changing my outlook on, on my life, on what kind of hope that I have. It changed it dramatically. And, and to the point where miracles, or at least remarkable healings that seem very difficult to explain, seem to me increasingly common. And it just, it changed my whole view of that.
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B
So a lot to unpack there and come back to the big idea. You're a neuroscientist, and, you know, reading the book, you know, you're trying to reconcile this. You know, on one hand, okay, I grew up Christian. I go to church, we pray. Okay, I got nothing to lose. Things look pretty dire. I'm going to go on this journey. But at the same time, the wheels are turning in your head. And you're trying to reconcile this because you are a neuroscientist. You're looking at brain images. And so walk us through, what are the. Some of the things you learned in this journey. You know, you argue, for example, that belief itself has biological effects, like what's happening in the brain when we believe, when we pray, what's going on?
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C
So, great question. And in context, I've talked with a number of Christians who very much believe that miracles happen and that God does miracles. And I'll say, okay, so here's a situation. Someone experiences healing, but could there have been something like a placebo effect, a mind body effect going on? And sometimes I'll get pushback on that, like, as if to suggest that as somehow discounting the possibility of divine intervention that caused them, as if that were somehow detracting from the meaningfulness of it. And I've talked with others, on the other hand, who will say, wow, all this talk of miracles is nonsense and we should just not even pursue that line of inquiry along those lines. And I think in my mind, those are two extremes. And as I looked into claims of healing, I helped found a nonprofit research institute, the Global Medical Research Institute, which has as its mission careful, rigorous investigation of claims of healing through prayer. And in the course of that, I found that first of all, placebo effects are real and mind body effects are real. And there's a fairly large scientific literature on these things. And to the point that, you know, for example, if I give you, if I rub a cream on your hand that's just, you know, ordinary lotion, and I say this cream is a powerful cream and it's going to reduce the pain you feel, and then I proceed to administer mild electrical shocks to your hand, you would experience some pain. And by the way, we do this kind of thing in my lab at the university. We'll, we'll put people in a functional MRI scanner and we'll administer electrical shocks to their hands and look at how that changes brain activity. So we've done various studies of that and so you can see the pain response in the brain. But if I apply a lotion to your hand and tell you that this will relieve your pain, vast majority of people will experience less pain. And you can even see changes in the brain activity, in how the brain responds and processes that pain. Now even what's, I think, even more interesting is that this placebo effect of the relief of pain is biochemically real to the degree that you can block the placebo effect by administering other drugs. So, for example, when someone has an opioid overdose that's life threatening, the thing you can do to save their lives is to administer a drug called naloxone, which blocks the opioid receptor molecules in the brain. It prevents the opioid from having its effect and in that way brings someone back from what would otherwise kill them from an opioid overdose, whether it's fentanyl or heroin or, you know, some other synthetic opioid. And it turns out that if you take people who are experiencing this placebo effect, in other words, you rub cream on them, that's just ordinary hand lotion, and you say this is a powerful pain relieving cream, and you then proceed to deliver a mild electrical shock, they'll experience less pain. But if you give them naloxone, the same drug that would help someone not die of a drug overdose, that will block the placebo effect. And what that means is that in that case, the placebo effect is acting by a known biochemical pathway in the brain. In other words, your body is releasing its own opioids, what are called endogenous opioids, and those open. So when you experience this placebo effect of pain relief in that situation, your body's releasing these endogenous opioids that function similarly to fentanyl or to morphine. They're not as strong, but still enough to reduce the pain. And so if you block them with this opioid overdose antidote, you block the placebo effect. And so the brain has this ability. And it's not just sort of a mysterious all in your head ability, it's a literally in your head biochemical ability to modulate the level of pain you experience. And it's not even just one kind of chemical. There are multiple different kinds of chemicals. So there are other pain relieving placebo effects that don't depend on opioids. They depend on what are called endocannabinoids, which are chemically similar to cannabis. So there's good research that has explored these and can in a sense explain biochemically why when someone says to you, a person in a position of authority says, okay, you're going to feel better when we do this thing, you actually do feel better, you experience less pain. And so I think those effects are real, they're well studied. And even if you know that something is a placebo, even if someone tells you this is just a sugar pill, this is only hand lotion, there's no active ingredient whatsoever. But we think it will make you feel better. It still will work in some cases. So I think to understand that in the context of looking for healing, prayer means that when someone receives, you know, participates in a spiritual activity, healing prayer, and they expect that that will help them feel better, it may help them feel better because God directly intervenes and heals them. It could also help them feel better because there is a biochemical response to that kind of situation. And, and I think in some ways the person feels better, right? That's a good thing. And so for me, then the question became, well, how far can you push this? You know, like is, are there even more powerful placebo effects or mind body effects? So I basically tried to understand how these mind body effects work and at the same time, look for experiences that suggest even more powerful kinds of effects and then ask, you know, can we explain those or do those seem to go beyond what we can presently explain?
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There seems to be a theme in hearing you speak. If we rewind to the prayer group, there's almost like the one type of prayer where we're kind of hoping, maybe no expectations, and then the other prayer group where they're praying, but they, there, there are clear expectations and if we go to the placebo, there are expectations like this is going to work. And you, I noticed you use the word expect and expectations. It seems to me that belief, when attached to a clear expectation, is very powerful. And the science would suggest so talking about the pathways, when there's a clear expectation this is going to happen. There's a signal in the brain that has a biological effect.
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C
Yeah. And not just one signal in the brain. There are different kinds of signals. There are multiple different kinds of placebo effects.
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B
Let's go there because I think of the implications, I think the bigger question, why I think your book is so fascinating, is a lot of people face illness, disease and so forth. And you're a man of science, you're a neuroscientist, and obviously there are a lot of pharmaceutical interventions, surgeries, what have you. But belief can be very powerful, if not the only protocol, but one of the protocols, if you're going through a surgery or taking a medication or. Seems like this should be part of the picture.
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C
Yeah. And I think the concept of a placebo is kind of, it carries this sort of taint of deception. It's generally looked upon as a nuisance among medical researchers rather than like a feature. It's the kind of thing that you want to control for and eliminate as much as possible so that you can. And there are reasons for that, because if you're testing a drug, you want to know what's the effect of the drug. And so the standard kind of research study that you would do is what's called a randomized controlled trial, and especially double blinded trials where you basically eliminate or you make the placebo effect equal across the group that gets the drug and the group that doesn't, because neither group knows what they're getting. And in that way you control for the placebo effect. So for the medical research community, the placebo effect is something you want to get rid of. But for the person who's looking for relief, you know, maybe it's not such a bad thing after all.
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What do you find within your research and your nonprofit. What are some of the commonalities where, you know, you reference these miracles.
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What did you find, what these people have in common?
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C
So we looked at a number of cases. So for gmri, we basically have two lines of research. One is looking at individual cases of claims of apparently miraculous healing, and the other is looking at randomized controlled trials, which we just conducted, one at the University of Maryland Medical center, and the cases of individual healings. For in many of the cases, we find that the. Initially, it looks very difficult to explain, but as we dig into the medical records, you know, we, with the, with the patient's permission, we get copies of their medical records and, and we run them by medical specialists. And in a lot of cases, we'll find that there is. There is a kind of natural explanation that you can come up with for, for how they experienced healing. And in some cases, it's at the chemotherapy worked. In some cases it's that, you know, that there was ambiguity in the diagnosis. They may not have had the disease that they thought they had. But there are cases where, having looked at all the medical records before the healing experience and after having consulted with medical specialists in the. In the respective areas, we still don't find an explanation. So, for example, there was a woman, this was now some decades ago, who lost her eyesight late in the teenage years. And she was examined at, I want to say, at the Mayo Clinic. And the examination showed that the back of her eyes was damaged. And so she was diagnosed with juvenile macular degeneration. And there are some parts of the body that if they're damaged, they'll heal up on their own eventually. But when the back of the eyes is damaged, the part that converts the light into nerve signals, that part does not regenerate. So this woman went blind and was blind for 12 years. She then she got married and had a kid, had never seen her husband, had never seen her child. And she went to one of these healing prayer meetings. This was, I think, in the early 1970s now. And she was. She didn't experience any healing in the moment of the, you know, those prayer meetings. She went home, and a while later, she and her husband were praying before bed. Her husband prayed a short prayer, asking God, like he always had to heal her eyesight. She opened her eyes and she could see. And this, of course, caused quite a stir because her eyes had been examined multiple times over the course of years, and the damage to the back of the eyes had been confirmed. And when we began looking into her case, we had her go back to the ophthalmologist and Take new images of the back of her eyes. And we had a professor of ophthalmology read those. And what he said was, you can see a little bit of scarring. Where it looks like there used to be damage to the back of the eyes. But it's not damaged anymore, and she can see. So, you know, that's. That's one example. I think there are other cases I could go through that you asked about the commonalities. And I think the main commonality in what we've seen Is that someone has a disease that there's not really a hope of cure. They have a kind of spiritual experience. Often in the context of these group healing, prayer meetings. And either right then or very shortly thereafter, they have this dramatic recovery. Now, as a scientist, I'm trained to ask critical questions. And it turns out that there are cases of blindness. Of what are called conversion disorders. And a conversion disorder, it's also called a functional neurological disorder. And the conversion disorder was developed originally, hundreds of years ago. Came out of the same tradition that Sigmund Freud came out of. And the idea is that someone has a kind of emotional distress. And that distress becomes converted into a neurological disorder. And a functional neurological disorder is diagnosed when the physician examines a patient who experiences sometimes blindness, sometimes a sudden weakness in a limb, and observes the symptoms. But can find no evidence for an organic cause of that disease. In other words, when there's no apparent damage to the eyes, there's no apparent damage to the visual cortex in the brain. There's no apparent damage to any of it that would explain the blindness. And when everything, the visual system, for example, seems intact, there's no apparent damage. And yet the person is blind. And not just thinking they're blind. They are truly unable to see. That's when the diagnosis of functional neurological disorder or conversion disorder is made. And so there are cases of blindness where someone is truly blind. And in some cases, when you talk to them, you find out that they've had very traumatic things going on in their lives lately. And if you then start to address the trauma, you provide, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy of some sort. And you help them address and heal from the emotional trauma. There are cases where the eyesight then returns. And so if we have a case where someone appears to have been healed of blindness, One of the first questions we have to ask is, is this a case of a functional neurological disorder resolving? And the answer to that question begins with the question of, is there evidence that there's some actual damage to some part of the visual system. And if there's not, then we consider a diagnosis of conversion disorder. If there is damage and that damage can explain the cause of the blindness, then that rules out a conversion disorder explanation. So I think when we look at these cases of miracles, we have to consider some of these mind body effects, which we don't really understand. I mean, to this day we don't really understand how conversion disorder works. We don't understand how it can cause a loss of eyesight. We only know that it can. And so these are the kinds of questions that sort of push me forward in looking for cases of even more remarkable miracles, cases of healing that seemed even more difficult to explain because on the one hand, it provides new empirical data that we can take and ask what's going on? How can we understand this? Does this tell us something deeper about how the mind and the body interact? Or is there something even more profound going on? And so I am a, a scientist and I am also a Christian, right? Which means I believe, I believe in God. I believe that God may intervene at times in our lives. And so I don't rule out the possibility that God intervenes and, and miraculously heals people. But I think before I would make a claim like that, I would want to investigate what are all the ways that we might be able to explain what's happening here in a way that doesn't require a sort of divine intervention. And I think exploring these, I mean, they're fascinating cases. And I think in a lot of cases we do learn something about mind body interactions. And in some cases, I think after having exhausted everything we can find and everything the medical experts and specialists can find to potentially explain things, we still don't have an explanation. Now that's not to say that we won't have an explanation ever at some point in the future, but rather that currently there's no viable way that any of us can see to explain how this person recovered. We only know that they got prayed for and now they're better.
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This episode is sponsored by rula. Mental health is the foundation for overall health. But finding a therapist who's available, a good fit and takes your insurance is a real barrier. RULA connects you with licensed in network therapists, often with an average copay around $15 per session. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by Insurance. Visit rula.commindbodygreen to get started. That's R U L A.com mindbodygreen you deserve vental healthcare. That works with you, not against your budget. This podcast is sponsored by Function Health. Function Health goes beyond basic lab testing. I love that they test 160 plus markers in a blood draw, especially markers like APO B that most doctors don't check. The results are easy to understand. I can take my results and make meaningful changes to my lifestyle. Check your health the way I do 160 plus lab tests a year for $365 plus the ability to dive deeper into your results through Functions connections to platforms you already use like ChatGPT and Claude. Join@functionhealth.com mindbodygreen or use gift code mindbodygreen25 for a $25 credit toward your membership. This podcast is sponsored by Advocare. Some days demand more from you, whether it's a workout, back to back meetings or just staying present with your family. Spark Energy and Focus provide stable functional energy. Mix it up before a workout or even mid afternoon when you feel that dip coming on, it's so easy. Shake, sip and within minutes you feel more dialed in. Not wired or jittery, just clear, focused and ready to power through. The drink has a well rounded and balanced formula that goes way beyond just a quick energy boost. You get 120mg of caffeine paired with amino acids and taurine so the energy feels steady, not spiky or jittery. It also includes Choline for mental focus and clarity plus B vitamins and L carnitine to support energy metabolism and vitamin C, A and E help support your immune health and everyday wellness. There's also zero sugar which makes a real difference on how you feel later on. Right now Spark Energy plus Focus is offering 30% off and free shipping. Go to drinkspark.com and use code mindbodygreen at checkout. That's code mindbodygreen@drinkspark.com this episode is sponsored by Prolon. Fasting may support everything from metabolism to longevity, but most folks can't stick to it. Prolon's five Day Fasting Mimicking Diet is a stress free nutrition program that keeps your body in a fasting state at its clinically shown to trigger autophagy. Designed by longevity experts using Nobel winning research, the program works at the cellular level to support weight management, metabolic health and lean muscle. For a limited time, Prolon is offering Mindbody Green listeners 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift. When you subscribe to their five day program, just visit prolonlife.com mindbodygreen that's P-R-O-L-O-N-L-I-F E.com mindbodygreen to claim your 15% discount and your bonus. Prolonglife.com mindbodygreen so in terms of our
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B
brains, we describe them as prediction machines. So can you unpack that a bit? How our beliefs shape what our brains predict and then ultimately how our bodies respond.
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C
So the idea of the brain as a prediction machine goes back at least to Pavlov. So if you remember, Pavlov trained the dogs, you know, rang the bell, and then a little while later, the food appeared. And pretty quickly the dogs learned that when they heard the bell, the food was going to appear. And essentially the dog's brains were learning to predict, given the current set of circumstances, that something was going to happen very soon. And there's a whole line of theory now, theoretical developments in neuroscience, that tries to simulate and understand the brain as a prediction machine. And what that means is simply that given everything that has happened and everything that is currently happening, what do we predict is going to happen next? And so why would the brain do that? And it seems based on, and this is part of my ongoing research, neuroscience research. And that is. So we might ask, well, why does that seem to matter? And it matters because the degree to which you can accurately predict what's going to happen next depends on you having an accurate internal model of how the world works. So in order to navigate the world successfully, you have to understand how it works. And how do you understand how it works? Well, you learn it, and you update your model of the world by making a prediction and then evaluating whether that prediction was correct or not. And if it was not correct, you feed that back and you use that information to update your model so that next time you'll make a better prediction. And this general approach is what underlies all of current AI as well all the large language models. So if you use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or any of these artificial intelligence models, they're all trained to do exactly this. They are given a whole bunch of data, basically from nearly the entire Internet, and they're fed a stream of information, such as all the words in a book, and they are forced to make a prediction about what's the next word that's going to appear in that book. And if they get the prediction wrong, then there will be an error signal which turns into a training signal, which trains the model by adjusting its internals to make a more accurate prediction next time. So this is how AI is trained. It's how the brain seems to learn how to form this model of how the world works. And so to get to the other part of your question, once you've learned how to make these predictions, being able to make those predictions is very advantageous for your survival. So let's suppose that you're walking along and a bear jumps out at you. You don't necessarily need to think too hard to figure out what's going to happen next. You can make a prediction that if you do nothing, that bear is going to injure or kill you. And so because you can predict that, you will very quickly use that information to take action. And not just sort of, you know, rationally thinking through it. You will experience an emotional and physiological response. Your heart rate will increase, you'll have adrenaline that it will prepare you to take the action that you need to take in order to save your life. So that ability to predict what's going to happen next is foundational for all of our cognitive abilities to build off of that.
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B
You know, I come back to the. I don't want to call it a cliche, but you know what I find myself repeating? I've got two girls, nine and six and a half. And I'll say, whether you think you can or you can't or you can't, you're right. And then I think about the words you just use. Rational, emotional.
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And so how do you.
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This core idea of belief and also being rational in the case of the
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bear, how do you.
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B
As we think about our world and you know, whenever I go down this rabbit hole, I. I come away with the conclusion. I come to the conclusion that no matter how much we think we know about health and the connection between the mind and body, we just really don't know anything. I. There, there are the known knowns, the known and unknowns, the known unknowns, then the unknown unknowns, and I just go to the unknown unknowns.
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A
What's your.
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I know I'm unpacking multiple concepts here. Like, what's your view on the influence of the mind and the body and the brain as a prediction mechanism? Whether I think I can or I can't, the signals, what happens next?
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C
Yeah. So I guess we could go any number of different directions with that question. I think so. On the one hand, there's more we can learn about exactly how that plays out. So we can trace out all the neural pathways, for example, from how making a prediction that your life is in danger of imminent injury will lead your hypothalamus and pituitary glands to secrete hormones which will cause your adrenal glands to release adrenaline, which will cause longer term effects on cortisol. These are all things that I trace out in the opening parts of my book. So there are these very specific neural pathways and biochemical pathways by which the predictions we make will influence our bodies very much and in ways that can have long term impacts on health. So, for example, if you're chronically stressed, that's going to increase your cortisol level, which is going to cause changes in how your body metabolizes glucose, which can over a long period of time cause metabolic syndrome. It can cause all kinds of health issues. And so in that way, if our, if the predictions we make are such that something bad is going to happen, that will have very real biochemical effects on the body, which can lead to disease.
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B
And so if I'm listening and I'm doing the right things, I'm physically fit, I'm doing my cardio, I'm lifting weights, I eat clean, I'm doing all the right things and I, and I'm relatively healthy, what should I be doing as a daily, on a daily basis to make sure my, my belief system is in the same way? I am strong and I've got a high VO2 max. You know, what, what, what, what, what is the equivalent of my belief system protocol that I should be working on? So I am prepared if down the road, you know, maybe there's a diagnosis I get and I'm not really thrilled about it.
- [38:41]
C
Yeah, well, you know, the old saying goes, you are what you eat. And the same applies to beliefs. So I've been in various healing prayer meetings where whoever's leading the meeting will try to encourage the, you know, the people attending to say, well, you, you have to believe, okay? You, you have to believe that God's going to help you. You have to believe. And, and I think while that may be true, I'm not sure that's always helpful because if you say, well, I'm not sure I believe that any of this can help me, then, you know, having someone say, well, just, just try to believe, well, you, you, you, you can't necessarily, you know, psych yourself into that, right? I mean, and nor would you in some cases necessarily want to. Right? Because if you sincerely believe that something's not true, why would you want to try to convince yourself that it is true. So my experience, and I'll get to what I would suggest in a moment, my experience was such that I wasn't sure what I believed about whether miracles happen. And so what I Did is I immersed myself in situations where it seemed that experiences of miraculous healing and recovery were happening the most I immersed myself in those situations, and I just observed. And the more I observed, the more these kinds of miraculous recoveries seemed very common, to the point where I can't even count the number of times I've heard examples of people getting their eyesight restored, hearing restored, all kinds of chronic pain disappearing. I've lost count. Okay. And the more time I spent in those environments, the more those experiences essentially caused me to update my internal model. And I think you can distinguish different levels here. Okay? On the one hand, there are metaphysical beliefs, there are cosmological beliefs about, for example, the existence of God, and, you know, whether you believe God does miracles today. But there are beliefs on another level which is empirical. That is, do I believe that? As a matter of fact, setting aside the deeper cosmological questions that miraculous healings happen, that people sometimes recover in ways that we can't explain, does that happen? Now, that is an empirical question. And so if you put yourself in situations where people are regularly claiming and seeming to experience these kinds of seemingly miraculous recoveries, the more that becomes normal and the more you update your internal model to reflect that these kinds of recoveries are more likely. And so I found that as I did this and I began to travel to other countries, I traveled all over the world just chasing miracles, basically. And the more I did that, the more I saw them, the more common they seemed to be. And so then when it came back to the question of my own health and recovery, for me, the question was, so, you know, am I likely to experience a miraculous healing? Is this something that is within the realm of possibility or even likely? Because I had seen so much at that point, it wasn't a matter that I had to somehow psych myself out or trick myself to believe that miracles happen. It was simply a matter that I had seen so many that it seemed it was natural to believe that those are more likely. And so, in a sense, to come back to your point, whether you think you can or you can't, you're right, because I had, like I said, you are what you eat. Because I had experienced that. I put myself in that situation. It changed my mindset, it changed my model and made it actually easier to believe.
- [42:46]
B
I think it speaks so much to the power of environment. If you want to get healthy, you hang out with people who, you know, maybe don't drink alcohol or don't smoke and go to the gym every day, it's going to happen. And that's a different situation. If your whole social group is going out every night till 3am getting smashed and. And doing whatever, you're probably less likely. Or if you play sports, you hang out with people who prioritize winning, you're more likely to win. It makes a lot of sense in terms of being on a journey where you're looking for healing. You're going to have a better outcome if you are in an environment surrounded by people who maybe have been through what you've been through or something similar, and come out on the other side who are very positive versus maybe being in an environment where everyone around you is maybe dying or not having the outcome that you want.
- [43:45]
C
Yeah, absolutely. And that was very much my experience. And one of the takeaways, I think, as I got towards the end of the book, and that is that a lot of the healing experiences that I saw didn't happen to people when they were by themselves. They happened in the context of a group and of a shared pursuit, a shared vision, a shared set of activities, a kind of mutual camaraderie, if you will. I certainly experienced that. I made friends, lifelong friends, with people who were pursuing healing as I was for myself. And that kind of social interaction, that kind of dynamic, I think is very helpful. And I mean, intuitively we understand that social support matters. That's a good thing. But I think more specifically, in the context of pursuing a kind of healing experience, I think that kind of social support and camaraderie seems to me very helpful. And just empirically, that's where I saw the most healing experiences.
- [44:56]
B
100%. It makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, where do you think the science is headed here? Where do you think we're going to be in 5 years, 10 years? What type of conversation are we going to be having?
- [45:08]
C
Well, I mean, trying to predict the future is a tricky business. But I think what I would say is I've noticed that over the last, especially 20 years, like if you look back into the 1980s, 1990s, there was very much this kind of undercurrent of animosity between scientific initiatives and religion. And so you have the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and creation versus evolution, and there was this kind of undercurrent of mistrust that really goes back to the Scopes trial. It goes back to Darwin, it goes back to Galileo. There was this undercurrent of mistrust between proponents of science and proponents of religion. And I think on the one hand, some of those Culture wars of the 1990s, those ended around, I'd say, about 2005. And it was about that time that people who were looking at different religious practices. So, you know, whether it's yoga or mindfulness, some of these things which are very much mainstream now, but their origins are very much rooted in spiritual practices. And people like Richie Davidson, along with the Dalai Lama and some others, really pioneered bringing spiritual and religious practices into the mainstream as legitimate objects of scientific investigation. And so I remember in 2005, I went to the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. There's at least 20,000 neuroscientists who all converged on Washington, D.C. and one of the keynote speakers for that meeting was the Dalai Lama. And I remember thinking, how did we get here? Because the last I checked, science and religion kind of didn't get along very well. And now we have the Dalai Lama, no less, addressing the Society for Neuroscience. And it was well received. And, and I think at that point there was a distinction made between scientific research that was somehow aimed at proving a religious truth, you know, proving that a particular tenet of faith is true, versus scientific investigation that aims to answer empirical questions without necessarily addressing metaphysical truth claims. And so, for example, if we make a claim that people who practice mindfulness will experience less stress. Now, on the one hand, you know, it's a whole other topic as to, you know, well, is that a religious or spiritual practice? And if so, you know, that's a whole other discussion. But at a minimum, we can say that there is a significant segment of the population that would perceive elements of that, at least as spiritual and religious practices. And so to have a situation where you can study that, it's an empirical question whether those practices will lead to objectively reduced stress levels and objectively better health. And that's exactly what Richie Davidson was doing in the early 2000s. They showed that people who engaged in what was kind of precursor to mindfulness based stress reduction showed improvements in their immune system function. And that's just empirically true. Now, does that mean that the cosmology of Buddhism is true? That doesn't really address that. It just makes an empirical claim. And so I think to get back to your question, what does the future hold? I think there will be an increasing acceptance of using scientific approaches to investigate the health effects, empirical health effects of spirituality and religion. And there's already quite a bit of literature on this. So people like Dr. Harold Koenig at Duke University has done a lot of research looking at the correlations between religion and spirituality and health and it's almost. Almost uniformly positive, in other words, that people who are more engaged in religious and spiritual practices tend to enjoy better health.
- [49:33]
B
It's fascinating. I don't know if you're familiar with Dr. Lisa Miller.
- [49:37]
C
Somewhat.
- [49:37]
B
Yeah, she's a dear friend. She spends part of her time here in Miami. And I just, you know, bridging the gap for her and mental health outcomes and kids and having a spiritual practice. Very powerful. I'm curious, how do you start your day? How do you end your day?
- [49:55]
C
How do I start my day in terms of.
- [49:58]
B
Do you have a protocol? It could be nothing. It could be nothing special. Do you have, you know, a go to protocol, if you will? It could be, you know, beginning of day, end of day, middle of day, but something you rely on now.
- [50:11]
C
Yeah, I think on a daily basis when I wake up, the. The first thing I do is, you know, as a Christian, I. I welcome the Holy Spirit. So, you know, within the tradition, Christian tradition, there's, there's Jesus, there's God the Father, there's the Holy Spirit, who. And Christian theology is with us today and now. And so first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is, good morning, Holy Spirit. And in a sense, I'm starting the day by recognizing the connection with God and I'm orienting my awareness toward God that what I'm doing is not just, you know, obviously there's the mechanics of going about the day, but I start the day with just that simple spiritual connection, which I find sort of helpfully places the rest of the day in the context and often sort of pray briefly and express gratitude. And so another part of my book goes into some brain imaging research we did on the effects of gratitude practice on brain activity. And we found in particular that simple expressions of gratitude can have lasting effects on brain activity and the sensitivity of the brain, particularly certain parts of the brain, to expressions of gratitude. And so I'll start my day with an expression, a short prayer of gratitude for what God's given me and, you know, what God's doing as I perceive it in my life. And I find that's also helpful in sort of orienting me and placing the rest of the day in that context. So, you know, just for me personally. Yeah.
- [52:11]
A
So just to double click on gratitude,
- [52:13]
B
I think is interesting. What would be your gratitude prescription for someone listening whether they're Christian or not religious at all, if someone says, okay, gratitude, I'm sold. I want the health benefits, what do I do, Doc?
- [52:26]
C
Yeah. So in a paper we published this was in 2018. I did the study with Professor Joel Wong, also at Indiana University. And we found that people who were in treatment for. For anxiety, for, you know, various mental health concerns, when we gave them a simple exercise in which we asked them to write a letter expressing gratitude to someone and they didn't have to give the letter to that person, all we asked them to do was to write the letter. And the act of writing down an expression of gratitude was associated with improved mental health scores a few months later. So I think the. I don't know that there's any particular formula for it, but rather the act of expressing gratitude, whether to someone in person or even just writing it down in a journal, that in itself seems to have measurable mental health benefits.
- [53:31]
B
It could be as simple as just journaling at the end of each day. What am I grateful for today?
- [53:35]
C
Yep. Exactly.
- [53:36]
B
Fascinating. Josh, such a pleasure. Love the book. Proving a miracle. Highly suggest it. Thank you so much for coming on. Anything else you'd like to touch on before we wrap? I know we covered a lot of ground.
- [53:47]
C
No, I mean, just thank you so much, Jason, for having me. And I think there's. There's probably a lot more we could get into, but I think we've covered a lot of things that I hope, I hope the listeners will find useful and very practical for, for improving their own health and well being.
- [54:03]
B
Thank you, Josh.
- [54:04]
C
Okay, thanks.