Transcript of Presentation: Our Brains and the Modern World
Presenter: Chuck Rich (neurosurgeon)
Length: ~64 minutes
Introduction and Background
[Chuck Rich]:
Thanks. It’s great to communicate with so many familiar faces, and it’s hard to have our kids out of this age group, ’cause it was so fun. We used to give us excuses to see all the neighbors and be involved in all the activities, so I’m really excited to talk about our brains today.
As they said, I’m Chuck Rich, and I grew up around here. I went to Highland High School, and I grew up in Salt Lake, then left after high school to go away to college and medical school and residency, where I married my wife Tiffany, who’s back there. We live over on Olympus Drive. I have three boys—I don’t know if any of you know any of them—but Colson and Christian and Will, and they’ve loved this state and the activities, so I’m sure you guys are all having a great experience as well.
But Tiffany, I’m kind of front row seat with some of the other parents I see here watching what it’s like to grow up today in this world. And it got me thinking over the last decade or more of raising my own kids, why is it so hard? What is going on that makes it so hard, I think, for people to handle this world.
And it struck me one day. I was reading another article, and they were referring to a lot of the parts of our brain as our Neanderthal brain, or our caveman brain. I was thinking about that, and it got me thinking that, yeah, our brains really haven’t changed a whole lot. Certainly not in the last hundreds of years or millennia, or thousands of years. They may have changed over how God created us all over hundreds of thousands of years, but they certainly aren’t changing much recently, and yet our world is changing so much.
And I kind of came up with this idea or this thought that our brains really are not made for this modern world. And I think it has ramifications, repercussions that I hope we can talk about and have a discussion.
I kind of wish I would have changed out of my suit for my other ward that I serve right now in a bishopric, because I’d rather have it be just a casual discussion, and those that know me, I’m usually in my scrubs, so that would have felt more comfortable. But anyway, so if anyone ever wants to stop in the middle and ask a question, or if you want to save it till the end, that’s fine too.
Reality, the Brain, and Purpose
One of the things I want to talk about is the reality of like, or I want to talk about reality, and that, and I guess what I mean then is that Jacob in 4:13 tells us about things as they really are and of things as they really will be. And Neal A. Maxwell had a great talk and he had a book that I read, maybe as old as some of you. I was heard in high school I read it, and it really struck me, it really hit me, this idea of what are things really like?
And yet, even at that time and subsequently in all my neuroscience training, I started realizing, I started thinking a lot about, what does that really mean, things as they really are? Because it’s certainly not things as they really are in the physical universe, because our interaction with this entire world and this universe comes through the interface of our brain. In this mortal realm, our spirits are not really directly connecting with God, or directly connecting with really anything. It all comes through our spirit, our brain. Does that make sense?
And as a result, this may be a closer representation of what reality is on a physical scale, meaning we do not hear all the frequencies of sound, right? Our dogs can hear high-pitched frequencies, whales hear really low frequencies. We don’t hear but a very small fraction. We also don’t see most of the spectrum of light of this world at all. We don’t smell the molecules of smell that my dog smells. We certainly don’t sense that we’re on this globe hurtling through space at a thousand miles an hour and rotating all at the same time, and we have this illusion that we’re just sort of sitting here on this solid terra firma Earth, right? We don’t feel gravity. Other one I used to try and dunk and I couldn’t—we just do, I just feel gravity. But generally we kind of accept this as normal and as reality.
But I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s wildly not the real, any reality on a physical scale. So I think what Jacob was teaching and what Neal A. Maxwell’s talk was about is what is the purpose of all this? What is really going on? What is the reality of why we’re here, where we’re going, and what are we supposed to be accomplishing while we’re here? So, if that makes sense, I’m gonna go to the next thing.
Because when we’re here in this neighborhood, we’re walking around, hanging out in the ground, skateboarding, we’re going to school, trying to figure out what sport you like, and you’re looking up at Mount Olympus the whole time, and it really struck me like, why is it this way? Why did God create the world and our brains in such a way that this is all we get? This beautiful view of Mount Olympus and pleasant temperatures, not the freezing cold of the outer darkness universe, or not the heat of being near the sun. We’re in this little small sliver of distance from the sun, and that we don’t burn up, but we don’t freeze to death. Everything just seems to be so perfectly positioned that it was, again, a testimony to me that God created this world and our brains for a purpose, and we all know that we’ve all been taught in church that we’re here to learn about Him, to become like Him, to have our faith tested, to grow, to make mistakes, to improve. And so He had to create an environment or a laboratory or this earth that would accomplish that. And the reality of the physical universe doesn’t really help us get there. But that reality is real, and it even extends to our bodies, our brains. The physical sciences behind our emotions, and if we don’t get those things, we’re missing part of the secret of doing well here in this test, in this order of life, because we’re not aware of what’s going on to us. Does that make sense?
Neuroscience, Purpose, and Personal Testimony
You know, it teaches that all things that are out there’s a God, yea, even the earth and all things that are upon the face of it. I have a lot of friends. One of my best friends, his name’s Dennis Porter, so if you ever want to read a really interesting book on the brain, it’s called Gray Matters, and it’s on the national bestseller list, New York Times bestseller list, and we went to college together, med school together, and residency together, and neurosurgery. We spent about 15 years straight together, and he is a world-famous pioneering neurosurgeon and has a great lab. He writes also. I’m a local community, you know, kind of a country doc neurosurgeon, very different. And he’s a really brilliant guy, and this book is fascinating, it’s called Gray Matters. If anyone’s interested as an adjunct to this, he really is on the forefront of neuroscience and thinking about it. But he very much believes that this world all came about through a big bang, through happenstance, and that we put all the meaning on it. Any what we do is what creates meaning. But there isn’t really a purpose or meaning behind it.
Well, to me, I look out at the world just like Alma, and I see all the cosmic stars and forces and dark matter and energy, and then we have this little blue orb Earth in the middle of all, nothing else like it. And it to me is a very strong testimony that there is a purpose here. And why do I bring that up? Again, if we’re made this way, if our bodies and our brains are made this way, what was God hoping or wanting for us through this brain that is his only conduit to reach our spirit, okay?
I just got to back up a little bit, and I’ll go over this quickly, but in order to really put this in some context, and I want to have the disclaimer that everything I’m saying today is my own thoughts and things I’ve read. I’m certainly not speaking from the church. Don’t ever get that mistake, and I think they’ll ever put me in that position. And I’m not even speaking for all their neuroscientists. This is just sort of how I’ve distilled down a couple realities that I gained a testimony when I was very young, and I had some experiences that made it impossible for me not to reconcile what I know to be true spiritually with what I learned about the school, or about the brain, or about the body, or science. And I’m stuck in this position where I can’t, like my friend, just say, I’m just all in on the spirit, on the science side, because I know some things. In my world, I know some things to be true, and this is kind of dumb, but when I talk to you, I don’t want you to go away not knowing that I have a firm testimony, and it may not be any different or any more spectacular than yours.
But when I was a little kid, I lived up Newton, Massachusetts, my dad was a resident, and I was four, I think, and some neighbors had caught a bullfrog, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And every day I’d go out looking for bullfrogs. And I remember one day walking in the back door of our house and being so frustrated, slamming the door, and I couldn’t find a bullfrog, and remembering that for like one of the very earliest memories I have of going to nursery at church and them teaching us about prayer. And so I thought, I should go back outside, and I should pray. So I went outside, snelled by these little cement stairs down by our, walked down basement, and I said a prayer that I could find a bullfrog. I got up, looked around, and there was a bullfrog there. And I so clearly remember this, and I was like, well, I don’t look a little bit. So I went and looked around the first bush, and there was the biggest bullfrog you’ve ever seen. I could barely, I couldn’t get my hands around it. That’s why I saw this picture. I couldn’t, I just remember walking like this with my fingers not touching the end of the house, calling for my mom, and she didn’t hear me. So it started to squirm, so I went out and put it in a pail that I had prepared for my bullfrog that got. And I ran inside, found my mom, bring it back out, bullfrog was gone. I don’t know if my family still believes to this day that this happened, but I knew it happened, and I knew that that parent had something to do with it. Of course, that’s four.
But later, I remember another crazy, like, just little thing, may not be any different than you guys and your testimonies that are just developing, but I remember going skiing with my dad. He used to take me out of school a lot. Wasn’t very worried about my grades. I got very good grades. I did well on all my tests, and what he was worried about was my friends. He was worried about some of my influences in my life. So he used to take me out of school like every Friday and go skiing just to kind of talk to me and see what’s up. It was during junior high. And I remember one day we went up skiing, and when we came back to the car, it was snowing hard, and he didn’t have his key to the car. He’d lost his keys. And he was mad at me. He said, you stay here. I’m going to run back to the, to where we bought the tickets. I took my wallet out, maybe it dropped out there. And I remember sitting there, and I had something I wanted to do with my friends that night, Friday night. And I remember thinking, I need to get, oh my gosh, however you get home. And I thought, I’m going to say a prayer. I took the deal down, filled that parking lot back up. I got that set of prayer, we could find these keys. And once again, I thought, I better go look. And now, between then and this time, there may be been a few, you know, spiritual experience in my life, but not a lot. I was sort of distracted by sports and everything else. And I knelt down and I thought, I got to go, and I walked the opposite way from where my dad went, and I walked and I went behind one car, I looked down right behind the rear tire, and his key was there. And I was sort of, once again, convinced that someone was listening to me.
And then, later, I went away to college. I had a great year. I went back to Harvard. I had a blast. I played basketball. I was going to go back. I wasn’t going to go on a mission because I wanted to play, and I had these great roommates. I was going to go through my four years with them, and but on my table at my nightstand in July, supposed to report school to basketball middle of August, on my table nightstand was my, this old Book of Mormon paperback, where the inside was the inscription from my bishopric when I got baptized. And I had never seen that book before. I don’t know if they gave it to me when I got baptized, but I had certainly never seen it before, and I picked that book up and started reading it, and I read most of the night, and I just deeply remembered feeling spirit of the room, and maybe even the presence of angels, but just something telling me that all this early life stuff when I was too immature and too just spiritually blind to really get what’s going on, was somehow tied to this. And that when Christ is our savior and that he did appear to the Nephites and all this stuff. So, turn life upside down, call your friends, call your roommates, call coach, go off on a mission. So, and again, when I know these things to be true, I grant that I can’t prove a lot of things I’m saying today, but I believe that God created our brains to help us have joy in this world and to have a great experience and learn from people.
And like C.S. Lewis, it’s kind of turned into this, one of my favorite quotes is that, you know, I believe in this gospel, in this church, in Christ, as I believe that the sun has risen, not just because I can see the sun and the horizon, but because by it, I see everything else because of the light it provides. And that’s how I feel.
The Brain as Interface
So I remember another time, another frog story. I’m back at Harvard Med, well, first year in my neurobiology class, and this guy starts telling me, he’s a neurobiologist, he studies frogs because it’s got such a rudimentary nervous system. And he tells us how there’s a frog sitting there in a swamp, and it’s just this little swamp off the side of the road. There are trucks going by, there are airplanes flying overhead, there are people conducting complex business and everything all walking around, there are people jogging. That frog in the reeds by that pond, all it knows is that, is it something to eat, or is something’s going to kill me? What’s the temperature? Is it time to seek shelter? Is it day or night? And it only sees in black and white. That’s that frog’s entire world. And I remember reading him so strongly with the spirit saying that our brains are a little like the frog’s brain compared to God. And realizing that I’m running around here doing all these things I think are so important, caught up in my own world, that maybe God has a bigger perspective for me than I can have for myself. Just like anyone walking by that pond has a better idea of what reality is than that frog does. But to that frog, that’s its whole reality. And the only reason why that frog has that reality, and we have ours, is the difference in our brains. Well, our spirits too, our children. You know what I mean? That’s how they get their input, right?
So when you look at these brains, here’s the skull, it’s kind of weird. Think this, this thing carrying this thing is our brain, and it interacts through that. But the brains, wildly complicated, it’s the hardest thing to understand in the world, everybody says. And believe me, I don’t think I understand it. I just have kind of learned how to be a carpenter or a plumber around it. But the things I have learned that everybody knows is, it’s divided up into different areas that handle different things. You could probably read it from where you are, but back in our occipital lobes, we can, it’s where we handle vision. Our left temporal lobe is mostly memory and speech and language patterns. And this area up here is our movement and touch behind it. But the frontal lobes are where we think and where we process. And it’s all connected, don’t get me wrong, but they definitely have different places.
And the other thing is that on a more microscopic level, you also have all these neurons that are interconnected, and they have synapses, and they have transmitters. And somehow all this biology, all this physicality is what our spirit has to work through. Now again, my premise is that this is true, that you guys are over here, and what you believe, or what I believe, about this gospel, or about there being a God, or about that we are not just specks of dust, and like, you know, cell bags of fluid floating around, that we actually have a purpose, then somehow that’s interacting through this complex brain structure.
And when I was going back into childhood, my dad gave me that book, The Three-Pound Universe, when I was in sixth grade. And I remember reading it, I don’t know how much I remembered or understood, but it definitely got me thinking about this idea that why is it called a three-pound universe? That weighs about three pounds, your brain. And like this thing says, if you have that many neurons, which we all have, and each one is connected at least a thousand times, then the connections in our brain are more than all the stars in the galaxy that we know. And so in reality, our universe is, the whole universe is, in our brain, and everything we see and do and feel is through our brains. There’s no external reality to that until one day we die and our spirit separates, and then we will see another reality that’s different than this. This is my viewpoint.
Neurotransmitters, Dopamine, and Modern Hacks
So, in our brain, I talk about these transmitters. Now, some of these guys may have heard about, but the point here is that God wants us on this earth, wants us walking on Holladay, having a good high school experience, playing sports. Wants to be part of our family. Well, he gave us transmitters to help us do that. And you have dopamine, which is supposed to teach us alertness and excitement and reward. And it, and then you have norepinephrine, which is that fight or flight response. And then you have serotonin, which is kind of like well-being and everything’s doing good. And I guess the message I want to keep going here is that once again, all that we’re doing in this life has to work through this to learn. And our world has drastically changed how it affects these mechanisms compared to even us very young parents in the room compared to our grandparents. No, but it’s not very many decades before that our world, the world is very different than what you guys are dealing with.
So, one of the other big messages is that the way this was all set up originally was that you went through hard, you did something hard, and then you got a reward for it in your brain. You did something good, and you got a reward for it. But somehow, neuroscience and industry and video games and food and drugs have learned hacks to give us the same jolt of feeling good without any of the hard work or any of the good. Just the flood of dopamine. Does that make sense?
So, again, when you talk about serotonin, acts that are building, promoting, non-addictive, that make you grateful, that’s serotonin. Short-term pleasure, the rat hitting the button for his cocaine hit in the cage. That’s a dopamine. See the difference? And the weird thing of most of all is that no matter how much dopamine you get, it’s never enough. I mean, like categorically never enough.
So what do we, how do we, how are we supposed to stimulate dopamine in this life? We’re supposed to get it by eating something good and healthy for us because we’re really, really hungry and then we eat it and then we, it gives us pleasure while we’re tasting it, eating it, and afterward the serotonin comes in and you feel good. Pleasure, like sure, some things feel great, you know, sun on your face, a wave you catch, the feeling of like cold water jumping in the—I mean, these are all things that release dopamine back in the day before you were bombarded by dopamine stimulation through all the artificial means today.
Being attracted to someone, starting a family, it has dopamine. But again, it alone has no long-term satisfaction. Sex alone, through dopamine, it has no long-term feelings of anything, of peace, belonging, family, well-being. It just doesn’t. It’s a short-term thing like the rat hitting the button. And again, not to get, exercise back in the day and today, back and release dopamine, new experiences. Why would God want us to have new experiences? Any ideas? To learn, to learn. If you didn’t ever go try something new, you’d never learn anything else. And to travel over that horizon, to do something different, that releases dopamine. It’s a novelty thing. But you then have to get there and do something worth it. We all know that if you just go on a trip, it feels good for a minute, but it doesn’t do anything unless you actually learn something there. But it entices you to go do something.
So again, these are all these things you can kind of read through it. The dopamine gives you this excitement, a reward, and then it tells you to do it again. It doesn’t, it’s not like you did it once and it’s enough. It says do it again. And then it gives you a focus of like, what do I got to do to get that feeling again? Which is very different than feeling good. Does that, you get that feeling? And then, like you said, exercise, sunlight, little things, sleeping well. This is about how we used to regulate our dopamine. It’s really not these artificial sources like junk food, your Jolly Rancher and your Slurpee and your Cheetos and then some porn. Some drugs and scrolling on your phone. That wasn’t available to me, or wasn’t available to my grandpa. It just wasn’t. And now it is. And just don’t ever mistake dopamine for happiness. It’s not the same thing.
Miracles, Reality, and the Frontal Lobe
So I have a good friend in this neighborhood, for one day, but we have another friend who’s not a believer, and we had a big argument for a time about the church, and this, that, and what’s true, what’s not true. And finally he was fed up, and he just said, you know what, Lon, I’m tired of talking about this. Why don’t you just choose your miracle and I’ll choose mine? You’re choosing the miracle that some big bang happened that went through some particle soup that then went through atoms first forming, then went through this dark age that lasted about 12 billion years, and all this dark energy and all this stuff happened, and then today, and then somehow out of all of that, these little creatures started climbing out of the primordial soup of water and turned into this, into a dinosaur, into this, and then all of a sudden we have, you know, Michael Jordan playing basketball. Or Einstein, you know, deciphering the universe. And all on the, all chose the other miracle that God did it. You have to, every time you, if you choose that miracle, every single day you have to choose another miracle that it keeps happening, that it keeps sustaining, that it keeps going. All I have to do is choose this one miracle that God’s in charge, and now I can go pay attention to the more important things in life. I couldn’t have agreed more. I get it. I’m choosing one of two possibilities, and so are you. You believe it happened one of these two ways, there really is no other in between.
The other thing I want to say is because these are the two realities in this world, if you think you can overcome what I’m trying to talk all over here about the way your brain works, if you think you can overcome it, you’re crazy. If you think you’re the exception, if you think you’re the one that can look at pornography or try a little crack, smoke a little meth, no, I’m kidding, but, or eat the wrong foods or whatever, whatever it is, if you think you can do that and still be okay, if it was evolution, you’re battling millions of years of evolutionary forces that created your brain as it is, and you’re not bucking that trend. You’re just not winning that game. Reality always wins. And if God created you, I’d even put it to you that there’s less chance that you could overcome that than if it was evolution, because God is much bigger, the idea of God is much bigger than even evolution.
Once again, we have these Neanderthal brains, and I want to point out that the difference in what God is, why we aren’t Neanderthals, why we’re humans, and why we’re the children of God, is because of this. This greater crown here of the frontal lobe, because it’s in the frontal lobe where I think our spirit mostly connects and can guide our judgment and our actions and our desires and what we choose to think about and what we choose to do with our time. It’s the executive functions. All the other stuff is just hardwired. Our vision, our hearing, our balance, our coordination, our sleep-wake cycle, our appetites, those reward cycles of dopamine and serotonin, those things. We’re not that much different from the animals, or the monkeys in those other areas. This area where we really are wildly worlds apart, and that’s because we’re children of God and he made us in his image and he wanted us to have some way to think like him and act like him and make choices in this life, okay?
Ancestral Life vs. Modern Life
So, quick thought, the only part of participation I’m going to ask from you all today. Think about your answers. Grandpa, what did they used to do with their time? What stories were, what’d they do? What’d they like to do? Anyone? Fish. Fish. They go fishing. What else? My niece liked to ride horses. So what do you tell me about? Anything else? They’d hunt, right? They’d farm. They’d gather food. What did they want? What were their desires? My grandpa, he wanted to go see the ocean. Never seen it. You get to see it all the time. They, easy get there, you can look on the internet, whatever. Very simple things. He won’t, and then what about, what needs did they have? Food, water, shelter, right? Very basic things that we still have, but where they’re, how they’re met differently. How’d they used to get places? Did they jump in their car and drive down the road to their friend’s house? Mark, what did your dad do when he wanted to go someplace when he was a little kid? Walk. Walk. Right. Like me. There’s not that long in the past when humans didn’t even have bikes. They walked, they rode a horse, or they rode a mule, or they rode a camel, or something. And believe me, that’s a lot more work than it seems.
Part of our problem today is everything that they used to do, they lived in families, they lived in a little community, they pretty much knew everybody. In almost every place around the world, people lived in one spot, they didn’t travel very far, and they pretty much kind of knew who they were and where their place in this world is. Today, what do we do? We turn on a tap like a god and get all the water we want. We call Uber Eats, we go through a drive-thru, we deal with traffic, like we get everywhere by our cars, we don’t walk hardly anywhere, we play video games, and alternate realities and worlds that no one could have ever thought of before, and our brains stimulated in ways that it has never been stimulated. In the history of mankind, all of God’s children, except you guys, didn’t do this. So I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it’s not, I don’t think it’s what he intended to have our brains overstimulated. And we live in these huge cities where you feel different, and I don’t think it’s, our brain feels that we don’t know who, where we belong. And it makes us fearful, it makes us worried, and I think it percolates even into big schools, and you just don’t know who your clan is. Who is my group? And that’s what, we get that feeling of belonging, we all want that. Well, just so you all know, you guys are the guinea pigs. You guys are the computer-aged guinea pigs that had a phone. Have a phone and have access to all the information in the world. Your brains are stimulated.
I think we’re all coming to agree, and I assume you guys are too, that even though it may have the intent of bringing people together, it usually makes people feel socially isolated. You have too much information, too much entertainment, too little work, too little exercise, and you have addictive foods, whereas in the past, people had to work for their, they had to plant their food, harvest their food, prepare their food, and by the time they ate, they’d already expended more calories than they are, than they’re going to consume, and they had already developed a hunger and appetite, and food tasted great. Now, we take that strawberry that used to be just so good. When you first had strawberry, when I was a little kid, I remember having strawberry before there was a strawberry Slurpee, or before there was a strawberry Jolly Rancher, or a strawberry Sour Patch Kid. And somehow, strawberry went to the nth degree of refinement or excessiveness, and they’re not even similar, the taste, right? But that, but our brain was made to eat a strawberry. And then you bombard it with this other stuff, is it any wonder why the strawberry doesn’t produce the same response if you get so addicted to junk food that you, that’s all your brain is expecting, that degree of release from the sugar and from everything else. And all this stuff results in things being, feeling like they’re out of control, you’re disconnected from your friends, you feel anxious, you feel overwhelmed, and you wonder why. Well, in my opinion, it’s because our brain is not keeping up with all this being fed. It’s overstimulated.
Addiction, Dopamine, and Teenage Brain Development
This Dr. Anna Lemke, I heard give a talk at Stanford, she has some really, really interesting research on addiction. And I’m bringing that up now because I’ll talk about a little more in a second, but you guys are the target audience for addictions. They always think about the old crackhead on the street or the old grandpa drinking, smoking cigarettes. They got addicted when they were kids. It’s really rare to get addicted to something when you’re older. It’s not impossible, but it’s rare. And I’ll tell you why in a second. But addiction has to do with two things, how much dopamine there is and how much it’s released. Well, the things I’m mentioning before, the way God designed our brain, you were supposed to get a dopamine release when you’d watch the sunset and you saw the ocean for the first time, or you rode a wave, or you saw your friend, or you held a hand of a baby, back in those 90s days, or you kissed her on the cheek and felt, saw Star, you know, saw skyrockets and fireworks like Bobby Brady did when I used to watch the 80s Brady Bunch back then. Well, they’ve created drugs that attack the part of your brain so strongly that the amount of dopamine that’s released is so overwhelming. Hundreds of times more dopamine than anything that our grandparents used to ever, could have ever done. The best food they could ever eat, the most powerful alcohol they could ever, I mean, none of it even comes close. So, and then it was not even just how, what you have. Now you have crack, you have cocaine, you have meth, and then they’ve decided, hey, instead of just smoking it, why don’t you snort it, or why don’t you inject it in your veins? Because we have hypodermic needles, which no one had until the 20th century. So none of this stuff was possible, and this last few generations are being bombarded with this.
The last thing I want to bring up with this really quickly is that this whole pain and pleasure thing, the problem is, is that our body wants to be in balance, and if you have too much dopamine, when the dopamine’s not being hit, you’re gonna go into a way deep deficit, and you’re gonna be depressed, and you’re gonna feel lonely, and you’re gonna feel weird, and you’re gonna feel like something’s not right, and until you take that drug of choice, whether it’s drugs, or it’s scrolling, or it’s shopping, or, but there must be an opposition to all things, and that’s the way God created us.
And when you guys are teenagers, when you were kids, you’d follow your mom around, you’d do everything she told you, and you’d learn all this stuff, and then you go to school, you’re the nicest, the best students, you’d sit there and listen to your teacher and do your homework, and then all of a sudden you turn into teenagers. All you wanna do is go, jump off cliffs, or ride your bike too fast, or do flips on a trampoline, or whatever. All the other risky behaviors I won’t mention. And so during that time, you’re, we have this thing in the brain that, for whatever reason, God designed us so that dopamine’s least more potently than it was when you were a little kid or when you’re older. Why? Why would you want to do that? Well, he has to give you a big reward, and it’s like excitement. Back in the day, it was so you’d go learn for yourself, like you said. Go try something new. Take the risk to go in on a date, because boy, holding that hand is so exciting. Work, get a job, leave home, start a family. Back in the day, you’d go hunt for your food and take on those risks. Well, anyway, what happens during this time is when you’re a kid, you don’t have any connections. You start experiencing the world, and you get a million, so many dense synaptic connections. And when you’re a teenager, all of a sudden they start falling away, calls this synaptic pruning. And why? It’s because what you learn here is largely people telling you what to know, what to do, what to believe. Don’t touch that pot, it’ll burn you. Don’t climb on that wall, you’ll fall. Don’t take that jump and do a backflip, you’re gonna break your neck. Then you turn a teenager, and all those warning things go away, and why did God do this? Well, he didn’t mean it so you go do the backflip. But he did mean it that you learn for yourself. You learn what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s true, what’s not true, you know, what’s accurate, what you’re interested in, but it makes you relearn it. And during that time, the dopamine is really strongly being put out to reward you to tell you to go do this.
Now, this is known that in the natural animal world, these cubs stay with their bear, their mom till like three years old. Then all of a sudden at three, they’re glad to leave. Whereas before that, they were afraid of everything. They wanted, they would go hunt on their own. They certainly weren’t fighting. They were playing around and rolling around and being bear cubs. And then around two and a half to three years old, they all leave mom and they go off in the world and are willing, mom actually pushes them away. They go off, they start having fights. They start hunting their own food and why. Their brain does the same thing. All those fear judgment connections that were because mom told me, mom growled at me, dad growls at me in my house and told me not to do this. Well, now those fall away and the bears go out and learn it on their own. And if they didn’t have that unbelievable drive to go seek something new, to find a mate, have their own cubs, to get in fights, whatever that excitement was, they wouldn’t do it. They just stay with mom forever. And that’s what’s happening to you guys, whether you know it or not.
Self-Brain Surgery and Thoughts
Now I’m a brain surgeon and sounds impressive, but I have a lot of students come operate with me, and the only thing I tell them is that there’s one rule in brain surgery when you come watch me is that you can’t tell everybody how simple it is. Because we really don’t have the technology, we are not as, we do not know how to fix our brains. What we can do is go and take a tumor out, or if someone falls and has a blood clot, or if they fall and they break their skull, I can go in there and know what not to do to mess you up and put it back together as best possible. But I’m not going in there fixing your neurons or rewiring your brain. And what’s interesting is that you guys are doing that every day. I don’t know if you ever thought about that, but you guys are your own brain surgeon. You guys are doing self-brain surgery every second, every moment of every day.
There are these phrases in neuroscience, the brain takes its shape for what it rests upon. Well, obviously your brain is not resting upon anything, but it is like jello. If you took it out on the table, it would rest, it would take the shape of whatever it’s resting upon. What it means, of course, is whatever you’re focused on, that is shaping your brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together. Hebb’s law, it’s called. Well, if you do a pathway, like trying to learn to play the violin or play the piano or shoot a free throw, write cursive, whatever it is you’re trying to learn, those neurons that fire together pretty soon get wired together and it becomes automated. I had a very misspent youth. I could sit in my basement and shoot 10 out of 10 free throws all day long without ever playing basketball anymore because of just a very misspent youth and hardwired basketball shooting ability. I can’t run anymore because I could stand there and shoot a basketball. Well, similarly, everything you guys are doing with your time, everything you’re doing with your bodies, everything you’re doing with your mind is wiring that. So you guys, whether you know it or not, are your own brain circuit.
And I guess there are a few points here I wanted to bring up and just have you think about. You and your mind or your spirit is not the same thing as your brain. It’s the thing that through which your spirit has to work. Second, your brain, your spirit can control your body and your brain, but similarly, because we’re in this mortal world, and it’s a fallen world, your body and how it feels, the pain you’re experiencing, the cold you’re experiencing, or your brain, the habits it has, the fears it has, that can also affect your spirit. Believe it or not, some thoughts arise from your spirit, and I believe strongly some thoughts arise from your brain. And the ones that arise from your brain are often the ones that are automatic, that you have trained your brain to think, or your environment has trained you to think. But those are different than what you think yourself, and learning to distinguish those two things is a little bit about what it means to learn to listen to the spirit, Holy Ghost spirit, and to really listen to yourself and know thyself, like the spirit, the scriptures say, because the brain wants to automate tasks because it takes too much energy to hardwire, rewire, think it up, make it up every time it’s the whole reinventing the wheel. It’s going to automate anything you do a lot, like playing piano or shooting free throws. So whether you like it or not, you’re doing this, and this is going on all the time, whether you’re taking control of it or not. And when it happens passively or by outside forces, you feel stuck, you feel anxious. I think it’s what I saw in my own kids, sometimes feeling out of control.
When you’ve had tough experience in your life, it can make you shrink back and not be willing to try new things, because you had a bad experience. You can go on years later and look back and think, wow, all the friends I had, all the activities I used to do, I used to dance, I used to play the piano, I used to do all these, and now my life has been reduced down to going to and from school or to and from work and eating same thing every night and watching the same dumb TV show. And it’s so different than the life of your childhood and your teenager when you’re learning so much. But this is what happens. And these feelings can really cause us to be so sad and depressed. When you look around and you think, I’m not living the life I wanted to, then we turn to try and anesthetize ourselves. Now, when I do brain surgery, I’m allowed to anesthetize you. I take Keith Lerner over there and I say, put him to sleep, make this guy numb so I can take his head apart and put it back together, and he won’t know and won’t be so mad at me. But when you’re doing your own self brain surgery, I’ll guarantee you one thing. If you try and numb it up or anesthetize yourself to that process, it won’t work. So when you can’t dream scroll, you can’t just reflexively go shopping because you just, you’re bored and tired or you’re sad. You can’t seek out your Panda Express and a donut every day. You can’t just watch TV and reruns of Housewives of some various crazy city. You have to face, if you do that, you’re just going to face the pain the next day. To be a good brain surgeon on yourself, you can’t anesthetize yourself. And all these things that are part of this modern world do that. And in the past, there really was almost nothing. There was weak wine. That was it.
Focus, Capturing Thoughts, and Gospel Alignment
So in John 10:10, he tells us, the thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. How is this both possible? How is it this world is so hard on us, and it’s hurting you guys, and bombarding you, and industry, and the food scientists, the people trying to destroy you, and steal your money, and to kill you, eventually, through drugs, and alcohol, and smoking, and all the stuff, and yet Christ came that you might have life more abundantly. Well, the answer is, and this is a little so complicated, I want to make a slide. I’m just saying, simply put, when you get into quantum physics, and superposition theory, the idea is that an electron, the most basic particle of your brain, that turns into the electricity, that turns into the chemistry, that turns into the biology, turns into your thoughts that you perceive. When we study this, they know for a fact that electron can look like it’s in more than one place at one time, but the minute it’s looked upon or observed in that spot, it all collapses down to, well, that’s where it is. Now, this sounds kind of crazy, but this is what’s happening with us. Whatever emotion you focus on, whatever task you focus on, whatever thoughts you entertain and encourage is the reality you’re creating, both in this world and in your brain and automating it and setting up patterns of thought and behavior.
In second Corinthians, I think this is why the apostles understood some of this. They didn’t know that they’re smarter than the brain, the neuroscientists at Harvard who are sitting there in a little rat petri dish trying to figure out the frog, trying to figure out, you know, that there’s nothing behind this other than just molecules. They’re saying, no, you have a spirit. The apostles knew that we tear down arguments and every presumption set up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. Take your thoughts captive, make them obedient to you, your own spirit, your own light of Christ, your own conscience, and make it something that points to Christ, that makes you more like Christ. Again, the renewing of your mind that you might prove what is good. It’s done every day, whether for the good or for the bad. When you go do brain surgery, it takes a lot of hard work. It was a very long residency, and it was a lot of study. I don’t know how terribly smart anyone one person has to do, but you have to be really diligent. It takes a long time. But you know what, what more important than my study and my hard work and 15 years in kind of a lot of libraries was having good teachers. Well, in self-brain surgery, it’s even more important, because if you don’t get taught the right things to think, the right things to believe, the right things to do, you’re going to go off the rails also, because everyone’s performing brain surgery, but as you all know, there are some kids that the influences in their lives are causing them to do brain surgery on themselves. That’s like having a bad brain surgeon. And the last thing you want is a bad brain surgeon. You want to do the only, do no harm. Well, think about the prophets your friends, your parents, and what they tell you. I guarantee you, nine times out of ten, I mean, nine times, nine out of ninety-nine times, listen to them, not what the world’s telling you.
Protecting the Brain and Closing Points
So lastly, as a brain surgeon, protect your brain. It’s the only thing you got to work with your, with the spirit. Wear a helmet. I have so many kids get head injuries, and they’re, it’s never the same. Too many concussions, too many, you have a bad head injury, you’re, that spirit does not have a full experience here in this life. Avoid alcohol, drugs, all those kind of things. They’re toxic. They kill your brain cells, and it’s not a joke, it’s, they just do, and we all, well, I know burnouts, I know people that were normal in junior high, and they do not have normal competencies now. And lastly, your brain needs nutrition, and your brain needs sleep, and somehow we’ve lost both. We have poor nutrition, and we stay up all way too late, and we get, you know, we just, we’re off. And we can have the mind of Christ if we do those things.
And I guess the last thing I want to say is that this brain surgery thing, I could go on and on about the, if you have questions, I’m sorry, I ran a little over time, but there are studies that prove the things that repair your brain or that you do self-brain surgery, every one of them aligns with the Holy Gospel principles, repentance, gratitude, serving others, working hard, getting outside, prayer, meditation, and exercising faith or hope in something bigger than yourself. And those are the things that heal people’s brains, and it’s been proven, but they call other things. A gratitude journal. But it works, because this is how God created us, and he taught us the gospel, and he sent Christ here to save us, and he gave us prophets, he gave us parents, and communities to teach us these things, and if you do it, you guys will create amazing brains that will be able to stand the forces of this world. But if you’re not aware of what’s trying to be done to your brains, it’s hard to protect yourself from it. So seek out the life of your great-grandparents. Walk more, talk to someone face-to-face, not even on the phone, let alone texting. Eat real food, maybe not a lot, mostly plants. How about, you know, exercise every day, set big goals, seek novelty, seek new experiences, and you do those things, and you’re gonna have a wonderful life, and avoid all these pitfalls that the world’s throwing at you. And, anybody have questions? Brain surgery questions?
Q&A
[Audience Member 1]:
I got a question for Jack. Churchill, on one of your slides talked about how some thoughts come from, enter your brain and some come from the spirit. Yeah. Is there any way to distinguish them?
[Chuck Rich]:
I think it takes a lot of work, and I’m not perfect at it. I’m sure I’m not. But I do think that what I’m getting at mostly there is that we get automated thoughts. We have one time that we walk down the hall and someone says something that we think, we’re pretty sure they said something derogatory or mean about us, right? Next time you walk down the hall and you see two people talking and you think they’re saying something about me, that is, that is no way that’s your spirit telling you that. That’s an automated thought of fear and protection that our brain has from years ago when we saw the tiger in the grass and the tiger could kill us so we didn’t, we almost didn’t see it. So the next time we’re seeing tigers everywhere because we don’t want to get killed, or our friend got killed that day and we didn’t. And those leftover automated mechanisms are what I think promote a lot of these thoughts. I got a little thing in the mail the other day from the IRS, and I am terrible with my tax. I mean, I pay them, but it’s always like the last minute, I’m always calling an accountant to help me, and my first thought was not, wow, I maybe got a refund. My first thought was, oh my gosh, I’m going to get audited. Well, that’s just a fear reaction, that’s not a thought reaction. That’s not like, but the spirit is what makes you think about things that import and what matters in this world. And all the other stuff is noise, and our brains have become very good at feeding us ideas, and be wary about what you think. Really give it a hard look and a test, a scientific test. Is there really basis to this, what I’m thinking right now? And even if it is, can I change that? You know? Can I think of something else, something better for me and for those around me? Because if you, if the idea is that we don’t, can’t control our thoughts, well then, I don’t know what, how we have a test in this life. Because it really is through our brain and our thoughts that we change the one thing that connects with our spirit. So, anything else?
[Audience Member 2]:
You, then, JJ. So my thought was right on the same line, because I’ve learned it’s like really helped deeply make space through my thoughts and then like how I feel about myself. And it is almost shot, well, I would appreciate if you making that note, but some thoughts come just up automatically, don’t they? Because some of it, I will believe, like deeply believe that, no, I know that thought’s real. Oh, should we talk to the beginning? We talked about like our perception of reality and let’s believe reality. And I made this challenge to myself one time, that every thought that I had, that maybe wasn’t the most constructive, or helpful or hopeful, like didn’t bring alive Christ into my next action, I made myself challenged to ask if that thought was true or real. And I started with people who were close to me, because I was like, oh, I’ll be pretty confident I’m right. Like, not the stranger in the Holocaust being that right. I felt like my sister was being offensive, and I was shocked five for five times in a row. I was wrong. And so my, the power of the brain, it is shocking. So I appreciate you saying that, because those thoughts do come wired from things in childhood that are meant to preserve you. But as I got older, it felt like it was betraying me, so I had to, like, slow it down. I don’t know. They control. Yeah.
[Chuck Rich]:
[Acknowledges.]
[Audience Member 3]:
Just question on for these guys, like, phone addiction, video game addiction, I mean, I know that’s addiction is probably a strong word.
[Chuck Rich]:
Well, okay, again, like that one that I alluded to quickly is she, one of her subjects that she talked about and she showed video of was a guy who was addicted to game videos. I mean, he had the whole setup in his college dorm. He had like six screens that the pictures they showed. He had a headset. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like it, you know, and he played games all the time. I mean, 14, 16 hours a day. And it was only Stanford kids, super smart, sleep three hours, get his work done, play games. All around the world, I guess, through these things. And he was getting so depressed and so hopeless, and life had no meaning. This kid that was a superstar to get to Stanford now had nothing, and unless he played video games, he felt horrible, I’m like a loser. Well, her point was that when he plays these video games, these lights are going off, he’s getting rewarded, he kills this person, or he does this thing, or he gets this reward. It’s this constant dopamine hit that they have figured it out. They, these are not just random people who run those companies. They are neuroscientists who are figuring out how to tweak your certain centers of your brain to make you addicted to their game. And she made him understand that every time the dopamine was that high for that long, it went way, way into a negative after. Because we have something called homeostasis in our body and opposition in all things, and this is not how it was supposed to be. She said that you have to lean into something hard and something that hurts or is painful to do to get the dopamine. Because your body’s going to react to your pain or your discomfort or your hard work, and also your homeostasis elevate your baseline levels of dopamine. Isn’t that fascinating? You go to work hard, you go do your chores, you study all day, when you’re done with that, you don’t have to do anything to get a hit of dopamine. The body just raised. You feel better. Your serotonin goes up. Conversely, you do dopamine and ser- stuff all day long, all day long, all day long, seek the easy path, seek the serotonin, nice fluffy pillow, and your stuffed dog, and you watch TV and eat junk food all day. That’s creating those feelings, but it’s not real, and then your serotonin also goes way down because you didn’t do anything of import. You didn’t do anything of any lasting value. You created no long-term means as a body, as a person. Does that make sense? So when that, when you look at your phones, you think you’re having just fun, but you’re rewiring your brain to need that to feel normal. And no one wants to admit it, but video games, food, sugar, carbohydrates, shopping, internet, TV, and our phones and social media, all they are is a drug that is hitting dopamine. No one wants to call them that, but that’s what’s happening to your brain. Cause your brain was not made when they had these things. Your brain was made when all they had was the farm and bad food. But it was driving you to go do those things. It was driving you to go marry that girl or that guy down the road that wasn’t that attractive, but at least he showed up and worked the farm. But that dopamine, that drive was so strong you went and did it. One day, you get on your phone and you swipe on hinge or whatever it’s called, whatever. Ridiculous. But it’s what’s happening and your brain is not meant for that and it goes really bad really quickly.
[Audience Member 3]:
So what do you do to like get out of that? You’re in that loop.
[Chuck Rich]:
Well, like I said, all it takes, this is the secret of brain, this is the self-brain surgery. All it takes is redirecting your thought to one other thing and you are straightening that thought. You put the phone down, you go outside on a walk, your brain is now, because what happens in this pruning, it’s like the, it’s like the, you drive around Utah and you see big highways and then off the side you see this like old beaten road that’s in disuse. Asphalt’s cracking or it’s a dirt road or something. That used to be the main road. And if you leave these other pathways alone, all those snapped connections go away. They do, they just fall away. But if you don’t, but you have to let go of them. So this student I was talking about that was a gamer, she made him stop playing games for three weeks straight in her lab. And he, it was supposedly the most, one of the most miserable times of his life. He could read books, he could sleep, she’d bring him food, he could exercise, he had weights, but he couldn’t be on a computer or play a game. And after three weeks, he was talking, he said that my entire world had changed. I noticed things differently, I felt calm, I felt peace, I was interested in calling my friends, I wondered what my mom was doing, I hadn’t talked to her in three months. Because his mind has become so wired to that addiction. So the point is, is that all you have to do, and this is where I really believe the judgment comes in. This is the spirit. You all have your own spirit. You have free of the seed. It’s being hijacked by these things, but it’s not gone. And when you pray to God for help, that spirit, I think, and his spirit will come in and help you jumpstart, override those negative connections. If you make the choice, that’s what you want to do, and you follow through. You do it, and you turn to something better every day. With you and your friends, you choose better things. Those, the conversations you have, the thoughts you have, the thoughts you entertain, it will create those connections. And that’s why we all know some amazing people, many amazing people in this neighborhood, who are just as pure as day, and they have, they’re so fun, they’re so happy, because they just feed themselves their thoughts, good thoughts all the time. And it’s all within your reach. You all know people like this, and it’s not like going to come, have to become a, like, a star musician or athlete or something where it takes years and years and years of practice. I promise you, because when I see my, summer of my, my freshman year, after freshman year, whatever, I missed them, I was a derelict and a sinner and not, you know, just completely focusing on the wrong things in July, and October, when I was in the MTC, I was a totally different person. And that, that’s the atonement. And all it takes is that willingness to say, I’m not going back to that, whether it’s basketball or pornography or drinking or drugs or parties or social media and texting and posting that, all that, you just turn it away and do something else with your time, and it’ll take a few weeks. It may take a couple of months, I promise you. Your brain will rewire so quickly and start that path to becoming like the mind of Christ and the life that God intended for you. So, any other questions? I know it’s been a long time. Yeah.
[Audience Member 4]:
That’s really quick. And with that, I’ll be the natural man and come back and I’ll say it again. Right. Delete Instagram, but you might be downloading it. How do you overcome like that feeling of failure and fall back at?
[Chuck Rich]:
You know all this stuff better than I do. That’s not, that’s not a glitch. That’s not, that’s the plan. That, everybody does that. I got back from my mission. I made mistakes. I repented after I met, I mean, you have these highs and lows. It doesn’t matter. It’s the point is that if your spirit wants to be like God and want to turn to them and repent, you will, and you will help people. And everyone of you have the choice to not do that. Everyone of you have the choice to say, no, I don’t want to do that. But I promise you that if you just believe, don’t, let me give you a phrase. I’ve got a kind of bright son, Christian, and he has the greatest daughter. He said, I spent most of my life trying to decide if I believed in God. And then I knew I believed in God. But he found out that the more important question is, do I believe God? There are a lot of people who say they believe in God, but they must not believe God because they don’t believe they exist. So, jump past the question of do you believe in God. You’re not worthy. See, you’re his, do you believe him? He’s told you over, I’ll forgive you forever. All you got to do is turn to me again. And your brain will rewire and you’ll turn to him and you’ll feel happiness and joy that you’re not going to get through dopamine hits and through doom scrolling. So when you say, like, oh shoot, I did this, what are your alternatives? Keep doing it, feeling miserable and become a leader and have a horrible life, which is inevitable. Or turn back to God to start doing worthwhile things and take in all that’s so wonderful in this life. For instance, you know, like this, and it’s so great that I’ll be able to make a slideshow in a few hours after church and stuff, you know. Used to take weeks for me to make my slideshow for high, high school assemblies and go get the slides developed and… Anyway, point is, the world’s going forward, and it doesn’t have to be all bad if you’re just willing to turn to Christ and to God. And I leave you this testimony in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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