Exploring the Mind-Body Connection with Dr. Lee Warren

Exploring the Mind-Body Connection with Dr. Lee Warren

Join us in this insightful episode as Dr. Lee Warren, a renowned neurosurgeon, shares his unique perspective on neuroscience, faith, and mental well-being. Discover how understanding the brain can deepen our spiritual walk and improve mental health.In this episode:

• The role of neuroplasticity and how deliberate mental practices can reshape our brains
• Practical strategies for self-regulation based on Scripture and neuroscience
• The fascinating interface of mind, brain, and spiritual life
• How suffering can refine us and give purpose, supported by biblical perspective
• The impact of hope on neurochemistry and resilience
• Exploring the concept of the mind’s location and its connection to eternity
• The significance of wonder and awe in mental health and spiritual life

Key Takeaways:

• Dr. Warren’s blend of neuroscience and faith points to the importance of managing thoughts through intentionality and the biblical practice of taking every thought captive.
• The “self-brain surgery” metaphor emphasises deliberate mental strategies to address emotional and spiritual health.
• The reticular activating system filters our perceptions; belief modifies the signals we focus on, shaping our reality.
• Moments of wonder and awe, especially in the right brain hemisphere, are vital for mental health and spiritual connection.
• Hope activates motivational neurochemicals, empowering us to undertake meaningful change, even in suffering.
• The biblical concept of “renewing the mind” aligns with neuroplasticity principles—changing thought patterns through deliberate action.
• The distinction between mind and brain underscores that thoughts are not exclusively generated by physical brain activity, offering hope and freedom.
• Suffering, when reframed, can lead to character development and hope, as supported by both Scripture and science.

• Dr. Lee Warren's Website

• Self Brain Surgery Book 
• Lectio 365 Prayer App
• Podcast
• Substack Newsletter

For free resources, reflections, and regular encouragement, come join me over on Substack. You’ll also find the option to subscribe to The Faith-Filled Collective — a monthly space for women who are pursuing wholeness and holiness. 

You can also find my e-books and webinar links here

Love and hope

Jo

Transcript

Jo Hargreaves: Hello everybody, welcome to the Faithfield Therapy podcast. This is the first time, well it's the second time that I've ever had a guest, but it's definitely the first time I've ever recorded it, had a video of our conversation, so I feel really excited to do that. So a huge welcome. If you're new here, I'd be interested to know what brought you here. If you're regular here, you know this is where we talk about therapy, theology, neuroscience and scripture, submitting it all to God's word and knowing that God's plan and desire for us is to make us holy and whole in our spirit and our soul and our body. And I am, of course, I'm going to say all the usual stuff like, oh, I'm so honored. Oh, I'm so excited. That's what everybody says on a podcast to have this guest, but I absolutely am. You are a real, you are the real deal, Dr. Lee. So a huge, huge welcome. Thank you so much for being with us. How do you, how do you show up today? How are you doing? How are you feeling?

Dr. Lee Warren: Hahaha. You know, Joe, I'm grateful to be with you and I am equally blessed to be with you. You're the one that shows up on Instagram and connects these ideas and just so proud of the work that you're doing. And we're doing great. You know, we've been on the road promoting this message of how we can change our mouths and change our lives with God's plan. And for the first time in over a month, we're home this weekend. So we're super grateful for that. And the weather's beautiful and we're just enjoying the spring. So I'm doing great today. Thank you.

Jo Hargreaves: Love that. So tell us what you do then when you're at home. What does relaxing, what does recharging look like for you? And do you do that as an introvert, somebody that gets energy from being away or as an extrovert, somebody who likes to connect and be around lots of people.

Dr. Lee Warren: kind of an introverted extrovert, if that makes sense. I find myself in places where I'm on the stage or doing the speaking or, you know, being the quote unquote expert. But I really want to be home and hanging out with Lisa and walking on the riverbank. We live on a 300 acre farm in the middle of Nebraska in the United States, which is a corn farming country. And we live on a mile of riverfront. So we like to walk on the river and catch fish and be outside. But I spend a lot of time in the office and in the operating room working with people and talking to people and diagnosing problems and operating on problems. And so it's very refreshing for me to be in my own space and quiet and spend some time sort of disconnected from other people too.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah, okay, yeah, I love that. Having that moment of all those moments of disconnection just to replenish you, yourself, God. Yeah, I love that. And so you've alluded a little bit to what you do, a real life brain surgeon. mean, you're just on a whole nother level of working with the complexities of the brain, of the spine. Why don't you tell us a little bit of what does your everyday life look like? I have no frame of reference for getting scrubs on and delving into somebody's brain. I do it metaphorically, but you do it in real life. So what's that like?

Dr. Lee Warren: Hahaha. Yeah, so I spend two days a week in the office, just like your primary care GP does, you know, meeting people and looking at their scans and talking to them about their issues and trying to understand what the real problem is. then two days a week in the operating room where we actually go and do something about some of those problems where I like you said, I do brain surgery for things like brain tumors and head injuries and hemorrhages and aneurysms and things like that. seizures and strokes. And then I do back surgery, so pinch nerves and ruptured discs and people with sciatic pain and all kinds of pain related things. I do some vagus nerve work for people with seizure disorders and things like that. So a lot of different things. Neurosurgery is really fun because you get to work literally from the top of your head to the bottom of your tailbone and any nerve in your body that we could make better in some way. So a lot of time, one-on-one with individual people in the office with ideas and problems and trying to understand things. And then a lot of time individually with people who can't fight back, so to speak, people who are asleep and I'm trying to fix the problem for them and work with a big team of really smart people to do that. And so it's really rewarding and fun, sometimes scary, sometimes sad. I'm also the guy that has to sit and tell you that the tumor's back and it's cancer or that your husband's not gonna make it or the kid might not walk again. frequently in conversations like that in the emergency room and having to be really real with people because people want to know what the truth is. They don't want you to, you know, sort of blow smoke at them. They want you to tell them what the truth is and what we need to do about it or what can be done about it. And sometime the answer to that question is nothing can be done about it and we just have to pray or have hope or come to to grips with reality. So it's a really complex and diverse set of things that I do really all boiled down to trying to help people understand what's the problem and what we can potentially do about it.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah, wow, that is heavy stuff, isn't it? Real life stuff. And there will be people who listening who that really resonates with from being the other side of you to hearing some of that stuff, or even people just being able to resonate with the fact that life is heavy and busy. And often we're holding two truths at the same time and the complexity of life that is beautiful and brutal and all at the same time. So those of us who understand for those who are listening who understand what it is to kind of carry the weight of some of what you're carrying, how do you then use what you know? And we're to get into your book in a minute because I cannot speak to you without speaking about this book and there's particular questions that I want to ask you off the back of reading it which is blowing my mind but...

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you.

Jo Hargreaves: How do you then, taking what you know about the brain anatomically, taking what you know about God as a good father, taking what you know about the nervous system and regulation, how do you then regulate yourself after such intense days of having to those conversations and do all of that stuff that you do?

Dr. Lee Warren: Well, I think one of the things that surprised me the most and you and I have talked before, so you know, my story is not just a, I don't just come at all this from the point of view of being some expert from the, from the, I'm in charge of telling you what the deal is, but I'm also as a person who's been through a lot of it myself, you know, coming home from the war and having some PTSD issues and losing a child and all those things that we've talked about. So I have a real heart for people who are hurting and who are struggling to understand what is going on with them because I've been in that place. And so when you talk about regulation, like I've been in that place where my brain made me feel like everything was coming apart at the seams and I could objectively look around and know I was in a safe place. I'm in a room I'm not getting shot at and nobody's blowing me up and all that. But I still felt all those things. And so I had I have a lot of empathy for that sense of dysregulation. So when I'm stressed and when I'm tired and I start to feel that stuff bubbling up, The first thing I do is remind myself that God has given us an innate ability to control what our bodies do by taking command of processes that He built. We're not responsible for building them, but we can learn to operate them in a way that helps us and doesn't hurt us. And so I've come to really embrace this idea that if you don't manage your nervous system, it will manage you, right? And so when I'm stressed and when I'm tired, I try to look ahead into those times and say, this is a period of time when I'm likely to feel certain things, my heart's going to race, or I'm going to feel stressed, or I'm going to feel in danger or not safe. And therefore, I can get ahead of that by sort of cognitively anticipating and telling my brain what to start preparing for. Like, okay, when I feel this, I know I'm not going to actually be unsafe. And so I'm going to act as if I am safe. then that sort of taking steps and taking action tends to help me prevent those times from when it feels really overwhelming.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah, and I really love, welcome and appreciate how practical you make that as well. And like I said, we'll talk about the book, Self Brain Surgery and the ability. Well, I'll let you intro your book and then I because I'd also really like to and I usually we know I was going to I was going to say tell people where they can find you. But actually, I don't want people to get distracted and go off doing that. So we'll do that at the end.

Dr. Lee Warren: You

Jo Hargreaves: I jump ahead of myself. But really interesting hearing what you're saying is I'm thinking about this gift of metacognition, essentially being able to stand outside of ourself, think about our own thinking, which is essentially, I would draw the parallel with that's essentially how we can do to Corinthians 10.5 of being able to take our thoughts active. How do you tie that all into this idea of metacognition?

Dr. Lee Warren: Right.

Jo Hargreaves: and 2 Corinthians 10.5. What does that look like for you? And you've kind of given us a headline now, but just expand a little bit of what that looks like for you to do that.

Dr. Lee Warren: Well, it comes from this place of being aware that a large amount of what we think and feel automatically isn't based on anything that's really happening. Right? We know that our brain, and this is where we get into the difference between mind and brain, which I think you're going to want to drill into more later. But I think most people, think society in general sort of teaches us, in fact, traditional neuroscience teaches us, taught us for a hundred years.

Jo Hargreaves: I absolutely am, yes.

Dr. Lee Warren: that everything about you is the product of your brain activity, right? This three pound lump of tissue, I got a plastic brain on my desk, this three pound lump of tissue in between our ears is who we are, is what we're taught, right? That everything you think, feel, believe, do, are capable of, all the things that are wrong with you are all related to what your brain is doing. And really in the 21st century, especially with neuroimaging, with the ability to put people in a scanner and see what the brain's doing when people are thinking. we've come to see that even from a neuroscience standpoint, it's really hard to defend the idea that the brain generates everything that we think and that the brain generates everything that we can do. so scripture has always said that, as you said, that the Bible is full of these ideas like renew your mind, you know, don't be anxious, be grateful, like take your thoughts captive, be renewed in the attitude of your minds, all that kind of stuff. And scripture has always been pointing at this idea that you have a choice in whether or not to act on what your brain tries to make you think you have to act on. And so when you talk about feelings and thoughts, like your brain generates some chemical signals that make you feel like something is happening. But the truth is, your brain doesn't know the difference between something that's actually happening in real time and something that you're just imagining or pondering. And so a good example of that, I think I gave in the book is this idea that if you open, you go to your mailbox and pull a letter out, and it's from the government, right? You may immediately have some sort of reaction to that idea that you're in some kind of trouble and your heart may start to race and you may start to feel dry in your mouth, your skin may tingle and your hair might stand up on the back of your neck and you might perceive that as being some sort of threat. Or you might have been anticipating a letter from the government that's going to give you a big refund on your taxes or something that you need that's a good thing for you. And you may start to feel very similar things in your body, right? Your heart begins to race and your mouth gets dry and your skin tingles and your hair stands up and all of that. But what makes one of those signals bad and one of them good? What makes one of them fear and one of them anticipation or eagerness is the story that you're telling yourself about what that letter is going to contain, not the inherent truth of what the letter actually contains, right? So then if you open the letter and find out what it contains, now you're dealing with facts. And so I think the problem is most of us are never taught

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Jo Hargreaves: Mm.

Dr. Lee Warren: that everything we feel isn't in fact true. That we just, we sort of live in that place where we are reacting to what our brain tells us as if it is true. And then we have to deal with the ramifications of the decisions and choices that we make in response to having believed that that thing was true. And sometimes that works out fine. You you hear a noise, you think it's a bear, run away and it really was a bear and that saved your life. Sometimes it is harmful. Sometimes you get irritated at something your husband texted you.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: and you fire off an angry reply and then you read it again and you misread it and he was not saying what you thought he was saying and now you've got an apology. I know he told me. So sometimes you react as if it's true and then you have a problem because of your reaction and that happened because it wasn't actually true. And so when you mention metacognition, that's this idea, this thing that humans can do that I think is a gift from God by design that no other creature

Jo Hargreaves: You can put it in my messages.

Dr. Lee Warren: creature that he created is able to do. And that is to get outside of what you're feeling and thinking and be curious about them, to be investigated, and to be cynical even sometimes of what it is that you're thinking and feeling and should you react to it or should you decide on a different response. So the Bible comes along and says, hey, take every thought captive. What is saying what they're saying that's 2 Corinthians 10.5. What it's saying is, don't let your thoughts and feelings force you into a reaction that might not be helpful to you.

Jo Hargreaves: Ooh.

Dr. Lee Warren: Instead, think about them for a second and choose the response that is going to be helpful for you. And if we just did that one thing, I think probably 90 % of our mental health issues would go away. If everybody just got aware that you're not obligated to react to everything you think and feel, and you can take a second, you can put a little pause in there. And that's why I call it self-brain surgery. The idea that surgeons don't just react to everything, we plan things, we anticipate, we choose. and try to choose wisely on the best interest of our patient. We try to make a decision that's going to result in a good outcome and not one that we have to stop the bleeding all the time. And so if everybody could just build in that little pause that take every thought captive idea from scripture, that little biopsy of the thinking that I call it, then I think a large amount of our troubles would dissipate.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah. Yeah. And I love that phrase, the biopsy of the thinking. I just think that's an incredible phrase. And I think it gives us some almost like cognitive margin, doesn't it? When we take the pause, when we take some time, almost just the noticing is something that gets this prefrontal cortex lit up again for us to be able to go, huh, like you said, be curious. yeah, I really love and welcome that phrase biopsy. just the curiosity, the examining it. And I think so many of us live totally unconscious of any of those reactions. We don't necessarily tune into them. And yet you say, God's given us this gift of metacognition to be able to do that. And I really like the example of the government letter because we all have our own version of that. We all have our, like for me, often like a physical symptom, I'll be like,

Dr. Lee Warren: Yeah.

Jo Hargreaves: Okay, I can go down a worst case scenario thing, but I know that my mind, well, we'll come onto the mind and the brain, but my mind and therefore my brain has become very attuned at noticing things, essentially confirmation bias, always looking for evidence, the story we've told ourselves is true. And if the story we've told ourselves to be true is one in which we're, I don't know, like a victim or something bad happens or everything's out to get us.

Dr. Lee Warren: Right.

Jo Hargreaves: then do you think it's accurate to say that our brain, think it's even from, I think there's even a specific part of the brain that this happens in. Maybe it's the reticular activating system. I'm not sure. You'll know more on that than me as an actual real life brain surgeon, as I always call you. But do you think that that's true? That we just become really wired to notice certain things and that actually happens at a, that takes up mental real estate in our brain.

Dr. Lee Warren: Hahaha.

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. And we know, for example, you're referring to the filtering mechanism of the reticular activating system that creates. So everybody has it sort of backwards. We think that our eyes are like little cameras that show our brains a picture of the real world that's out there. But the truth is, our brain actually sets an intricate web of filters. for what we are looking for in the world around us and not just the physical world, but the mental world, our emotional world, all those worlds relating to our relationships and experiences. Like your brain actually listens for your mental instruction as to what it's supposed to pay attention to. And if you build a thought life that says nothing ever works out for me or I always fail or he's going to leave me or you know, the cancer is going to come back or whatever. If you build your brain to be looking out for that, information that negative information, your brain will literally show you what you're looking for. It'll look for evidence to magnify and amplify the signals that you're telling it to look out for, even if they're not in fact more common than other more positive signals that are out there. And there's this famous experiment, I just had a conversation with Ian McGillchrist on my podcast, and it was beautiful and brilliant. he's, yeah, he's, he's, he's brilliant guy. But we talked about, we talked about this famous experiment. you can find it on YouTube. can't think of the guy's name, the psychologist's name, but they asked the two teams of basketball players, right? And they're passing the basketball back and forth. And one team's wearing blue and one team's wearing red. seen this? And so that they asked these research subjects, they say, count how many times the red team passes the ball. And then they'll watch them pass the ball for a little bit. And then they say, how many times did they pass the ball? And they'll say 23 times or whatever. They're remarkably accurate. Then they'll say, how long was the gorilla on the screen?

Jo Hargreaves: I'm happy to speak.

Dr. Lee Warren: during the thing and they go, what are you talking about? There's no gorilla. And then they play the tape back. And in the middle of the experiment, this guy's walking around in a gorilla suit and more than 50 % of the subjects in the research program never saw the gorilla because they weren't looking for it. Right. And so that tells us how powerful this idea is that if you're looking for something like how many basketballs are being passed, that's all you're going to see. And so knowing that we have that incredible cognitive bias and this hardware in our brain that will filter our reality for us, we need to stop thinking that we're very good at inherently knowing what everything means, because your brain is telling you what it means based on what you're telling it to look for.

Jo Hargreaves: Incredible, incredible. I love that experiment and I also missed the gorilla. I'll tell you who it was that showed me that experiment. She's a fellow American, Perrie Anne Brownback. She does some great work. Yeah, she's brilliant, isn't she? And she showed me that and I thought, I can't believe I missed the gorilla. But it's so true and I love this phrase. You have fantastic phrases that you weave all the way throughout your book. mean, self-brain surgery is just an incredible phrase in and of itself. Wish I'd thought of it.

Dr. Lee Warren: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: yeah, I love her.

Dr. Lee Warren: Ha ha.

Jo Hargreaves: But I love this idea of building a thought life. You kind of live in the thought life that you've built and you see and experience the world a lot based on your thought life, which reminds me of Philippians four verse eight, where Paul is just very clear. These are the things to think about if they're true, noble, excellent, praiseworthy, think about those things. And it's, I mean, Paul way ahead of the neuroscience with this stuff because it impacts you at a

Dr. Lee Warren: Right.

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely.

Jo Hargreaves: It's a, it's a very deep cellular level in your brain. How do you do that? How do you, as aside from metacognition, aside from being aware of your own confirmation bias and your own filtering system, is there anything that you proactively put into your life to do that Philippians four eight? I'm going to intentionally think about something true noble, excellent, praiseworthy. And how can we do this?

Dr. Lee Warren: Absolutely. And I think this is important for anybody. And even if there's somebody listening who's not a person of faith, and we're talking a lot about Scripture and your work's all about Scripture and mine is too, but in case somebody listening isn't, I just want to tell you that developing a practice of being intentional about what filters you're setting for your life and what your brain for that day will improve your quality of life independently of any sort of spiritual connotation. I believe God designed your system to work that way, but you can operate it outside of that belief system. mean, everybody can operate their brain better than they are. But what I do is I start my morning with an intentional quiet time where I'm trying to get that right hemisphere of my brain to be more active because most of us, Emma Gilchrist is dead right about this. We built our lives in a very left hemisphere focused way where everything is a fact or an object. that every person, every relationship is an identifiable thing that we can put in our pocket and know about. But that's not really how the brain is designed to work. It's designed to be integrated between the left and the right hemisphere. And the right side is much more about context and big picture and story and all those things. And I believe that the right hemisphere is where our immaterial mind communicates with God. That's where I think that happens. Because you have to get into it, right? That's a big idea. Haven't written about that.

Jo Hargreaves: Ooh, I love it.

Dr. Lee Warren: But that's a big idea. And I think it I think it's right. And I think somebody needs to write about it at some point. Maybe you can write that book. But but in the right hemisphere of your brain, you can't just turn it on and operate. You have to get quiet and still to sort of get that part of your brain to be more active because it's it's it's it's loud and invasive like the left side is the left side jumps up and gets your attention and says this is happening. This is a fact. This is the thing you need to take action on the right side. Like, hang on a second, maybe.

Jo Hargreaves: No.

Dr. Lee Warren: Maybe it's not that, you know, but it's quieter, right? So I start in the mornings with intentional time of Bible study, prayer and worship with this idea of trying to just calm myself down and get my there's this app called Lectio 365 that Pete Gregg from the UK, right? I use it every day. Lisa and I do that together every day. And one of the things he always says is, as I enter prayer now, I pause to be still, to breathe slowly, to re-center my scattered senses. on the presence of God. And I see that in my mind, I can see my brain like being part of that re-centering my scattered senses. And I try to think about my corpus callosum. This is really nerdy. I've never said this out loud to anybody. But your corpus callosum is the integrating part that connects the two halves. And it's mostly inhibitory, which means it mostly calms things down that are coming in rather than firing things up. So it's trying to say, take a breath, slow down, because the Bible says in Isaiah 30, Verse 15, in quietness and trust is your strength. And it turns out that really resonates with me as a neurosurgeon. And I'll get to the, this is a long answer to your question, but I'll get to the answer in a second. But as a neurosurgeon, most of the time when I'm in the middle of a difficult operation and I've got an aneurysm that's about to rupture or a nerve that's under a lot of pressure, I have to do two things at the same time with the instrument that's in my hand. I have to, I have to sort of use force and strength to push something out of my way. but still at the tip of that instrument be very delicate to dissect something or move something. I've got to be able to use big muscles and little muscles at the same time with the same hand. And that's what I see my brain and my mind needing to do is to say there's big things happening in your life. There's going to be scary stuff today. There's going to be alarming things. There's going to be trouble, but there's also good things happening at the same time. And if you're going to see those, You got to be delicate and thoughtful and you can't just charge ahead all the time. You got to take a moment and take a breath and quietness and trust is your strength. So I try to spend some time in the morning thinking ahead. What parts of my day are likely to throw these bombs at me? What moments are going to be stressful? And because I know how neuroplasticity works, that your brain wires in what you focus on and what you repeat and what you pay attention to, then I want to start building, like you said, building a thought life that's going to supply me with some things that will help me when I'm under those stressful moments because my left hemisphere and my automatic thoughts and feelings are going to be loud in those moments. And I want to remember that while I'm reacting to the loud stuff, I still need to be really delicate with the other end of that instrument.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: And so I see that in my mind in the morning as part of my, I'm worshiping, I'm quieting myself, I'm humbling myself before God, I'm putting myself in a position of receiving to get that right side of my brain to be more aware and alive and giving me context and nuance and big picture stuff. And then I'm going to also try to bring my frontal lobe, my left side frontal lobe online to give me that more decisive, articulating, defining thing, but not to be so loud about right? And then to center them. And so I think if you want to get ahead of your day, and you want to get onto this process where metacognition becomes your friend, and you're not overanalyzing, you're not stressing all the time, and you're not reacting all the time either, then the way to do it is to be intentional about setting some thought processes and some filters on what your day is likely to be about. And then running some repetition in your mind of how am going to handle this? What am I going to say when I feel this?

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: because since your brain doesn't know the difference between something that's really happening and something you're just anticipating, you can flip that to be helpful to you. So instead of being anxious about it, you're being, you're sort of being analytical about it. And you're saying, I'm going to build some repetition so that when I'm actually in that situation, the default becomes more helpful to me than harmful. And so that's how I address it, Joe. It's a long answer.

Jo Hargreaves: it's an incredible answer. It's an incredible one and it's got so, it's so, in a way actually there's this beautiful simplicity to it of like an intentional start to the day, an intentional overview of what's going to happen but then there's so many layers and that's what I love this work. of the layers, but also the fact that they just all point us to an incredible, I would believe, and I know you would too, an incredible creator God who's knitted us together, who's decided these things. And I love this idea of the left and the right. I mean, I've actually never made my way through fully through in McGill Chris's book around the left and the right. It's intense. Yeah. But I know again to mention Perri Anne Brownback, she talks about step right.

Dr. Lee Warren: Let's try it.

Dr. Lee Warren: That's long.

Jo Hargreaves: like how when I'm getting kind of analytical and all that all that kind of stuff how can I step right and she talks about stepping right into wonder and I read something recently and I'm going to be really honest I can't remember if it was some peer-reviewed research or something I saw on TikTok I can't remember I can't remember one but I know there was something that I read and it's just locked in my brain somewhere about how wonder lives predominantly in the right hemisphere and how wondering in of itself is calming to the amygdala. Do you think that that's got truth in it or is that TikTok psycho bubble?

Dr. Lee Warren: No, I think it's true. I think it's really true. you can see evidence of it in stroke patients. My brother, I've talked about this before publicly, my brother had a big stroke, right hemisphere stroke when he was 43 years old. He had endocarditis and some bacteria went to his brain and caused a massive stroke. And he recovered really well. He can't move his left arm, but he has a very left brain life because his right hemisphere is out for the most part. And so a lot of what McGilchrist writes about is, is you can see it in people like my brother that have had right hemisphere strokes. And he's lost that kind of awe and wonder feature of his life. things are, things are flat for him. They're, facts for him. And you don't see that sort of, wow, look at that sunset, you know, like that you see from the right side. So I think it's real because I can see it in my patients. I can see it in my brother. And I can see it in people who are too busy to notice. the things around us, the things that are always there. You the day we buried my son, Joe, I wrote about this in one of my earlier books. The day we buried my son, our first granddaughter was born on the same day. And so our daughter, who was supposed to be at her brother's funeral, wasn't there because she was delivering her baby in Texas. We were a thousand miles away. And we weren't there with her to experience that joy because we were engaging in this, you know, this devastating loss of our son. And so it was this brutal sort of day, but at the same time, it had all this light mixed in with it because we were getting text messages, you know, she's, she's nine centimeters, the baby's coming, Scarlett's arrived, she's healthy, everybody's okay. You know, so we're getting pictures and, and we're at the funeral and we're getting text messages with, good news at the same time. And so we were able to see like, left hemisphere stuff. is a fact that my son is dead. It's a fact and it's not negotiable and it's always going to be that way and it's dark and it's heavy and it's sad and it's brutal. But at the same time, there's all this wonder and beauty and magical stuff that's happening on the same day, in the same moment, and both are equally true. And I think you have to see that, that you have to have both of those things in your life if you want to be a fully realized

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: human. And I think if you want to tolerate and survive a lot of the things that happen to most of us, because if you don't, if all you can see is the hard stuff, that something devastating happens to you and it becomes defining of you, you probably got clients like this, right? There's somebody that you know, that 20 years ago, their husband cheated on them or their child died or something horrible happened. And every time you talk to them, that's the thing that's on the tip of their tongue, like still. 20 years later, it's the defining thing of their entire life, right? They never were able to move past it. We know from good research, Mary Frances O'Connor and others have written about complex grief and how people get stuck. And it's all related to this anterior cingulate gyrus problem that gets in the cingulate gets sort of stuck like a gear shift. And they just can't move on emotionally. There's this verse in Isaiah 48 10 that says, I have been refined. in the furnace of suffering. Right? And so you kind of come to this choice of, you going to be defined by this suffering or are you going to be refined by it? And it's a binary choice. It can't be both. you either, I can tell you, like Lisa, I think would agree with me on this, but I'm a fundamentally better and more complete human being 13 years after the death of my son than I was before I lost him. And it's not a good thing that I lost him. It's the worst thing I've ever been through. But it clarified some things about what my life was for. it helped me to see some purpose. it burned away from me some things that furnace of suffering metaphor really resonates with me because there were some stuff in my life that didn't need to be there and wasn't important. And I thought it was, you know, about who I was and what I was for and all that stuff. and having gone through that crucible, like now, so 13 years later, it's the loss of my son remains the hardest thing I've ever been through, but it's not the first thing on my thought process every day when I wake up. And if you say, how's it going? I'm not likely to say, well, you know, I was just thinking about my son. Like, it's not the first thing. He's not no less real or important than he ever has been, but his loss has become something that's helped me to clarify my purpose, and that's why it's bearable. Right? And so... think this ability to say right hemisphere is super important. you lose all in wonder and all that stuff, you lose a big quality part of your life. Left hemisphere is super important, but both are there for a reason because there are good things and bad things happening in all of our lives, all of the time. And if we want to survive and find meaning and purpose and hope and happiness and all that important stuff, we have to be able to acknowledge that even when we're suffering, there's still good stuff.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah. Wow, that's really spoken into some of the deep stuff that the human stuff that we work through and walk through and that is so, that is the reality of our humanity, isn't it? Of holding those things. And it's interesting as we, as I even do this of like holding both things that actually like the left and the right hemisphere as well. And the gift of them working together. And when you talk about that, I'm just thinking, because my mind always goes to scripture and you never want to reduce somebody's deep pain and suffering to a platitude. But a scripture is different, isn't it, of God working all things together for good for those who love him. That that's something that can be actualized and operationalized in our life, but also at a neurobiological level as well.

Dr. Lee Warren: That's right. And Romans 8 28 is that verse and nobody should ever, I'm just giving a little prescription here. Nobody should ever say that to you at your son's funeral, right? Like that's not a verse you should quote early in someone's grieving process, but it turns out to be one of the things that actually helps you when some time has gone on to start seeing, hey, there are some good things. that are coming out of this. And one of them is, I mean, just as an example of the work that you're doing, the work that I'm doing, when you put yourself out there in the space of, I figured some stuff out that might help other people, right? You get an email once in a while that says, hey, I was gonna kill myself. And then I stumbled across your podcast and you talked about your son and you survived it. Maybe I can too, you know, that sort of thing. And then you start seeing that Victor Frankel thing where he said suffering becomes less so when you give it purpose. Right? And so I think bereaved parents can find this idea that if they can find a way to give voice to their child and what they've been through, then their life still means something and they can still help other people and that loss isn't so senseless anymore. It's not so purposeless. And that becomes something real for you. So you see all these people that start foundations and start nonprofits and stuff to try to honor their child. And that's their work is trying to turn loss into legacy. Like I said earlier, And that turns out to be true. And Romans 8.28 is 10 years after you've been through something really hard. You can look back and you can say, you know, God did work some things out. And it doesn't say, it's often misquoted, it doesn't say God works everything into something good. It says God works out everything for the good of those who love him. And so what that means is it's good that I'm a better person than I was. profession and I was identified as who I was, as what I did. And I thought being a neurosurgeon was the most important thing in the world and all this stuff, all the stereotypical doctor stuff. And now I'm like, my purpose is not to perform surgery. Like my purpose is to help other people find their way to God, to figure out what's hurting them and what to do about it. And I can do that with writing, I could do with podcasting, I did in a conversation like this. or I can do it in the operating room. And so my purpose is broad now and it encompasses everything I do in my life and not just what I do for a living. And so now it means something so much more than it did before I lost my son. And I never would have probably seen that had I not been through that furnace that Isaiah talked

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah, yeah. And there's something hopeful, isn't there, for people who are just so hopeless listening to this, is that, and I love what you say of, that it's almost a retrospective verse. is absolutely, yeah, not the first thing you say or that you write in a condolence card, but that there's always a sense of hope. And I know you've written about this in Hope is the First Dose. Can you tell us a little bit about how hope

Dr. Lee Warren: That's right.

Dr. Lee Warren: Yeah.

Jo Hargreaves: What hope does to us? Well, I guess the basic question is at a brain level, how does me being hopeful change my brain?

Dr. Lee Warren: Well, the first thing is it sets, it gives you the ability to set filters as we talked about that are more positive. So you can start to say, early on, on somebody's deathbed or at the funeral home or leaving the grave site, you don't see into the future that it can feel different than it does right now. And that's where a lot of people get stuck with anxiety or grief or... any of the things that we go through, addictions or traumas, we start to have a very short vision of what the future can look like. It's going to feel like this, it's going to be like this, this is who I am now. And that sort of fixed identity of what the future can look like is hopelessness, right? It's never going to be different than it is now because the social scientists define hope as the sort of ability to believe that you can get there from here, like whatever there is, like... to someplace that feels better, to someplace that's more positive, to someplace where I'm not an alcoholic anymore, or someplace where I can believe my life can mean something again. Whatever there is, you have to believe that you can get there, and that's what hope is. And Eugene Peterson is one of my favorite Christian writers. He wrote this phrase, it's kind of clunky, but when you think about it, it really works. He said, commits us to actions that connect us to God's promises. Hope. commits us to actions that connect us to God's promises. What does that mean? It means, like, if I want to believe and live in God's promises, there's some stuff I've got to do to get to them. Like, I can't sit where I'm at right now and believe that God's going to make it all work out someday. Like, I've got to take some steps towards that promise, right? So, I'm going to take actions that connect me to those promises, and then they're going to start feeling more true as I'm going to see them playing out, right? So, in the brain, It turns out that hope like ignites neurochemicals in a different way so that so that you start thinking again, your brain can't tell the difference between something that's really happening something that you're just imagining, right? You start thinking of things that might feel better in the future and your brain says, okay, I'm going to give you a little dopamine reward that will ignite your motivation system and maybe you'll start taking some of those actions. So when we get that little kick of dopamine, it's supposed to motivate us to do something to

Jo Hargreaves: Yes.

Dr. Lee Warren: to create the engine that's going to give us more dopamine, right? That's the basis of motivation. It's also the basis of addiction. So we use it for motivation to help us instead of hurt us, right? So when you start thinking, maybe it can feel different if I believe God and I just take that step to sort of trust Him. He says, hey, all things work together for good for those that love the Lord. Maybe that's true. He says, I have a plan for you, a plan to prosper you, not to harm you. Maybe that's true. He says, the Lord is close to the brokenhearted. Maybe that's true. What can I do to make myself believe that that's true? Well, if I was happier, maybe I would get out of bed today and brush my teeth. I'm going to try that. And then your brain will give you a little dopamine and you feel better. So tomorrow you get out of bed and you brush your teeth without so much effort, right? And we know now there's this interesting part of the brain called the mid anterior cingulate gyrus. And we're talking a little bit further back in the cingulate. that's related to willpower and resilience and grit and all those kinds of things. And this relates to Mary Frances O'Connor's complex grief research too, because that's the anterior cingulate part that gets stuck in complex grief. And it turns out when they look at willpower, what they find is people who can motivate themselves enough to do something when they don't feel like it, like just some little thing. Like you go through some big trauma and you don't feel like getting out of bed. and you don't feel like going back to work and you don't feel like working on your marriage and everything's falling apart and you're drinking and you're numbing yourself and all that stuff. If you can just say, I'm going to make myself get out of bed and do this one thing that I don't want to do. Your mid anterior cingulate learns from that, that you're capable of doing something that you don't want to do. And so then it creates some more robust connections. That's Hebb's law that neurons that fire together, wire together, begins to lay down some hardware that will enable you then the next time you need to do something harder, the bar of entry is lower. It's not as hard. So your cingulate learns that you're capable of doing hard things that you don't want to do. And it makes it easier for you to do other hard things. And it turns out that the more you sort of force yourself to work towards that promise that you want to believe, the more enabled you are to do so neurologically.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: And then your neurochemical environment starts to become the kind of person who does hard things. Right. And then you find this verse and it stops you in your tracks in Romans three, five, three through five, I think it might be three, three through five. But I think it's Romans five, three through five that says, we know that suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope. And so there's this four step formula. You have to suffer a little bit. You have to become the kind of person who can tolerate and endure some suffering. And then you start to develop the character of being the kind of person who's willing to press through suffering to become more endurable, durable, to develop more endurance, whatever the word is there. And then you start to become that kind of person. And then all of a sudden you become more hopeful, because hope is neurological, right? It creates this neurological environment. And then there's one more thing that the social scientists say. They say, what, is required to develop hope. It's agency and opportunity. So agency means that you believe you can do something about the situation that you're in. And opportunity means that there's a chance for you to actually do that thing. And so now we have this part of our brain that says, if I do something hard, my brain will become better at doing hard things. And if I keep doing that, that will become automated and I'll become the kind of person who is able to do hard things. And then that being that kind of person will make me more hopeful in general across the board and my brain will start setting filters to look for more hopeful opportunities and I'll start finding that when I make steps towards God's promises, they start coming true. And so all he was ever waiting for was for me to step up one time and he's gonna meet me there like the prodigal son's dad ran to him, right? And so there's another weird verse in Joshua. that talks about when the people were finally able to go into the promised land, there was time for them to cross the Jordan River. And he says, tell the priests to step into the river and then I'm going to part the waters. And the problem we have is we all want the water to part before we're willing to get in there. Right? And the brain says, no, no, no, you got to start, you got to start doing stuff and then I'm going to make it easier for you to do stuff. And then God says, I'm going to give you this character that comes from endurance, that comes from suffering. And then the scientists say, guess what? It turns out that if you want to be more hopeful, you got to do stuff. You got to start making yourself do things. And all of them mesh together in this beautiful, perfect way that proves all along again that God wrote the prescription that science took 2,000 years to figure out.

Jo Hargreaves: This is the stuff that gets me up in the morning. They're incredible. I love those parallels. I love those parallels. I think, again, I should write these things down, but I'm sure I've read something about people who do the hard things. Essentially, I don't know if the right language would be to develop that part of the brain. There's longevity attached to that. That actually, I'm sure maybe I heard it on Andrew Hoonman's podcast.

Dr. Lee Warren: Me too.

Jo Hargreaves: But there's something around health anyway, around doing that. I've been trying to explain that to my kids in the morning when I'm like, brush your teeth, get your shoes on, your brain can do things it doesn't want to do and it's very good for your brain. So I love that. And I love your ability to draw all of these parallels and really dig in. I just quickly danced up at the time. I cannot even begin to believe that we've been speaking 45. I can't. And actually I wrote a whole load of questions down because I thought, I know I'm going to get really distracted. So I'll write some questions down. I've not asked you one of them. I've just, gone into my own head, but what I would love to, and maybe give us a headline that will tie us into the book, because this is what I've just found fascinating and haven't been able to stop mulling over. I first learned about it when Dr. Caroline Leaf said the brain does the mind's bidding. And that piqued my attention. I don't know, 10 years ago, whatever. And then I feel like you've brought that back into my thinking of this, the difference in the nuance between the brain and the mind. And so, I mean, to ask you to highlight that is to do it in injustice. But if you could give us a bit of an idea. And I'd love to ask the question, because I don't know this yet. Where do you think the mind lives? Because I can't make up my mind where the mind lives.

Jo Hargreaves: So help us understand the nuance and if you were going to locate it, do you think it takes up mental real space and mental real estate? Just tell me your thoughts on that. I find it fascinating.

Dr. Lee Warren: Yeah, so if you think about it, Christians have always believed, or are supposed to believe anyway, that there's some part of us that doesn't die when our body dies, right? There's some part of you that's eternal, that's going to live in heaven, that's always there. That's the part that is made in God's image. It's not your arms and legs, and God doesn't have a body like we do. It's your mind. It's your spirit. The Bible conflates the terms mind, heart, and spirit. And I call them mind because I think that's ultimately the mind. is the intellectual immaterial part of you that will live forever. Okay. Your brain is the hardware that allows your mind to interact with the world, with other people in the world around you. Okay. And with God, mean, this hemispheric interaction and embodiment of our mental activity in the hardware of our brain is where we can pray and interact and do all those things. So where is it? I guess it's in the universe. I guess it's the universe. I mean, guess all of our consciousness collectively is the immaterial part of what is not physical and structural. It sounds weird to say that, but when you die and they put your body in the ground or cremated or whatever happens to your body and your brain dies and disappears, there's still Joe Hargraves out there. And that's your mind. Okay. Where does it live? It's immaterial. Just like where does God live? God lives everywhere because he's a spirit.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: And the physics of where mind and matter come together, where the immaterial and the material connect, there's actually some quantum physics experiments now around a particle. This is super nerdy, but there's a particle called a exciton polariton. That is the particle that becomes real when light is turned into matter. And there's some evidence now that that happens in your brain and your spinal fluid in the caverns of your ventricles. There's some research around this. So that might be an ability someday for scientists to say, yeah, when you pray, this immaterial thing turns into material energy in your brain and it happens in your spinal fluid through excitons and polaritons. That might be the physics of how God does what he says. I stumbled onto a concept recently where I think, and this is a another hour-long podcast, probably someday for us, But when God says something, it's almost always like an inside joke, like an onion that's got multiple layers to it. It's always true on every level that it can be true. So like when God says, for example, that let there be light and that Jesus and John, it says, by Him everything was made, everything that was made was made through Him and by Him and for Him, right? It means that when he made light, and God is light, that he was creating the thing that ultimately would interact with the physical parts of our body and convert immaterial stuff to material stuff. it's a big answer that we can't even possibly scratch the top off of here. But mind is that part of you that's not physical, that doesn't live anywhere because it's everywhere. And brain is the physical structural organ through which mind interacts with the world around you.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: Okay, does that make sense?

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: Okay, now you can put somebody you can put somebody in a functional MRI scanner in the 21st century now, and you can examine what their brain is doing chemically and metabolically at baseline when they're not particularly thinking about anything, right? And then you can say, Okay, Mr. Johnson, move your right thumb and you can see what part of the brain is involved in moving the right thumb. But you can't put somebody in a scanner and tell where their thoughts come. This is a parlor, sort of a magic trick that neuroscience has been playing on us for a hundred years. When they say your thoughts come from your brain, that's an assumption because they believe in something called materialism, which means everything is the stuff it's made from, including you. But there's no science that has ever demonstrated that thoughts come from brain activity because they don't. They're a mental event. Now there are some neurological events that trigger things that you think about, chemical events and feelings and automatic thoughts that your brain has stored. But innovative, real new thoughts don't come from brain matter, they come from mind. And so the reason I can say that confidently is because there's so much science research now that says we can't figure out where in the brain thoughts come from. And so mind and brain, two totally different things and that gives you incredible hope and opportunity because you're not stuck with the brain that you have.

Jo Hargreaves: Yeah.

Dr. Lee Warren: Because neuroplasticity works by directing your mental energy to changing what your brain becomes structurally, that means that Romans 12.2 is actually not about your brain. It's not about neuroplasticity. When Romans 12.2 says, renew your mind, it's talking about what happened in Romans 12.1. Romans 12.1 says, present your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, as an act of worship. So brain is part of body and neuroplasticity is how the mind makes the brain do its bidding, like Dr. Leaf said.

Jo Hargreaves: wow, okay, that's incredible and also make me think, gosh, okay, I need to undo that, I need to unlearn that, I need to rethink that. That is incredible and it answers in the most sophisticated way. The question I remember asking my science teacher when I was about 14 of what's a thought? Where does a thought come from? What is it? And I just remember it was very, I mean, lovely guy, but I wasn't very satisfied by his answer. And so that...

Dr. Lee Warren: Nah.

Dr. Lee Warren: Hahaha.

Jo Hargreaves: I think you're right, I think there's a whole other podcast in there. But for now, some of, well, a lot of what you've talked about, we can read more about in your book. I'm gonna write, I will put links to that, will send, will, Amazon links, all that kind of stuff in our show notes. But if you can just tell people.

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you.

Jo Hargreaves: I guess where they can buy the book if it isn't Amazon. I know that in the UK that's where I bought my copies from. So where we can find you online and tell us a bit about your podcast because I know that people have probably to be honest paused this to go off and find all of that stuff and then find it already. But if you could give us a bit of a headline, where can we connect with you?

Dr. Lee Warren: Sure. My website Dr. Lee Warren, just drleewarren.com, no period or anything. You can get the podcast, my weekly newsletter on Substack like you. And then the books, all my books are there. But Amazon in the UK is probably the best place. I don't know if any of your physical bookstores have it, but certainly Amazon does. And we love to interact with people. So I communicate with people, write people back sometimes. And so easy to get ahold of drleewarren.com. Everything about me is there.

Jo Hargreaves: love it. Thank you so much. We've also, I know that this is on your sub stack and my sub stack and maybe in other places, but we've done a previous podcast before. And I, we've done, we've done a call together with the Faithfield Collective. So if you remember the Faithfield Collective and you've missed that, you can find that. But for now, Dr. Lee Warren, thank you so much. Thank you for your time. I know that you're incredibly busy, hugely in demand. So I'm really grateful. that you've taken this time. I'll put everything that you've mentioned in the show notes so people can access that. Bless you and thank you so very much. God bless the amazing work that you're doing.

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you, Joe.

Dr. Lee Warren: Thank you, God bless you too, my friend. Thank you.