tv Book Discussion CSPAN September 8, 2014 5:21am-6:04am EDT
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we think joan of arc was not schizophrenic. joan of arc suffered from hyper religiosity. we can actually induce this with a helmet. we can actually put a helmet that shoots radio into the temporal cortex of the brain and inducing the feeling of being in the presence of god. this is a called a god helmet. and we can actually induce this feeling. scientists of course we like to experiment. we put an atheist inside of the god helmet. [laughter]. that atheist was richard dawkins. we put richard dawkins in the god helmet. and afterwards we asked him, do you feel the presence of god. he said no, no god. they put a catholic nun in the god helmet. the catholic nun was, her belief shaken because you can induce the feeling of god with a switch? and she said no, she said, god made us with a telephone system so that we can communicate with
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god. you can't win. anyway, let me wind up. super geniuses, yet one of many things we talk about in the book some people had a bullet go through the left temporal lobe. one policeman had a injured the left temporal lobe, hitting bottom of the pole. after that they emerged as super mathematical geniuses. tonight when you bo home, do not pick up a hammer. do not hit the left part of your brain thinking you will become the next einstein but it has happened several times in the past. this individual can take one helicopter ride over the harbor in new york and draw the entire, entire skyline of new york city, down to every window and you can see it at jfk airport. next time you land in terminal 1, of jfk look up, you will see this huge mural drawn from
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memory by this individual. of course einstein is the greatest genius of modern times. his brain is still with us today. we have his brain. it is different. not by much but it is different. it is at princeton hospital. well i'm sort of running out of time. so let me just wind up on one note, and if you have further questions, read my book. when i was a kid, growing up, my role model was albert einstein. my favorite einstein story is this. when einstein was an old man, he was tired of giving the same talk over and over and over again. so one day his chauffeur came up to him and the chauffeur said, professor, i'm really a part-time actor. i heard you speak some times, i memorized. why don't we switch places. i will put on a mustache, i will put on a wig. i will be the great einstein giving the speech that you have given some times and you can put on my hat.
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you can put on my uniform and be my chauffeur. so they switched places. this went along famously until one day, until one day a mathematician in the back asked a very difficult question. and einstein thought, oh, the game is up. but enthis shover said, that question is so elementary even my shover here can answer it for you. chauffeur. thank you very much. you've been a great audience. thank you very much. [applause] >> michio kaku spoke to booktv about the future of the mind last weekend. watch that online at booktv.org. coming up next, david theodore george presents his book, "untangling the mind," why we behave the way we do. >> now, i would like to introduce dr. david theodore george, the author of,
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"untangling the mind." in "untangling the mind," dr. george presented us with a virtual owners manuel of the brain, how it works, how it is put together and what outcomes you may expect from the inputs we all make to it every day. s. i think three major parts of the book explain themselves very well. part one, why emotions spin out of control. part two, losing it, extreme behavior. and part three, thankfully, seeking healthy emotions. as dr. george goes through his presentation he will probably explain to you as how these all knit together. why you see such aberrant behavior as road rage, addiction and other extreme and unexpected
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reactions so stimuli. on behalf of the library of congress i present dr. theodore george. [applause] >> thank you very much. it is quite a privilege to be here. you have to keep in mind that i'm a psychiatrist and i'm used to dealing with one-on-one. so, this is a little bit overwhelming for me. anyway what i would like to do is share with you a few thoughts. i guess the first question is, why did i write the book? i've been in practice now for 30 years and seen an awful lot of people and one of the things that impressed me and that there is awful lot of emotional pain at least some of us experience some types in our life. anyway i got together with my writer. david: lisa burger and so we wanted to sit down and every
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time we did, i always said to her, listen, are we going to help people? and so that my guides principle as i tried to write this book, saying, are we going to help people? my ideas sort of, you always look back on these defining moments in your career and i was doing a research study probably 25 years ago and, you know how it is with your doctors. we were at the end of the session. i was walking out of the door and the gentleman said to me, he says, by the way, doctor, he said, sometimes i'm afraid i'm going to lose control and i am going to hit my children. it was one of those questions that, i had not had before. and, but it really has intrigued me now, as a psychiatrist we often look at symptoms, we formulate treatments, but the
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real question that is there is, why do i do these things? why do i do this? and if you look at the news media, just in the last two weeks, you know, all of us are asking, why did robin williams kill himself? he has got everything. he has everything. we all love him. why was he so depressed? these are questions we'll raise in the book as we meet different people to see to try to understand the emotions an behaviors that they have. another defining moment for me in kenya, we flew in this plane, dirt landing. this was taken from the veranda of my hotel room built inside of this little mountain, if you will. the camera was not very good so you can capture it. it was one of the most gorgeous
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places, profound picturesque things i had ever seen. you would see a herd of he will grants, herd of giraffes, gazelles, every animal imaginable you could see in the riverbed riverbed was hippopotamus. monkeys were jumping outside of the room. this is the most beautiful thing i've ever seen. that evening at around 6:00 the naturalist came and we went out on a van. when we did, the first thing he said to us, was, under no circumstances do you ever get out of this van. it is not safe. all of this sudden this serene atmosphere was changed and it was all about survival if you will. cheetah mama looking after her
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two cubs. what you can't see, she just taught him how to kill an antelope for them to survive. she scanned environment looking around. the analyst says, if she were to leave them, they would be dead. they could not defend themselves. so basically this was sort of a defining process for me to look at nervous system with survival. we response to threat and pursuit of rewards. when you think about threats, it is obvious when somebody has a gun to your head that you feel threatened. but if you look at the nervous system, it is much more profound than that. it may be a look, a tone of voice, everybody married can relate to that. it could be somebody saying, i
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don't love you anymore. it could be that you lost your job. just feeling like somebody is looking down on you in sort of disrespecting you. in other words, think broadly when you think of threat. the other is pursuit of reward. we don't have much time today so i will not get into it. it all makes sense in terms of that we pursue food, we pursue air, sexual behaviors all of this is for survival. one of the 10 nets of the book when we look for pathways, drive for things get taken over t source of -- sort of tries to understand the rationality we see of addictions of a person can be drinking. they have cirrhosis of the liver. they are going to lose their
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family. they're going to lose their job. they will sit in treatment with me and say, doctor, i will never drink again. so do it. how do we begin to understand this sort of irrational side of human behavior? i would like to introduce you to a couple of people you will meet in the book. a couple is mr. wilson. he was sort after favorite of mind to talk about, because i think we all can identify with him. he wasn't quite sure why he came. his wife told him to come. but when you got to know him, he was dealing with issues all of us was dealing with. he was dealing with a child. he was dealing with work. he was dealing with finances. and. as far as his child was concerned and both he and his wife loved this girl dearly.
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she was having a lot of problems. she got into drugs. she got into alcohol. she was cutting herself. she was depressed. she and his wife were debating what to do. lisa capturedded it, my coauthor said, they kept revisiting the same issues. all of us can identify, you get stuck in the loops. as you got to know mr. wilson, there were other features about him as well. you could tell he had an anger problem. sometimes at work, it is hard with my boss. he is that kind of a guy. he is micromanager. i got into it with him. probably shouldn't have. but he reserved it. not too many sessions later he cops in, says, well, lost my job because of cutbacks.
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work was a problem for him. one night he comes in and recounts the story and he said, you know, i came home and my wife wasn't there. and, he said, i was really nervous. did she leave me? so he calls her on the cell phone and, she is out shopping. and so he said, i was furious. did she not know that we don't have money for this? and she is disrespecting me. he starts to drink. and she comes home. she is furious at him. she hates his drinking. she calls him a loser. and, he says, that's it. i'm out of here. tries to leave. she says, oh, no, you're not leaving me this time. i'm tired of you walking away from me. tries to block him. around there is a push that takes place. so in other words, how can we begin to understand mr. wilson?
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so what i would do is give you a little reference points when you talk about it in the brain because it is helpful for me to conceptualize it. i gave you a bunch structures here because this is taken out of the book and we talk about a number of structures. the ones i want you to focus on are the cortex here. this is the going to be overriding, not process, collision making, put on emotions. another structure going into the imgidala in your temporal lobe. one you probably haven't heard much about the gray. these are one of the major tenets, tenets of the book is to talk about my pag. and so what it is, it is in the mid-brain, tiny structure runs
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along this ventricle canal here. and i didn't expand upon it here. so you see this, sort of diagram, to me it is not particularly helpful but it is the best that i could do. you see this columns of neurofibers running through this mid-brain and embedded in it are going to be clusters of neurons that have a specific job. so you're going to see here that there is these active neurons to process the environment and then there are more passive neurons. just as an aside, this is highly innovative with the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. you begin to see the mind body connection. so what i want to do now is to just sort of give you a model in terms of how i process all the
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information and build upon it to understand mr. wilson. what you have here is sensory input. we sort of take it for granted. but if you think about it, this is critical for survival. just imagine walking through a dark alleyway, at midnight and you're all alone and you hear a noise or you see a face coming at you. so in other words, this is, this is really important because it could make a difference whether you live and die. you have sensory input from your body whether you make a big difference whether you live or die. if you have chest pain, it could make a big difference. this sensory input will come into your nervous system. it will process in two major directions. it will come up through the cortex and have multiple synapses. it will take time but give you a
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very precise approximation of what your environment is. the other thing it will do is come down to the a mig dal la. and it will be extremely fast. amygdala is interesting. what it is doing is processing your sensory input out of your conscious awareness. it is that fast. it will pick up those sites. it will pick up those sounds. it will pick up the facial expressions that make you feel like you're nothing. and you will begin to react to this. the way a certain neuroscientists talks bit dealing with animals you see a wigley line and react to it, that is a snake. if you look longer, no, it is a branch. in other words the branch is the cortex. the snake is a a mig dill la. -- amygdala.
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that to me is really going to be the sort of the future of psychiatry, the future of neuroscience, trying to see how do we process our environment in the sensory input. it will be a function of genes. it will be a function of our past experience, et cetera. and then you have output behaviors. that is taking place in the pag. you all heard of fight and flight? that is where i really believe they have a final pathway that is coming out. so in other words, you have all of the sensory information that is being processed but now but now it has final common pathway organized in pag. you have fight there. you have fight. another another one there you don't hear about is shut down. and then predatory behavior. associated with what is going to be emotions.
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do you ever look at emotional literature. to me it is complicated literature. the way i process it is, emotions are there to drive behavior. hard for me to fight if i'm not angry. hard for me to flee if i'm not fearful. and et cetera. so depression is going to drive shutdown. and you don't, i can't think of an emotion that is going to drive predatory behavior. what i like about this is, now you have the model where you begin to see that all of these emotions, all of these behaviors in and of themselves are not wrong. it is the context in which they occur. that could be angry. that could be bad or it doesn't
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have to be appropriate. so what you have is, this processing is on like a rio stat. and theoretically it should work so that it is commensurate with the stimuli that you're dealing with. where pathology comes about is when, you find yourself sitting on one of these buttons, experiencing east motion and behavior when it is not connected to the environment and situation that is driving it. what i want to do is just spend now a few minutes looking at all these different behaviors and emotions. fight, we all talk about but what is it? where i got interested when i was studying domestic violence and i gave you a illustration what you saw here with mr. wilson. so in other words, to me, the biology of it or the animal model would be, the halloween cat. if you look at that cat, he gets
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boxed into a corner and, his tail comes up, first stands up, sideways, puffs up its longs, and shows its teeth, his at you and fundamentally, that cat is afraid. it is trying to say, stay away from me. so that basically was mr. wilson i've done number of studies of people with this problem. the thing interesting to me. we did pet scans, we showed correlations between glucose metabolism between the cortex and amygdala were not very well-connected with individuals compared to controls. so basically as i see it, the ability to inhibit sensory input isn't there. so they see something, they hear something and they overreact and they can't dampen it down. another feature about it very
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intriguing to me, i was studying individuals, many times they were chronically angry. my training was, let's figure out why you're angry. you sit there and you talk to them and talk to them and finally you realize, i don't think there is a great reason here. you're just angry. [laughter] that is really a critical thing when you start to study this and to understand it because you start to see the importance of those connections between the cortex and the amygdala and driving you out here into these behaviors. another thing you noticed about mr. wilson was he was drinking. a large number have a alcohol problem. think they feel out of control. alcohol fills part of that vied that is there. the major problem is, it drives the behaviors just that much faster.
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if you're prone to become violent, you're more prone to be violent if you're drinking. road rage, same kind of thing. another point that is there that is fascinating is, that when you're involved in this particular button, when you're sitting on it, your mind sees the world as a threat. you become very focused whatever the enemy is that you perceive, and you then have the mind-set, i am right. i'm so justified. it makes sense the body would do this. what if i'm wrong, they could be right. you know, i never survive. i'm right. that's it. we're going to do it. in other words that is sort of this constellation that you will see here. touch on flight, for example. we saw it with him. gets threatened. he says, i'm out of here. that is the flight type of
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behavior. i touch on this in the book. really it is not part of this story but it is so powerful when you think about it. the power of fear in our lives. it's a great thing if there is a tiger outside of my door. so many people live on button much fear. there is no tiger out there. it is very incapacitating. it is hard to talk about. it doesn't make any sense. it is irrational. why should i be afraid but i am. it takes so much energy. almost like i'm treading water, three feet of water and, entire time, stand up. you don't understand, i can't. so just takes so much energy and is so hard. smut down. saw it a lot in mr. wilson. he was dealing with the job. dealing with his daughter. comes home, just leave me alone. can't handle anymore stimuli.
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depression never made any sense to me. it is an ugly emotion. people feel terrible in depression. then i read an article back in 2001 or so by bandler. what he did was he stimulated the pag and the animal became into itself. and he called it, going passive. i read this, like bingo, finally i have a model now to begin to understand of depression. and so basically, it would make sense that the body would do this. supposing you just been out in oklahoma. you've had tornado come through. you've lost your house. you have had several family members to die. going into shutdown is like a
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shot of novocaine into your nervous system. it numbs you. it gives you a little bit of distance. it is not that it takes you all away. it somehow moves enough to begin to deal with it. emotionally it makes sense, other thing it makes sense, i've been out to battle. i have fought and i am wounded. so i have to heal. if i didn't go into this state i would keep right on going. in other words, it serves the other physiological role. and you see now, again we come back to this reostat and you can get into this thing and be depressed for no reason. that is what i see with so many people when they come in is that, there is no great reason. they're just sitting on this button. predator. not saying much about it. it is fascinating thing. i don't see the people.
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they don't come into to me, say, hey, doc, i'm a real predator. occasionally i will see them and what goes on in your mind? it is a distance that takes place. they don't have the same fear conditioning that we do. they can't appreciate apathy. not apathy. empathy. they can't relate to your pain. in other words you begin to understand it. here again it is all on a button society loves you if you have sort of got that propensity to be a predator around go get bin laden. if you're president of a company and getting out another company. there is good side to it. there is a bad side to it. the last one i thought i would do is talk a little bit about posttraumatic stress disorder. in order to do this, i thought i what i would do is take a little
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audience involvement here. does, person in the book that you're going to meet by the name of carol. what i want you to do, i want you to picture that you are carol. begin to say, how would i feel if i was here. this is woman i met a long time ago. she was a young girl at the time when this thing occurred. and she was at a party. had a little bit to drink. she was with three other girlfriends. and, she was driving home. and as she did, something happens, so fast, couldn't even remember. the car flipped. she had her seatbelt on and she was okay. the other two girls, they ejected out of the car. were dead. and then they the other girl was in the back seat and she vividly described the screams and the
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fear that were in that person's eyes as she was trying to get her out of the car. she ended up dying as well. she says, that you know, she just sort of shrinked away from the accident in a numb sort of state and ended up at home. i want you to sort of picture, get yourself into her shoes. what would it be like? and basically i think what you would see, you would see, thoughts coming back into you, scenes coming back at you, of that ask of that girl that had the fear in her eyes. you would be trying to get rid of those thoughts. i have don't want to think about them. put them out of my mind. you can't put them out of your mind. you would be startled. and then, you would have a host of emotions.
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what basically ptsd will disconnect your cortex from the amygdala, it will give you all the emotions. move you from anger. why did i do this? what was wrong with me. total fear what would this mean? then there is legitimate part and panic goes on top of it. there is the part about going numb. i can't feel anything. it is just over. then you have other symptoms there. you are five hours later you are at home. are you going to feel happiness? are you going to feel joy? one to me perhaps the most interesting is, do i see a future? at this particular point in time my life is over. i don't know how i am going to go on. so basically what you've done now, you in your mind have con octobered symptoms you would experience as i think you would with ptsd as i listen to people
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that have it. in other words, ptsd makes perfect sense if you're in a war, because, if i forget the enemy, if i powerforget the threat i could die. the sense of you're ready to go to flight, to flee for survival. and thin the other one that you've got is you've got got a future. if i'm sitting there, two months i'm going home, to be with the fam lie, i'm not focused on the war. i have to be focused right now. i can't be thinking about the future. in other words all these symptoms come together and they make so much sense. the problem is, that some people, it stays there. it drags on and keeps bothering
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them. so in other words this is very difficult thing to experience. that i'm very passion fat about, we understand war. the other things that see that are driving it to me are very troublesome. growing up in a home not safe. it is domestic violence. it is, man, some of our streets, you know, there are places, i hear it all the time, when i deal with people that have been from the inner city. sure somebody died. someone got shot the other day. the way it is. we accept this in our society. other one there, with large cases of ptsd, is sexual abuse, the power of what this does to the nervous system. in other words one thing i forgot to mention about the gal is important. she tries to go to sleep that
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night. and her mind is racing. she can't shut it off. and shy learns, well if i drink some alcohol, i can get some sleep, i can get some distance. the problem is, it just makes it that much worse the next day. it is not the answer to the problem. and then you know you start to look okay, what are the ramifications of this ptsd? we talk about trying to get people to read, to schools, make students best they can be. if i am suffering from ptsd, and i have no future, am i going to be that interested in learning, will i be that motivated to say, hey, man, i will get out there to think about college and what i am going to do, there is no future. my life is over. that sense of being out of control.
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so you move from internal sense of control, to an external sense of control. perhaps then you would join a fanning or you know, i wonder about some of these people that i see with terrorist activities, you know, it is an external control that takes care of all these emotions. then all you have to do is imagine that person is stuck in anger button, so right. i am so justified. put a pause on it and you begin to understand, some of the human behavior that we see. i like to close with one of my favorites. barney is the one you will meet in the last chapter. and this is a gentleman who is 80 years old. i still see him standing at door. he is so fired up. he has fire in his eye. i said, barney, come on in.
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so he has his wife in tow. i said, barney, what's the matter? he says to me, he says, doctor, i can't stand her anymore. [laughing] and, i said, well, barney, i said, when did it start? >> he said 40 years ago. and my point is we laugh but i think, you know, what would their lives had been, if he had the ability to face who he was, to face the situation, and say, i'm going to deal with this? and, you know, that is sort of the parting thoughts that you know i want to leave you with is this gps system we all have. we have times in our life where we have quote, missed the exit. and we have that lady that comes on and says, redirecting your path. and sometimes we hate her but
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she is really our friend and sometimes, you know, if we make that extra turn, we'll have a different road. it will be a different experience but it can still be very meaningful. that is the hope i want to leave with you, is that the power of human mind and spirit to change and to, get healthy. and, i think we've got tremendous medications, tremendous therapies that are out there that can really help us and i want to leave with you a sense of hope. thank you. [applause] anybody have any questions?
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yes? >> [inaudible]. >> the question was, so many people up to the age of 28, as we say, label things with anxiety. to me anxiety is much more difficult concept to put your finger on. he is probably a portion of that pag, and cortex and amygdala gets disconnected to make us more vigilant. how do you make something, somebody names it blue, somebody names it gray. it is a naming problem that takes place. i see it as at least a readying
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this system here is simplistic because it's about survival. and i -- then it really does -- the only way to me life makes any sense is if you are responsible. otherwise we just become -- life doesn't matter. and so we try to address this issue in one of the chapters there, in terms of responsibility, and you are going to have to know yourself, and it's going to be -- listen, i know i have a problem with anger. and so now what am i going to do about it? and i seek help. one thing i've been excited about, did a study where treated people with domestic violence, and if you take an
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antidepressant like prozac, makes a huge difference. i won't be as angry and i'm going to have an extra second to think before i go off. and this is independent of depression. the next thing is, i have to assume responsibility. i know that if i do this and drink, i'm going to probably have a problem. that's something i need to do. if you look at it the same as any other medical illness, if have polyps in my colon, i have to get a colonoscopy at least once a year to keep up with it. may not want to but that's the fact of life and that's assuming responsibility for my nervous system. yes? >> you talked about how depression was a shutdown of the body. i was wondering if that could trigger an actual physical shutdown of the body, like with eating disorders and anorexia, if the depression could lead to physical shutdown?
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>> well, i mean, the question -- you heard the question -- that's where i just tried to introduce this concept of the mind/body connection, and for me, i also trained as an internal medicine doctor, and it is so exciting to put those two together. if you look, for example, at fight, think about what the body is trying to do. it is going to good out there and it's going fight the enemy, and when it's on that button, it's anticipating that there could be in injuries that take place. and so, in other words, now you start to see that people that have an anger problem have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. there's clotting factors that are going to be involved. and there's going to be -- the body is preparing itself for
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battle and then to heal. depression will also have some of those things that there are as well. and it's going to be activating more of your parasympathetic nervous system, ties intoure gout, and you begin to under how there can be an interaction between the mind and the body. one of the most dramatic case is ever had -- i love the case -- referred to me and it was woman that had not eat 'or drank anything in a year and a half. every time she weapon to drink she would gag and cooperate keep it down. so she hat a peg in place and they were feeding her directly into her stomach. and so they had done all these tests, couldn't come up with anything. so finally they referred her to a psychiatrist, and so i did electroconvulsive therapy on her, and within three treatments this woman was back to eating normally.
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