Back from the dead | Nicholas Kardaras | TEDxUrsulineCollege

five I am really really happy to be here I must say but truth be told I'm happy to be anywhere and and if I really have to be quite candid I'm really extremely grateful to be alive and and that's why I'm especially happy to be here to be present because almost fifteen years ago I was dead and I don't mean that metaphorically I don't mean that as a figure of speech I mean that in the clinical sense heart-stopping asystolic what the doctors call a systolic four hour over an hour and fifteen minutes and and that's a real eye-opener to be dead for that long so I'd like to talk a little bit about that near-death experience the power of transformation that could come from that addiction which is part of the interweaving dynamic because we've heard a lot today about purpose and I can talk to you a little bit about the lack of meaning and purpose in one's life and what that might lead to and also I also want to touch upon what I see today as probably the most insidious and pervasive addiction affecting a whole generation and that's technology so when when I began to understand this idea of purpose the first person I became aware of that really spoke so really wonderfully in my mind was Viktor Frankl and you know some of you may be aware of Victor Frankel's seminal work man's search for meaning which interestingly was originally titled when he wrote it in 1946 man's search for meaning the original title was in spite of everything choose life and those of you who aren't familiar with Viktor Frankl Viktor Frankl was a 39 year old psychiatrist from Vienna a psychiatrist from Vienna has that for a shock but he was a 39 year old psychiatrist in Vienna who was sent to Auschwitz with his bride Tilly who had been married to for about a year at that point his mother his brother and his sister his mother died in the gas chambers his brother died in the mines of Auschwitz his sister did survive and went to Australia and and he also survived but what he saw out of that and this is the great work that we learned from Viktor Frankl is that there was this idea that through the struggle of survival in the concentration camps that struggle can be a source of meaning for some people that in that struggle can be life in that struggle can be a sense of I will survive not to quote Gloria Gaynor but I will survive and and that was a powerful idea that he came away with from his life and when I first began to get aware of some of Victor Frankel's work in my own clinical practice and in my own life I also began to conceptualize a corollary to that that yes struggle can forge one sense of purpose in one's life but what if there's not a sense of struggle what if in the absence of struggle how a parent is meaning in one's life and I began to see that for some people the struggle is obvious survival it's a Maslow's hierarchy of needs thing those that have to survive pay the bills for Vout concentration camps my own father was a 14 year old boy in a small village in northern Greece that was overrun by Nazi tanks he had to hide in the mountains as he saw most of the adult males in his village shot and killed he was 14 years old when he went penniless to Athens and forged a life for himself for my father his sense of purpose and meaning was life live support my family my father didn't have time for yoga retreats self-discovery it was live live and survive but I've noticed that the chief of the children of those who have struggled many of us have had parents who survived World War two or the Great Depression or Vietnam and sometimes there's an N UE that can happen in the younger set what's my purpose mom and dad they raised us they had their purpose but what's my purpose and I am regrettably more fortunately one of that generation where my parents struggled so hard to raise bring their family I was I came to the United States when I was three years old we came to New York and life was a struggle for my father and in that cauldron of struggle there's a lot of dysfunction they didn't have dr. Spock books they so it's fair to say that I was raised in a fairly dysfunctional family and I like to call him the Greek stanzas those of you that are familiar with Seinfeld think think of the Costanza is now Greek and that was what my sort of family was like so as a young kid growing up in a middle-class blue-collar part of Queens I couldn't stand it I wanted to escape and my first drug of choice my first escape was when I was seven eight years old the science fiction and Star Trek more specifically I wanted to be with Captain Kirk on to go where no man had gone before I wanted to be somewhere else other than where I was because my family was dysfunctional I didn't like where I lived and I had a sense of drifting and I drifted through high school did well I took tests well so I never really got great grades but I was a good test taker so I went to the Bronx High School of Science which is a good school I got into Cornell which was a good school when I came out I was drifting and I stripped and stumbled into a career that was full of addictive potential I it's a long story but I chanced and through a career as a nightclub owner I started working as a doorman and within a couple of years I got involved in the very empty superficial life that was full of a new kind of escape now I didn't need Star Trek anymore now I had drugs and alcohol and so ten years of that life led me to that that near-death experience cuz my near-death experience my medical reports will tell you that I had a lethal overdose of opiates and stimulants but I'll tell you that what led to that overdose was emptiness a life without meaning in the life for that purpose and usually when people hear that I was I touched the void for so long everybody sort of wants to ask me what was it like what did you see I had been profoundly interested in what lay on the other side even as a kid I used to start about near-death experience I was really interested in what lay beyond was there a white light and what did I experience and I know that we as a culture from the illusion mysteries to the Egyptian mystery cults have been profoundly interested in our death because our death in our conceptualization of death tends to define our lives what I think may lay beyond tends to really affect how I live my life and what I'm here to tell you is I didn't have a white light experience unfortunately or fortunately I don't have a memory of a two-week period from when that happened I did find out when I further when I learned about Kenneth rings where Kenneth ring as a psychologist Murray University of Connecticut who studied near-death experiences that less than 20% of people who have had near-death experiences have the classic white light I didn't have the white light but I had a profound I opened up my eyes no the first thing that I saw when I opened up my eyes in the party a Cornell Presbyterian I opened up my eyes and I saw Marty King Larry King's brother you know Larry King suspenders his brother was getting a bypass and he was in the room next to me and I I was totally disoriented and I opened up my eyes and said where am I and there he was Marty King who looked like Larry King and he said you made it kid it made it and I said where am I and he said you're in the cardiac unit the Cornell Presbyterian your ticker stopped you had a they almost lost you and I said I'll surely I'm in some layer of hell if I'm what I can't believe where I've gotten well I did feel different I felt profoundly different and I had a really really deep existential thirst when I woke up from that moment I said I wasn't put on this earth to do what I was doing and I needed to change my life and that started a really intensive transformation process where I started just going to the library and reading books about philosophy and religion and the nature of consciousness and I went back to school and I realized that purpose was the key my life had lacked purpose and for me purpose also not meant helping other people and so I started working in psychiatric hospitals rehabs I had my own private practice where I dealt with a lot of existential issues and I realized the sense of purpose is really important that people who didn't have this were vulnerable to self-destructive tendencies like I was I saw that in people interestingly I started working with young people like this at around this time I started working with teenagers and I also saw in them this this drift the sense of the sense of I don't know but what was different than you know and that's not new to this generation of teenagers but what I began to see is this generation of teenagers had access to a powerful drug that my generation and our generation may not have had access to and I don't want to be a lot.i but technology was shaping these young people that I was working with and as a recovering person from addiction and as a person who treats addiction and teaches the treatment of addiction I know addiction when I see it and these kids were addicted to their tech and I also know a newie and malaise when I see it and this intersection was happening more powerfully not just attentional disorders not just anxiety the tipping point for me was about eight years ago I was working with a young man who was sent to my office because he was acting bizarrely and he walked into my office and he was blinking and he said where are we and he sat down at my desk and I said do you know where you are do you know where you are and you just kept blinking and i said i'm dr. carr darris do you know who you are and he just said it's this and you looked at my lamp and he said are we still in the game and I said no we're not in the game anymore he'd been playing World of Warcraft for a period of several weeks up until that point and had a gaming induced psychotic break that required a month-long psychiatric hospitalization and psychotropic meds to get him back in touch with reality he had gone through the matrix and not known what was real and what wasn't it might feel they call that their realization it was also going through deep personalization as well where he didn't know if he was real anymore and I began to get really fascinated by that because again I'm an addictions expert I've been through through the looking-glass you know I'm seeing it but now that the substance is different the substance is much more readily available I had to try hard to get my drugs these substances were much much more readily available through our younger youngest most vulnerable and so I started in research and the more I found out the more I would discovered that there was more and more research that was showing that screen time was so profoundly affecting the the brains of our youngest and a lot of this research was out there was in peer-reviewed literature but yet it wasn't getting as prominent and I did a lot work for school districts and I was noticing that school districts were all in on tech iPads for kindergarteners I mean while the research was showing pretty significant things it was shown frontal cortex damage I also teach in neuropsychology as well one of the classes that I teach and that was realizing and what are the researchers were concluding there were about seven or eight studies that were concluding brain gray matter abnormalities and white matter abnormalities in frontal cortex in the left striatum which affects the frontal cortex as some of you may know is the decision-making the executive functioning part of the brain impulse control consequential thinking part of the brain that gets affected by addiction and these same effects were happening in kids that were doing excessive screentime doctor queuing in Belgium the University of Indiana Medical School the Chinese the Chinese were doing an incredible amount of research on gaming and Internet time the Chinese have identified Internet addiction as their number one health crisis the Chinese Health Organization has identified 40 million Chinese teens as being Internet addicted now we don't have that as an official diagnosis yet in this country we have it as in the appendix of the dsm-5 is under review I'm seeing it as the wave of an epidemic that's affecting our youngest and/or brightest what really hit home to me was when I read about an interview of the New York Times a reporter from New York Times interviewed Steve Jobs in 2010 at the unveiling of the iPad and the report has said to Steve Jobs Tech God Steve Jobs the man who invented really this wave of Technology what do your kids think about the iPad and Steve Jobs said they don't own one they don't own one Steve Jobs know something about tech if you know is enough to not let his kids have tech when they interviewed some engineers from Silicon Valley yahoo and google engineers and they asked him where their kids went to school their kids went to non tech waldorf schools the people designing the tech creating the tech somehow weren't letting their kids get onto tech so my point is I'm not a Luddite I'm not anti tech wait I've got a smartphone but I'm I I think my purpose in life now has become to raise awareness about age-inappropriate technology we're seeing some really powerful effects on our most vulnerable so I love my smartphone I love my car I just don't think my seven-year-old twin should be driving it and that's really my point that if we care about this generation we have to be more thoughtful and engaging with them and what this generation needs like we needed is a sense of purpose sense of creativity a sense of connecting with who they truly are because those developmental years our key windows of development and there's this powerful drug called tech is intersected in their lives they may not get to that next developmental stage I'll conclude it by one interesting study that had come out in 1998 1998 tech by the way and they looked at dopamine so we know that how dopaminergic something is dopaminergic meaning how dopamine activating dopamine increasing something is is relevant to how addictive something may or may not be and so in this amazing 1998 study by cope at AU they found okay so baseline level of dopamine is here and let's say eating chocolate is that raises dopamine 50% sexual activity raises dopamine a hundred percent snorting cocaine raises dopamine levels three hundred and fifty percent and crystal meth raises dopamine twelve hundred percent they found that 1998 games for teenagers raise dopamine 100% the same as sex 1998 tech was as dopaminergic as sexual activity now my suggestion is were allowing seven and eight-year-olds to have access to such dopamine activating technology it's just too powerful for them they don't have the ego strength just just say no so that's my that's my whole thesis and that's my whole focus that's giving my life purpose now to try to really engage with parents who care and school administrators who care to raise their awareness to the importance of their kids having purpose and and being careful about the tech that they expose their kids to thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 148,670

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Keywords: Religion/Spirituality, ted, tedx talk, English, ted talk, Lifestyle, tedx, Philosophy, Psychology, Life, TEDxTalks, Health, Culture, tedx talks, ted x, United States, ted talks

Id: Vy2dRxc4Sm4

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 12 2014