Entrepreneur and Author Billy Carson How to Have a Better Brain

[Music] hi billy so nice to meet you thank you thank you for coming i can't wait to get my brain scanned well see what we see it's actually very interesting really yeah our goal is to really get rid of the term mental illness like this is brain health right and who doesn't want a better brain and as an entrepreneur that's your most precious [Music] so tell me your story you were in new york for a little bit and then you moved to florida yeah we had a little bit of a rough go in new york as a kid my father unfortunately was a a alcoholic and a drug addict and so my mom thought that moving to florida to miami would be a a new start um kind of move right into the the den of of all the you know drugs and alcohol but we moved to a place called opalaca in miami which is a really bad place they had a steel gate around the city up until um just a few years ago they called it the triangle because it was shaped like a triangle actually uh and they called the bermuda triangle we lived in the middle of that the cops wouldn't come in there it was killings murder i mean as a kid i would see people getting killed people getting stabbed and it was this normal everyday event really um and how old were you when you moved from new york to i was six going on seven you're six months on seven yeah and so new york is stressful then you move to miami and it gets worse i got way worse yeah and pretty bad i mean it would be nice my parents delivered newspapers at night so they'd be nice when people try to break into the house and i'd have to go get a butcher knife and you know throw over the little dinette table get my brothers and sister behind it the dinette uh one of my brothers had been born so just one brother and one sister at that time and you know standing there all night with a butcher knife you know trying to protect him you know so so yeah pretty hardcore uh place the crossing the school crossing guards would rob you on the way to school and uh the junior high school for that elementary school ended up getting closed down because of all the murders of the kids murdering each other so it's pretty pretty rough spot yeah so then what happens so you know one day um i didn't have enough money for an ice cream truck i mean every day we were so poor we only were eating matzah uh crackers with butter uh and toast with cairo syrup and whatever else anybody would donate us indented cans from the grocery store for like four and five cents and stuff like that and all my friends were going to the ice cream truck every day and i was like we're so poor and they're poor how can they go to the ice cream break every day and we're in the same neighborhood where are they getting this money so one day i said i'm gonna just sell my toys so i went and got this crate of all my broken toys and whatever i had i was like i don't even need toys and i just went door-to-door asking for donations for my toys five cents 10 cents a dollar whatever and i ended up you know having two handfuls of money and i went got some well i just wanted to get the bazooka bubble gum with the comic strip in it and i got it and i said to myself wow i just realized something here there's nobody coming to save me i'm gonna have to save myself and once i came to that realization i knew i was gonna be okay i love that so much i think the one word the first hallmark of self-defeating behavior is blaming other people for how your life is true yes that's number one and responsibility never means fall it's just your ability to respond and it sounds like how old were you i was seven you were seven when you realized no one's coming to save you yeah i realized it yeah i told my mother i don't belong here you know and um i just realized what was going on in that neighborhood just didn't make any sense to me i saw kids getting yelled at aggressively i saw kids getting beat by their parents and the next day in school they'd be just as bad and rowdy so i knew that the beatings and the yelling wasn't working when i turned 12 my dad told me you're gonna have to get a job and pay rent believe it or not by the time i was 13 i was making more than my parents interesting so [Music] when i went through your history the things i'm paying attention to head trauma at 22 you're actually not driving you're a passenger right somebody falls asleep at the wheel it launches you through the windshield right and even though you don't lose consciousness how fast were you going do you have a sense they estimated about 75 miles an hour and we hit them and they were doing approximately 50 to 55 so yeah so if you just think of the forces that were going on you get launched so crash your brain rattles inside your skull you get launched and then your body stops that's another inside your skull there's a lot of sharp bony ridges and your brain is the consistency of soft butter because when i saw your scan i went oh i had a brain injury yes we'll see it right we'll also see we can fix it so um and you had nerve damage to your right eye yeah um it's numb right there [Music] we have scans all right hey we have scans oh man um so we do a study called spect and spec looks at blood flow and activity it's different than a cat scan or an mri they look at structure we look at functions and i can tell if you need a structural scan you don't okay but um spec basically tells us three things good activity too little or too much and then my job is to balance and most psychiatrists never look at people's brains so they make diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological information yeah and i think that's insane yeah right you're an innovator you're trying to see the future and i knew 40 years ago that imaging was the future of psychiatry but my profession has dragged its feet so right so when i got to look 30 years ago we started looking not just like a little kid so excited because you know i now i have your story now i can match your brain to your story when we look at your scan you had a traumatic brain injury it affected your left temporal lobe wow and i wonder if that comes and goes but it's clearly hurt so the left temporal lobe is here your occipital lobe back here um and your parallels you see these density yeah you have a lot of really good brain function so and the holes you don't have holes in your brain they mean that means it's lower in blood flow than it should be um we can fix those okay but i mean this is really clear and so sometimes your memory is probably not as good as it could be yeah and then you said the injury happened to your right eye yeah so this is the right side it's your visual cortex right here um but i get a sense that the injury happened like this so from the right back because it hurt the other side of your brain your brain's in a closed space yeah it's got nowhere to go right so if you get whacked here we'll often see trouble over here my favorite scan is the one we might do four or five months from now if you do what i ask you to do yeah this is how it can change wow so virtually it can be normal actually and normal is the wrong word it can be healthy right emotional brain is still pretty busy and it's a bit in a trauma pattern wow so whenever i see this diamond i'm like oh i wonder if there was trauma there was but it doesn't seem like it's really impacting you have you ever seen a therapist for all this trauma stuff no and does it haunt you um i can't say it haunts me i reflect on it a lot uh people try to figure out how can i always have such an optimistic mindset or attitude um you know i really don't know you know um i don't get depressed over the things i don't get uh do i feel like i'm saddened every now and then for what's going on in the world yeah but at the same time i just try to focus on when i focus more on providing solutions and finding solutions it gives me some sense of peace you know i was reading that and reading how you're really doing great overall and this term post-traumatic growth came to me is that a lot of people what that would cause it's a lot of problems in their life an excuse to drink and excuse to use drugs an excuse to not work an excuse to be mad and excuse but for you wasn't an excuse it's like what is it i can do to take care of myself and then what is it i can do to take care of others right i love this focus yeah right and that's the best way to deal with trauma is turn your pain into purpose yes i always think of people in these four big circles biology what's your brain like psychology what's your mind like and for some reason from an early age you were able to put that together yeah social circle we're in a pandemic yeah it's like how's business how's my relationships all that matters right and spiritual circle which is why the heck do you care yeah why do you think you're on the planet what is your sense of meaning and purpose how would you explain that well i feel like i have a special calling to be of service to others so i pretty much dedicated my life to finding ways to help people i built the largest girls basketball program in the state of florida this lady jaguars we did aau junior olympics i had 121 players and uh every single player got a scholarship to college the total scholarships averaged out to over uh 12 million wow well this year all of my workshops and my lectures on my tv network are doing them all for free instead of pay-per-view so i'm just trying to find more ways to help people guide people be some type of a life coach for people uh point them in the right direction teach them how to become researchers for themselves and make their own decisions and ask the right questions and and look for answers you have a television network tell me about that uh well you know i don't when i don't like things i create my own so i didn't like what was on tv so so i created my own tv network for bidded knowledge tv and it's on apple tv roku amazon ios and google play store and the web as well it's doing very very well actually so overall resilient concussion we can make your brand better yeah we're in a war yeah for the health of our brain the u.s has four percent of the world's population 15 of the world's deaths that is unacceptable that is unacceptable for the wealthiest country on earth but we are one of the sickest countries on earth with obesity and diabetes and hypertension and the government's not talking about let's get you healthy i know they're talking about let's control you but it's like yeah okay if you don't exercise then you can't go to the ball game right or you can't go to work if you don't exercise yeah uh that's not true questions um and you're pretty thorough um if i if i go work your plan how long do you think would take me to turn around and you know improve my brain you know a few percentage points two months oh wow but really making sleep a priority that's really important um and then do things that help yeah supplements hyperbaric oxygen table tennis yeah okay yeah i'm looking forward to i'm going to start right away [Music] you

Channel: AmenClinics

Views: 180,293

Keywords: Brain Health, ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, Dementia, Alzheimers, Nutrition, Daniel Amen, Amen Clinics, Psychiatrist, ADD, Mental Health, Brain SPECT scan, Brain Scan, Psychiatry, Integrative Health, Wholistic Health, Memory, Mental Health Treatment, Mental Health Services, Billy Carson

Id: _gwMJBvYzOs

Length: 14min 21sec (861 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 01 2022