Jeffrey Schwartz: You Are More than Your Brain - Science Uprising Extra Content

I'm a research I addressed and have been for over 35 years and a practicing psychiatrist and I've had a concentration on obsessive-compulsive disorder for many years and it was in studying obsessive-compulsive disorder that I was able to apply this notion that I've had for even longer than that that you're not just your brain and that you can do things with your attention to change your brain and obsessive compulsive disorder was a very good condition to study to advance that perspective because obsessive compulsive disorder really is significantly a brain mental health disorder in fact it's very arguably the best understood of all mental health disorders from a brain perspective and so people get in obsessive compulsive disorder they get intrusive unwanted thoughts and urges often about washing checking that things aren't clean enough that things are unlocked that things need to be redone and it's very important to understand the condition to know that the people on some level know that that's not really true and when we studied their brains we found out why a thought or and a feeling that they basically know isn't true bothers them so much and and it is because there is a brain circuit there literally is a brain circuit that actually connects a part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex that's it's you know right above the eye sockets and and then it there that area of the brain is connected to basically a gear shifter there's a simple way to put it but a reasonable way to put it essentially when something has been checked enough or a person basically feels like okay I understand what that is I'm okay with that then the gears can shift and you move on to the next thing and it turns out that the gear shifter is the core part of what gets called the habit center it's a structure called the caudate nucleus um part of a set of a structures called the basal ganglia and and this structure um another name that it goes by actually in in in all mammals is the striatum and and so the striatum is a habit center and and that's obviously very consistent with being a gear shifter um and so when people have be you know have habitual behaviors or anything you do really repeatedly gets wired into that area of the brain and that area the brain can run the outer surface of the brain called the cortex very very quickly and very very automatically so that you can do very very efficient behaviors very very quickly without having to think about it at all in fact it it's really unconscious and and it's it's literally automatic behaviors um and we all have a lot of them and it helps make life much much much easier then I mean life wouldn't be possible without it I mean even the action of getting out of this chair would be very complicated if you had to think through every movement you had to make to do it so so so a very large part of our behaviors are wired by the these habit mechanisms in the striatum and in obsessive-compulsive disorder there is a problem specifically shifting that as I say cortex area of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex and it gets stuck in gear and when and when it gets stuck in gear you you get bombarded with feelings that things aren't right that things need to be checked that things might be dirty and and therein lies basically a brain mechanism for understanding this neuropsychiatric disorder obsessive compulsive disorder so the idea that I had about how to utilize that information in ways that could show that people with OCD even though there's something that is not really working quite right in their brain could really do a lot about it is is by training people literally training them to reinterpret the feelings that you need to check or that something is dirty reinterpret it as a false message from your brain and I developed this four-step method in that came out in a book called brain lock over 20 years ago and that method basically told people to real able and and say wait a second I don't really need to check that again that that feeling of needing to check or that feeling that something is dirty that is really not what it sounds like it's not what it says it's it's it's it's false and then and then you reframe it and understand it as an obsessive thought or a compulsive urge to wash to check or other bad thoughts that people get turn light switch on and awful there's just a usually large number of behaviors that people start to do repetitively for no real reason other than they're getting these false brain messages so once you label and and reframe or in the original version for OCD we call RIA tribute it and say that's just my brain then you can really refocus your attention on other behaviors now that's hard to do when you have OCD especially because your brain is like pulling your attention towards the thing that is bothering you but but it turned out that people could in fact learn how to understand that this is not me this is a false message from my brain and learn how to refocus their attention and when they did that their OCD improved and their brain changed so that that was really where the whole science part of this really came in because because we did these studies using brain imaging at UCLA in the in the 80s into the 90s and um and repeatedly showed and work that has now been repeated and have become standard work in a very large field of doing brain imaging for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder that there really is this OCD circuit in the brain and that yes you can use medications to help treat it there's no doubt about that but it's not just medications and that you can use changes in understanding and changes in how you focus your attention to also change your brain in ways that are similar to how medication can change your brain and when you do that it helps it helps you manage the symptoms and and then it even helps the symptoms decrease in intensity this does shed light on us not just being our brain because if we were just our brain then we really wouldn't have any sense of choice about how we responded to these things now a lot of people when they have OCD really feel like they don't have very much choice so so so that's where the real clinical battle happens and of course when you primarily treat it with medication or even when you primarily treat it with behavioral approaches that don't take into account this capacity that people have to reinterpret it and change their focus of attention because because you can treat obsessive-compulsive disorder with behavioral methods that have a lot in common with how you train animals and and I'm not particularly making the claim that animals are anything much more than their brain maybe they are but that you know it's not my department and it's not a claim I would make but I'm certainly making the claim that people are more than their brains so the part of the approach to treating obsessive-compulsive disorder which was kind of at the baseline of this bigger theoretical philosophical approach that I've done a lot more with since those days in the 80s and the 90s um was this issue of sure you could take medications and ensure you could do sort of basic behavioral approaches that have significant amounts in common with training and animal um and they work and so there's no controversy you know they're helpful they work but but the thing that makes it theoretically interesting is what an animal can't do is really understand wait a second I'm getting this feeling but it's not who I am it's not me it's it's a false message that's coming from inside of me from my brain and and that's the part that way you really get get the leverage to say well you're not just your brain but because you you're understanding you're actually understanding and making a selection of what you're going to focus your attention on that takes into account that what you're responding to is a message from your brain and that you're not going to listen to it several years ago I wrote this book called you I not your brain which really brings it right home to everyday life and in that book we talked about I wrote it with actually another psychiatrist named Rebecca cladding who was actually a resident at UCLA at the time when we started writing the book and she was kind of a student of my approach to treating obsessive-compulsive disorder for quite a few years before we worked together on that book and in that book we have a concept called the wise advocate and that concept of the wise advocate leads to discovering your true self so so that's where your more than your brain I mean book if there's there's there's certainly no argument I mean and you know any I've been doing your science for over 40 years I mean and neuroscience really believes that the brain is has a lot of effects and does a lot of amazing things and I certainly believe that too because you know I'm I'm happy to be a neuroscientist but I what I don't believe is that every aspect of a person can be explained by just those brain mechanisms and that and that and that when you start talking about on the one hand having a true self and that and that you're making choices about what to focus your attention on to develop that true self then you get a concept that really isn't in neuroscience this concept of the wise advocate so so the wise advocate is what we sometimes summarized as your inner loving guy that every person has access inside of themselves to you know an inner narrative and obviously in various spiritual systems it could be understood in in a variety of ways and that's fine too so so the concept the wise advocate concept is very intimately related and in fact but with developed by me after many years of study of mindfulness and mindfulness is something that now everybody seems to know what basically what it is or at least they've heard of it they might not know what it is but they've heard of it and and some so mindfulness is something that I've spent many many years practicing and studying over 40 years practicing and studying and and mindfulness is basically taking a third person outer perspective on your own inner experience and another saying or term that that I still use sometimes that then I used to use more before the wife advocate concept Kant comes from the very the father of modern economics named Adam Smith who was a Scottish philosopher in in 1700s and he had a cot a concept called the impartial spectator and that impartial spectator for him was was very important in how people make decisions about what's ethical aright and what's ethically wrong and the impartial spectator was basically again sort of the the the observer the clear minded observer or clear minded observers in Adam Smith's system that gives you a perspective on you know is this the right thing to do or is this the wrong thing to do and and so in some ways it's the word conscience has something quite related to it but it's it's more than just your conscious though conscience though it's actually far more than just your conscience because conscience basically usually is understood as as something that's kind of you know wagging the finger at you saying don't do that do that don't do that whereas the impartial spectator is more observing and then the wise advocate is really more than that because we take this description of inner loving guide very seriously and what we take especially seriously is the notion that you can have an inner narrative with this inner loving guide and talk things over and and it's in the process of talking things over from a perspective of observing sort of where you're coming from you know what are you thinking what are you planning what are you trying to do what are you and then what are your long-term goals and all of those kinds of questions sure neuroscience has a lot to say about the front part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex and the role that the prefrontal cortex plays in goal-directed behavior that's straight neuroscience largely human neuroscience but honestly even monkeys you can study that in and and um but what's not really neuroscience is how do you decide what your goals are I mean so once you have a goal yeah the brain has a lot to do with pursuing that goal and especially keeping your attention on track of that goal what neuroscience doesn't have a whole whole whole lot to say about is how you choose these goals and and and and that's and that and and and but that's really kind of where the you are not your brain concept really has its full written richness because what we're trying to do is tie an understanding of the brain to help you every individual person make better choices about what goals they do decide to pursue so it helps it helps if you understand your brain to understand how habit center works to understand how sort of reward mechanisms work to understand how attention focusing actually works I mean you know one you know one of the things by knowing the front of the brain is very important and attention focusing is you know don't do things that damage the front of your brain like too much substance abuse will damage the front of your brain etc so so so so these are all you know it helps to understand your brain but what you still need the Internet to make decisions and choices about what you actually want to pursue and that's that's really where the the big part of the you are not your brain concept comes in because the mind in this system is choices and decisions that we make about what to pay attention to and and you can almost say that everything except those choices and decisions basically are determined by the brain I mean so all your freedom comes in the choices and decisions that you make about what you pay attention to and all the input largely actually is just the brain so so so you have to filter through what the brain is sending into you and it's in that filtering and in those choices that you make that this whole wise advocate concept pursuing a true self becomes very important and that's what we understand by you are not your brain well if you're just your brain you're really not very different than a robot and people who are really dedicated to believing it's on the brain will say yes I'm basically just a robot but a lot of people who think that they want it to all be the brain will go actually I don't really want to think I'm a robot and and and so then you have to start thinking about well what is the difference between you and a robot do you believe there is a difference between you and a robot and if you do that's when you get into this issue of genuinely making choices and decisions based on your own sort of sense of an inner loving guide connecting with you the other big argument philosophical dispute that you get in with - with people who think that way is that they genuinely want to be committed to the the belief that science can answer every question so a lot of the cultural battle that goes on is around the issue of whether science can answer every question and in our current culture that's a hard battle that is really being fought out every day in the culture at large and and so a lot of the difference between the two sides really boils down to do you think science can answer absolutely every question and and and people who really want to believe in genuine choice and want to believe that human beings are intrinsically different than robots do not believe and I do not believe that science can answer every single question that that science can totally describe what a human being is even though as a neuroscientist who's had some reasonable success in advancing the field of neuroscience especially you know around the subject of obsessive-compulsive - order um you know I believe that we have shown that sure there are brain mechanisms that explain why people have those symptoms and science can understand why they have those symptoms science does not explain very well why some people give into those systems where I some people resist those symptoms why some people are more you know willing to sort of resist those symptoms why other people don't have the wherewithal to resist those symptoms I mean even people who want to say science can answer those questions do not claim that science has answered those questions so there are a lot of questions that everybody goes well we haven't answered those questions yet and then we're left with the two sides that says science will answer that and then you have the side that I'm more representative of the comb know there are things that science just is not going to answer I have a name for the people who think that science explains everything I call them science worshipers I mean you know they have their and I and I actually call the belief that science can answer every question a form of a fundamentalist religious belief because I think believing that science can answer every single question is in fact a form of a fundamentalist religious belief and um not everyone shares that fundamentalist belief there's lots of people especially common among you know creative artistic oriented people and then a lot of just regular people right I mean now a lot you know the science people will say well that's just because they don't understand science but but I mean I know enough people you know it's not in this day and age right now it's no longer the majority of scientists especially in biological sciences a lot of people in biological sciences lean towards you know that belief that science will answer can in potentially can answer everything but that too is an interesting historical development because because you know there's been many times in the past when when scientists didn't believe that at all and and one of my favorite scientists who I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years studying is the inventor of the computer Blaise Pascal who invented the first calculating machine in fact I'm no I'm no computer expert but I think Pascal is one of the first if not the first computer language named after him no one argues that he invented the first calculating machine he's clearly one of the great mathematicians that ever lived and no one denies he was a great scientist but if if you read his book in French corpus a which means thoughts he'll tell you very very very clearly that science is very important science is very powerful but there are the most important questions Pascal says as eloquently as almost anyone had never said it right up there near the top that's why we're still reading him four hundred years later is is that you know science does not answer the most important questions and that and that's actually what I also think the most important question science does not answer it all gets in to the subject of how do you interpret the brain data I mean you know like what how do you understand the limits of what brain data can explain and and and then how do you understand the the way we approach the questions that are beyond our current limits and you know from from a sort of National Science Foundation perspective the answer is let's just do more science well I mean yes and no because I mean even the concept of what science is is a historical cultural concept that can sort of expand and contract and and and this belief that material causation and that physical brain mechanisms alone explain all aspects of a person it's a pretty recent onset I mean it doesn't have a deep historical base that belief it really doesn't Charl Sherrington who's one of the greatest neuroscientists who ever lived no one would deny that no one he's one of the founders of the field of modern neuroscience he assertively did not believe that that that the brain can explain all aspects of what a person is like I you know who I am where did I grow up who are my parents what is my culture what is my faith what do I believe how how do these things influence how I interpret the world and we are not even almost close to understanding those kinds of questions in brain terms and I don't think we ever will actually

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 36,070

Rating: 4.8686566 out of 5

Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, Darwinism, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Michael Behe, John West, consciousness, free will, materialism, ocd, psychiatry, medicine, Jeffrey Schwartz, You are not your brain, brain lock, neuroplasticity, mind over matter

Id: rFIOSQNuXuY

Length: 26min 51sec (1611 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019