ASM096 LIVE in Boston, MA

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coming to you from eastern nazarene college in quincy massachusetts it's ask science mike live

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welcome to ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life this is a very special christmas edition of the program because we have a christmas tree on stage that you can't see on the internet the questions are on screen the answers are unrehearsed and i don't know where this evening will go any more than you do and also i'd like to thank my friends at eastern nazarene college for hosting tonight but i'd also like to say that any crazy words that come out of my mouth are my opinion and not theirs so let's see what happens and get it started [Applause] [Music] uh thanks for coming all the way to boston as we were saying earlier it's hard to get musicians and riders all the way up this far so i have a question about the election and what we're going to do in this post era so i studied international relations in grad school and so when i was looking at this election i was far more concerned about things that you've mentioned like nuclear war like general escalation between large armies and militaries than i was about things like abortion and social issues that might be treated very somewhat poorly on the more conservative side so with my conservative family my republican family they seem to be more concerned with how our politicians are going to treat these issues like abortion and and gay marriage than they are about us launching ourselves into a global war um and other other big issues like that i've heard you say similar things like that not to put words in your mouth so i was wondering what you think about starting that conversation with people and being able to work through the logic of is it are some of these things more important at some times than they are in others and how do we start to have that conversation with people who are very passionate about social issues and moral issues and politics yeah really good question um i did a facebook live yesterday about this now what's weird my friends on the internet you're hearing this deep into december but it's technically still november as we're recording tonight so if you want to find that video go back to november 29th on my facebook page and you can hear it because i've been talking about politics more in the last few months than the rest of my life combined and i hate it because what am i passionate about i'm really passionate about the intersection of science and faith i feel like i have interesting meaningful things to contribute to the conversation i feel like politics in terms of energy is like wrestling a pig uh it's disgusting the pig kind of enjoys it um and in terms of science that's a southern colloquialism it's a thing so i say y'all um and then on the other hand when you try to use science in the political realm like it's pretty easy to draw contrary narratives or interpretation of data in politics because you're talking about incredibly complex systems you're talking about economies you're talking about sociology you're talking about human psychology times what 337 million something like that in the us now so that number of points of interaction creates incredible complexity which is why i've historically not identified strongly with any political party because the idea that there's one ideology that always works to govern humans property and economies seems crazy it seems the best we can do is be prescriptive with different approaches on social policies and taxation and regulation and then monitor kind of our data points and see if things are working or not and if they're not change them for most of our country's history that's actually worked okay the downside in many ways or what i thought was the downside of the american political system for a long time was its emphasis on two parties which thanks to lin-manuel miranda i understand uh emerged basically because some of the founders really hated each other and uh and so they bake into our process at the state level especially a winner-take-all system that favors two political candidates i'm like how much diversity of opinion can you have on a multiple choice test where you pick a or b well how is that going to allow us to express our ideas of government governance to our elected officials but there's this beautiful thing if you consider politics from a darwinian lens right so you don't have many points of data a or b but you have a selection pressure in the form of elections that if parties drift too far from what the country thinks is good for the country americans throw a party out on its derriere right which is the energy of national politics in america since our inception america has never passionately voted four parties they've gotten mad at whomever is in charge and thrown them out now occasionally and very occasionally in american political histories parties so dogmatically attach themselves to an ideology that they go extinct we used to have a wig party in america i don't know if you know this we haven't elected a whig in a long time the democrats used to be called what the democratic republicans right and they had a realignment that caused the party to re-identify itself completely but speaking of realignments the party of lincoln was socially progressive and stood for social issues and the oppositional democrats were primarily centered in the south and we're pro-slavery so the selection pressure of people trying to figure out who best represents my interest and politicians trying to make a living by convincing people they stand for them creates a series of ideological mutations that get selected for or against an elections and from a meta-politics perspective the american system is actually quite clever there is a problem our system has a lot of intrinsic assumptions about polarity and under the table dealing right again thanks to lin-manuel miranda we all have in our popular imagination the fact that the capital was in washington dc because some guys went to dinner and had an off the record conversation which also birthed the stock market that's a big deal and as we have tried to root for good reasons corruption out of politics we've discouraged non-public conversations and now we are in a situation where thanks to freedom of information acts which again i think are a good thing conversations that happen in recorded media especially digitally can be requested and have to be released to the public and by the way thanks to hacking conversations that were never intended to be public sometimes just get released anyway which creates an environment where people are afraid to speak in conciliatory ways across the aisle which is driving a process of intense polarization and i've seen some really interesting data projections that look at different congressional bodies over time and the amount of legislation that was involved in any two people in a congress and where they exist on a political spectrum and there used to be this thick webbing in the middle where centrist republicans and centrist democrats often worked together on legislation that got passed and as you've watched especially since uh gingrich clinton and the contract for america that web started to sever and when you get to contemporary congressional politics there's almost no connection between the two parties and this has been reflected in an internet driven electorate which exerts extraordinary influence in the primary process so for both republicans and democrats more than ever different beliefs and behaviors are rewarded at the primary stage but a shift towards a centrist position for prime for um general elections is no longer accepted by a lot of voters especially on the right but the left is starting to follow suit so we're losing the ability to compromise politically and what i'm seeing what started with obama start with obama a lot of the people who are so excited about trump right now felt like progressives feel in 2008 they felt forgotten they felt like the country was about to fail they felt like god was about to heap out judgment on the nation and that energy has been simmering for eight years along with some data has come out showing the primary factor predicting a trump vote was not wealth like we thought it was it was education level so trump really really excelled with low information voters at all income levels especially if they're white and this has led to a process where not only we can't talk to each other at the congress we can't talk to each other on twitter and we can't even talk to each other at the thanksgiving table and this is a big issue because like religion your views about god are closely associated with your personal identity and so when someone discusses ideas about god that are different than your ideas about god it becomes a critique of your identity and your amygdala tends to take over unless you have a very practiced posture of civility and that kind of conversation politics does the same thing only let's let's give christianity another faith some credit they have a central message of love so in the process of trying to teach people to proselytize or engage interfaith dialogue we teach people to kind of hold their identity a little more loosely that maybe even an evangelical america if you want to convince the person to know jesus you actually have to be nice to them that's not foundational in either of the political parties there's no discipline of like love you're conservative right that's not in it you know what i mean so it's created just this incredible oppositional energy and both sides now have social issues they care deeply about based on fundamentally different forms of creating a moral system right on the left the foundation of moral and ethics tends to be like consent it tends to be someone's right to live a life of their choosing on the right the language is we want to maximize personal liberty the subtext is often for people much like ourselves because on the right you have a stronger identification with divine law how differently do patriotic americans approach oh let's say flag burning on the right it's like yeah that should be treason losing your citizenship we should execute them because they're attacking the country itself right because we're identifying this flag as a symbol as being intrinsically as valuable as what it represents and someone on the left might say well i would never burn a flag but i mean ultimately it's just a flag right it's not hurting anyone if you burn a flag you see the difference in how moral decisions are made this is incredibly important in these conversations because we have to understand that on the left when you want to stand up for the rights of marginalized people or same-sex marriage or whatever on the grounds that it hurts no one on the right they would say but it defies the will of god and therefore what hurts everyone and marriage counseling they call it an uh irreconcilable difference right that's gotta think well you're gonna have to agree to disagree or one of you has to change your mind or we'll just talk about the same thing for the next 20 years in this counseling room right so is the answer like an american great divorce do we just like put up border fences along like the northeast corridor and the west coast and just build like a giant flyover between like that won't work i don't know if you know this the red states grow all the food you know i mean like that's really uh vital you know california grows some food but not enough to feed l.a much less you know brooklyn and l.a so we've got to figure out some way to converse i am figuring this out in real time i thought i was great at it i used to be much better at having cross the aisle political conversations but i have realized lean a lot further left than i ever have in my life right now now part of this i was talking to someone today um i feel like for like 15 20 years the republicans have been like nudging me with a pitchfork like please don't vote for us um but it's also i've just as i've gotten older i've i've gotten a little lefty and that means i i when my when my own family can't understand the difference between personal and systemic racism and i talk about systemic racism and they perceive i'm calling them a racist conversation's over it's even worse when i'm talking to someone who actually expresses personal racism and because i so now closely identify with all of you that listen to the show and i feel like i have a tribe i'm like well i don't even need that tribe i'm not going to talk to racists this is a huge problem because guess what human beliefs are formed by social identity so if all of us people that believe in equality and justice for everyone keep writing off and quarantining our racist neighbors and relatives guess what just happened we removed that piece of social identity that could potentially modify their beliefs which lets them feel forgotten attacked polarized and justified it's incredibly important especially for white people to maintain some form of civil dialogue and relationship with people across the political aisle what does that look like here's the tough thing it looks like listening if you show up at thanksgiving and you've studied like you're ready right when that turkey gets sliced and the plates are handed out and so i'll make the trump comment you have 30 new york times articles memorized ready to go let's do this like you're going down i have superior information no um why trump explain it to me i honestly don't understand help me understand why trump was good for the country and if as they explain that and say okay i i i didn't realize a lot of that so help me understand uh white vote overwhelmingly went for trump and the only ethnic group in america that a majority went to trump was white people help me understand how this doesn't denote a race problem in the country and what could we do what do you think we could do to help address racial issues in this country get them talking get them sharing and listen this is the third episode in a row i've said this but it'll be new to all of you sorry internet but who do we expect is going to go into rural america and have these conversations i i grew up in the south i'm trying to move to california as soon as i possibly can that's the problem that's why popular votes get one on the left they don't have any electoral value because they're happening in like five cities that's why we've lost all the governor's mansions that's why we've lost all the state legislatures and that's why we've lost both houses of congress and why we just lost the supreme court and listen to me saying we like i'm a card-carrying democrat see how easy it happens social identity it's real insidious stuff so um i have i have family that has never left florida or georgia i have family that's never been on an airplane i have family that's never had sushi you know what i mean so here i am in a position of dramatic economic privilege i'm i make my living selling books and people listening to my voice that is not like a rural occupation like my my cousins literally grow our food and cut our timber and do they have some mistaken assumptions about people different races and ethnicities yeah they've never met them how how would they know and who do i expect to go out of that conversation if i won't if i feel morally superior in some way and i wash my hands of my own family that work is for me and what i've realized there is not a person in the united states of america more responsible for how this election went than me i didn't vote for trump but i got him elected so what's the next step listening to things we can't stand to listen to but to understand the heart of the matter to maintain relationship and connection to over time and by time i mean 10 years 15 years 25 years help our friends and family understand that in america it is not actually life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for everyone and it won't be america until that promise is real so hello science mike um i started listening to you about a year and a half ago uh when my fiance introduced me to you um he's probably your most avid listener on both podcasts all right um but i'm not gonna embarrass him um and uh we even put charity water on our registry okay um so but anyway i just want to thank you for the work that you do on your podcasts um in the book um and sometimes you do some blog posts and there was one in particular i have it in a while but yes i did yeah there was one in particular though the dream of jesus one oh yeah um that one just like floored me um as somebody who like has made their career and their lifestyle about social justice um and also has strong but sometimes unfortunate ties to the evangelical church i found it really encouraging um like i know um like in that blog post i don't know if it was your dream where you basically had this vision where um the sower and the seed was analogous to um black lives matter and people not receiving that message and um it just really helped me like feel like solidarity um so anyway i i um kind of grew up with like the like michael gunger and like back to friend of god with israel so like so if you know michael's like church background that's mine i'm even half puerto rican so i may give you context for my question so um over the years i've slowly detached from the charismatic church and um it has nothing to do with like theological beliefs but really it's the stance that far too many churches and voices of influence take on issues of justice my question is what's happening in my brain for example when a worship song i used to love comes on but i immediately have to turn it off in disgust not because of what it's saying but because that worship leader tweeted out um something like all palestinians are muslims trying to kill god's chosen people therefore we are at war for a reason this was actually set in my worship meeting um oh yeah uh he also posted something on instagram that i won't repeat um i think my palestinian christian friends would find that hard to believe i know i did i i was working at world vision at the time and i posted thankfully they had this like whole article about christians and palestinians you know they're trying to build those bridges with evangelicals um but anyway i wanted to know what's happening in my brain when i can't even talk to some of my friends because they voted for trump when the pain in my heart i feel for the evil people associate with out of ignorance but wolf ignorance um and i also um like want to know when i just can't even like listen to anything to do with like white evangelicalism for example because i know if they're not standing up against injustice then they're complicit so my question is what's happening in my brain whenever these associations or these reminders with a community i used to call home make me fiercely uncomfortable because of their alliance with injustice thank you oh great question so first of all you may not know i started as a blogger uh i thought that'd be the best way to like get my story out was blogging and that was right when blogging was dying so it was like a ton of work and i get really excited if like 5 000 people read a blog post be like oh yes it's working and then i discovered like i can just talk in a microphone and put on the internet it's a lot less work and a lot more people listen uh so that's why i'm a podcaster not a blogger i still do blog occasionally i don't know just because um and that was just stalling so i could think of my answer so i used to be southern baptist now i roll hard with the methodist wesleyans what's up so and i recently spoke at a clergy gathering for my conference so like the pastors in the florida conference all got together to hang they brought me in to speak because i like have a method of shout out on the book which i think was a bit of excitement for my fellow methodists who were like wait somebody under 50 goes to our church so uh methodists are kind of graying it's a mainline thing so um and our bishop ken carter told a story uh about the prodigal son you've probably heard this parable if you've been exposed to the teachings of jesus at all it's one of his like like number one radio hits right the prodigal son parable so um it's like multi-platinum parable and but he kind of told this story different than i've heard it told before and that he denoted our more fundamentalist or legalistic christians as the older sibling in the story blew my mind because it painted that tradition in a completely different light and so he's saying we have a lot of prodigals and he was actually talking in the methodist church right because it's a very like no left right everything come on in like kind of church and um so a lot of people are progressives because they've been hurt a lot like they have a lot of scar tissue and when you've been hurt by somebody deeply you kind of have a couple strategies you either kind of start lashing out at people or you learn to treat other people with grace and so he's like so we've got all these prodigals in our denomination and we're so happy they've returned obviously i identify very strongly with the prodigal narrative but i never even thought about the older brother so you can imagine all of the people i used to go to church with that are southern baptists that never had like an atheism thing that are trying to spread the gospel and i'm the one with the book deal and they go uh god i worked the farm the whole time he went and ate with the pigs i mean atheists right but the whole point of that story what does the father do to the older son does he rebuke him no he affirms his love for the son and his belonging and says that what he desires most is a whole family with the older son and the prodigal and fellowship together so yeah do i differ on some very significant issues with evangelicals absolutely absolutely i think some of conservative evangelical teaching puts a barrier between god and people and causes suffering but before i get too high on my high horse i was a conservative evangelical like nine it hasn't been a decade since i believed exactly the same things so where do i like decide like i am enlightened and they're backward let's also remember by the way in an evangelical church if you talk about the poor and the orphan and the widow and past the plate you can make something happen these aren't people like so on the left we're all like let's gather everybody's stories let's get consensus let's all talk about it you know well you know well you know i i don't have money this month but next month i i think i'll i'll participate in that but you know i want to hear we're going to hear everybody's perspectives and evangelicals just like a pastor says we got to build wells in africa and people get out the checkbook and they make it happen they're not evil evangelicals aren't evil evangelicals have hurt people i've hurt people so in your brain there's two things at play one trauma you came from that tribe and you are not in that tribe anymore and there was a sense of separation anxiety that we call grief and that may or may not have been resolved or healed in your life that gets stored in your brain as a relationship between neurons that includes the anterior cingulate cortex in a in a dark way the flip side of compassion a warm part feeling in the anterior hearing cortex is is a depression or a melancholy both of those happen in the same region of the brain and the amygdala fear and trauma you have some mix associate that pattern and for a lot of people that are former charismatics former evangelicals our exit from those denominations involved some degree of what rejection well we're social mammals rejection leaves scars you keep the rest of your life psychologically especially if you're rejected from an entire community if you are shunned or ostracized by more than half of the people you know that leaves a mark and so when anything you perceive in your environment passes into your thalamus and gets processed by the hippocampus through memory formation it can trigger those feelings of trauma and the brain can try to protect itself by expressing disgust or outrage to avoid uncontrollable grief that's only one thing here's the other thing social identity your social identity has changed which means your brain starts to otherize them they are not in your tribe and human brains love nothing more than embracing and supporting the tribe and subverting or battling the out group that's why it's important we learn not to otherwise people or we encourage their brains to do the mirror image of what our brain does and we just become camps shooting arrows over big stone walls i work intentionally in prayer and meditation and in bible study at deotherizing people i read about jonah and his disgust with nineveh and god's delight in nineveh right i read those kinds of stories and i i do the lectio divinia and i read over them and i read over them and i asked god to help me have grace towards then of it this happens over and over and over in the bible where you have the the chosen people of israel and a prophet saying they're not the other god's for them too that's that's messy and it's full of contradictions um but those are like the two energies at play because there's nothing more other than your former tribe because you take grief and you combine it with tribalism and that is an incredibly powerful mix to the point you can't stand a song that you used to love right the point that you can't see that person show up in your twitter timeline after i heard the story of the prodigal and the older son i realized like the faces of the older sons that disgusted me came to mind and i've picked up a practice of praying for those people every day that god would bless them like i would keep them that god would lead them how's it going it's okay sometimes i'm like god would you bless them would you keep them some days i think about um the good days i had with those folks i think about when they came to the hospital when my mom was really sick and stayed for hours and they you know one of my friends he knew i was really into a certain kind of milkshake and brought one and like i really like milkshakes and it's those intentional actions of detoxifying uh your feeling towards those people and that may take like professional therapy um you didn't say how long you're in this faith tradition i'm gonna assume it's probably like more than 15 years right yeah so guess what that's a multi-year recovery process of grieving that's a big loss that's a big death uh so give yourself some grace it's okay to go oh yeah i'm angry and just experience that but also to learn to release it for your own health and well-being but ultimately i think so that we can be salt and light [Music] hi uh thank you for for all that you do uh i'm also from uh i kind of grew up in the in the church now uh i'm i'm not really sure what i call myself i'm a research scientist uh and uh so so i i view the world very much in in variables so dichotomous variables are continuous variables so there are two things that come to mind one thing that's really been on my mind lately is that very few things in life are dichotomous life is a continuum uh and and typically on some sort of bell curve uh depending on on the scale at which you're viewing things i'm curious kind of both from a biological perspective as as humans and also from a social perspective [Music] why we have the tendency to dichotomize things is it because it's easy or is it some sort of mechanism to survive and then at the same time what is the danger in doing that uh losing nuance and and then perhaps what is the benefit there has to be some sort of benefit to that so uh really those those types of of issues um and and then well i guess i guess i'll stop there right on okay fantastic question um i'm going to assume some people heard that question are like i don't understand the question so i'm going to slightly unpack it um a dichotomous variable would mean something is 0 or one and those are your two options uh is this a chair or is it a balloon that's a dichotomous variable we can safely say i'm not aware of any middle ground between chair and balloon although i'm sure someone will tweet or email me and explain to me how i'm wrong what if you tie chairs to a balloon okay good point um whereas a continuous variable is a 0 to 1 with all points in between so 0.575 isn't 0 or 1 is ever so slightly closer to one now that would be a continuous variable that doesn't have a bell curve the values between zero and one that'd just be a flat line when we say a bell curve we mean if we sample things you'll have lumps in the distribution that tend to be stronger in the middle and weaker toward the ends so a continuous variable that expresses itself as a bell curve would be the height of adult males in a given city right they're going to be a big lump in the middle it's going to taper off and there's going to be very small values on either end that can also look like half a bell curve can be the power law where you have a big lump on one end products ordered on amazon the most popular things get ordered a lot a lot a lot some things get ordered almost never and it creates this slope and on the internet they can't see me making a slope with my hands sorry i don't know why i look at the internet like my laptop represents the internet brains are strange so in reality dichotomous variables are in fact relatively rare um because you're kind of on a spectrum that includes bacterium and bananas and you know what i mean like dna is a is a continuous variable kind of information um so it can actually be somewhat difficult to even explain like is this this species or is this species is it a subspecies uh it gets really difficult when we talk about races in animals uh chimpanzees there's seven different races of chimpanzees by a lot genetically speaking there is most scientists agree one race of human beings so race becomes like a social construct that's still incredibly important but but our brain looks at the opposite our brain wants to turn things into dichotomies craves it why you don't perceive reality as it exists you see um this stage is awfully monotone well you know you've got some we got a green christmas tree we've got like red ornaments that hang from it there's no such thing as red or green those aren't innate qualities to the universe your brain interprets an electrical signal sent by your eye that represents a wavelength of a photon as red or green but the underlying reality is that red and green are a continuous variable expression of the frequency of photons super accessible stuff we're doing right now nobody's lost so your brain builds a map of reality that's relatively low fidelity so your brain is a storytelling machine and it tells the story by throwing things away it thinks are unimportant to your immediate survival your brain story is designed to help you find water and food and shelter and sex and the biological imperatives you need to survive because you're a human it also includes building models of other people's consciousness so you can guess what they think about you especially when you do different things so you can impress them to either be part of a tribe gain favor with higher ranking members of the tribe or mate with members of the tribe that's what a social animal does you have a social consciousness it is easier to sort things into dichotomous variables than in real time assign a progressive or continuous value so if you take away civilization and you put us in an open savannah and the grass is waving and you take the neurological horsepower to decipher is that a hyena or a lion or a cheetah or a no it doesn't matter is it safe or unsafe that's a much faster decision and guess what the penalty for being wrong is in a false positive nothing and guess what the penalty for being wrong is in a false negative death that's what we call a very strong evolutionary pressure towards dichotomies where false positives aren't a big deal see what i mean now imagine how you view the world with that information and it's all about saving energy brains are expensive organs they take a ton of calories they take a ton of oxygen when you get as big brain as humans they increase infant mortality they increase maternal mortality mortality the odd thing is it creates helpless infants which what need larger brain parents right a helpless infant requires more sophistication to keep alive how long does it take an uh an antelope to learn to walk and defeat itself a couple of hours how long does it take a human infant to learn to walk and feed itself and so we have this weird evolutionary pressure that says have smaller birth brains and larger adult brains which takes a longer childhood that's why we're so weird in the animal kingdom and all of this is driven by the mass and calorie consumption of brains which is exactly why dichotomies are favored by evolution and why science is so hard and why nuance is so hard we are more comfortable with friend or enemy than frenemy right it's way easier to say are you with me or against me then we can form a coalition in some cases but have oppositional energy and others nobody wants to invest that kind of time because our brains hate it we have to turn the neocortex on the outer layer of the brain that's slow and and to do the same amount of computational work takes a lot more energy and uh has more limited resources and we'd like to favor the fast more ancient neurons in our limbic system so we have to develop as a discipline an ongoing fostering of uncertainty and subtlety and nuance we have to train our brains to be more neocortical and less limbic and uh why i love that question so much is i think so many of our social ills are created by our tendency toward dichotomy [Music] uh hi science mike i wanna thank you for doing your show um i i did a big deconstruction from a fundamentalist baptist church about nine years ago um but you weren't doing your podcast back then so um i powered through all your backlogged episodes in about two months okay and there's so many things i'd like to ask you but the biggest thing is that i'm part of a church that's more conservative and i definitely lean more progressive but i'm in a unique position because i i run the music there um i'm married to the pastor's daughter that's a big data point yeah there's a lot going on there but they give me the opportunity to speak from the pulpit and they don't question what i say they uh they say just say what you want and we'll listen and i've been fortunate enough i was able to speak on uh um climate uh climate change right and uh well i got a lot of weird looks from standing up there um a lot of people just looked at me like i was dumb uh there were a couple people that came up and uh said they appreciated what i said um so i think you're you're the right person to ask this question how far do i push the people before i i accept that some people can't be changed oh yeah i'm definitely the right person to ask that question because as you know i still attend the conservative evangelical church and i'm universally popular in my home city it's actually funny the fewer miles from tallahassee florida that i perform an event the less people come right because in that region i'm i'm the you know weirdo heretic former baptist not science mike um and as i get further away and people don't remember me with that identity they first hear of me as whatever i am and it doesn't bother them as much right because the change in belief freaks people out why because it messes with their model of reality they made a bad prediction and evolution hates that seriously uh so for example if i were to talk climate change with conservatives i wouldn't talk about the scientific justification for um you know human-caused climate change as a scientific concept i would talk about the edict and command in genesis to care for the earth and in order to demonstrate the degree to which god has invited humanity to be co-creators i would mention that the theology in the church is that the fall changed all of creation so human behavior in the bible affected the natural world dramatically because god gave people the authority to care for the earth that would be how i centered a discussion like that anytime i was talking about an issue in that church i would take the lens of scripture they use and talk about the scriptures in a way that they can understand and relate to and i wouldn't think that's duplicitous because there is no single lens the scripture was written with different it took 1500 years to write the bible so different authors used different lenses as they wrote the text so reading the bible multiple lenses brings it to life it doesn't kill it now how far can you take it um ask jesus what happened when he brought a new way of reading the torah to the people um ask any christian martyr you take it too far for a while it's really exciting when you're when you're making numas we're all for you right sorry love you rob uh but then if you go if you go too far you've gone from being a source of inspiration to a danger i don't know where that line is i do know rob says you can't lead people where they don't want to go a lesson i think he legitimately earned the right to say i tend to favor on the side of honesty on preemptively letting people know i might not be a voice you're interested in right um but i'm also not married to the pastor's daughter that's wow um ultimately if you're in a community where as you are following god it will create an increasing source of opposition it might be time to like relocate or where you can create a distance to go where god's taking you without i really harmed the baptist church i used to go to i really really that it's recovered but the controversy around my presence in that building that went on for many months a lot of people were deeply hurt but they weren't changed their eyes weren't open to some new insight about god or about people if anything they were galvanized in their position by what they perceived as my betrayal sometimes i think the most gracious thing we can do is move on while we can do so in good terms and i've had very smart people tell me i'm dead wrong about that um i'm just not really interested in tearing down churches that seems to be happening at too fast a rate in the first place if people have found a way of relating to god that brings them peace that fills them with love that encourages them to treat others with dignity and grace i don't want to take that away from them that doesn't mean i won't call out things that i think are are significant that doesn't mean i won't call out the the racist history of much of protestant christianity and the way that getting gets expressed today but that conversation actually goes better if i remember and honor the good things about the faith tradition so that i'm not demonizing them if you call someone if you demonize someone you've lost the ability to speak into their life and the fact is as a white former evangelical it's actually safer for me to have those conversations it's safer for me to go into an all-white space and talk about racism than it is for a person of color but as soon as i set off the the nuke of deep controversy in a community there is no way i could ever speak with authority or be received in that church in tallahassee ever again no one there will ever listen to something i have to say and believe a word of it and one thing in my life that i would change if i could i would have left that church and then started the work i do now i would have changed the order because doing that would have not only saved me a lot of heartache and a few thousand dollars in therapy bills it would have made that church a healthier place i can't do the do do do do after that it seems to too intense right there in the back hi science mike long time listener first time caller i'm i'll try to be concise without say without giving up comprehensiveness for the sake of brevity i know that struggle thank you um i'm relatively young recently moved out cam come from southern baptist tradition and sort of coming into my own and a near and dear friend of mine um came out of the closet and i was surprised by my reaction i was so much more upset that he didn't want to date me than the fact that he wanted to date other men but it opened this whole new door to me that i just you know i finally had a connection to the lgbt community and the liturgist did this beautiful respectful just well done and comprehensive podcast on the whole lgbt community but the the question that i have specifically has to do with people who identify as being transgender okay um i don't understand how someone with such an extreme disassociation from their physical self can be considered healthy okay because that's like the one thing that i don't hear anybody asking is is this healthy so condoning problematic or unhealthy behavior is going to be problematic for me to do so can you explain to me some of the psychology if we know any of it for people who identify as being transgender yes i can thank you for your question so one thing gets a little messy in creating a space like ask science mike is in order to be a place where people can grow we have to have a space where someone can be in the room and identify as trans and we can have to have someone in the room who feels comfortable enough to have questions about that so i want to honor that you that's a hard question to ask so thank you um scientifically speaking orientation is not really a thing it's just not a thing um i'm just doing okay so nobody brought kids good sometimes sometimes the live shows just suddenly go ask science mike after dark with no warning and some people bring like nine and ten-year-old children to the event i'm like you listen to the podcast right oh they've heard the after art episodes oh okay you have a more open house than i do uh so we understand that organization organisms primarily have a neurological and biological impetus to what seek genital stimulation and so when i grew up in the evangelical church i was told that like there is there is no instances in the animal kingdom of same-sex behavior that turns out to be slightly incorrect it's almost in the mammal world the opposite right and animals like higher higher primates like interspecies no big deal anything i can do to get stimulation that reason let's let's make that happen right because they don't have a moral ethic they don't have sociological conditioning well i mean that's over simplifying it many primates do have a system of morality and ethics but their culturalization is less elaborate than ours and they certainly don't have a language capacity to draw that's not true dolphins so pretty much any way you slice it humans aren't as special as we tend to think of them right like so pigeons turn out to be better art critics than people that's true if you ask if you ask pigeons to adam ruins everything anybody if you ask pigeons to figure out if they look at art from a painter and you show them a piece they haven't seen yet they outperform art critics and figure if it's a fraud or not pigeons chimpanzees have better short-term memory numbers than we do way better you know so anyway a little aside we're not that special but um so the same thing is true to some degree um with biological gender evolutionarily speaking sex is an adaptation to help multicellular organisms try to keep up with bacteria so if you the reason multicellularism multicellular organisms exist if you become a ball of cells you can easier defend yourself against bacteria right you can pull your resources really cool so that turns out to be rewarded over and over we got more and more complex just trying to deal with the germs right and uh but it turns out if as you grow larger and larger as an organism your rate of mutation declines because all the cells in the colony have to start maintaining like similar genetic makeup so your generations get longer as you reproduce and from what we can tell evolutionary speaking males are a specialized type of female right so the first sexually reproducing organisms were more hermaphroditic and uh obviously for hermaphroditic organisms what's gender this is just a way for us to exchange dna to accelerate our rate of mutation to hopefully keep up with the bacteria that keep killing us they keep making us sick so to make a male from an inherently female embryo requires a genetic component along with delivery of hormones at key points in the development and then you get a male instead of a female that process is complex and it doesn't always play out perfectly and so you can have someone be born for example with a uterus and a vagina and testicles instead of ovaries that's what that happens uh it's called intersex it's not trans that's intersex but intersex is like i think like one in a thousand babies it's not actually that rare if you're intersex you're biologically ambiguous in gender now for someone to be trans from outward appearances they are not biologically ambiguous but we are learning they may be neurologically ambiguous or even neurologically backwards or sometimes they have more subtle gender variations occasionally you can have mismatches between expressed gender and genetic gender and those people we are finding statistically are more likely to be trans so the science is still new and undefinitive and unexplored but we are seeing in many cases a scientific basis for a trans identification uh now let me undermine my own argument you can also see a neurological basis for psychosis in a secular culture the best way i think to make ethical decisions is the intersection of consent and suffering our actions should not violate another's consent and our actions should not cause other people to suffer and i think that's how you make a call between well if someone identifies as psychotic they should be allowed to abuse people no that violates other people's consent and it creates suffering but if someone identifies as trans that's really their life right so so i made the turn on that issue when i was an atheist and i was like oh my gosh i have no way to make ethical decisions because i only understood morality through divine law and i literally went through like an afternoon of hedonism like i skipped work and like i ordered pizza and i pizza at like 2 p.m and i was like i was at home playing video games eating pizza and i was like atheism is amazing i'm just gonna do what i want forever it's a true story and i was like uh i gotta eat so i have to have a job so i guess i'll keep going to work but other than work i'm just gonna do what i want and in time i realized that was obviously untenable right like i can't just literally do what i want whenever i want so that's to be some way to make moral decisions so i start reading like philosophy and ethicists and trying to build a decision-making system and that's kind of what i came up with now i will admit that for me today the inclusion of people on different points or different identities in the lgbtqia plus space is actually also a matter of faith for me but i understand why people have interpretations of scripture and interpretations of of god's will that doesn't create that space and so what i would lean on then is say like are we a secular society or are we a theocracy if we want to be a theocracy we have to understand there is some diversity of opinion of what god believes about things in theist movements and what are you going to do when a different group of theists is in political power and they make decisions about how we govern based on their interpretation of scripture or a completely different set of scriptures which is why i'm a christian secularist but so i would say scientifically speaking yes absolutely there is a basis for that but it is also not definitive so far [Music] hi mike hi it's really good to have you here thanks for coming thank you so people are carrying around a lot of pain yes and the more and more i engage with people around me the more i see that their current pain is connected to past childhood hurt my own story is included in this the scars that we carry affect the way we live today as we navigate the healing process my question if it's okay is threefold um childhood pain is inevitable but why do we store it and tuck away the trauma why do we avoid the grief and is there a way that we can help children now process through their pain more thoroughly so they don't have to carry it as heavily throughout their lifetime gosh that's a really really really unbelievably good question why do we store grief store trauma survival um we learn out we have we learn we have these strong muscles and hands and we climb a tree we climb the tree really fast because we get good at and we get too high and we fall you knock your breath out the first time you are 100 convinced you're going to die never in your life have you asked your lungs to breathe and they'd be like nah right it's terrifying and your brain incorporates that into your model of reality and what happens you're really cautious about climbing trees now you either stop climbing trees and it becomes like a phobia or you climb trees more carefully survival let's put in a social context you're in a natural human society pre-civilization never more than 150 people right that's kind of our neurological capacity for tribe and there's one adult in your group that every time you toddle over he just smacks you and you get stars in your eyes how many times are you going to do that in a row before you stop it is a survival advantage to remember things that traumatize you it's an incredible incentive for the brain to do that here's the problem now your brain the storytelling machine what's a face in your brain it's a distance between eyes the eyes and the nostrils the nostrils from each other the nostrils to the lips the width of the mouth as we understand it is some data points that's the face you don't actually remember like other things about the person you might remember their hair they have glasses or not those secondary characteristics but that's the primary way you recognize a face if you lose that capacity everyone looks like a stranger even people you know that's a neurological disorder and so we're just looking for patterns and data to recognize people places and things so we can get false positives on our trauma and that creates things like anxiety attacks or emotional outbursts trauma that was meant to keep us safe by recognizing something creates one of those false positives we talked about so why don't we properly grieve all the time one it's unpleasant and we like things that are pleasant do we prefer asparagus or vanilla ice cream when both are presented one of them now some of you might be weird but i'm going to assume a majority of the room is going to enjoy the velvety frozen delight that is vanilla ice cream or whatever your poison is over asparagus i mean it makes your pee smell funny so it's unpleasant to grieve so we favor something more pleasant which is avoidance and then this gets reinforced because what do western societies really have a problem with overt displays of negative emotion or grief anybody heard the phrase buttercup or snowflake since november the 8th we shame people that express grief like if a family member dies okay take a day off work and you can cry in your coffee for like a week but after that like suck it up we're westerners we don't grieve and because social identity and social inclusion are such powerful pressures in the way we find worth in order to fit in we've been trained to repress grief that's point two in your question point three how do we help children not do that we encourage grief we accept grief we maybe even celebrate grief uh we create homes in which emotional expression is always accepted but using your emotions to trample over others is not it's not carte blanche so one of my daughters has a temper she is allowed to express anger she can go to a room and be as angry as she wants she's not allowed to hit her sister right and so what what what i see sometimes in a response to repression is almost an excess liberty where children aren't taught how their actions and emotions affects others we want to do both allow children the freedom to be expressive but also understand the ways that their expressions can help others and you do that by fostering open dialogue and communication in the home there is no thought or feeling which is not allowed to be expressed about your experience in my home however your thoughts or experiences about your sister's outfit may not be freely expressed if said thoughts or feelings will create a sense of shame in your sibling you see what i mean you know it comes actually pretty naturally humans we're social animals all we have to do is not actively ruin the process uh and and most important in this in this whole rhythm is to create the skills of dialogue and reconciliation for unforeseen circumstances or the times that our emotions go too far [Music] so um i used to describe myself as a non-emotional person i would lovingly refer to myself as a brick wall or a robot and then somewhere within the last 18 months or so things started to change and i began to let people in again and feel things and cry which i don't do i cried when i finished your book i've never cried reading a book so i'm an emotionally manipulative person yeah i've i kind of picked up on that um so my question is is could you explain what's happening in my brain because i remember at some point or another you made a comment about when you have a spiritual experience you're tend to be more emotional and open to those things could you explain how that works in the brain yeah first of all we're experiencing this renaissance and vulnerability thank you bernay brown this is the power of doing work you believe in right you can actually start to change the way people live their lives just like some books in a ted talk i mean that's crazy um if you think crying is unpleasant if you've been shamed for it you develop coping strategies to prevent it that might be overt repression that might be intellectualization you might turn your analytical capacity onto your own mind and say where is this sadness coming from what does it feel like in different parts of my bodies let me get my white coat and my magnifying glass and what do you know the sadness goes it disappears and all that happened was like i got dust in my eyes for a second but it's over this you know uh in some ways that's good it can be good i don't have to cry it means like in times of crisis maybe i keep it together really well that's the true thing about me um maybe it means you know i feel like i function better i don't experience negative emotions but maybe there's an odd sense of distance and detachment with other people all the time and maybe there's like a sense of discomfort when they cry like i don't know what to do i can't cry with them that would be weird so maybe i just do this i awkwardly patted the air internet so i wave to you internet so i have to like subtitle the show so a couple things can happen one you can like grow as a person and you can get in touch with your vulnerability and you can stop being afraid of being judged by others or yourself when you express emotions and that creates a cycle where in your you don't use your defense mechanisms to shut off your feelings which can be crazy because i cry all the time now i watched sausage party in my hotel room this afternoon and i mean that movie shouldn't have gotten an oscar right like i get it i was really uncomfortable with some of the subtext i get like comedy should be freeing but i thought like some of it was just like over racism um but then i still cried in the film uh and if you've seen that movie that's absurd to cry at that film like i cry at everything now and the floodgates opened for me after my mystical experience my mystical experience caused me to kind of re-examine everything i thought about the world and in order to get in touch with that light i also had to get in touch with the dark when we limit our emotional dynamic range oh man i'm literally stealing brene brown right now whatever she's a good researcher at least i cited her when you like limit your movement into the dark you also limit your ability to feel good things so the springboard of sadness and grief and melancholy is actually an excel a more powerful joy in elation it's to have a greater disparity um it's like vinyl versus mp3 right like just a richer emotional experience i don't actually think vinyl is richer but i thought it was a good cultural metaphor i think a lot of psychology like the needle sounds really cool and anyway i was almost went on a science rabbit trail um mystical experiences create a hyper connected state in the brain and because of that they can drag some things up that were once hidden but you can also have that happen without a mystical experience but in the same the same thing is happening either way you're allowing parts of your brain to be stronger associated with experiences than you have in a long time and i think it's great i've learned like a lot of the reason i get like dear abby style questions on this program which was meant to like answer science and faith questions and it's all about like half the questions or emotional trauma it's because i cry with people i don't have anything brilliant to say i just tear up too and people feel like gnome when you cry with them right like people like they really feel a sense of connection so like after the event when people come up to me and they tell me the thing they've been dying to tell someone they start crying i just start crying immediately and they feel better because they weren't judged for being sad so i think it's actually this beautiful thing um i think when men cry we start to repair masculinity i think when men cry we start to subvert patriarchy we start tearing down the negative cultural connotations of masculinity and femininity i think the fact that i'm affectionate and cry is going to save my kids money and therapy you know what i mean when one of my daughters is upset the fact that i'll not only hold her clothes i'll cry too i think that's good i think that's healthy and not only being not negative i actually think it's a benefit to society and i think bernay brown's excellent peer-reviewed research would reinforce that so i have had depression and anxiety for years and years um coming up on the two-year anniversary of my suicide attempt and in the aftermath of that i found out that my mom attempted suicide when she was a teenager and i knew already before that that my uncle had committed suicide and died by suicide before i was born and there's a lot of evidence that this is genetic that depression and mental illness just runs in my family but it seems like panic attacks and depression make it difficult to find food and shelter and pass on my genes and i it doesn't seem to have any genetic benefit at all um evolutionarily um so why would it be passed on okay really good question really really good question evolution doesn't care what you do after you successfully breed so selection pressure does not apply to later in life phenomena evolution doesn't screen against cancers that are common for people in their 50s and 60s if they die their kids can already take care of themselves and if you take a more compressed reproduction cycle that has been more typical in our history where people are having their children in their teenage years you realize that anything past 30 is gravy to natural selection so that's one piece a lot of depression intensifies as we age but not all and i say that as someone who put a shotgun in my mouth in my teenage years who tried to hang themselves in their teenage years so what's the deal with that uh the other kind of odd thing about suicide it is more common in more developed societies so there seems to be something about the way we live our lives now that fosters more of that darkness i'm leaving well accepted science and pontificating right now i always like to disclose when i do that but would i have had the time to just sit and think about how i feel before agriculture when my next meal has to be chased down or gathered all day a few calories at a time right because remember bananas that used to be like bananas corn didn't used to be like corn we made that stuff through agriculture genetically modified foods are all we eat domesticated food and plants are all genetically modified by people and when you go into pre-agrarian societies i don't think we had the space for introspection to allow whatever that genetic component is that creates what selection pressures you would think would eliminate to be manifesto fully now why would evolution in those contexts still reward like clinical depression is is very different than situational depression as is anxiety it's not like you if you have situational depression if you get to the underlying emotional issues if you get to the circumstances driving the depression the fog just kind of lifts if you have clinical depression your brain is biased towards this melancholy state or even this little total lack of feeling in more severe cases of depression regardless of your circumstances why would evolution reward someone with a darker outlook and an increased fear response because when the sunny optimist says i think there's better food over the mountain the person with a darker temperament goes i don't think there is and there's enough to eat here we're not doing great but we're not we're not all starving to death completely you got to remember as a social species we're not solo animals so our gene expression happens in the context of community always it is why evolution has also uh kept uh people like me around seriously we've learned that there's a bias towards thinness or fatness in all cultures and civilizations well the f thin people tend to be a lot healthier why would evolution keep people like me around because when food gets scarce those of us that gorge when we eat survive longer right these extra pounds if like if the grocery stores stop stocking the shelves what do i have here 3 500 calories a pound times like 30 pounds i got extra weeks over some of you skinny people weeks where i'm just like i mean i'm hungry but i'll make it right and so this is how genetics happens in communal expression it rewards a diversity in physical and emotional temperaments and in fact we're learning this is really crazy it seems like evolution also can end up favoring traits that don't actually result in successful offspring in social animals if your contribution to the group increases the survival of members in the group from an evolutionary perspective there's no such thing as individual human evolution so i think what we have is a an intersection of an unprecedented context for your genes to function in basically unlimited food uh almost guaranteed access to shelter and the luxury to create an unfathomable number of social taboos and mores and norms that have to be followed because we're not so busy trying to eat and that could be how those genes keep getting expressed and could i be honest i'm really happy your genes keep getting expressed i'm happy you're here and i'm happy the counselor that talked to me after my second suicide attempt had tried eight times and she got it she got it in a way that the first guy didn't who was just like well i'm gonna give you this book and everything will be fine you know what i mean i'm so glad you're here because we need you we need the lineage that led to you and we need the unique expression of humanity that is exclusively you so i'm glad that both god and evolution brought you to this world and to this room uh hi welcome to the great unchurched wasteland of new england thank you for coming uh my question has to do with cynicism okay uh i've until recently been a proud cynic or as i you know and other cynics call it a realist um i don't tend to call it that anymore but um i was raised catholic gave up on that was an agnostic for a while uh became an evangelical christian for about 10 years gave up on that yeah am sort of in an agnostic what's happening here sort of for uh phase um and i'm a five on the enneagram if that helps okay so the question is paint a picture so i know i've i've heard you talk in your podcast about cynicism before and there's studies that link it to dementia and all kinds of not cool stuff so i guess you could say i'm becoming cynical about cynicism but it has to serve a purpose so i i also have a multifaceted question okay and i'm also married to a pastor's kid by the way okay um is it possible for cynicism and optimism to sort of coexist in a brain given that as you've said before brains are actually multiple systems each with separate subcomponents um does cynicism play any role in healthy things like forming boundaries or is that unrelated and how do i how do i become more optimistic when i'm but the cynical part of my brain is sort of like yeah like that'll work right okay great question cynicism is exclusively born from optimism pessimists don't need cynicism they already think things are going to be bad right there's no reason to be cynical like you have to be ironic like oh yeah that's going to work you just go that's not going to work that's pessivism right like that's a hundred percent sincere uh optimists go that's gonna work right so cynicism is when your idealism and your optimism have been burned too many times in a row because you're like it's gonna work and it didn't and it hurts and so you create a sense of detachment cynics are frustrated idealists you cannot have cynicism unless you had idealism to begin with uh my i am an idealist of the nth degree so is my friend michael gunger which is the reason he and i can be so incredibly cynical because we actually have really high hopes and even expectations for the world right when a friend of mine says we could never have a world of racial equality i can't believe that because i'm an idealist so cynicism is the brain trying to distance itself from pain uh by preemptively judging it's not gonna work it's a it's a cognitive defense mechanism um trying to store my archives for the recovery from cynicism technique forgiving those that burn your optimism is a big piece oh i'm reading your mail i'm sorry um yeah so that cynicism came from somewhere and um like you don't get cynical about you built a car or you fixed an engine and it wouldn't start you're not like oh you can't fix engines you just like keep working on the engine until you learn to be a good mechanic cynicism comes from people that hurt you although an institutional organization might have a bias that bias gets expressed through what individual people so identifying those that help foster that cynicism and learning to forgive them is a step towards releasing the cynicism and then healthier expectations so in my own process on racial justice which is ongoing and will always be for me i thought i thought i had it because i didn't see race i'm good i don't see race we're all the same and then when i realized that although that's probably better than like outright segregationism it has its own bag of problems i got into a state of grief and guilt that was paralyzing which actually gave me distance from the hard work of dismantling racism my own guilt my own shame so as i process that right now i'm fighting cynicism because i had this idea that we were making tremendous progress as a society and some of my friends of color warned me about my excitement for several years straight i was like no no no no we're gonna do it like this generate we're gonna do it we're gonna finish it um so what have i learned my friends with multi-generational experience with trying to create progress on race in america were right and i was wrong who'da thunk uh so what do i have to do as an idealist to avoid cynicism i have to adjust my expectation that progress is slow and inconsistent that it's not always forward that sometimes we fall back and that my idealism must be attached to the ongoing effort and not the outcome so do i remain an idealist that says it is possible to create a world in which people of all races and ethnicities have equal social an economic access and opportunity yes do i think we're going to have that turkey cooked by 2041 no because if i hang on to that it's gonna be just the next group of kids they'll get it then i'm gonna become a cynic on race if i become a cynic on race i stop working for it and that's the danger of cynicism now why then would cynicism be a thing brains do because it can help you cope in your own context right evolution doesn't necessarily reward you for thinking systemically about all people right evolution really rewards you for thinking about what like your group and in that context cynicism can serve you quite well this is why faith is important to me it's my faith that tells me you're really into a first century palestinian dude wasn't white and then like his most passionate follower the apostle paul took a message that everyone thought was just for jewish people and opened it to gentiles racial inclusion is in the dna of christianity we just keep screwing it up and that's why it's necessary to confront your own cynicism it's hard work and it means cynics don't risk emotional loss if you just know it's not going to work then you're not risking being hurt or disappointed if i was really cynical then a racial disparity in an election would only reinforce how smart i am but i think i'd rather just grieve and i'd rather just grieve so i can keep working okay so my question is about our brains and what happens in our brains when we experience the good and evil of the religion we identify with so i went to a very teeny tiny christian school and it was like church six days a week so i can say that i have heard god's voice and felt physically his love for me just the same as i have seen a demonic entity and heard demonic activity just the same as i've prayed in tongues and helped to get us pray a spirit off of someone so with experiencing the good and evil of christianity that's in the bible what is really happening in our brains is it in the same areas or same regions that it's expressing or like what really would be the reason for me experiencing those things that's a fascinating question i don't think i've seen a study of a brain imaging of someone experiencing demonic presence internet help me do homework there if you find one send it to me i'm hooked yeah universally what i've seen in studies are imaging of people having positive religious experiences or doubting religious experiences here's a spoiler alert science is very competitive and highly tied to economics there's an incentive in science to only publish positive results nobody gets more funding even though it's important for finding a negative result so as you're looking for a possible hypothesis you try to back a horse that's going to win and it helps if what you're researching is juicy pr for the institution so brain imaging about what people experience when they feel god's love gets funded really easily because the institution goes oh wow we could get funding from conservatives too and people are really religious so we like validate their religious expression using science that gets funded incredibly well we study people who doubt oh man people doubt all the time they identify with the study if you're like i don't know if you know this fmris and other brain imaging systems are crazy expensive which is why in brain imaging studies the sample sizes are usually pretty small takes a long time to image your brain in real time on a very expensive piece of hardware so if you're writing a grant and you say i need three million dollars to study demon possession i want to dust off the resume um so i'm not aware of any study now i could like try to riff and that's incredibly dangerous so one of the biggest problems we have in reporting on neuroscience today other than very small sample sizes and people making over drawn conclusions it's like when i talk about what god does to the brain it's not based on a single study it's based on a lot of studies and also includes qualitative and quantitative research that's not based on brain imaging right so that's why i'm comfortable talking about those things i'm always reticent to take a single study and draw a conclusion from it and i'm really reticent to go based on my understanding of what different parts of the brain do these parts of the brain could be involved because i don't even think neuroscientists are qualified to do that yet when we look into the brain we're about with neuroscience where astronomy was when we made the first telescope because we look out in the sky and we're like whoa that's not just a point of light that's a that's a sphere and it has rings that was radical stuff um and it turns out like some of the fundamental assumptions of early astronomy haven't been stunningly correct as we got better imaging hardware and the thing the same is going to be true for brain science so i want to honor how great a question that was but i want to preserve i'm not a scientist the only way people get asking me science questions is if my hit rate on accuracy is super high if i start spouting off just like what i think about science then one scientist writes a scathing blog post career over no more book deals right so i and let's be honest a lot of science communicators they need the ratings they need the funding uh but it's important to me if i want to advance meaningful dialogue between science and faith is i always hold to good science so maybe we'll get a study in the future that we can answer that question or the internet will let me know studies i haven't seen that's so weird i keep pointing to it it really i'm trying to stop and i can't um and if that happens it's my word to you i will post a follow-up on the show as i get information about that okay hey so i have two questions about meditation that you've talked about a little bit in the past um so i had the app on my phone where a guy in like a soothing accent tells me to breathe for like 10 minutes a day it's fantastic is it a southern accent no it's like second only to yours that is not that soothing anyway go ahead i love english descent so it's close for me it speaks to me um ryan i put the headphones on the guy tells me to breathe for 10 minutes and it's great dude in the middle of the day um which i guess is a form of mindfulness meditation which is different than what i've been sort of trained or taught historically or in my past about um sort of christian meditation which is to meditate about god and to think things about god or jesus and i've heard you describe in a recently aired podcast about you know i'm going to be super reductive but i don't mean this in a negative way staring at candles and telling yourself that god loves you is like a thing that you can do for long periods of time and um and i've experienced some of that as well and i'm curious first of all in terms of the neurological benefits of meditation how similarly beneficial are these sort of breathe and try not to think about all your thoughts type of meditation yes and the specifically focus on certain things and then the second question um isn't the sort of reminding yourself that god loves you while you look at candles thing isn't that sort of selling yourself something or can't you comment yourself of anything if you look at enough candles long enough and tell yourself the same thing over and over again oh yeah and is that especially effective if you've pre-decided that you want to believe something as opposed to maybe if you're in more sort of a doubt phase or like a discovery phase of your faith is it useful or are you like no i've just decided that i'm going to believe in the flying spaghetti monster and so i'm going to stare at candles until i don't doubt it anymore right fantastic question uh okay for question one uh prayer is a type of meditation neurologically speaking so the neurological benefits of christian prayer and christian meditation are equally found in secular mindfulness meditation in buddhist meditation in muslim prayer all those things have the same brain health benefits couple of things that are different mindfulness meditation often does not incorporate the same reduction of activity in the parietal lobe and therefore the sense of transcendence or removable removal from physical space that religious meditation does if that's a thing you're into it's important to have like a religious spice to your meditative practice now someone like sam harris is an atheist who engages in non-god-centered spiritual meditation and he reports that he has very religious like experiences without religion in that meditation i'm interested to see that studied that and don't read that as me being skeptical read that as me being genuinely interested in terms of couldn't you meditate on it couldn't you meditate on the fact that the flying spaghetti monster loves you that's a phrase atheists use as like a joke about god the ridiculousness right um yeah if you did that after eight weeks you would probably feel closer to the flying spaghetti monster uh and you would probably get the same benefits to your brain when i talk about the value of meditation it is not as a fact-finding mission um i am prescriptive with prayer and meditation so if you're in a doubting phase and it's important to you to get to the bottom of the god thing go for it what i understand is that a there is no bottom you'll just keep digging uh and i speak from some experience there uh i got to the point where like if you dig hard enough into epistemology and philosophy you just fall into the void we can't know anything so forget the fact can i prove god exists i can't prove you exist right like it's ellipsism is fascinating but not good for helping you to avoid the passing bus like i can just stand here the bus doesn't right like it just doesn't work and and that's not to say that all because we can't prove anything it does not mean all ideas are equal we can still once we make the assumption there is a reality test ideas with evidence we're giving like a little epistemology class right now anybody having fun on a rainy wednesday night um my point is for the person who's gone through that long enough and they can't make their mind up they may be wearing atheists for a while they maybe just been agnostic and they feel frustrated and isolated and a longing for god i understand by research those three recipes make a delicious delicious soup called suicidal tendencies people losing their faith are often at an extremely elevated suicide risk and so then i offer a prescription i cannot solve the god puzzle for you but if feeling close to god is important for your emotional health and well-being science demonstrates that this will help and that's that's my entire approach i get really frustrated when religious people pass off my book to a skeptic and say he has proven god exists a you can't prove things in science you can prove things in math because it's axiomatic you can't prove anything in science there's no such thing as 100 confidence in the sciences because your data could be misinterpreted and it could be incomplete so although we have a very very very very very high statistical confidence that the earth is a sphere that confidence is not 100 percent don't run away without flat earthers so what do we what do we do with that the point in my book is i identified ideas about god that were more scientifically plausible that you could place a much higher statistical confidence in but the only reason i do all that is to provide some justification for christian practice a lived faith and because i'm a mystic i think that's the only way you can actually find god is through the practice of faith there absolutely is no set of variables or preposit propositions prepositions would be a weird thing to try to find god through you're i'm really into grammar help me with my dangling participles um that was a terrible dad joke so god can only be known through love i really believe that and i also say it's not scientific what is scientific is that the most genuine spiritual experiences in brain imaging studies are non-linguistic in nature what is scientific is that a practice of faith can be emotionally and neurologically beneficial what is scientific is it is not delusional to be a person of faith um but i i i love your questions so much because it gets to a common critique i have of a particular response to my work which is to take my work and turn it into an apologetic proselytizing tool as opposed to a medicine for people who are suffering and that's what i'm about if people are happy atheists man be a happy atheist you know what i mean i'm in um what i what troubles me is for the people who become post-religious and never again at peace that's my crew well you've done it you've wasted a perfectly good rainy wednesday hanging out with me thank you i'm so glad you're here i'm going to stick around we're going to go down to the coffee shop and i'm gonna meet everybody wants to meet talk to everybody wants to talk i will mention that a phenomenal book called finding god in the waves is for sale in the lobby i would be happy to sign your copy that you brought or your copy that you bought tonight if you want to come up with them and just have a selfie and no book signing i still love you but i really love signing books i'll be honest so um i want to thank greg nordine for his magic editing the pro podcast with andrew golucky for pre-production work and organizing our together groups if you'd like to connect with other ass science mic listeners in your area go to sciencemike.com and click on the together button and i want to thank my patrons on patreon for making the show financially possible i had some microphones blow up this week because apparently you're not supposed to tour across the country with usb mics and because of my patrons like not only feed me i was able to get a new microphone and keep doing the show so patrons thank you and of course i want to thank my friend jeff botteford for writing the ask science mike theme song thanks for listening everybody and i'll talk to you next week [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]