ASM212 Electric Cars, the Placebo Effect, and Nonreligious Brains

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electric cars the placebo effect and non-religious brains all that and more on this week's episode of ask sciencemic [Music] well hi friends and welcome to ask sciencemike a podcast hosted by me i'm mike mccarg the science mic from the title of the show and this is a podcast that exists because i believe that every sincere question deserves an honest and non-judgmental response this show has been going on for quite a while as you can tell by the episode number and most weeks we get together and work through questions together and have a lot of fun doing it speaking of that by the way my friends [Music] the production team had an idea they had a meeting and they thought it would be fun to start doing themed questions so we'll do questions around a particular theme and one thing that you all ask for a lot is a return of the after dark episodes that happened way back when the show first started where we explored taboo topics together and so we are going to do an after dark episode in the near future about sex and sexuality so if you have questions about sex and sexuality that you have wanted to get an answer to but have been afraid to ask i'd like to encourage you to go to ask sciencemike.com and down at the bottom of the webpage you can send two times two types of questions one you can email a question and two you can record a voicemail and uh for after dark shows we don't worry about holding our normal ratio of email to voicemail questions we'll consider all of them and just pick the best ones okay so if that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of go to ask sciencemike.com and leave a question also uh really exciting i've got a book coming out april 28th it's called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass and we're just starting to ramp up the book marketing efforts and with that i made something new myself if you go to ask sciencemic.com new book that will magically transport you to a place where you can find all the different ways that you can pre-order that book which will be available as a hardcover and an audiobook and there's links to like everyone in the world who will sell it on that link ask sciencemic.com new book finally in the near future we're going to be announcing some of the dates on the book tour especially for those first couple of weeks uh and that'll be exciting but just before the books come out book comes out i'll be speaking at a conference at first christian church in tyler texas on april the 25th and if you head to ask sciencemike.com and then click on the events button in the menu that will take you to a place we can get more information about that and if you're listening to this far in the future you may see other events listed there as well okay with that let's uh let's do a podcast let's get it started [Music] hey excited to mike this is mason long time blister first i've asked her i want to ask you a question about neuroscience and belief i loved and heard it said that belief is something you either have or you don't have and i've listened to the podcast long enough and done enough research to know things about the god gene and stuff like that that kind of genetically predisposed certain people to have mystical experiences while others do not um but i was wondering if you could speak to this question is there any evidence that certain brains are not wired to believe in the supernatural are there is there any brain that just it's impossible for them to uh believe as an anthropologist i realized that the metric of belief is rather overly simplistic to measure uh sort of religious participation i know that culturally that what we call belief in the western world is really not uh the whole reason why people participated in religion maybe not even the primary reason why most people participate in religion i realized this as a social scientist but i i do i was curious to see if the certain brains are predisposed to quote-unquote belief while cern and others are not thank you so much for doing what you do i can't express to you how much this podcast has been to me and my uh journey and and sort of becoming a an academic who who focuses on on things like spirituality and whatnot i um i really can't thank you enough you uh have been so influential in my life keep doing what you do i love you all right what a fascinating question uh and i would expect no less from an anthropologist i'll start by admitting i'm a little nervous um as i'm uh the internet's favorite college dropout and you're an anthropologist so it feels really strange to uh try and answer this question for you so i really appreciate one that you listened to the show and two that you said such encouraging things and i'm going to do my best to offer you um an honest answer and a genuine response regardless of the fact that i'm not an anthropologist or a specialist of any kind although i do love neuroscience a whole lot it's a bit of an obsession for me and one thing that interests me about neuroscience versus other disciplines in the sciences is there's some problems we have studying brains number one um we don't have a control of what a brain that hasn't been shaped by environmental interactions would be like right the kind of the fundamental operation of a brain compared to almost any other organ or tissue or cell in an organism is to adapt to an environment and um that makes teasing out nature versus nurture really really hard since neuron's job is to respond basically to nurture rapidly that's their that's sort of why animals that evolved nervous systems were successful is neurons let animals adapt to the environment more quickly than they could otherwise of course another problem with brain science is we typically have very small sample sizes because neuroimaging is expensive and time-consuming also introduces a lot of constraints so um most neuro-imaging systems you can't really behave in a natural way while undergoing activity you might have to be very still in order for the imaging to work so as much as i love and i mean i love neuroscience you know i like to start by acknowledging some of the limitations in how we can conduct neuroscience today one of the things that i often say is that in terms of our understanding and capacity to image our brains we're at a similar point that we were like when galileo first started using telescopes we are very early in looking at uh this complex bit of the universe called the human brain and the other thing about your question is i haven't seen it addressed directly by experts at all so the really only thing i can do is offer my opinion gosh that's scary um but i have been researching for the last 10 years research across neuroscience sociology psychology and even anthropology you know trying to look at how brains respond to religious beliefs and what the factors are that influence religious belief because many years ago i decided that spiritual doubt was an emotional and neurological condition as much if not more than it was a spiritual one and since my work and and mission and life became for a while helping people cope with doubt um i studied it deeply to see if science could help me come up with more effective treatment options if you will for existential and spiritual doubt now i would agree with you that the term belief is just wildly oversimplified when it comes to describing human thoughts feelings and behaviors about the supernatural and even about the world itself you know when i look at political differences uh not only in the united states but across the world and cultural differences beliefs don't seem to do a good job describing the behaviors of human animals and if we look at this supernatural in particular if we were to look at a person who had no supernatural belief we would find that they generally still have a bias towards anthropomorphizing the world that's a very natural human behavior that kind of emerges from how our brains view the world we also find that people with no belief in the supernatural are still likely to ascribe and accept purpose-based explanations for natural phenomena uh that includes trained scientists even scientists who study evolution our brains just tend to do that i think that is related to the fact that we're social primates and one of our primary orientations in the world is a is a drive to learn how to relate to um other humans but we have no intrinsic understanding of whatever human is when we're born so evolution has gifted us with this impulse to seek out other beings other entities that are capable of the kind of empathetic socialization that we are capable of and uh that hardware doesn't shut off when we're no longer babies it just keeps running in fact oxford believes that uh two of those factors that anthropomorphizing our world and accepting purpose-based explanations for observed phenomena are some of the ingredients that uh lead to the almost universal conceptions of god or creators across human civilizations so it seems like the seeds for a world view that in some way incorporates the supernatural whether that's simply an unseen realm or an unseen creator or even something as simple as superstition it seems almost universal among the human species i know a number of uh atheists who are even anti-theists who believe religious belief is um unwise and say that superstition is a dangerous root of religion who are in small ways superstitious themselves and they will admit that if you give them enough bourbon so um even uh people who are working to be rigorous discipline thinkers and dispel any notion of the supernatural from their life well they still seem to have the same biases that all of us do of course we also associate spiritual experiences with various god networks in our brains that mainly incorporate the emotional and sensory areas of the brain so people who tend to be more religious or more spiritual or feel a more personal connection with god uh those their their networks the the there's no god spot in the brain but the networks of their brain that are responsible for their understanding of god tends to incorporate more brain structures in for example what we would call the limbic area of the brain the emotional center of the brain or the the paleo mammalian part of the brain to use an old term from the triune brain model as well as going up into the occipital lobe and the parietal lobe both of those brain areas of the neocortex especially the parietal lobe are associated with the transformation of nerve impulses into sensation and we find that for people who have deep experiences with the divine or spiritual experiences that's the part of the brain that's activated now we also understand through research that it seems some people have an innate orientation towards a more i would call cerebral theological disposition so these people whether they you know reject belief in god or people who are just really into theology more than the experience of faith their god network in their brain tends to be more strongly associated with the rational analytical and reductive portions of the neocortex particularly the prefrontal cortex and particularly the left prefrontal cortex in people for whom the left hemisphere is their reductive hemisphere some people's brains are upside down compared to everyone else's so uh you can't oversimplify that but for most of the population we would associate this god network being kind of centered around the left prefrontal cortex so there we start to get a little picture that brains can have different dispositions towards how they process ideas about god and therefore the supernatural and from that here's where i move into what is purely my opinion my conjecture based on reading all of this research i tend to think of most brains as being on a spectrum of propensity towards religion religiosity or even supernatural belief so we have this spectrum you can imagine before us and on one side you have people who are not very likely to accept and experience supernatural ideas and on the other end you have people who are very very likely and then you have people in the middle i also imagine based on my life experience that there's kind of a bell curve distribution on that spectrum that most people are somewhere in the middle and people on the far ends are very rare people on on one far side tend to be atheist or tend to be uh you know really really heady theologians and on the other end are people who are experiential mystics so it really doesn't matter what you say no amount of rational argument can debase them of of the power of their frequent spiritual and mystical experiences these people might call uh prophets we might call them contemplatives now so there's this spectrum how much of that is innate how much of that is conditioned i have no idea i think it's probably reasonable to assume that we sit on different parts of that spectrum at birth and then our life experiences both personal and social will tend to move us along the spectrum as we go through life that has certainly happened to me i used to be very very likely to accept notions of the supernatural then for a while i was very unlikely and now well now i'm somewhere in the middle you know today i don't have much if any intellectual assent to notions of the supernatural i don't really have a supernatural worldview and yet my intuition is much more accepting of supernatural notions based on my personal experiences i love to hear people talk about their supernatural notions even if in my epistemology i reject that and that that might sound ridiculous to rigorous thinkers uh i think in my own way i'm being rigorous by one demonstrating that i don't think there's a lot of empirical evidence that supports the supernatural so i don't make assumptions in how i communicate with others or make public policy based on that and yet i also understand empirically that supernatural notions do something fascinating to human brains and i like to explore that and i don't feel any sense of shame over that right so then the spectrum gets complicated for me i move through social circles that are atheistic non-theistic theistic even animistic and i feel at home in all of them and i'm just so comfortable with it these days and people in most of those circles to get tend to be uncomfortable my theist friends don't like my epistemology my atheistic friends are disappointed by my openness to spiritual experiences and you know to each their own and this whole ramble is to get actually to the heart of your question is there some way for a brain to always reject belief in the supernatural regardless of conditioning not that i'm aware of from a developmental perspective i believe any child who is taught by their caregivers that the supernatural exists will accept that and then doing so will accept a notion of the supernatural now there could be some condition or disorder that i'm unaware of and i did try to look and do some research where you know even young children automatically reject notions in the supernatural but i actually think that would probably create some attachment trauma because one of the ways that we grow to appreciate a creator or supernatural phenomenon is as children we believe that our our mother our primary caregiver is all knowing and then we learn we get disenfranchised that our primary caregiver is not all-knowing but then that kind of gets mapped onto this unseen part of the universe that becomes god um that seems to be a really necessary and normative function in the formation of human psychology so i think it's very unlikely that there's brains out there that automatically reject the supernatural but i do think it's possible through conditioning and development over time to produce a brain that no longer will accept notions of the supernatural now could that be permanent could you get kind of locked or pegged on one side of this spectrum where you absolutely always reject notions of the supernatural maybe maybe especially if there's some trauma there that if the rejection of the supernatural is a way of coping with traumatic events in the past uh but then that wouldn't be like an intellectual ascent that would be a psychological defensive affect it's a fascinating question i hope that uh my very long-winded answer just kind of speculating uh was useful and helpful and i so appreciated you sending in such an interesting question this episode of ask science mike was made possible by my friends at betterhelp and betterhelp is an online affordable private online counseling service that's available anytime and anywhere through your computer or mobile device sometimes finding a therapist is so hard that people avoid finding a therapist i mean how do you know who's qualified to help you with your challenges what do you do if you feel uncomfortable with the person how do you find time and space in your day to go to the therapist's office well betterhelp has solved all of those problems by connecting over 6 000 licensed therapists with now over 800 000 people around the world when you work with better help you work with a licensed mental health professional specializing in a variety of life challenges and growth issues to get started all you've got to do is go to betterhelp.com sciencemike and fill out a questionnaire and betterhelp will connect you with a counselor that i believe you'll love i am a paying better help subscriber it's the way i do therapy today to work through my life challenges and i find it very wonderful to be able to sit in my office at home on the phone or on a video chat with my therapist at a time that's convenient to me it's secure it's affordable available on a sliding scale in fact and you can get 10 percent off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com sciencemike so why not get started on the work that will help lead you to a more fulfilling and satisfying life today by visiting my friends at betterhelp one more time that's betterhelp.com sciencemike [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey science mike i had a question about the pros and cons of electric car production and manufacturing and the real change in reducing the effects of climate change even if that is a small change some of the criticisms i've heard surrounding electric cars are number one the large battery packs are useless after their lifespan of less than 10 years in some cases and once the battery packs are used up they sit in the landfill because they can't be recycled anyway number two using electric cars doesn't help with the greenhouse gas emissions that much because you're still getting electricity from your local power plant which in lots of cases is still not coming from a renewable energy source and number three the production of these cars may be manufactured from a plant that doesn't use a renewable energy source the more electric cars they're sold equals more emissions from the factory that are released therefore offsetting the benefit of a traditional gas-powered car i know the local benefits of pollution are a definite probe owning an electric car and since i thought i heard you say you own one i'd like to know your thoughts thanks for your work and taking the time on this question jake well jake you are right i do have an electric car it's a fiat 500 e it's a tiny little vehicle and i love it i love it because it's easy to park because it's small it was less carbon intensive to manufacture and requires less energy to operate so it charges quickly and has a pretty good range even with a relatively small battery it's just overall a really efficient way to travel if you are traveling in a car which the first point i would make is whether you're driving a gas powered car or a battery electric vehicle that's a whole lot less efficient than taking mass transit where available so we'll start there that even if you have a battery electric vehicle uh you are still being relatively inefficient in your carbon footprint just based on all that cars require all the roads all the road maintenance the energy to operate one vehicle uh it's just it's just not very efficient but kind of going to the specific points in your question i'll kind of take them piece by piece um the large battery packs are not useless after they're used in a car the battery packs which are these days typically lithium ion cells are still very usable when they're no longer reusable in an ev they have up to 80 of their charging capacity remaining and then make excellent energy storage reservoirs for our power grid especially as we move towards renewable sources of energy whose power output is not as consistent as fossil fuels so if you have wind plants or solar plants you can create large storage reservoirs of energy using batteries and all the electric car batteries are one source of um battery power to put on the grid now after that you're right the batteries are difficult to recycle it's not impossible but right now it takes for example to get the lithium back out of these lithium-ion battery packs is about five times as energy and cost intensive as getting lithium from a mine and uh that's not great now we're improving methods but it is a problem we also likely don't have enough recycling capacity for the amount of electric vehicles being sold and so we will have a great reckoning a few years from now unless we start building the infrastructure ahead of time so 0.1 large battery packs are useless that's not true they can be used for a long time on the grid and then ultimately they can be recycled uh the the only point there is that right now there might be insufficient recycling capacity for the number of batteries out there uh point two saying electric cars don't help with greenhouse gas emissions there's a grain of truth there it is true that battery electric vehicles produce much more carbon emissions when they're manufactured and that is because of the battery batteries are very energy intensive to produce compared to vehicles that produces something called a carbon debt the difference between a gas power car would create to the difference between how much carbon it takes to make a gas car versus a battery electric vehicle is the carbon debt and that gets paid off over time depending on the car you get in your driving habits that can be between two and four years and then eventually over the life of vehicles say eight or 10 years which we're finding batteries in electric fields are lasting longer than we thought not less long that carbon net gets paid off and then it tilts dramatically in favor of the electric vehicle it can be half or more uh the total lifetime carbon emissions for a battery electric vehicle versus a reasonable uh compact car right so if you compare a battery electric vehicle something like an suv then it gets outrageous the the advantage even if you get a battery electric suv versus a gas powered suv those advantages increase suvs are really bad for the environment everybody they're really not great um so that's interesting right the the offset uh is paid back over time because of the very low carbon emissions and also battery electric vehicles get greener over time as our power grids move more and more towards renewables so if you get a fuel-efficient hybrid uh or a fuel-efficient non-hybrid vehicle its kind of carbon output is fixed but we're seeing the carbon output of battery vehicles decline as we put more wind and solar and other renewable forms of energy on the grid so the only place is kind of left in the united states where the emission question is even close is in the midwest where there's a lot of coal power and the rest of the country it's it's really not close at all in terms of ongoing emissions which kind of gets to that grid point right and also kind of covers the factory thing now there is one important caveat i'd like to to say uh it takes two to four years depending on driving patterns to pay off your carbon debt uh which means buying a new battery vehicle every three years say on a lease is probably producing more carbon than you would just continuing to own an existing gas powered vehicle in general we're not going to buy our way out of climate change so what happens is companies like tesla give this really great image of like wow you can have a sexy fast car and save the plant it's not true that's just not true if we want to meaningfully impact climate change we have to buy less things we have to buy them less often that means holding onto cars for a long time so if you're going if you've got a vehicle that's worn out or you have an incredibly carbon intensive vehicle say a large pickup truck or or an older vehicle that has less emissions controls on the tailpipe and you want to buy a vehicle by all means buy a battery electric vehicle but then keep it for six or eight or ten years and that's going to start making some difference especially if you as much as possible use public transportation to get from point a to point b that's going to make all the difference in the world so there's no question in most uses use case scenarios there's less local pollution and less carbon emissions over the life of a battery electric vehicle when compared to hybrid vehicles or traditional even fuel efficient gas powered vehicles and that gets only more dramatic as you move into more carbon intensive forms of personal transportation like suvs and pickup trucks so they're a clear winner but don't let that win lull you into buying habits that are ultimately undermining what you're trying to do if you're getting a new battery vehicle every three years you're probably not saving that much carbon compared to driving a gas-powered car hi mike i have a question about the placebo effect as i think about some of the more spiritual mystical religious teachers that talk about the power of the mind and our mental ability to control circumstances or energies or healing or faith um i wonder if the placebo effect is a suggestion that there might be something toward that if taking a sugar pill while being convinced that that pill holds real power can heal you is it potentially evidence that simply our own minds can do some of the work that we wouldn't think we could traditionally do i don't know if this question is really scientific in any way shape or form i could probably do some googling but i'm such a big fan of your show and the way you articulate and share your ideas that i thought i'd ask you i feel very safe and comfortable asking in this setting thanks well thank you for your question it's exactly why the show exists i want people to ask questions they don't feel comfortable asking other places so thank you for being brave and sending in your question and absolutely the placebo effect is real and it's not the same as doing nothing or having no intervention the placebo effect is more effective than doing nothing and the way that we judge the success of a given treatment option today in our modern medicine is it has to outperform placebo which implies what that placebo does perform now really interesting to me when we talk about placebo pills when we're testing medications in pill form did you know that the color of the placebo pill influences the size of the effect and even more powerful is the size of the pill so if you go somebody a really big placebo pill and have them swallow that the effect of the placebo in the study gets bigger [Laughter] isn't that wild so if you're giving a pill with literally completely inert ingredients that ingredients that are not you know bioactive in any way the fact that the bigger pill makes the effect of the placebo effect larger or the impact of the placebo effect larger i just think that's really interesting there's also uh the placebo effects evil twin called the nocebo effect which is also real and the nocebo effect is when you give someone a placebo and you tell them a list of possible side effects then people experience those side effects even though they didn't take the medication that causes those side effects which also means that when we're taking actual medication and we know what the side effects are we are more likely to experience those side effects isn't that wild we have seen that when we started talking about gluten insensitivity more people started to have reactions to gluten but what's interesting is in trials you can give people food items and tell them that there's gluten in it and people who believe they're gluten insensitive will have allergic reactions to a food item that does not contain gluten because of the nocebo effect what does this tell me it tells me that our minds are very powerful now why is this energy is this the power of the spirit is this mind ever matter i don't think so i think our minds emerge from our brain body system your mind is is part of you it's a it's an outcome of these physical processes which means what every thought you have and every feeling that you experience is an honest-to-goodness physiological change in your body so of course our minds impact the functioning of our body everything our minds do happens in our bodies that's why i've been so into embodiment lately i'm just learning to admit the obvious that any sense i had that my intellect was separate from my physicality was an illusion the whole time and do you know i have been feeling so much better lately i've made big changes in how i eat i've made changes in my workload i've made changes in my life and relationships all based on a medical crisis and in that medical crisis with heart disease i was told that a significant factor in my heart disease was anxiety and my my eating is linked with anxiety so in order to continue to eat food items that support my health i had to address the anxiety so i didn't medicate constantly through food and i've had really major changes in how my body feels not just based on the dietary changes or the or the changes in daily activity but especially based on significant work in therapy i did a week of group intensive therapy at a place called on-site at the beginning of this year and i've noticed that my digestive health is wildly improved that my my stomach and intestines are not so sensitive i've noticed improved sexual function and increased libido and much much less chronic pain i'd already had less because of changing my food and now i just i don't know that i have any chronic pain and i've had chronic pain for almost 20 years um so what does this tell me addressing not only my lifestyle but my feelings is changing how my body feels and changing my medical outcomes and why is this it's because our emotions are physiological when we feel anxious when we feel sad on an ongoing basis we feel depressed we feel frustrated or angry over long periods of time these are chemical responses in our body that can produce things like inflammation now inflammation gets thrown around all the time when i talk about inflammation i'm speaking specifically of tissue sensitivity resulting from an ongoing immuno response or other mechanism in the body that's causing actual measurable tissue inflammation but those that is absolutely real we know that difficult feelings over time impact our bodies and addressing that impacts our health outcomes now this should not create a pattern where we disregard the effectiveness of modern medicine in treating significant health issues i am not saying you can happy your way out of cancer if you have cancer you should seek out the treatment of an oncologist you should not rely on a guru to cure you of cancer that would be unwise and dangerous but it also tells me that modern medicine has it has a tendency to treat the body as separate from the mind and from the emotions and that looks very short-sighted it seems to me our overall healthcare expenditures and our overall quality of life as a society would be improved if we incorporated mental health and emotional health into our body health models and our failure to do that is where the growth of pseudoscience and homeopathic medicine and faith healing and woo come from because when you go see a homeopathic healer they sit with you and they listen to you and they pay attention to you and they empathize with you and they don't treat you like a set of diagnostic criteria on a clipboard our medical system would be wise to incorporate not only the incredible findings in modern psychology about health outcomes but the interpersonal dynamics and interaction from other forms of dare i say treatment when people feel better because of a faith healer or from a guru or one of these spiritual experts it's because that person creates an emotional connection now often that they're they're also engaging in fraud whether they know it or not there are things in life there are medical issues that simply will not be cured or addressed by positive thinking but i i don't think people are dumb i don't think people are are foolish for seeking out other forms of treatment when modern medicine doesn't actually make them feel better i think we have a systemic problem that can be addressed that's why by the way i partner with hillary mcbride so much other than i just adore her is her insights on mental health i think the more people like hillary are known and become popular the more the medical community will pay attention to the power of human psychology to influence medical outcomes and quality of life that's why my next book is all all about mental health because i think these things are important and i think in significant ways our society has gone to um to really unfortunate places in how we relate to health so i hope that answer is helpful and useful kind of as you navigate and think through the power of the mind in relationship to healing [Music] our next question came in via email and it reads hey mike i grew up evangelical but over the course of a year of deconstruction and traumatic experiences ended up largely leaving my faith behind in the aftermath i had to piece back together some semblance of purpose for myself and reconstruct my identity i rediscovered spirituality through mysticism in part thanks to the liturgists and i've been able to include some of the most important aspects of my old christian faith within that but i also brought with me the values i had acquired during my faithless period one of which is support and affirmation towards lgbtqia plus identities i firmly believe that all identities should be welcomed and embraced within the body of christ my question is how do i talk about this with my traditionally conservative christian friends i have not yet found convincing arguments that the bible allows or affirms non-traditional identities or relationships and the only honest response i have to there but the bible says is my saying i don't care i don't feel right staying silent when talking to my christian friends because i know the harm the church continues to cause queer people but i don't know how to communicate why the church's treatment of them is so wrong when the person i'm talking to is operating under the belief of infallibility of a text which i no longer consider infallible any advice you can give is greatly appreciated thank you for everything you do well thank you so much uh for caring you know i've followed a similar path in my life as you probably know if you've heard me on the liturgist podcast i grew up a conservative religious fundamentalist in the evangelical tradition i was not affirming of same-sex marriages or um anything other than traditional male and female gender identities then i became an atheist and i realized there was no non-religious objection to those identities in relationships then when i came back to faith um boy it was i would rather at the time continue to affirm lgbtqia plus people then accept you know the teachings of paul now there are resources out there for people who still hold you know this infallible view of scripture there are arguments you can make from a scriptural basis to include lgbt people in the church there are eloquent arguments that are made and they are all over the place and they won't help most people because human beliefs aren't generally something we arrive at through you know cognition and rational analysis so when someone says but the bible says they are not inviting you to create a reasoned counter argument but the bible says is something that's coming from deeper in their brain in my next book which is called you're a miracle and a pain in the ass i uh describe the brain using a a metaphor and we have multiple layers of our brain and something called the triune brain model that's an older model but it's still useful for understanding how we experience the world and there's basically three layers of our brain and that model there's a reptilian brain there's a paleo mammalian brain also known as the limbic system and there's a neo-mammalian a portion of the brain known as the neocortex and i visualize that as your brain basically being a person standing on a puppy standing on a crocodile and i in the book i talk about you know how those three work together in our daily life experiences and how that can explain some of our behaviors that confuse us why we sometimes do things that we don't want to do to use paul's phrasing but in this situation when i'm trying to talk to someone i disagree with on an issue of controversy i understand that each layer of the brain is asking a different question and i realize you can't talk to layers that are higher until you address the question of a layer that's lower so the crocodiles question about the world the reptile brains question is am i safe what they care about is physical safety and security the puppy's question is do i belong our feeling brain wants to make sure that we belong socially and then finally the person that i generally picture wearing glasses and reading a newspaper uh says what does this mean so if you start to talk about what does this mean with someone who says but the bible says what you need to understand is the crocodile in that question is going am i safe am i safe this is new information this is different than what i was taught as a child and things that are different than what i was taught as a child are frightening they can mean i'm not safe now why because for human people the puppy is powerful our social brains are powerful we can't survive on our own so if the puppy questions if i belong or not then the crocodile immediately questions am i safe so you have to set up a relationship with a person where they feel safe talking with you where they feel like you know that their confidence won't be betrayed where they can be curious where they will also not be judged this is slow difficult work and then the puppies question with the bible says basically they're asking if i accept what you're saying i'm going to be rejected by people it has nothing to do in most cases with an analysis of scripture and more with an authority figure in my social community has said that this information is not allowed and anyone who accepts it does not belong and that's why not affirming theology is so sticky it's not in most cases again because people have a certain hermeneutic to their scriptures it's because they have a social identity and the reason in the church lgbtqia plus theology is so divisive and so controversial is two groups feel unsafe and at risk of belonging because of the discussion if you're not affirming you're afraid that if you become affirming you'll be rejected you've also been conditioned by many theologies to believe that your very soul is imperiled by accepting these ideas the ultimate not safe is eternal conscious torment in hell so that's very sticky in the brain meanwhile lgbtq people feel very unsafe because these positions threaten their very right to life liberty and pursuit of happiness lgbtq people are actually unsafe because of these theologies so for people like you my friend there's a very important opportunity here to wade into conversations that simply are not safe for lgbtq christians to have you and this this is difficult work will probably require therapeutic support on an ongoing basis but you can have ongoing conversations with a few people at a time where you can make them feel safe and not judged and make them feel a sense of belonging as they work through these ideas and don't talk to the person or if you talk to the person talk to the puppy in the crocodile at least as much and the way you do that is you tell stories that promote empathy and share feelings over time that's more effective than just coming up with a convincing scriptural argument now don't get me wrong i've worked through a lot of the the scriptural notions what does this word mean what's the difference that that paul's using man bed for example these these translations what's uh yeah what's different between the conceptions of gender and sexuality in that society versus this one a sophisticated hermeneutic can be helpful you know i can go there i just don't i don't like to i don't um i'm i'm a rare person if paul actually is against same-sex marriages i just say paul is wrong um but i also think paul would have no idea we're talking about he lives in a very different society so there's a humorous there but what i'm saying is this is the wrapping paper and not the gift this is the icing and not the cake what is it the center is empathetic stories and the sharing of feelings if you can talk about the the impacts on this theology on friends that you have if you can talk about in an empathetic way your growth and transformation what it's meant for you and the growth and transformation of other people and still tourists tell stories of transformation that will be the most effective thing that you can do both for yourself for the people in question and for the lgbtq people whose very lives are threatened by this theology did you know that every week on ask science mike i include resources for most questions on the show in our show notes so if you go to ask sciencemike.com and find episode 212 that's the episode you're listening to right now i'll have links and additional resources for many of the questions that were on this week's program i want to thank you so much for listening for leaving ratings and reviews on itunes i want to thank all of my patrons for making the show financially possible and doing the work of picking the questions that appears on the air i want to thank caitlin hermstad for producing the show greg nordin for production and sound design andrew golucky for pre-production and brett cradle for management services of course jeb bodiford wrote and recorded the ask science mike theme song and i'm so grateful to him for that thank you for listening my friends and i can't wait to speak with you next week