American Thought Leaders - Dr. Michael Nehls: How Changes in Our Brain Make Us More Susceptible to Indoctrination

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

“You have to have a high level of psychological resilience, and these cells provide the resilience.”In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Nehls, a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.”Dr. Nehls advocates for a strong “mental immune system.” His studies look at the critical portion of our brain known as the hippocampus, which processes and indexes memories.“But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn’t grow. It shrinks. ... And Alzheimer’s is actually a result of the shrinking process,” says Dr. Nehls. “Your life experience, which makes up actually your individuality, is replaced by essentially a commodity—what everybody learns [from] the news—and it’s replaced. And you are left as a human being [who], at the extreme stage, is only remembering the narratives that would create fear and sorrow.”And how might the spike protein contribute to this?“What inflammation does is it actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus,” says Dr. Nehls.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

you have to have a high level of psychological resilience. And these cells provide the resilience. In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Nels, a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of The Indoctrinated Brain, How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom. Dr. Nels advocates for a strong mental immune system. His studies look at the critical portion of our brain

known as the hippocampus, which processes and indexes memories. But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn't grow, it shrinks. And Alzheimer's is actually a result of the shrinking process. And how might the spike protein contribute to this? What inflammation does is it actually shuts down

the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Jekielek. Dr. Michael Nels, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jan, thank you very much for inviting me. As I told you already, I'm very, very honored to be here. Well, you have become a kind of an expert or at least an advocate for something called the mental or psychological immune system. And we don't usually think of things that way, but it actually does make me think of this term that Elon Musk seemed to pioneer or at least promote, the woke mind virus, if you recall.

Right? So anyway, tell me about what this mental or psychological immune system is. Well, as a molecular geneticist, I was very hard working on evolutionary research, evolutionary science. And from an evolutionary perspective, it's totally clear that we have to follow a certain imperative, which is be fruitful and multiply. We know this already from other thoughts but here it's clear if our ancestors hadn't followed the rules the two of us wouldn't be sitting

here so it's obvious. But to be fruitful and to multiply you have to become an adult and in the humans you have to be maybe even a grandfather or grandmother to protect your children and your grandchildren so with your wisdom. that was at least what it was in the former times up to the end of 19th century. It was shown that if you grow up to become a grandfather or grandmother, the likelihood that your grandchildren survive into adulthood is actually increased. So in order to actually be fruitful and multiply and actually come up to an old age, we need to defend ourselves and everybody knows we defend against pathogenic microorganisms quite efficiently actually. And my PhD work was actually to identify a gene regulator, a gene that regulates

other genes of the immune system and without this gene we would be actually it would be impossible for our immune system to adapt to viruses so it was very important work but this is one part of the immune system we need but we also have other enemies enemies which i call pathogenic microorganisms to compare to the pathogenic microorganisms pathogenic microorganisms i think i know what you're going to get at here. Yeah, usually they come on two legs. Most people think of maybe kind of animals, a big bear or tiger or something, but usually the major enemy of humans are other humans.

And we were probably enemies of other human species. You know, maybe 30, 40, 50 thousand years ago there were several roaming the earth, but now it's only homo sapiens. But anyway, we also have to have an immune system against pathogenic macro-organisms. And of course this one is centered in our ability to think, to be curious, to have stamina, you know, a psychological resilience and that we have a memory that we know how to react based on experience. And this experience doesn't have to be our own experience. It's also the experience of others. So, children, we are, for example, educated by our parents or grandparents with their wisdom,

their stories and that's why people, humans are so eager to learn narratives. Narratives are the food of our mental immune system. So our brain is essentially created around the possibility to memorize instantaneously and for long term everything that we experience and what we learn from others. We are social learning machines. It's very interesting that you say that narratives are very important to building your psychological immune system because I might argue that narratives are actually one of the chief weapons against us right now. The point is we are eager to learn from other people. Narratives are the food, and we are eager to get as much food as we can for the system. But this, of course, this natural

ability can be used against us. Everything that we try, a laugh, can be used against us. Every instinct that we have can be used against us. So there's always two sides of the coin, so to speak. But practically speaking, narratives are a good thing. We learn from narratives. And only when certain narratives are allowed, when thinking is not possible. I mean, if my grandmother tells me a story, I don't have to believe it. I'm allowed to question it.

And so that's the nature of narratives because my grandmother made experiences, she conveys them by telling me, and then I have my own experiences and if there's a conflict, we discuss and I learn and we improve. And that's kind of an adaption to new situations. And that's exactly what our bodily immune system does. It can adapt to variants of viruses, and we have to adapt to variants in situations. And that's what our mental immune system can do. Well, and so what's really fascinating to me in The Indoctrinated Brain, of course, your book, you're kind of explaining to me a little bit more than I had, I guess, come across before about why so many of us might be believing some extremely

preposterous narratives that if you know, seemingly to me, you know, some of these narratives at the slightest kind of scratch on the surface, the surface, seem to fall apart, yet they're also so dominant among so many of us as human beings. Explain to me, there's something happening to our mind, actually. Yeah, the default mechanism of our thinking is also sometimes called System 1 thinking and that goes back to the old mind thinking compared to the new mind. Some people say it's also the thinking mind and another Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick when he did the science on the neuronal correlate of consciousness he called the system one essentially the zombie

mode because it's not conscious, it's not conscious acting. And the system one is kind of our default way of acting, learned behavior but also instinctive behavior. And then we have in addition to that the actual actual thinking system, which we call System 2, and it all goes back to a Nobel Prize for economics, which was given in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman. I don't know if I pronounced him correctly. Kahneman would be German, but I don't know, Kahneman. But you might know.

I don't know. But anyway, he got the Nobel Prize by differentiating these two systems and the system two. The actual thinking system is a conscious system and it requires energy. And because we live for 24 hours a day, we cannot use up all the energy in the morning and then if the situation arises in the afternoon where we might need system two energy and real thinking, the energy is not there because he realized with his research that this energy source is limited. So it's limited and so our brain essentially is by default system 1 and only if our gut feeling somehow,

it's probably actually a gut feeling, tells us something is wrong in the situation, I should really stop here, think and not act the same way as I usually do in such situations. Then I have to essentially activate system two and invest in energy, mental energy. But what happens if this energy is not there or if the gut feeling is not strong enough? Then I continue with system one. And system one, of course, is a system that acts also on situations which make us afraid. In situations when we are afraid, we follow the mass without thinking. We just follow the mass because the mass means safety.

The question is, why do people not activate System 2? What can we do to improve that? So explain to me what the hippocampus is and its importance in our thinking process and exactly what you just talked about. Yeah. I mean, we started this whole conversation with a question about the mental immune system. And I mentioned a few functionalities of the mental immune system. And the major part, of course, is our autobiographical memory. And that's exactly where the hippocampus

comes into play. Well, tell me, let's just define for me what autobiographical memory means. It's actually essentially our mental diary of everything that we experience, that we learn, the narratives which we are told, everything that we have to remember instantaneously because it happens only once. Like we, I don't know, we make a walk and we find a nice bookstore. Then, of course, we go home again and we have to remember that there was a bookstore. It's not like a foreign vocabulary, a foreign word that we have to remember,

but it's essentially memorized by repeating it 20 times. We saw the bookstore, we remember it was there, and we can't go back. And this exactly actually is what the hippocampus is able to do, and he's unique in that. Only the hippocampus is able to remember something that we experience, learn, think or hear from people one time and we can memorize it for eternity, at least for a whole lifetime. Maybe for eternity if we put it into a narrative until the next generation. So anyway, this whole information is based on four questions. What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? And how did it feel? So, here are four questions. When, where,

what and how did it feel? It has to evoke some kind of feeling, an emotion, because the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity and it stores only things that come with emotions. So if a story has an emotion, we kind of force the hippocampus to memorize it. If it doesn't have any emotion, if it's routine behavior, we don't store it. And it indexes it somehow, right? Yeah, exactly.

Or categorizes it. Exactly. So the when and where is essentially creates coordinates, first of all in the space and time continuum where we live in, so in the outside world, but also in the inside world in our brain. It indexes where and when we have experienced something, and that's the index for the memory content. So what actually did we experience?

How did it feel? But we need the time and space neurons, actually neurons for that, time and space neurons. For the space neurons, actually, there was a Nobel Prize given, I think, in 2014 for their detection. And 2016, there were the first papers on the time neurons. And they create kind of an index. And then the hippocampus will remember forever.

We all know that if we want to try to remember what happened somewhere, sometime. It's always somewhere and sometime, and then the memory comes back, because that's how we find, essentially, the memory traces and reconstruct what actually happened at the time. So we need these time and space neurons and they are located in the hippocampus. And just for the viewers who don't know anything about the hippocampus, the hippocampus has its name because it looks like a seahorse. We have two of them here. I always show it like this.

They are like the size of a thumb. One percent of the brain mass of humans is the hippocampus. They are here in the temporal lobe, very deeply embedded under the neocortex, which is a later development in the evolution of the brain. They are just kind of under it. And the neocortex is actually what I call the neocortical hard disk or the hard drive. Because every night the content of the information that the hippocampus has stored during the day is uploaded into the neocortical hard drive. And that is stored. And only the time and space neurons have the access to it and allow us to retrieve the information. So every night when we sleep, the hippocampus essentially is restoring

its memory capacity again by uploading the information of the day before. There's only one caveat. The time and space neurons remain, and if you age up to 100, oldest woman was 122, actually without Alzheimer's, then you have to memorize things for 100 years. So you would run out of time and space neurons to index new memories.

And that's why the hippocampus has another unique feature besides its ability to memorize things instantaneously and long-term. It has the ability to grow new nerve cells on a daily basis. So it has the potential to grow. So with the wealth of personal experience in our diary, you know, in our autobiographical memory, the hippocampus, this little seahorse, actually grows. It can grow one, two or three percent every year. But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn't grow, it shrinks. So in adults, the shrinkage rate is on average about 1.4 percent. In our modern society, you're saying somehow there's been studies done that show in one set of circumstances it grows, but in the average, let's call it average modern society it shrinks

absolutely and in 2016 i published a paper which is called unified theory of alzheimer's disease and in this paper i show that if you keep up the growth you will never get alzheimer's and alzheimer's is actually a result of the shrinking process. So neurogenesis is called adult hippocampal neurogenesis, so adult because it's neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons in the adult which is unusual, it happens only in the hippocampus. This adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus, so the word is adult hippocampal neurogenesis, complicated but it's important, adult hippocampal neurogenesis essentially prevents Alzheimer's and this is based on many functions of these neurons because they are not only there to make an index, they have additional functions and these additional functions are very important if we think about

system 2 and system 1. So I have maybe to go into this for a few moments but then the viewers will actually understand why they are so important. So they're important because these index neurons are created, new index neurons, which are not index neurons yet, because they have not memorized anything when we wake up in the morning, but they are there. So they are fresh, maturing neurons. They are ripening, so to speak, and want to be mature neurons that have a function. But in order to do that, we actually have to learn something new. We have to make an experience. Otherwise there would be no need for them.

Stimulate them in some way. Yeah, we have to give them a job. Memorize X or Y. But if we don't give them a job, they actually die. They have an internal program of death. So there's the death program. It's called apoptosis. And so if certain cells, particularly nerve cells, are not needed, they kill themselves. It's suicide. So their survival instinct, so to speak, is we want to make memories, we want to make our job. So they are the neuronal correlate of human curiosity. If you have these cells, you are curious. If you don't have them, if they are not produced, your curiosity is down.

But your curiosity is not everything. If you are curious, you enter a new space, you ask questions that you might not like the answers. So everything that is new, per se, has the risk of being dangerous in some way or other. So in order to still follow your curiosity, you have to have a high level of psychological resilience. And these cells provide the resilience. They are actually dictating how high your stress level is if you experience something new. And all antidepressants that are out there do nothing else but activating the production of these new nerve cells. So if you, in an animal experiment for example, you stop the production of these nerve cells,

all antidepressants that are out there would stop their function. They're not working anymore. So it's key that you activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus to increase your resilience and to get out of depression. But you're telling me that these are getting smaller, and so this is, of course, reflected in the increased levels of depression and Alzheimer's and so forth. Absolutely.

One important function of thinking, system two thinking, is that our frontal brain, which contains what we call the working memory, the working memory is only currents in your brain. It doesn't fix any thought. So if you think about thinking, you want to change your lifestyle or you want to really go deep into a problem that might affect many people, it becomes quickly very complicated, the different alternatives that you have to consider. So it becomes quickly complicated. Now our frontal brain, the working memory, can only keep four or five, maybe six items parallel in action, so to speak, or in your working memory.

Actually, the number of items reflect your IQ. It's very important, actually, when we come to that later. So intelligence is essentially reflected by the number of items you can keep simultaneously active in your working memory. But it's only four or five and a complicated thought might require 10, 15, maybe hundreds of intermediate thoughts that need to be stored. And only the hippocampus can do that. So when we talk about the mental energy that is required for System 2, we talk actually about the storage capability of the hippocampus. And if you are running out of new neurons that become time and space neurons for these intermediate thoughts, then your battery is empty. You have no memory capacity anymore, at least not really.

You still can. Now, we come to that when we come to the process of indoctrination. You can still overwrite, but this is a different story. But having no index neurons left means you are what we call scientifically ego depleted. So you are exhausted. And we all know that if after half a day or almost the whole day of social activities, narratives you've learned, discussions you have had, or just thinking on your desk fills up all these index neurons that were available from the night before. And then of course there are none left and when a new thought comes in, well, what do

you do with it? There is no storage capacity and you rather stay back and say, tomorrow, let's sleep, I do it tomorrow. That's the cause of ego depletion which happens during the day. But of course if you wake up in the morning and you have no new nerve cells produced, if adult hippocampal neurogenesis is not working, then you are starting the day ego depleted. You are not able to activate system two when you are in a permanent state of system one. You are essentially permanent in the zombie mode.

You say when actual good reason to fear something enters into our system, that compromises the ability to create these, right? Yeah, it has two effects actually. One effect is that fear creates a high level of stress. We know that high level of stress hormones undermine the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus. So eU stress, I mean, the healthy stress is good. If we have a purpose in life, it's good. We do things that we like to do. They should be challenging

because they create new memories and the hippocampus is happy with new memories. The index neurons are happy. So, and we need a certain stress level to actually achieve something. But if it's becoming a situation of distress, particularly chronic distress, then actually the production of these nerve cells is down. And it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. In a situation where your life is at stake, you know, where you're threatened,

you need all the energy to fight or to fly it or whatever, or for freeze, but you need all the energy. And in this situation, the highest levels of stress hormones essentially stop any production in the body of new cells. So wound healing is, for example, stopped. The regeneration of blood cells is stopped. Chronic stress, that's why, for example, people use steroids to inhibit cancer cells in growing,

because it stops the production of cells. And the same happens in the brain. Neurogenesis, also reduction of cells, it stops. But it's usually an acute situation. If it becomes a chronic situation, then you have a chronic stop, but based on the high level of steroids. And then of course, you have damage to your mental immune system, which consists of curiosity, a high level of psychological resilience, and the memory function. And then comes the second thing.

If you have this fear point, these narratives that are presented to you, you force because they cause fear, they cause emotions, and emotions cause the hippocampus to memorize. But think about it. You have no index neurons, but particularly in the evening, you are tired, you are exhausted, you are ego depleted, and you get the news that the next world war, the war against climate will kill all humanity. Then you have these perma-pandemics, as the World Economy Forum calls them, which kill everybody. So we are constantly in a situation of being killed. So at least from the narrative point of view.

And you have no index neurons. Then you force the information into the hippocampus nevertheless. But only on, it costs something. It costs the index neurons that have been used before. They are overwritten. Because the hippocampus will remember that the day before, I've learned this new story about whatever. Basically, this is literally brainwashing what you're describing. Yeah, it's really the name washing comes into place here. It's more than

even washing. It's replacing. You replace essentially former memories, maybe good memories, maybe things your grandmother told you. Everything that your life experience, which makes up actually your individuality, is replaced by essentially a commodity, what everybody learns by the news. And it's replaced and you are left as a human being that at the extreme stage is only remembering the narratives that create fear and sorrow. You are a frightful person left that only wants to have one thing, an end to everything. Please end the horror. This is already putting the fear of God into me as you're describing, you know, the sort of the mechanism how this works. But then you actually have another part

to your hypothesis, which is involves this spike protein. There are many measures, many, many reasons why the neurogenesis is down. Some of them acted already before 2020. And that's, if you consider, I'll come to the spike protein in a moment, but I think it's very important that people understand that spike protein has some function, a very bad function, but we are already in a situation where our mind is not working well enough in the society. We are already a System 1-driven society. The majority of people have not the ability, at least not enough to engage system two when it's needed. And it's not their fault because we live in

a modern society where the hippocampus is not growing but shrinking. And you actually asked me and I skipped the answer because I put something in between and we forgot about it. But the point is, before 2020, the hippocampus was already shrinking. And in my paper, the unified theory of Alzheimer's disease, I show what the reasons are why it's shrinking and how we can actually remedy it. So if you remedy it, not only that you prevent Alzheimer's,

you also allow your brain to grow instead of to shrink and to be open for new thoughts. You are more happy because your psychological resilience is much higher. I might add, from what I'm understanding from all of this, your individuality, your uniqueness, your own variant of critical thinking, all of that grows. All of that grows. That has not only implications for you as a person, it has also implications for society. Think of a society that essentially comes across a problem that is important for the whole society.

Then you have to find a solution. And how likely is it that you find a solution if the whole population only consists of people whose personalities consist of the narratives that the leaders gave us? It's much more likely that you find somebody with a solution that has a unique individuality and by chance comes up with the best idea. And as soon as one person sparks the idea, it's like a fire spreading because everybody knows about it. I mean, one person invented the mobile phone and everybody has one. So it's not like everybody has to invent it and that's dose for every thought.

So the broader the individuality is of each individual, and the more individuals we have with a broad individuality, the better the immune system of a society. But the reverse is also true. If you want to dominate a society, you have to reduce the number of people and you have to reduce the individuality and at the moment both is happening. Well, right. I guess you're alluding to the excess mortality that we're seeing in the population. Particularly in a part of the population, that we're seeing in the population. For example, yeah. Particularly in a part of the population, which is from 16 to 64. I want to touch on this, but do you think these are environmental factors that are causing this?

Is it diet? Is it video games? You know what I mean? There's so many different elements. To be honest, it's all of the above. It's all of the above and much more. So I actually produced for my book at the time, I wrote a book in 2013. It's called The Alzheimer's Lie, which essentially is the basis of the paper I published, Unified Theory. And there I show that Alzheimer's is not caused by aging. Age is just the prerequisite because it takes

a few decades for the shrinking of the hippocampus to reach a point, kind of a point of no return, where Alzheimer's is developing. So just because something needs decades doesn't mean it's caused by the decades. Just out of curiosity, how easy is it to measure your hippocampus? It's actually quite easy. When we talk about what we can do to improve its size, there are fantastic studies out there which show actually that the theory is correct. At any age, you can start to grow it and regrow it again. And that's the nice story that I'm going to tell.

And everybody who reads my book will find out what he can do to improve the size of his hippocampus. So let's go back to these neuropathogenic substances. Presumably, they have an impact. We know that spike is somehow neuroinflammatory, neuropathogenic. That's been documented in the literature. Everything that stresses the hippocampus will cause damage. And you can imagine if you have an acute inflammation, let's say a respiratory disease or whatever, then your immune system reacts to it and it starts to produce first pro-inflammatory cytokines. Cytokines that activate the immune system to fight against the pathogenic microorganism.

And in this situation, you're usually sick. And sick is, of course, a trusty reflection of the fight that's going on internally. And you have to restore, of course, you have to lay down, you have to sleep. And so it's clear that it makes sense actually to shut down the hippocampus. You are not eager to make new experiences, you're not outgoing, you're withdrawing. So what inflammation does is it actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus for the time being. So an acute inflammation is pretty much the same like an attack which increases the stress

hormones, it shuts down the hippocampus. And it's not a bad thing. Again here, if it's chronic it's not a bad thing. Again here if it's chronic it becomes a bad thing or if the inflammation is not really caused by a virus but maybe by something else just mimicking a virus being there. And that's what the spike protein is doing when you inject the mRNA. You produce a spike protein in your body, anywhere in your body, and then the SARS-CoV-2, we know, meanwhile, has been fabricated to include this furin cleavage site into the mRNA of the spike gene, which then causes the production of the spike protein, which has this protein cleavage site of this molecular scissor that we have in

all of our cells, which we call furin. So furin cleavage is cleaving essentially the spike protein two halves. The outer side, the S1 subunit, is able now to transverse or cross the blood-brain barrier and goes into the brain. So let me just stop for a moment just to kind of disambiguate this a little bit. So the furin cleavage site, just to kind of remind our viewers, typically we think about it from the perspective of it being a very unusual feature in coronaviruses. One of the things that's sort of a hint that it very likely did come from a lab. It makes it, the virus, easy to infect humans. But you're saying it also has another

function. Yeah, exactly. It has another function. The main function is to increase its infectiousness. But practically speaking, it allows now the spike protein to be internally shed, so to speak, from the production site and from the virus, but even also from the mRNA when it's injected. So it really doesn't make a difference at first glance if you are infected or injected. You produce, your cells produce the spike protein. It's been cleaved by furin and the S1 subunit was shown to be very effective in entering the brain by essentially crossing the blood-brain barrier, which is usually a protection

side of the brain against the bloodstream so that toxins and so forth cannot enter. And so let me jump in again. So the reason this lipid nanoparticle delivery platform was used was ostensibly to be able to get this mRNA into cells because cells are set up to avoid getting foreign mRNA into them, foreign DNA, foreign RNA. Yeah, absolutely. And so, is this a separate ability to get into cells? Yeah, no, it's not in the cells, actually into the space around the cells. So particularly the space around the cells in your brain.

So what you already mentioned, the lipid nanoparticles were chosen to deliver the mRNA to the cells. It's actually strange because if you want to immunize somebody, you can just use the protein and inject the protein or so, or inhale the protein and you create immunity where it hits the immune cells. Why the mRNA was chosen is really unclear. It's not unclear. You had to use it probably for this purpose in the lipid nanoparticles. But what was clear is the lipid nanoparticles were developed specifically to get hemotherapeutics against cancer in the brain into the brain to cross the blood-brain barrier. So they have chosen a vehicle for the mRNA which was developed to actually enter the

brain and that doesn't make any sense for a respiratory virus to protect against respiratory viruses because they never enter the brain. So they don't need any immunization in the brain, but the problem is, of course, the lipid nanoparticles per se are inflammatory, but only for the short time they are present. The longer time present, of course, is the mRNA, which was modified to stay long in the cells. And what is also shown, meanwhile, is that the spike protein itself, particularly the S1 subunit after the cleavage, is very stable.

And it can enter by itself, doesn't matter where it is produced, even if the cells in your toe produce the spike protein, the S1 subunit can travel through the bloodstream essentially anywhere and of course can enter the brain and stay there. And there it was shown to activate the immune system of the brain. So the brain consists not only of brain cells, of course it consists only of brain cells, but some of the brain cells are actually immune cells. We call them microglia.

And the microglia has receptors for spike proteins. They have them already. They have not learned that during your life. They learn that through evolution. And the receptor is called TLR4. This receptor recognizes the spike protein as a pathogen. And now, of course, it's tricked because you see it's a spike protein and thinks that's the virus. But of course, the spike protein as a pathogen. And now of course it's tricked because he sees the spike protein and thinks there's a virus. But of course the spike protein is just there, it has no virus with it. But the immune system cannot differentiate and it activates now the fight against this virus which isn't there. And we start an inflammation. But the spike protein doesn't go away. The inflammation doesn't go away. We have a chronic inflammation. And we know that the proteins that are produced in, for example, interleukin-1, interleukin-6,

or TNF-alpha, just names, but these pro-inflammatory cytokines are the most potent inhibitors of adult hippocampal neurogenesis that we know of. So if you have a chronic neuroinflammation, you have to have a chronic inhibition of the adult hippocampal neurogenesis. And that's probably the main cause that people are having brain fog, having this spicropathy after infection or injection. I mean, basically, you're telling me that a combination of this fear porn, as I'm not sure I like that word, but okay, and essentially spike production or prolonged spike production

in our body, the combination of that has an extra negative effect on us to be able to have good hippocampal activity? Yeah, I mean the fear itself plus the spike protein essentially are probably sufficient to stop completely the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, which means your mental immune system is shut down. And then of course the content of the fear and the narratives still become introduced as memories in your brain, but overriding in a second step previous memories, and then you eradicate essentially your personality.

One quick question. You could also be creating new memories yourself that are overriding past memories. It's not necessarily these fear-laden narratives, which are the only thing that's kind of overriding at this point. Yeah, sure. So even if I'm completely ego-depleted in the evening, which I usually am, and a friend calls me and says, hey, my daughter is sick, can you help me? And I'm surely not saying, no, I'm ego-depleted, let let me alone I want to go to sleep now I'm sure going to help him and if it's not routine I certainly have to invest and think about what

what I need to do and of course I will remember so what will happen obviously is that since no index neurons are available new ones I, I will overwrite old ones. But of course, better safe than sorry. It's better to help him than to try to remember maybe things or keep a memory of the old times. The present is more important than the past in this situation. But that's an exception. It's not what usually happens in the evening. But of course, if it would happen every day, if I overdo it every day, then new memories will always override old ones. I think that's a default mechanism of

how our brain works. You see, if I wake up in the morning, I have essentially no fresh index neurons because of the spike protein. But also lifestyle. As I said already, before 2020, we were already in a situation where the production was down for other reasons. If the production is down and I wake up in the morning, I'm not engaging in complex thought. I just want to make my routine life. I want to be in routine. I don't want to question anything. I want to just go along and be happy.

Of course, then nothing is there that overrides. This one day looks like the next day and the next day and the next day. And I can't remember. The week is over and there's not much I memorize from the week because it was the week like the week before. But but in situations where I'm now forced to memorize because every day we have a new rule about coronavirus, a new rule about environment, a new rule about environment, a new rule about the climate change that we have to obey now. All these new rules which are forced into our brain because they have consequences if we don't follow them. You know, we might get a ticket, we might go to jail, whatever.

But we are forced to memorize all these things. So this crisis situation that I described with my friend calling me is something that happens on a routine base to people that have an ego-depleted mind. And then, of course, it becomes really problematic because then you force an override of all your personality in the long run. So there's two things here that come to mind. First of all, I can't help but think of 1984, sort of the eternal present. We have no sense of history anymore. This is, of course, an extreme vision. No, unfortunately, it's not. It's overriding history. That's exactly what's happening. That's one side. The other side is, as people get into, let's say, having more of these narratives which are being inserted into your mind over time, and more of the population has

that, that population itself self-reinforces. Perhaps they're in a position, they work in media, or they have a lot of friends, and they're an influential person. And it ends up becoming, potentially, you tell me what you think, but like a vicious cycle fostering exactly those kinds of narratives even further, never mind the sort of, you know, incessant drumbeat propaganda, which some of these things have been pushed with, right? Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, it's really a problem.

That's why, but of course, these people like to have their own mind or they stay with themselves usually. And we all, I think, experience that. In my family, we have a wall between the one group and the other group suddenly. We have birthday parties where we are not invited, being not vaccinated, you know. I mean, clearly there was a big wall, but to be honest, the people on the other side of the wall were before 2020 kind of strange to me already because they were not curious about what, for example, I was doing.

It was really funny. Sometimes I was really asked what I'm doing. I said, I trust writing a new book. There never came the question about what. It was not interested. They already lived in their cozy system one and didn't want to be confronted because they knew, if I write a book, it has meaning, I hope.

Here's another thought. Obviously, not everybody in society is going to be this groundbreaking, visionary, critical thinker, scientist, whatever. But the issue is more that what value do we place on that? And I think one of the things that strikes me as having made America great, an amazing country, is we've put on a pedestal the people who think differently, the people who transigrain, the people who are able to rise through merit and figure out incredible things. And it's almost like in our current cultural, sociopolitical moment, and maybe this isn't just the U.S., maybe this is the West as a whole from the looks of it, to me anyway, we're not valuing that somehow. And this is, again, everything you've

just talked about, this whole hypothesis, it kind of jives with why we might not be valuing that somehow. And this is, you know, again, everything you've just talked about, this whole hypothesis kind of jives with why we might not be valuing that. Absolutely, it would explain it because if somebody is a critical thinker, he introduces critical thought. Critical thought is different from what you like to hear maybe. So you have to be curious.

You have to have a high threshold of resilience to dive into what he is telling you because he is telling you something that you might not want to hear because it challenges maybe your lifestyle. So you withdraw actually unless you are curious and that means you have a strong mental immune system because a strong mental immune system means you would love to learn what it has to tell because it might improve your life but before you can do that the prerequisite for that is you have a strong mental immune system and tell you what when when alzheimer's aloe's alzheimer's discovered the disease it was a curiosity. In 1906, it was a total curiosity. In textbooks, the biggest textbooks 30 years later on neuropathology, Alzheimer's wasn't even

mentioned as a disease. So it was totally uncommon 100 years, 200 years ago. So when we talk about the times when we honored people that changed the world, that created the American institution, constitution or whatever, that was a time where the majority of the people still lived more naturally. Yeah, all the things that we are lacking today and were lacking before 2020 causes the hippocampus to shrink. And the shrinking causes Alzheimer's, but Alzheimer's was not present in the early 20th century. So at that time, the society

was a different one. It was more freedom-loving and nowadays we have a society where the shrinking egos follow the herd, and the herd is taught by the narratives where they have to run to. They run to a new global governance system that is reducing our freedom. We really have to make the herd turn around. In this sort of situation, I can also imagine a scenario where a whole bunch of us decide, we're actually the enlightened people. We're the ones who have bigger hippocampus. We're the ones that are able to think critically and change society. And now we are going to look down on all those other people. I see this a lot. My brief study of history tells me that whenever that happens

and is allowed to foster, atrocities happen, basically. Absolutely. People always had different abilities. Some people are better in one thing, some people are better in other things. Some people are in the old times better hunters, some better fishermen, some others who better make maybe fire, whatever. So everybody has his speciality and that's what a social system is about, that everybody has his, hopefully has the chance to do the job he wants to do. And it's not forced to do anything. And so some people invent, for example, the mobile phone, and others use it. Does it mean that the people who only use it but are not able to invent it

are inferior people? I don't think so. When I drove to the lab and I did basic research for over 20 years, I drove in the morning to the lab with taking the bus. I was happy that there was a bus driver taking me there. I was happy that actually I was really thinking about that the streets are paved. You know, somebody has to do that. So if everybody would only drive into a lab and doing research, how do I get into the lab? Everybody has a job in a society and some people would maybe be overwhelmed doing research the way I did it and others might actually be saying, well, I'd rather be an artist or I'd rather be in whatever. People should choose whatever

they want to choose. But at one point, certain groups have a responsibility if they have an idea how to change things. Well, right. I think that's right. I think that's the right way to think about it. If you do have this awareness and this critical thinking capability and so forth, that actually is more than it puts you above others. It actually gives you more work.

My wife was really fearful that I write the book because she said, well, we might be getting attacked by just having this book out. It's not easy. But I said, well, I know that. And you see, I'm the type of person, if I see a banana in the skin on a street, on a pavement, I move it because I just fear that somebody might step on it and fall and break a leg. It may just be a metaphor, but if you see something,

if you have the knowledge that something is wrong, I think you have to, as an individual in a society, you have the obligation to do something about it. And so with knowledge comes responsibility. Isn't this the thinking, possibly, of some of these budding technocrats as well? They're like, well, we have to make sure society runs properly. Absolutely. I can believe they feel the same way, that they know something that others don't know, that they have the power about certain knowledge that they want to introduce now into society. But the problem is, to solve a problem that

is complex, even if the question is if there's a problem at all, let's say climate change or whatever, and maybe there are other problems which are more demanding and more necessary to solve. Just think about the plastic which we have in the oceans and so forth. There are many things we should rather maybe talk about, but that's a different topic. The point is, as a society, a society can only be as strong as we already mentioned as the more individuals are there that have an opinion. The ideas have to be… You have to be allowed to challenge the ideas. In science, when you come up with an idea, you're not saying this

is the truth. You're saying this is the proposition. This is a theory. So when I published my paper on Alzheimer's, how it can be prevented, I said it's a unified theory. I'm not saying this is a unified truth about Alzheimer's. It's a unified theory and even my book here is a theory. And I show the theory and at the end, like a prosecutor, I talk to my reader and say, now you are the jury. You can decide if my theory is correct for you. But even if it's wrong, it doesn't really matter because the science that I show is true. The hippocampus is shrinking in our society, no matter if it shrinks on purpose by certain measures, or if it happens just by accident. It's an emergent property of a lot of different systems.

Yeah, exactly. It's happening by accident, because our culture somehow evolved. It had some idea and it's a collateral damage that our hippocampus suffers. But that's all possible. But at the end of the day, I think what we need is, like in science, we need an open mind.

We need to be allowed to talk about the different options. And we have to have a receptive community that is willing to accept these alternative thoughts and think about them. They should be free to pick the best thought. Foundationally, and this is kind of as we finish up, I really want to discuss is how you propose to help people with that. Because basically, you're arguing that unbeknownst to us, to you and to me and to, frankly, everyone, our ability to think has been reduced, and

we need to regain that. So how are we going to do it? Your question reminds me a little bit of the situation when we were flying off. My daughter accompanied me here to fly to the United States. And the first thing that this flight attendant was telling us, if the oxygen is essentially down because of some kind of break, you have to take the oxygen mask. You should help yourself first before you help others. And that's the first step in my book in the last chapter. Help yourself first. Make sure that your mental abilities are the best because even if you

are already able to think, I believe you can do a couple of things to make your thinking better. Reduce a couple of deficiencies in your diet, whatever. There are a couple of hints to that in the book. I don't want to go into that in depth. But you can first help yourself. Create even a stronger mental immune system, a stronger self of yourself. And then if you have done that, you are more able to help others. And don't go back and just draw a line and say, well, these are the others. They are inferior, whatever you

alluded to. I don't think like this. You need them. We need a maturity. And maybe you cannot reach out to everybody or not everybody is responsive to that. But over time, I think more and more people will be. And there's also a scientific foundation to this thinking. And I actually show that in the book. In the mid of the 20th century, Solomon Asch did an experiment, confirmation experiment. So in this experiment, 12 people were asked an opinion about the length of a certain,

what is called a line. You have three lines, A, B, C, and a fourth line which responds to one of the three. It was totally clear that B is identically in size like the one you are confronted with. But 11 of the 12 were asked to say it's A. And the 12th one was the actual person that was essentially challenged. And he learned, wow, it's A, A, A, A, A. Wow, but it looks like B. Why do they always say A? But it was interesting. 80% didn't follow their common sense and say B. They said actually A because the majority said A. But it's interesting, when one of the other 11 was asked to say B, then the 12th person was not on its own anymore. And the likelihood that it also said B, despite the 10 others that know A in this case, was actually increased by 40%.

In other words, a little bit of courage goes the long way. I do want to mention this because in one of your books, you talk about the effects of the micro doses of lithium because it's an anti-inflammatory as helping with Alzheimer's. Is that right? Yeah, on my website, you can actually find an article I wrote about this because chronic inflammation is essentially a cause, which is caused by the spike protein, but also by other things that I describe in the book.

But the spike protein, of course, is very dominant here in current times. This inflammatory process can be undermined. The vicious cycle of inflammation that actually occurs in the brain, and I show this vicious cycle on my website in this article, can be interrupted and stopped by lithium. Not lithium that is used in bipolar disorder, in manic depression where you use really high levels which are almost toxic with a very small therapeutic window. I talk about doses which are 100 times smaller, which I call actually essential doses because

based on our natural history of human evolution, we have essentially grown our mental capabilities most likely in an area where we actually were not gatherers and hunters but fishermen and hunters and gatherers at the ocean in South Africa. There are a lot of evidence for that. And you have to think about the lithium content in the ocean is a hundred times higher than in fresh water. So if you eat fish from mussels or seafood from the ocean, then you actually take in a few milligrams of lithium a day. And this small amount of lithium is able to break essentially this vicious cycle activated by spike TLR4 and then activating the immune system by producing interleukin

1. This vicious cycle that essentially turns around because now the hippocampus has a low resilience. You get depression. Depression means toxic levels of steroids, for example, activating the cycle again and you're on a vicious cycle. This vicious cycle can be broken and it was shown from the University of Buffalo in New York, at least in test cases of 10 people that were given a low dose of lithium, that

nine immediately or in very short time got rid of the brain fog, a consequence of spicopathy. And in my paper, Unified Theory of Alzheimer's Disease from 2016, I have a whole chapter on lithium low dose because it was shown to actually stop the Alzheimer progression. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. It makes me wonder. Of course, we've had many doctors who are treating, let's call it, spikeopathy in various forms, right? And I'm very curious how lithium fits into their

treatment regimens. That's something I'll be looking into now. I think it would fit into it because lithium not only essentially breaks this vicious cycle of neuroinflammation, it also was shown to activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus. It was shown, and all the papers I cited actually in my article and it was also shown to activate what we call autophagy, meaning the removal of proteins, micro-organelles that are not functioning anymore. And there is one paper mentioned, I also cited in my article, that proposes that it might also work against a resident spike protein

in the brain. So much to read up on. Your website, briefly, can you remind us what that is? Yeah, it's very simple. It's michael-nells, N-E-H-L-S, michael-nells.com. Excellent. Well, Dr. Nels, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Yeah, thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here. Thank you all for joining Dr. Michael Nels and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.