Change Your Brain Every Day - How Do Violent News Headlines Affect Your Brain? (Part 1)

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

With violent headlines continuing to dominate the media, it’s important to look for root causes in dangerous individuals. In this episode of The Brain Warrior’s Way Podcast, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen take a look into the 4 circles that influence a person’s behavior: psychological, biological, social, and spiritual.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. Here we teach you how to win the fight for your brain to defeat anxiety, depression, memory loss, ADHD, and addictions. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we've transformed lives for three decades using brain spec imaging to better target treatment and natural ways to heal the brain.

For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceutical products to support the health of your brain and body. For more information, visit brainmdhealth.com. Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. So today we're going to talk about a topic that actually creates a little heat in our house, right? We're going to talk about violence, violence in the workplace, violence in society. Really, what triggers people to be violent and where does evil come in?

What's the difference between someone who's violent because they have something going on in their brain versus free will and someone who's just truly evil? And this can trigger some very heated discussions in our home we're going to be honest everywhere in our society now and it's not stopping right uh from the capitol hill shooting uh of a congressman right to what's happening in france and in england uh new shooting in San Francisco, and then Orlando. Right. And we need to be able to have rational conversations and be empathic and thoughtful. And at the same time, look at all of the details because we're not going to all agree on this, right? See, I never actually thought you would say empathic and try to understand it

yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna try really hard so i didn't grow up in a great environment right so um so i've got some pretty strong opinions on things um to say the least and maybe i've softened you over the years i don't know about that but but i but because of our work i will say that i've become more able to at least look at a bigger picture to be more well-rounded it doesn't always change my opinion critical but sometimes it does understand the biological factors of violence the psychological psychological factors, the social factors, and the spiritual factors of violence. So I actually really never thought about it. I mean, I grew up in the San Fernando Valley.

It was pretty safe where I grew up. Well, I grew up in part of the valley for a while when I was young, and it wasn't that safe. The only violence I had to deal with was on the football field or sometimes my sisters would get a little crazy with each other. But I never really felt it, although I say that, and I was beaten up every day of my life until I was about six. I had an older brother who, until he figured out I was a better playmate than punching bag. But when I started doing imaging, it just changed everything for me. I actually had no opinion of the death penalty. I didn't really think about it much. And growing up Catholic, they're sort of opposed to it. But when I started our brain imaging work in 1991 very soon defense attorneys started sending me people that did really awful things and they'd go can you help me understand why this

person did this whether it's a murder or domestic violence case or an arsonist and when i started to see the damage in their brain i began to think is it really the sign of an evolved society to kill people and then i read the quote from Dov Stayevsky, the famous Russian author. Who I don't like, by the way. Just going to throw that in there. Brilliant author, who wrote The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. And he said you can tell, he wrote,

you can tell about the soul of a society not by how it treats its outstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals. And that has really stuck with me that whenever we talk about violence, we want to try to go why because if you don't understand why it happens you can't do anything now that's where fix it now i'm going to say that's where you that's where you get me that's where you catch me because you're bright right because i want to

i want to be able to stop the cycle right i don't want kids going through what i went through i don't want the shootings you know workplace shootings and terrorist shootings to continue so understanding you know the psychology and the biology and the science of why this is happening that's critical that's important well and we can stop it before it happens. And the thing that just made me so proud of you is when we worked at the Salvation Army in Anaheim. Oh, I wasn't going to do it. With a drug treatment program with gang members and people had done some really awful things.

You were like, I can't do this. Oh, no, there was rape and, I mean, a lot of things that I'm, you know, crimes against children. I mean, it was pretty awful. And so I came home and I told you I wasn't going to do it. I told you I couldn't do it. I said, this time God picked the wrong person. And you told me with that irritating smile that you have, that one right there,

that husbands and psychiatrists have. And you said, no, God picked the perfect person. And I did not think I could do it. I struggled with myself. I was angry about it. I wanted to help Laura. I wanted to help the director very much because I knew that what we do would help them.

But I did not want to be around them. And I hated myself for being that judgmental. But I know I am. I am that judgmental against people. And so you help them. But I did not want to be around them. And I hated myself for being that judgmental. But I know I am. I am that judgmental against people. And so you helped them a lot. And then I sort of fell in love with their stories and their healing. Because you realize it's more complicated. Well, what I realized is, here's what I realized.

It's good or evil. Here's what I realized. Here's ultimately what came to me. Is that for every person that I realized is, here's what I realized. Then it's good or evil. Here's what I realized. Here's ultimately what came to me, is that for every person that I could help, that we could help, every person that actually legitimately changed, even if it was only 1%, which it wasn't, it was way more, but for every person that was helped,

that would be one less terrified child in the world and that was that was the big aha for me is that it's not about me it's not about my feelings about it god asked me to do this and so it wasn't about me that's really hard to do sometimes is to put your own pride aside and your own fear and do what you're so let's talk about what causes violence and and it's not a simple answer and anybody who gives you a simple answer it's just it's wrong now whenever we try to understand people here at amen clinics we always try to understand them in four circles biological psychological social and spiritual and um we'll come back to biology uh but psychology is did you grow up in a violent home was it modeled for you do you have negative thoughts and i worry in this political climate there's so much anger hatred vitriol

i was just reading a story about what happened in washington dc and one of the congressmen said we have to stop the political terrorism why are? So no matter what your position, you're a Republican or a Democrat, there's just hatred going both ways. And they're both at fault as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to fight with my friends who have a different... We're now in a social media Twitter cycle where, you know, the person who says the most awful thing uh gets the most attention and news media knows that it's the headlines that talk about crisis that talk about oh my god i can't believe this thing just happened that that that grabs the readers. And so even though 50 awesome positive things happen, they're going to go back to what's going to drive clicks.

Quite honestly, if I want to watch violence, I'll turn on Game of Thrones. I can't watch the news. I just can't. It irritates me. It's crazy. I don't want to be wound up and I don't want to be mad at my friends

who have a different view than I do. I can be friends with someone who doesn't have the same political or religious views that I have. I don't need that in my life and I don't understand why we are fighting each other when we have bigger wars to fight. There's got to be a reason for it.

Couples, like 10%, a couple split up because they had different political views so social um what's the stresses in your life now what you know did you get fired from a job the orlando shooting where someone had been fired from that happened at loma linda where i went to school it's a christian it's a christian and high school. And I actually scanned the McDonald's killer who three years later went back to a McDonald's in Northern California and shot up the place. And his brain was so damaged. But he couldn't let go of the bad thoughts that he felt. And then there's a spiritual bankruptcy really in people who commit violence that they don't know why they're on the planet.

They don't have a deep sense of meaning and purpose. So it's easy for them to hurt other people. That's not religion. That's evil, as you said. And I completely believe in evil, although on the in court once in a death penalty case lewis peoples killed four people in 11 days on a methamphetamine run and the prosecutor hated me george something and george hated me because i was giving the jury a reason to have mercy and he read my book so you wouldn't have wanted me on the jury a reason to have mercy. And he read my book, Change Your Brain.

So you wouldn't have wanted me on the jury? No, actually I would, because you're a thoughtful person. And he said, Dr. Amen, I read your book, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. I said, oh, thank you. He said, well, I read that you grew up Catholic. I said, yes, sir. He said, well, as a Catholic, I said, I grew up Catholic. He said, as a Catholic, do you believe in evil? And I took a breath and I said, yes, sir, I do believe in evil, but I would never call anybody evil unless I could scan them first and he got mad the jury started to laugh because Lewis's brain was so damaged and when you understand the story of his life it's heartbreaking yes he did something awful and his life is not an excuse for him to do bad things.

He's not going home. He's going to stay in jail. But do you really kill someone that's got a very damaged brain from repetitive injuries, from having untreated learning disabilities and ADD? As a child, he was a bed wetter and how his parents tried to manage that is whenever he'd wet his bed they would tie him to a tree outside with his wet sheets so he obviously had physical brain trauma and you could see it on the scans his brain was very damaged he had psychological damage um and as a way to medicate his very low activity brain he'd use methamphetamines because in low doses which is actually what we use to treat add in low doses they really helped him get focused and do work and in high doses they make

you crazy and paranoid and so on and he was spiritually bankrupt so if we're gonna understand and and you know this story and it's it's the one i always come back to it's like the slam dunk story for me is when um i'd been scanning people for about four years when I got a call 10.30 one night from my sister-in-law, Sherry, who told me my nine-year-old nephew, who's my godson, attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no reason out of the blue. And I'm horrified. And I'm like, what else is going on with him? And she said, Danny, he's different he's mean he doesn't smile anymore and i went into his room today and i found two pictures one of them he was hanging from a tree by a noose the other one he was shooting other children

and i was horrified and i thought he had a left temporal lobe problem because you know at that point i've been scanning people for four years and you know a lot of the kids i see are violent and they often had left temporal lobe problems and when i scanned him the next day he was missing his left temporal lobe he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space of his temporal lobe and when i finally got someone to take it out his behavior completely went back to normal right and if you miss the biological piece how do you help these people? Well, that's the part about our work that I love is because you prevented a disaster, okay, with Andrew. We see that in our clinics.

I see that happen over and over and over. And that for me is what I love about our work. It's what I really fell in love with about you as a psychiatrist, what's so different, because I didn't really have a very high opinion of psychiatry in the past because it had hurt my own family. But when I really saw what we do here, I just really fell in love with it. I still, we still on this topic need to address a couple of things.

Free will, you know, where does, so I know that I've got my own personal bias on all of this, right? Because we all do. We have our own personal bias on all of this, right? Because we all do, we have our own personal bias. So we have to learn, I think, if we're gonna be thoughtful, I have to work really hard to set my own history aside when I'm judging this. So we see all of these bad things happening in the world,

we have to set our own history aside. I think it's also really important when we're looking at this to go, okay, if someone wants to do something bad, they're going to do a bad thing. And it's not really about the vehicle they use. It's about treating the person. And we have to be very careful about that because I'm like, you know, people will, you know, go crazy over the gun issue. And I don't, I'm not going to get into that discussion one way or the other, but then you turn around and someone's using a bomb or a knife or a car so it's there's so many ways

attention to the people and what's happening with people and treating that and we also need to pay attention to what is free will because i do believe that there is free will but obviously what you're saying is that it can be affected and you know where does free if you're medicated or you have brain damage well what does that do to your free will so that's going to really be hard for people who grew up very christian or very you know with certain religious beliefs to believe that free will is when we come back when we come back, we're going to continue this discussion on some of the biological causes of violence. We'll also touch on social, psychological, and spiritual. So much to talk about.

Stay with us. Thank you for listening to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. We have a special gift for you. It's an opportunity to win an evaluation at the Amen Clinics. All you have to do is subscribe to this podcast, leave a review, and rate us on iTunes. To learn more about Amen Clinics and the work we do, go to amenclinics.com. You can also learn about our nutraceutical products at brainmdhealth.com. Thanks for listening.