Decision-Making Under Conditions of Chronic Stress with Delia McCabe, PhD | Ep 6

Delia received her PhD from Adelaide Medical School and her present research focus is on the neurobiology of stress and lifestyle choices. Delia’s knowledge about the brain’s requirements for optimal well-being, her enthusiasm for sharing complex science in an easy-to-understand format, and her ability to share practical and actionable steps with her audience, make her a speaker that keeps her audience engaged and enthralled from start to finish.

Chapters in this episode include:

• A Neuroscientist’s View of the OODA Loop and John Boyd
• Our Environment Shapes the Brain and Our OODA Loop
• This is Your Brain. This is Your Child’s Brain on Technology. Any Questions? 
• False Perception of the Environment 
• The Dangers of a  Synthetically Engineered Orientation 
• Dopamine 
• Our Brains & the Strategic Game of Interaction and Isolation
• Making Sense of Stress and its Impact on Orientation 
• The Mind-Body Stress OODA Loop 
• The Impact of Stress on the Workplace 
• Neurons That Fire Together, Wire Together 
• Alcohol-Caffeine Cycle 
• Some Context on Context Switching 
• How to Change Your Organization's Default Mode of Operation
• Decision Fatigue
• What Can Leaders Do?
• Making Work Visible 
• Ego, Default Mode Network, Our Brain 
• PTSD, Ego Suppression,  Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies.
• Why Do I Remember My First Girlfriend When I Smell Bubblegum? 
• The Interplay of Genes, Culture, Environment and Previous Experience
• Flow
• How to Connect with Delia McCabe, PhD   

Be sure to use the Chapters Feature to quickly browse and navigate to segments of this episode.

Want to develop your organization’s capacity for free and independent action (Organic Success)? Learn more and follow us at:
https://www.aglx.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@AGLXConsulting
https://www.linkedin.com/company/aglx-consulting-llc/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/briandrivera
https://www.linkedin.com/in/markjmcgrath1
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccrone
https://flowguides.org/
https://www.getflowtrained.com/

Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
Connecting the Dots – with Skip Steward
The F-14 Tomcast – with Crunch and Bio
Economic...

Transcript

Transcripts are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

00:00:00:04 - 00:00:33:12
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
All right. Hey, welcome to No Way Out, everyone. Today we have a nutritional neuroscientist with us who also has a background in clinical psychology. She's a fantastic keynote speaker. We met about four months ago in Portugal at the Experience Agile Conference. We had some amazing conversations and in fact, you could say that she partially inspired me and Marc to go ahead and start this podcast because of the amazing conversations we were able to have by connecting things like Tomboy to include the features of the world.

00:00:33:12 - 00:00:43:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Uncertainty, entropy, quantum uncertainty. Two whole world of understanding the brain. So everyone, welcome. Dr. McCabe, how are you doing this morning?

00:00:44:00 - 00:00:47:19
Delia McCabe, PhD
I'm good, Brian. Thank you very much for inviting me. And thank you, Mark. Great to meet.

00:00:47:19 - 00:01:04:06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
You. So, Dr. McCabe, we are engaged in Portugal and we had several conversations and we've had several conversations since at the time, you know, four months ago, you didn't know anything about the OODA loop. Do you mind telling us your perspective of John Boyd's OODA loop first?

00:01:05:08 - 00:01:26:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
You know, I was really I'd heard the term before, but specifically in relation to military, you know, explanations and you know, how military operates and so on. So I never really dived into it from the perspective of just ordinary life. And I was really amazed because I think, boy, it really understood human beings and how we operate in the world.

00:01:26:23 - 00:01:47:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
I think he understood so much more than he was given credit for at the time because his whole framework explains how we think and operate and move and change our minds and even the way we move our bodies. So I was really impressed when I when I discovered it and dived more into it. Brian and I have to thank you for that.

00:01:49:04 - 00:02:16:06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Doc McCabe, I have to thank you for helping me navigate some of the readings that I was doing on brain functioning, specifically things from understanding how veterans are being challenged through their PTSD and learning about psychedelics assisted therapy. So really, thank you for helping me navigate that and understand a little bit more about dendrites and synopses and what dopamine actually is, which I believe a lot of folks are getting wrong these days.

00:02:16:17 - 00:02:43:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So, again, thank you very much. So today we want to take a look at decisions in under chronic stress and conditions of chronic stress. So when we talked about what we're going to talk about today, this really triggered me to bully or think about John. Boy, do we have the outside environment, the physical world, and then we have what's going on inside here, the mental world, the intellectual world, the world of genetics, the world of culture, the world, previous experience.

00:02:43:19 - 00:02:57:06
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I want to kind of turn it over to you to have you navigate what's going on inside of our brain when it comes to genetics, our experience, our sleep habits and all that. What makes us see the world make decisions in it and act a certain way?

00:02:58:06 - 00:03:23:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
Wow, that's a big ask. Brian, let's start with something that's really important. That was basically the rule because Boyd really understood that the environment impacts us directly. And, you know, when we when we observe, when we orientate ourselves, when we decide what to do and then we act on that, all of that is a reflection or a result of our environment.

00:03:23:12 - 00:03:50:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
And obviously he did a lot more research. And I think if he'd lived for longer, he would have time to go into genes and epigenetics. What I like to say to people as a as a beginning of this conversation is that every brain is actually a fingerprint because every single brain has a unique environment that it's born into and a unique set of genes that will either use the environment favorably or negatively.

00:03:50:06 - 00:04:14:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
And so every single brain is absolutely unique. So although we all have the same brain structure, how these neurons, how these these different structures connect to each other is unique to every single one of us. So people born in an environment where they have plenty of food, they feel really safe, they feel loved, they can pursue their life dreams.

00:04:14:15 - 00:04:39:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
They are fulfilled. People and their brains will be different to the brain of a person who's born in any environment where the opposite is the case. So when we look at it from that perspective, we understand what people have sayings like, you know, perception is reality because the way you perceive the world, you perceive it through the lens of your genes that were handed down and of the environment that you that you are now, that you're born into.

00:04:39:03 - 00:05:04:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
But what happens along the way is that that environment also shapes the brain. The interesting thing is, though, that the brain is a very, very plastic. When it's when when the child is born. And if we just refined plastic and define it, plastic basically means that the brain is very, very malleable and able to connect in ways that the environment suggests it connects according to select.

00:05:04:06 - 00:05:40:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
Just put this into into layman's terms. If a child is born into an environment where it doesn't feel safe for a variety of reasons, it can be that it grows up in a violent family for example, in World War Two, children were born into an environment where they weren't physically safe. The brain changes structure. So, for example, a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is kind of like the emotional lighthouse of the brain, actually grows bigger in those kinds of circumstances because the environment is telling the brain that this is a dangerous environment and you have to be vigilant all the time.

00:05:41:03 - 00:06:04:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
So basically this means that your observation is heightened and you continuously observing your environment to see if there's danger and whether your life is threatened. Children who are not born in those environments, the amygdala doesn't grow bigger. And the challenge with this is that you can't rewind this. So now this child that grew up in a very dangerous environment becomes an adult in a safe environment.

00:06:04:10 - 00:06:32:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
And there's no danger that amygdala never goes gets smaller. That person is primed to be vigilant for their life because of the extra plasticity when the child is born. And for many years as that brain is developing, that neuroplasticity is very high because the brain and the body are getting used to an environment, seeing what's around and sitting that that that brain and that body up for reproduction and for survival so that these we call windows of development.

00:06:32:05 - 00:07:01:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
And I know that I showed you an image of that brain in Elizabeth to just you to explain that we can't rewind and say, well, during the ten and 12 months of that child's first life, they didn't have a great time. Let's just rewind and redo that wiring. We can't do that. And that's one of the challenges with the environment that we find ourselves in right now is that children's brains are being exposed to very high levels of stress and also technology, which is impacting how the brain is wiring.

00:07:01:22 - 00:07:28:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
Now, we don't know what the end result of that is going to be because we're not running an experiment. There's no control group. We are all in this right now and so are our children. So all we know is that the brain changes itself and why is itself according to the environment that we find ourselves in and whether that environment is to the brain service or not, we will only know in time.

00:07:28:13 - 00:07:46:19
Delia McCabe, PhD
But you do imagine that as depression and anxiety goes up, the more people are engaged with technology, the the inclination is to believe that this isn't going to do us do us any good. So that's just a little taste of how the brain responds to the environment that it finds itself in. Genes obviously have a role to play in.

00:07:46:19 - 00:08:08:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
Personal tendencies are a reflection of our genes and how they impact the brain in the way the brain develops. But many things in the environment can switch genes on and switch genes off once again to add to our benefit or to our detriment. And that just depends on the environment. So we have predispositions, let's put it that way, and the environment can need to switch it on.

00:08:08:08 - 00:08:08:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
Switch.

00:08:09:11 - 00:08:27:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well, I want to be a little selfish here and talk about my children, 11 and 13 year old. Right. So they just went through COVID, you know, being out of school, masks on when they're in school. A lot of work on the computer. You know, I walk into their office a couple yards away from here at night and their heads are down.

00:08:27:14 - 00:08:37:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
They're on their iPads. They're doing all their work in school, on computers. I'm concerned that that's going to have some repercussions as they grow older. Right. Is this should I be concerned?

00:08:38:11 - 00:09:03:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
I think every person should be concerned. Watching these brains develop and and evolve with technology is a very sobering experience because, well, firstly, let's just go back to dopamine, which you which you mentioned previously. Dopamine is a very important neurotransmitter and it's not really probably properly understood by people. We just think of dopamine as a pleasure, neurotransmitter, or most people do.

00:09:03:08 - 00:09:27:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
In fact, dopamine is the pleasure neurotransmitter, but it's also the anticipatory neurotransmitter, and it's also involved with motivation and habit formation. So it's a very multifaceted neurotransmitter, but it's directly related to our survival. So we have very high levels of dopamine released when when you have an orgasm or when you eat, when you an environment where you feel very safe and secure.

00:09:27:21 - 00:09:53:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
So dopamine is very tightly tied to our survival. Now, what technology does technology stimulates the synthesis of high levels of dopamine. So when people look at their screens and they get a look or they see something that they really enjoy, they move through, they engage with that content. They're having a release of dopamine because it's a pleasurable experience, but they're also having a release of dopamine in anticipation of more pleasure.

00:09:54:15 - 00:10:13:13
Delia McCabe, PhD
So this is where the danger comes in and which is why people get addicted to technology, because their dopamine release is at such a high level that you don't get that same release in ordinary life. And so people are naturally gravitate to that, which is you can see people addicted to their phones when you just go out into society, you see that all the time.

00:10:13:23 - 00:10:46:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
So that is, of course a danger. And one of the experiences that I had that really highlighted this for me was I was waiting in a queue to get into a store in Australia and Australia was very strict with lockdowns and we were waiting outside with our masks on to get into the store. And I saw a father and and his daughter in the queue in front of me and it was a really interesting experience because I was standing there and waiting and I had time just to observe them.

00:10:46:16 - 00:11:21:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
And the girl, she must have been about maybe 18, 19 months old. And the father was a middle aged man and he was on his device and she was on a little iPad. And I glanced at this little girl and she glanced at me and immediately moved away from my face and back to her iPad. And it really dawned on me then that our DNA is being overridden by technology because that child at that stage of her brain development, she should have been 100% immersed in observing her environment.

00:11:21:11 - 00:11:53:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
Her brain is primed at that age to look at the environment, look at other people's faces, look at her caregiver to see if it was safe for her to engage or look at other people using mirror neurons. It wasn't engaged in any of those activities. It was so engaged in that iPad. And it really was a very sobering experience for me, because that means that her brain was not going to be able to go back to that time, to be able to then do all the connections that were necessary for communication and assessing a social situation.

00:11:53:13 - 00:12:20:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
So just coming back to your daughter's brain, you know, they are now engaged with technology because they're having to educate themselves via technology and the education system. This is a challenge because they need that information. They have to gain that information. That's the way to gain that information. But we also know from research that when the brain sees information on technology, it doesn't perceive it as being longstanding information.

00:12:20:15 - 00:12:44:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
It sees it as being transitory because it moves you know, you're looking at a document, you can read it. Then you scan, you read, you scan. That information is transitory. And we believe that the way the brain sees that impacts how that then gets consolidated in short term and long term memory. Now, if that is the case, all that information that they that they gaining, it may not be going into their long term memory.

00:12:44:03 - 00:13:03:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
It may just be in the shadows, just in their short term memory, a little bit in their working memory. So when they have to call on that information later, is that information going to be there? Now, we don't know the answers to all of this yet. All we know is that we can't rewind and go back and their brains are very, very plastic.

00:13:03:07 - 00:13:25:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
Now, their brains are also changing because they're going into puberty. So the body and the brain are not changing focus in a sense to start hormone production. This is also when it becomes very, very likely that children that are in situations where they don't feel safe, where they feel very stressed, then start experiencing affective disorders like anxiety and depression.

00:13:25:19 - 00:14:00:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
And we know that's been occurring among the population with ordinary children just because of this ongoing engagement with technology. Because, once again, you know, we talking to each other. Yeah. And we can understand a little bit about our body movement and how and how we communicating. But when you communicate face to face, there is so much more information that is being passed between bodies and brains via eyes, via tiny, tiny movements on our faces that we pick up so many nuances in a conversation that we cannot do online.

00:14:01:03 - 00:14:30:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
I read some research the other day in relation to mothers and their children interacting, and it was quite a clever experiment what they did. They got mothers and their children to interact via video and then they got them to interact face to face and they found that via video. One part of the interconnection between the left and the right hemisphere was engaged in the video communication versus in person communication.

00:14:30:03 - 00:14:51:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
Nine in different areas were engaged. So that immediately tells us that there's something going on that we don't really understand. We can't put our finger on it yet. We know that there are different parts of the brain that get engaged when we engaged face to face versus online. And that all speaks to this challenge with being immersed in technology on a continuous basis.

00:14:52:06 - 00:15:24:08
Mark McGrath
When you you know, we could talk about the moral and the ethical component and before we get to that, I just wanted to kind of stay on the science component of it with things like social media, so pervasive as it is, and things like where people are getting a unrealistic view or they're seeing someone's ideal life or like they're getting these perceptions, as you say, dope in me, whether it's social media or watching the market show every second it or pornography or whatever it is.

00:15:24:17 - 00:16:01:10
Mark McGrath
At some point, physically, though, isn't it hijacking an overriding one's perception, isn't it synthetically taking over back to you to how they would in turn observe and decide and act like it's it's it's disconnecting them. It's creating a new reality for them that might not be connected or in or in harmony with their natural reality. So that when they're in certain situations, they don't know what to do, because their only understanding of it is the images that they've seen through interacting with, you know, various things on or on screens.

00:16:01:10 - 00:16:24:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
Absolutely, Mark. And this is where it gets really scary because we have to engage with our environment, with our complete body to be able to learn lessons and pick up cues from the environment. So as you know, going back to the look, when we orientate ourselves, we orientate ourselves in relation to the environment that we perceive and then we making decisions based on that environment.

00:16:25:02 - 00:16:53:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
If that environment is a false environment and we don't really understand the environment, we'll then orientate ourselves and make decisions based on a false perception of the environment. There's also been research done on children engaging with the environment when they're really young in terms of climbing up jungle gyms and playing on slides and playing in mud and dirt and building cubbies and all of that engagement with the environment stimulates neurogenesis.

00:16:54:10 - 00:17:18:16
Delia McCabe, PhD
It stimulates on that to Genesis. It helps the brain, the neurons that need to connect in terms of our movement and our mood, in terms of our capacity for the prefrontal cortex to grow, in terms of modulating emotions, learning to deal with pain, for example, all of these aspects of our emotion in a real environment impact how the brain develops.

00:17:19:00 - 00:17:51:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
So we know from from quite a lot of research that not engaging with the environment just then on its own impacts brain development and then function later on, not impacting, not being involved with the environment and being immersed in a false environment, as you said, which is, you know, it's a fantasy environment with lots of dopamine being released then adds insult to injury because the child is not just in sedentary and and not engaged with the real world and feeling its body in the real world.

00:17:51:02 - 00:18:08:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
It's now also engaged with a world that has been manufactured and we don't have answers to this. All we can look at is, is how the brain responds to environments and say, this doesn't look good.

00:18:08:01 - 00:18:20:18
Speaker 4
You are listening to No Way Out Sponsored by AGLX. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00:18:20:18 - 00:18:52:21
Mark McGrath
When we talk about OODA being a fractal that you know, I have an orientation myself, I have an orientation that aligns with the people on my team and we have an orientation with our greater organization. I'm just wondering when these sorts of physiological things are happening to two people and you read about these things, there's broader cultural impacts when you hear about birth rates going down or young people not dating, you hear about all these other types of things.

00:18:52:21 - 00:19:15:23
Mark McGrath
And lately I've seen a lot of, you know, in the old days, you know, we're Gen-Xers, right? I was born in 76 and, you know, in the old days things were on magazines or videotapes and whatever. But now your youngest child can access literally everything, everything from the most obscene to the most non-threatening and everything in between instantaneously.

00:19:16:23 - 00:19:35:17
Mark McGrath
And not just human relationships for maybe like, oh, I don't want to go to Egypt. Why? Why? Because I've already seen it on Google Earth that I've done a virtual tour of the pyramids. I don't need to go there. I've already seen that. Whereas maybe when we were growing up you'd get a National Geographic and you look at these faraway places and you think, Oh my gosh, and you'd create your own images rather than have them created for you synthetically.

00:19:35:21 - 00:19:51:04
Mark McGrath
I mean, what effect, broader picture? I mean, it seems like beyond individual's cognition that it's going to have a continued dampening effect or a continued adverse effects on teams and societies and communities and that sort of thing.

00:19:52:12 - 00:20:26:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
Well, it can't help but have this this negative effect, which is a roll on domino effect, because we do, as you say, we have this, you know, fractal way, the world works. And if you think about what people are doing, they then communicating about this world that they are themselves observing. And when you read about how people are communicating and how people are lonely, but they connected online, you realize that there's a huge disconnect between how they actually feel, what they're doing and how they're experiencing the world.

00:20:27:05 - 00:20:47:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
So as you said, you know, when I was a child as well, I used to get up the you know, the encyclopedia, look at a place, and then we used to imagine that place. And then you would talk to someone and you would find someone who had been there and then you'd have a conversation about that. This is such a multi layer shared challenge because the imagination is not being used.

00:20:47:03 - 00:21:07:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
When you've seen an image and you think because you've seen it, you know about it. And there's some research to suggest that this is one of the problems we having with social media, that everybody has an opinion just because they've seen the highlight of a journal article and now think they're an expert on that. And I've been reading a really interesting book at the moment by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertize.

00:21:07:10 - 00:21:23:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
And this is one of the things that they've looked at. If you've just looked at something and you've looked at a few of those things online, there's a altered sense of perception that you know more than you do simply because you've seen quite a lot of the information. You're not an expert, but now you perceive that you are.

00:21:23:16 - 00:21:46:19
Delia McCabe, PhD
So there's a lack of imagination is a lack of maybe even being humble and saying, I don't know enough about that. I need to find out more about that. So then how does that impact our culture? Well, if everybody thinks they know everything and nobody needs to investigate anything more and everybody thinks that they understand enough about something, there is no more intellectual curiosity left.

00:21:47:06 - 00:22:04:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
Then where does that leave us with critical thinking? If you think you know everything and you don't have to ask any questions, are you ever going to sit down and have a conversation with someone who possibly knows more than you? You're not going to do that because you think because you've seen it on Google or asked Jeff Toobin about it that now you were an expert.

00:22:04:05 - 00:22:37:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
So there are many, many ramifications for this challenge. And I don't have an answer to this. I don't think anybody has an answer to this. I think what happened, you know, just to speak to people who believe in conspiracy theories and that this was all a plan, I don't think it was a plan, but I do think that when, you know, social media discovered and, you know, we don't have to mention the names when they discovered that there was such a huge demand for these services, they didn't step back and say, from an ethical perspective, is this going to be good for humankind?

00:22:38:01 - 00:23:01:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
They didn't do that. They were opportunistic. They said, well, this is working, let's go for it. And so we've now been caught up in this tsunami that we don't understand. You know, if we look at complexity theory and we look at complex societies and complex challenges, I think we actually at the age of complexity and chaos and Snowden would be able to speak to this a lot more effectively than I can.

00:23:01:10 - 00:23:22:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
But just looking at it from that perspective, we sitting at a situation where we don't know how to solve this problem and it's actually verging on chaotic because there are so many ramifications to so many factors is a confluence of factors involved in this because of our brain and our sophistication. And it's sensitive that we're not going to be able to unravel.

00:23:23:19 - 00:23:44:10
Mark McGrath
And to be fair, there are positives, too, that we can have access to things that we didn't previously have access to before, and we're able to have a conversation like this to do certain things. So, you know, there's it's I don't think it's all bad per say. I just wonder maybe this can delve into the moral the moral, ethical.

00:23:45:14 - 00:24:15:01
Mark McGrath
Yeah. It doesn't necessarily have to be a conspiracy to acknowledge that your orientation is being programed synthetically by things that you're not putting in it per se, that you might be picking and consciously or subconsciously to the, you know, the platforms that you're using. I'm sure in some cases, though, it could be malicious, like people are putting things to, to craft a certain narrative or to to affect you to do a certain decision.

00:24:15:01 - 00:24:27:19
Mark McGrath
I mean, marketing's always existed, right? Like now it just has a different setting, maybe a different medium. So is is there like a tie with Marshall McLuhan? You know, like the medium is the message is that the is that when it comes down to.

00:24:28:17 - 00:24:48:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
The bottom line is that you're always going to have a human being behind the message unless he gets his general intelligence, which apparently isn't too far away. But generally, you know, there's a person behind a message and obviously they are bad people in the world. Psychopaths exist and people will manipulate messages to be able to get people to do things that aren't good and aren't right.

00:24:49:01 - 00:24:58:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
Even if we just look at pornography as an example, you know, you mentioned earlier that, you know, being a Gen Xer, you used to see things on photos, you know, in books.

00:24:58:05 - 00:25:16:09
Mark McGrath
And that's what it wasn't. It wasn't just bad magazines or whatever. It's also to just like things that you would you mentioned encyclopedias. I mean, I remember the encyclopedias that we had in a small Catholic school in Kentucky were from 1974 and this was in 1987. And you're looking at old stuff, but you're thinking, wow, it's like magical.

00:25:16:09 - 00:25:51:18
Mark McGrath
And there's this place called Egypt and there's pyramids. And, you know, so it's like like I was saying, there's a there's a spectrum of of this, that. And the other thing I think that like are you saying it's the it's the the images that we could create ourselves and our are we're I feel like we're less able to do that now because you can access literally everything immediately and have a an understanding such that you felt like you've been there before or you feel like I don't need to go there now or I don't need to interact with that person physically because we've already had a conversation, that kind of thing.

00:25:52:13 - 00:26:12:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
Absolutely. And you know, just to speak to what you mentioned about there being positives. Absolutely. They always positives when when there's a big change and a big disruption. But all we as human beings are smart enough to know where to draw the line and only use the positives and ignore the negatives. In this circumstance, I don't believe we are.

00:26:12:10 - 00:26:40:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
And it's simply because of our neurology that dopamine, that that drive to increase pleasure and sensation is what is pushing us forward with social media. And this online engagement and also the desire for the human brain to simplify things if it possibly can. And, you know, prefers dichotomy over complexity, which is why we now see this huge polarization, you know, in terms of politics.

00:26:40:14 - 00:27:04:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
So all of these ramifications, some of them definitely are positive. I know that in Australia when they had terrible, terrible floods, their Facebook became a wonderful medium for people to share information. She pick up points, talk about how they could be helped when they were isolated and they were cut off from the rest of society. It was a fantastic way for people to communicate with each other.

00:27:04:21 - 00:27:28:19
Delia McCabe, PhD
But under general circumstances, and specifically speaking about young men, there's a huge challenge for young among young men and their mental health at the moment. And one of the reasons for that is this inability for young men to feel comfortable communicating with other people because they've been so cut off. And of course, COVID added to that and also because of pornography.

00:27:28:23 - 00:27:49:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
So being able to relate to the opposite sex not has become a huge problem for them because as you said earlier, you know that that fantasy wall that has been built up isn't reflected in the real world. So young men are battling with that as well. So a lot of negatives, some positives in relation to interconnectivity from it from a technology perspective.

00:27:49:09 - 00:27:58:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
But the negatives are the ones that really concern me and other people that are aware of the changes that are taking place in the brain.

00:27:58:05 - 00:28:16:04
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So just listening to this conversation, this reminds me of the strategic game of interaction. Isolation. We've been talking a lot about that. And Dr. McCabe, you brought up a lot of the things that are going on in the outside environment, things like working from home, technology, information, a little bit of the rate of change that's going on in social media.

00:28:16:11 - 00:28:42:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But I'm a little curious what's going on inside the brain, inside our brain housing unit or our body when all this is happening. And before we get to that, I want to share a few things. First from our recent vacation to the to the archives, it wasn't a vacation, but we wanted to look at a few things. So in the strategic game of interaction, isolation, John Boyd actually start looking at what's going on inside the brain.

00:28:42:16 - 00:29:03:20
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
This is again 20 plus years ago. A lot of things have changed since then. I'm just sharing this on the screen now. But, you know, he looked at nerves, nerve cells, neurology, and he also identified this or I'm sorry, we we found this in the archives. And it says that the brains of men and women are different. Now, I'm not going to put you on the spot right now and have you answer that.

00:29:03:20 - 00:29:17:11
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Are they different? Maybe we can come to that a little bit later on. But I do want to dove into more of what's going on inside of our brain housing unit, that thing above our shoulders, between our ears, when all this is going on around us. So what do you have for us on that?

00:29:18:23 - 00:29:40:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
The thing that most people aren't aware of is that the stress response is only meant to last for between 30 to 60 seconds, because in that space of time, as you can imagine, you know, we either became the lunch of the predator and we didn't need the stress response anymore, or otherwise we escaped that dangerous situation and our stress response could be lowered.

00:29:40:21 - 00:30:03:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
Now, what most people are experiencing today is very far from 30 to 60 seconds of that stress response. Yet the body still releases adrenaline and cortisol in response to that stress, as if it was a life threatening stress. Today, though, what's happening is we get our prefrontal cortex involved in this and a number of other systems. So we experience the stress now.

00:30:03:23 - 00:30:27:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
We try to make sense of the stress. It's one of the reasons that COVID became such an exhausting experience for people to wade through, because they had this overwhelming sense of stress and frustration and fear. Then they were looking to the long term memory, you know, had this ever happened before? No. So then they accessed prefrontal cortex activity and this is where anticipatory and consequential thinking takes place.

00:30:27:17 - 00:30:47:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
So then they were saying to themselves, well, hold on a second, how is this going to play out? What does this look like? What's it going to look like in two weeks? What happens if this goes on for two years? How are we going to cope working from home, educating our children, fearful of this pandemic? So there was this ongoing neural activity happening not of 50 to 60 seconds.

00:30:48:02 - 00:31:12:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
Let's deal with the stress. Get out of it. This is an ongoing conversation going on now. What happens in the brain from a neurological perspective? Firstly, we have the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis. So the hypothalamus tells the pituitary gland to send certain compounds to the adrenal gland, to tell the adrenal gland to usher glucose into the muscles so we can fight or flee.

00:31:13:11 - 00:31:38:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
When this happens on an ongoing basis. This just causes the body now to be responding to adrenaline continuously. And then what happens? We have a cortisol response. So cortisol is like a long lasting stress hormone cortisol, when it bathes ourselves on an ongoing basis, causes a lot of negativity in the brain. This just put it that way. It's as if there's a fire that started and inflammation starts occurring.

00:31:39:06 - 00:32:07:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
So non neurons on functioning optimally because they are bathed in cortisol and there's an inflammatory response that's going on. This is also happening in the body, by the way, because the body is also being immersed in cortisol, all of those cells. And so that affects the gut. Then the gut lining becomes impacted, which then affects what enters the bloodstream, finds its way to the blood brain barrier, which is very similar to gut lining crosses over the blood brain barrier and then forms another layer of of inflammation.

00:32:08:03 - 00:32:31:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
So this chronic stress and the inflammation that it causes stops the brain from being able to function optimally. And this brings us to decision making, because the prefrontal cortex is where decision making resides, or let's say it's called the CEO of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, and decision making needs the prefrontal cortex. Because when we make decisions, we anticipate consequences.

00:32:31:23 - 00:33:12:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
We anticipate what certain behaviors and actions are going to result in. And this is where the prefrontal cortex excels. So now you have this ongoing stress response. The prefrontal cortex, when it is under stress, doesn't connect to other neurons within the prefrontal cortex optimally. And something happens that we call an overreliance on exploitation versus exploration. And I'll just explain that that simply means that the brain will default to habitual decisions and habits when it's under stress, versus looking at exploring new options, being creative, being innovative.

00:33:12:18 - 00:33:26:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
So people just fall back on old responses that something worked in the past. You did all use the same thing again. There is no sitting back and gaining a perspective when the brain and specifically the prefrontal cortex is bathed in cortisol.

00:33:26:22 - 00:33:32:16
Mark McGrath
And it's reflexive like like that's a reflexive response or a cognitive choice or that's reflexive, right?

00:33:33:05 - 00:33:56:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
And you can't choose this. The brain is choosing it because its capacity to connect is being limited. The neurons are not capable of connecting like they should. The connections between the prefrontal cortex work in memory, long term memory. These are no longer flowing smoothly because cortisol is stopping this response and this is not something you can think yourself out of.

00:33:56:19 - 00:34:21:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
So you can sit in a meeting with somebody and try and explain to them that these are different options that they have for their business. But if this person is operating from this position of chronic stress, they are unable to think creatively and innovatively because the prefrontal cortex requires a high degree of connectivity, whereas the rest of the brain relies on automaticity, the prefrontal cortex controls and it's the most recent evolution of the brain.

00:34:22:05 - 00:34:48:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
It doesn't have these automatic workarounds. There's not a response in the prefrontal cortex. It can only respond to the situation. It finds itself in. And then look at that situation and make decisions based on that. If it finds the situation so threatening, it will never, ever look at exploring anything new. Its focus is on survival. Keep you alive for long enough so that you can breed, not keep you alive, so that you can thrive.

00:34:48:15 - 00:35:12:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
So this is something you can't talk somebody out of. They are now stuck in this situation of having dendritic spine reduction, put in neuronal connectivity, high levels of cortisol. This all leads them to narrowing their focus to immediate knee jerk, habitual decisions and responses.

00:35:12:16 - 00:35:18:08
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So this is where we get the idea of neurons that fire together, wire together. Is that correct? Is this that?

00:35:18:08 - 00:35:42:12
Delia McCabe, PhD
Absolutely. So under these circumstances, the neurons that are firing together are not the neurons that are allowing you to explore your options. You have you reverting back to neurons that have already fired together, which is where habits come from. And that's why you see someone do something which to you seems completely illogical given the circumstances that have changed.

00:35:42:20 - 00:35:58:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
But to them it's logical because they're just falling back on a kneejerk response, which is just a neural pathway that was established. No, no new neural connection is required because they actually don't have the new energy for it and they don't have the the bandwidth, the neural bandwidth.

00:35:58:16 - 00:36:18:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So we know that control is outside and bottom up. And I'm going to lead into something that happened in our house at the beginning of COVID, and that is we got into the alcohol Netflix caffeine cycle, right? So plenty of plenty bottles of wine and a lot of TV and waking up in the morning with caffeine so that outside and bottom up control what we're putting in our bodies.

00:36:18:22 - 00:36:41:18
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That previous experience really wasn't a good thing. Right? And it's about the food we eat, too. It's about like you said earlier, it's the environment. So in today's working from home and hybrid environment, where we have a lot of context switching, we have a lot of demands on us, we have many that we need to do. That's that's not helping us out right now.

00:36:42:02 - 00:37:04:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
It isn't because the brain is super sophisticated, super sensitive, and it runs on nutrients. So if you just consider the brain is only 2% of body weight, but it uses upwards of 20 to 25% and more when we stress of the energy that we consume. So it's the greediest organ we own and there's no way to store energy.

00:37:05:06 - 00:37:39:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
So it has to cool on energy via blood glucose on a continuous basis. So it's a very tightly regulated system, but anybody that's ever been hangry knows that when you run out of energy you get irritable and the only thing you can focus on is finding food. So that's something that's very important to keep in mind. Secondly, the brain learns how we can lower the stress response, which is why alcohol is such a useful self-medicating tool, because alcohol does for a short period of time low the stress response.

00:37:39:05 - 00:38:02:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
But it's actually a central nervous system depressant, which is why the next day you then feel really low and you can't think really well because alcohol also impacts mitochondrial function. And mitochondria are the energy factories within cells and we can have millions of them in in neurons, clumps of neurons. So they are we rely heavily on mitochondria for neuronal function.

00:38:02:07 - 00:38:25:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
So consider the fact having, you know, alcohol the night before, waking up and eating coffee, coffee does increase your focus and concentration simply because after the dopamine release, that dopamine is converted into adrenaline. So you're actually getting a stress response from the coffee, which makes you feel like you alert and you can use caffeine for focus and concentration.

00:38:25:18 - 00:38:49:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
And no one's arguing that it isn't effective at that, but it isn't effective at keeping your central nervous system running smoothly because what's happening, you having the alcohol, which is dampening the sympathetic nervous system response, so it's stimulating pianists, which is parasympathetic or the calming system. But then the next morning you are consuming caffeine, which is stimulating the sympathetic nervous system.

00:38:49:05 - 00:39:12:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
So now you go up again in the evening comes you need to go down again. So the self medication procedure continues through some people's lifetime, never getting to the point of keeping the central nervous system perfectly calibrated. And then on top of that, those choices, alcohol and coffee, lead to poor food choices. And as I said, the brain runs on nutrients.

00:39:12:13 - 00:39:39:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
So when it runs low on nutrients, it cannot optimally make the neurotransmitters that we need. So it will always choose to make adrenaline or cortisol, dopamine before it chooses to make serotonin and GABA, because those are soothing, calming, inhibitory neurotransmitters. So you find people that are just in a heightened state continuously because the sadness is switched on all the time and the pianist isn't getting a look in.

00:39:40:02 - 00:40:03:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
And this is going back now to the city to 62nd stress response. The sympathetic nervous system is actually more sensitive than the parasympathetic nervous system. So our stress response is more sensitive because we were meant to use it less often. The penial gland  is more robust because it was supposed to be in play more than it is in it.

00:40:04:04 - 00:40:30:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
But what what's happening with most people today, which is why the term burnt out is so apt, their essence is switched on all the time and they're using external compounds like alcohol and even cannabis to calm down and bring in police activity. So now you having a system that is not very robust, stimulated all the time, and you having a system that's more robust, it's hardly getting a look in.

00:40:31:06 - 00:40:51:16
Delia McCabe, PhD
So all of this interacts with the environment and with our internal physiology. So the way we orientate ourselves in the world and what we are observing is through this lens of our physiology. If our brain doesn't have the right nutrients, it can't make serotonin, it can't make melatonin. We can't sleep at night. Then we need sleeping tablets to help us sleep.

00:40:51:16 - 00:41:12:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
So it becomes this vicious cycle and the more stressed people become, the more they gravitate to highly refined foods. Why? Because highly refined foods actually stimulate endogenous opioid production, which is our own opioid production internally. And so after they eat that food, they feel calm and relaxed for a short period of time. And of course, this becomes a habit.

00:41:16:12 - 00:41:27:13
Speaker 4
You are listening to No Way Out, sponsored by AGLX. Now let's get back to building your confidence in complexity.

00:41:27:13 - 00:41:59:16
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So hey Mark, what, what's really interesting about this conversation to this point is Dr. McCabe has pointed out what's going on, the outside environment and how that influences what's going on, on the inside or orientation. She pointed out genetics, epigenetics, potentially that from what I understand about epigenetics, some people can inherit the trauma of their ancestors. We actually also talked about, you know, the brain is a greedy organ, 2% of our body weight burning, 20 to 25% of our energy.

00:42:00:00 - 00:42:24:02
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
It's really greedy. And then we also looked at the previous experience alcohol, food, sleep, culture, all those things. You have traditions. So you're looking at the center of the of orientation. It's all there, right? And the interplay of all these determines how we make sense of the world, decide and act. Right. So that's what that's a strong connection there that that I'm sensing.

00:42:25:04 - 00:43:02:20
Mark McGrath
We were just saying, you know, it's that's why I had asked earlier, when you compartmentalize the moral and ethical and you focus, you have to understand, too, that there's a sort of physiological effect. I was telling Ponch that, you know, people lately are talking a lot about porn, especially as parents of of of teenagers. And it's not just porn, it's also Instagram and and all these other things where they're getting a false sense of reality, whether it's about sex or whether it's about style or luxury or whatever it is.

00:43:02:20 - 00:43:26:11
Mark McGrath
And it's it's you're showing us you're teaching us that there are there's physiological things that are actually happening to your body because of these things. It's, you know, strip out the politics and the morals and the ethics and everything. There are actual things that are actually happening to you physically that are having an effect on how you operate within your world.

00:43:26:11 - 00:43:46:09
Mark McGrath
And as you were talking and you know, you have a wonderful book about diet and how we feed our brain, certain things that I just thought of, I was telling Ponch, I was thinking of traffic, the stress of traffic. If somebody is hung over, they're eating a carb laden sugary donut with a cup of coffee and they're probably looking at their phones.

00:43:46:09 - 00:44:07:07
Mark McGrath
So they're having all of these things bombard them at once. And tremendous exponential numbers. And you just think of all the things that could go wrong. And they don't want to go to work because it's Monday and they don't want to do this because their team lost yesterday. I mean, all those things are firing off and it's clouding your ability to operate.

00:44:07:18 - 00:44:32:01
Mark McGrath
So I guess my next question would be, you know, a lot of people talk about fasting and restricting yourself from some of these things that, you know, whether it's a dopamine fast or a caffeine fast or a food fast or an alcohol fast. You know, for those of us that are parents, I mean, is there is there hope and the things that people could do for themselves and for the for the people around them?

00:44:33:10 - 00:45:05:22
Mark McGrath
I did I will give one thing that I heard a was a David Grossman. I wrote the book on Killing and he's a military psychologist and he talked about first person kill games was another thing that was was overriding children's mindsets. And they think that they're in war. They think that they're in a hostage situation or whatever. And he said and if I think I'm maybe have some scientific augmentation of this, it took about 48 hours to detoxify from what they saw on a screen, any type of screen, whether it was a video game or social media.

00:45:06:09 - 00:45:17:08
Mark McGrath
You know, if you do like a 48 hour fast, you could allow somebody to heal from that. I mean, give us some give us some hope on some of those things because there's a there's a lot we could be doing that we're not.

00:45:17:16 - 00:45:45:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
I think one of the first things to keep in mind is that, you know, when people get deprived of something via somebody else's instruction, they generally revolt against that. So if you can educate somebody, educate your children and say, okay, this is what's happening, how can we work together to solve this? Let's say, for example, too much screen time, whether that's TV and, you know, social media and so on.

00:45:46:04 - 00:46:10:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
Because once they understand a little bit more about what's happening, there may be able to become partners in this process of helping themselves. The other thing is that when people are under chronic stress, as I said earlier, they revert back to habitual behavior. So I don't I'm not aware of the 48 hour fast from from screen time and whether that is an effective solution.

00:46:10:19 - 00:46:44:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
I do know that if someone has to deprive themselves of all technology for even 48 hours, it will feel pretty harsh because they would have had that dopamine, that constant high of dopamine, and that will be removed. So that could be part of the solution. But it actually takes about 60 days to create a new habit. And one of the things that the creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, said, which I really love of this comment, because it ties in perfectly with with neurobiology and neurophysiology, he said goals are for losers, but systems are for winners.

00:46:44:13 - 00:47:09:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
So if you can bring a system into your life or into the corporation and that system becomes the default mode of operation, then that changes the way people look at things. So they won't then be focusing on. For example, you can bring in a suggestion that nobody checks the emails until they walk into the office. Now, that will be very hard for some people to do, but some people will latch onto that.

00:47:09:20 - 00:47:31:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
And I personally have done that with myself. I don't look at my emails or anything on social media, LinkedIn, nothing until I have done my morning routine. I'm in that system now. That system is part of the habit that are formed over time. It becomes easy and easy to fall back on that habit because the other challenge is that we never override annual pathway.

00:47:31:22 - 00:48:01:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
That neural pathway never goes away, it stays. We have to create a new one and under stress we fall back on the old one because those neurons have fired together and wired together in a much stronger, robust pattern than the new one that we tried to create. So that's that aspect of this. Bringing nutrition into it, making sure that your diet is as nutrient dense as possible is critical because when you're laying that new foundation for those new neurons, new neurons now have to fight to get then connect.

00:48:01:19 - 00:48:27:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
When you have the right nutrients available, it's easier for the brain to do that, which is why I'm always amazed when I read these purely technical and psychological stances on habit creation because a malnourished brain is not going to create habits with ease simply because of the neuronal function right there at the physiological level. So making sure that our diets are optimal is also important.

00:48:27:02 - 00:48:53:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
So nutrient density, I would start there if you're trying to change someone's habit or trying to allow them to bring new systems in that are supportive of their physical and mental health, start with optimizing the diet. When that happens, the gut starts looking better. When that happens, guess what happens? Sleep improves. When we sleep, it's easier to create new neural pathways because the brain is getting cleaned at night.

00:48:53:19 - 00:49:16:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
Then we feel more hopeful and optimistic. But it also impacts our mood. Then our cortisol levels fall when we sleep better. So there's a beautiful domino effect when you start right down at the neurophysiological level with providing the right nutrients at the same time make bad habits full of friction. So don't have crap in your house. If you have it in your house, it's easy to reach for it.

00:49:16:23 - 00:49:34:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
Make the friction high. You've got to get in the car. You've got to drive down the road to go and fix that favorite thing that you love that isn't supporting you. Lower the friction for the things that are good for you, and in that way you just set up a system to make it easy for yourself to respond when the going gets tough and you get stressed.

00:49:34:22 - 00:49:56:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
Because just remember, there's something that we haven't discussed, which is decision fatigue. So the prefrontal cortex is pretty good on running for about 4 to 5 hours. For some people, they can't even manage that. If it's if the prefrontal cortex is really poorly nourished because of the whole brain, the prefrontal cortex is the most nutrient demanding because there's no automaticity there.

00:49:57:00 - 00:50:15:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
So you then get to the end of the day and you just grab for that box of whatever or that matters or whatever it is, because now your brain doesn't have enough energy to make a decision because the prefrontal cortex is also in inhibitory part of the brain. So it will inhibit you from doing something that, you know isn't good for you.

00:50:16:02 - 00:50:35:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
So so this interplay of all these things. But if you set yourself up and you make your environment more suitable, it's easier to create those systems and to make sure that you fall back on the right ones because they're low friction and not on the bad ones that are at high friction.

00:50:35:20 - 00:50:59:10
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So you brought up the default mode of operating for an organization and I want to talk about that first and then go to the default mode of default mode network in our brain and talk about PTSD and stress and trauma here in a moment. But the default mode of operating in organizations, how do we what are the tactics that leaders can use to help create an environment to reduce stress?

00:51:00:04 - 00:51:06:00
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And you hit on this a few moments ago, but are there any other tactics or strategies you can recommend leaders do?

00:51:07:10 - 00:51:27:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
I think the first thing to make sure is that the leader understands what stress is doing. And if the leader is experiencing extreme stress because whatever the leader is doing will filter down. We all know this. So when the leader is refusing to admit that the staff are stressed and the teams aren't operating well, you're not going to get him or her to change anything and you're not going to get them to change that.

00:51:27:22 - 00:51:50:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
So it needs to be a full company acceptance of what's going on in the world, the volatility, the uncertainty, the overwhelm and what that's doing to everybody's neurophysiology because no one is immune once they all realize that and they all stick together and say, okay, how are we going to solve this? That they need to work on ways to solve it together because it will be different for every every organization.

00:51:50:12 - 00:52:15:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
You know, I've spoken to two people who are communicating remotely with teams on five different communication channels. These people can never do any work effectively because they're talking to someone on Slack, then someone else, you know, communicates via WhatsApp. And so that's the first thing to do so that the communication, because every single distraction, every single interruption causes further delays in whatever needs to be executed.

00:52:16:02 - 00:52:37:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
So I don't have an answer because you actually have to sit with an organization and see how they're functioning currently. Are they pushing caffeine? Is caffeine part of the culture? If caffeine is part of the culture, there's a lot of focus and concentration going on because the brain is using the caffeine for that. But guess what? There's very little creativity, innovation, because there's no perspective.

00:52:38:01 - 00:53:00:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
There's no sitting back, there's no looking at the big picture which is required for creativity. So every organization will be different depending on the culture within that organization, but it has to be accepted throughout the organization that stress is having an impact, what it is and what they want to do collectively to solve it because it's no good one person making a decision who are saying, let's do this.

00:53:00:08 - 00:53:11:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
Everybody has to buy into this. And it is everybody's problem today because everybody has a brain and most people are experiencing chronic stress. And with that, the cortisol that comes with it.

00:53:13:05 - 00:53:40:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So everybody has a brain. I'll agree with you on that for the most part. But that's sorry. There's another aspect to this. What about making work visible? You know, if you go back through, you look at anthropology, you know, art preceded, language preceded writing. So what value is there in in the visualization of a shared visualization of work that we promote, you know, through the Toyota production system, through the Toyota way, through these new ways of working.

00:53:40:09 - 00:53:43:17
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Is there any real value in that to reducing stress?

00:53:43:17 - 00:54:10:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
There is, because once you can see something, even if you see it in your mind, you have a better idea of how how the process works, how it actually fits together. And I will speak for a moment here about cognition, bounded cognition. One of the things that happens when we talk about something and only we understand that and we haven't shared that effectively with other with other people, is that we've got a certain perspective of that and they don't have that.

00:54:10:11 - 00:54:37:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
So one of the things that that that certain people do and I've done that and I've read that other people do it as well, is actually to take your ideas and put them on paper and look at them, because that gives you a shared cognitive perspective and then different people can comment on that. So I don't know if I'm answering your question properly, Brian, but for a leader to imagine something and just assume that the teams around him see the same thing is a very poor assumption.

00:54:38:03 - 00:54:49:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
We need to be able to make things more visible so that it makes sense to everybody and people can see what they're missing out because then people can ask questions and say, I don't understand that. How does that work? Does that answer that? To a degree.

00:54:49:23 - 00:55:15:13
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Yeah, it does. And I think this is a very important, important point here because there's you know, there's many people that listen to this podcast. But for those business leaders, there's coaches, there's folks that are trying to create agility. Here is your answer to why we make work visible. One of the core reasons we do it right. So in my mind, I think I need to bring Dr. McCabe in to be a coach with me, because this is what really matters at the end of the day.

00:55:16:07 - 00:55:39:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Shifting gears a little bit more, default mode network, our ego. I learned a lot about this from my time in the military and as a veteran, seeing friends that had gone through traumatic experiences. My understanding of trauma is it's not the event that matters. It's our response to that event that's based off of our genetics and our previous experiences.

00:55:39:23 - 00:55:59:14
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Right. So what that's what this means is Mark and I can, you know, be in the Marine Corps together, see the same air, lift through everything together, experience something very traumatic where one of us walks away from it. I'll use the word traumatized or suffering from extra stress then the other. Is that.

00:55:59:14 - 00:56:23:12
Delia McCabe, PhD
True? Yes, it is true. And there's been quite a lot of research done on resilience and how different people respond to similar situations and walk away with different effects. So I just want to talk about a an experiment, which is a natural experiment that happened after World War Two, where researchers followed a group of children into adulthood. They followed them for 60 years.

00:56:24:08 - 00:56:49:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
These were children that were moved away from their families to safer environments so that they wouldn't be killed. So they were removed from their primary caregivers at a very vulnerable age and put into orphanages and taken to other homes. And they found that after 60 years, the cortisol levels among these people were higher than among the general population, and that for women they were higher than for the men in the group.

00:56:50:02 - 00:57:12:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
So what this told the researchers that these adverse childhood events speak to us across our lifespan. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, the amygdala will get bigger. That's the emotional lot. Toss in the brain and it will stay bigger because it doesn't know that that person has now possibly moved to a safe environment. It's always going to be extra vigilant.

00:57:13:01 - 00:57:39:05
Delia McCabe, PhD
Now, a person that walks into a war zone, you are not always aware of what that person's childhood was like. If they experience an adverse childhood event and there are a number of them, you know, this abuse, these extreme poverty, these hunger, these survival threat, the brain will then have changed shape. And that means that that person will respond to that situation differently to a person who didn't have that adverse childhood event.

00:57:39:13 - 00:58:03:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
That's one of the reasons that researchers believe that some people in war zones are affected more drastically by these life threatening situations than other people. The other genetic component that they don't really understand fully yet. You know, some people may just be more sensitive from an emotional perspective. Some people may just think about life with more sacredness than other people do.

00:58:04:04 - 00:58:30:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
And we do know from Jim Fallon's work that certain brains don't actually feel a sense of conscience. And having done something bad and this is, you know, we speaking about psychopaths, although they don't seem to be to many psychopaths in the military because they don't work together well as a team. However, the way those genes operate will impact how that person perceives the environment that they're in and what they take away from that environment.

00:58:30:17 - 00:59:02:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
And it would seem that PTSD is actually quite a natural response for a normal brain to experience because what they've seen has threatened their own existence. And they've also seen horrific scenarios where other people's lives have been destroyed. So you would think to yourself that, you know, people that feel and are emotional and empathetic would walk away with with more of an imprint on the way their brain functions.

00:59:02:14 - 00:59:28:21
Delia McCabe, PhD
Now, why this happens is is challenging to explain because of the brain's complexity and because of it being a fingerprint. But it would seem that this chronic stress overload actually shifts the way the brain manages emotions, the way the brain modulates emotions, so it can no longer just have one bad day and get back up, have a horrific experience and make sense of it and back.

00:59:28:21 - 00:59:50:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
It's as if the limbic system now finds it impossible to find this emotional balance. So if you think of a of a seesaw, the seashore has gone completely into the negative side. It can no longer come back into the positive side. So these are all partly explanations for why some people will fall into PTSD and other people don't.

00:59:50:23 - 01:00:11:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
And also remember, we hold trauma in our bodies because our bodies are part of our brains. So when a person holds on to that trauma, it's not just within their brain that they've experienced it. The whole body locks up. That whole sympathetic nervous system now becomes activated and can stay activated. It goes into overdrive so that person can't calm down and relax.

01:00:11:08 - 01:00:26:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
They can activate the pineal gland to bring that balance back. So that's part of that discussion. Brian And it's a complicated one and it's very difficult to deal with PTSD because every single person's brain is different.

01:00:26:18 - 01:00:46:09
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
So I want to bring this back to the lab. One of the ways I explain ego rigid states is through implicit goes to control. It can be good or bad, but implicit guidance control holds our mental models or schema the way we perceive the world. And there's a pathway that moves from orientation back to observation. And that's the pathway I'm talking about.

01:00:46:09 - 01:01:10:15
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
And I'll call that the default mode network to our ego, if I understand this correctly, in order to recover from these traumas to become better, we have to suppress that ego somehow. Right? And that opens access to a high disorder, if you will. It allows our neurons to reconnect in new ways. And that's the way I like to present this on the on the early.

01:01:11:01 - 01:01:39:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
But some of the methods that allow us to suppress that ego are things like diet, meditation, prayer. And today we're seeing a lot of veterans use psychedelic assisted therapies to reduce that ego and get down to that higher entropic state to make new connections. So is that true with nutrition as well as you track this in the from a neuroscientist perspective, what's happening is I.

01:01:39:23 - 01:02:08:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
Am tracking what's happening and it's really very positive and it looks like what happens is that there's a reorganization of what we call a repositioning. And that repositioning kind of jumpstarts the emotional modulation capacity of the brain. And so a lot of people have a lot of positive effects from that because suddenly that that that reconnection, that repositioning helps them to let go of the negativity and to now find a new way to modulate their emotions.

01:02:08:18 - 01:02:33:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
And we don't really understand exactly how it happens. We know serotonin is a large role to play in that. And serotonin is a very complex neurotransmitter with many different types of serotonin receptors. So that's one part of this conversation. The other thing is that when the brain is well nourished, it can more easily make connections. And one of the ways it does that is through the right fats.

01:02:33:22 - 01:03:00:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
And if you take out all the moisture in the brain, 60% of the dry weight of the brain is made up of fat. And a specific type of fat keeps the neuronal membrane very flexible, very malleable, and very capable of forming connections with greater ease, which also speaks to neurotransmitters synthesis at the sign ups and neurotransmitter jumping across the sonnet to the next neuron, which is where the neurons fire together.

01:03:01:02 - 01:03:32:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
So there is an aspect that related to PTSD, and there's some research to actually show that suicide victims, military suicides, victims from PTSD actually had lower rates of the specific fat in their body and in their brain. So that speaks to the inability of the brain to now form new connections, the other ways that people are using to get their brain to recalibrate, such as meditation, even, you know, cold, cold therapy.

01:03:33:03 - 01:04:15:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
Yoga is another good one, are all modalities that are bringing the parasympathetic nervous system to the fore and pushing the sympathetic nervous system into the background, which then allows the brain to start forming new connections, because then the body feels that sense of calmness. And one of the ways we've spoken about this separately about into reception and into reception, the capacity to feel your internal states of being and your internal emotional state is a wonderful way to recalibrate your nervous system, because once you do that really effectively, you bring your penial gland  in and your issue and this gets a bit gets a backseat for a change.

01:04:15:15 - 01:04:34:11
Delia McCabe, PhD
And we do this through teaching people how to notice what's going on in their body. And one of the simplest way to do that is through the heart detection test. So people actually learn to register their heartbeat. And when they do that, they learn to lower their heart rate when they're anxious and when they're feeling stressed, which then brings the pianist in.

01:04:34:21 - 01:04:52:08
Delia McCabe, PhD
So any time you can bring the penial gland in, it helps the brain to calm itself down and then find a new way of being. Now, that sounds really esoteric, but it really isn't, because what you're really doing is you're allowing the neurons to then connect in a state of calm, and then you can form a new annual pathway.

01:04:52:15 - 01:05:15:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
Because if you stay stressed all the time, as we've spoken to you, when you're in that state of stress, you normally fall back on a habitual response. So when a person has a flashback, the whole physiological response is stimulated. Because if I had your reaction to that, if you allowed the pianist to step up and all the modalities that support that allow the brain to then recalibrate itself, because guess what?

01:05:16:11 - 01:05:39:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
The thoughts that you then start thinking are more positive thoughts and then can bring in Fredrickson and broaden our theory into this, because when you think more positive thoughts and once again, this isn't woo, because when you think more of pleasure and joy and happiness, guess what happens? You open, it is also stimulated and you have a different reaction to the environment around you.

01:05:39:15 - 01:06:03:18
Delia McCabe, PhD
So your orientation changes. You're observing different things now. Now you're noticing that other people are more friendly to you when you are not negative. And guess what that does? That pulls a wider cognitive repertoire and is quite a bit of a longer conversation. But it goes that that cognitive repertoire and it also helps you to store up resources for when you need them in the future.

01:06:04:02 - 01:06:41:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
And that's really one of the reasons that positive emotions evolved to help us in that direction. So, Brian, it's a it's a complex issue, but once again, we can't separate the body in the brain. We can't separate this orientation we have based on the experience that we have, and then, of course, the environment that we in. And that's one of the things that worries me about the PTSD sufferers and the veterans in America, is that the environment they find themselves in is not a supportive environment, and the environment will determine our cognitive resilience and how we heal our central nervous system.

01:06:41:01 - 01:07:07:17
Mark McGrath
Hmm. What about where does recollection fit into this? In the sense that if I see something and I had this or a picture of someone or a smell of something or go somewhere that I hadn't been in, say, 25 years, and all of a sudden it clicks that I felt like I was just there. How does that and I'm sure that there could be positive triggers and negative triggers depending on the experience.

01:07:07:17 - 01:07:11:10
Mark McGrath
But what what's the physiological thing that's happening there?

01:07:11:10 - 01:07:40:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
Well, the brain is set up to make sure that something that elicits a very strong emotional response gets put into our long term memory, because that highly emotional response is very likely linked to survival or breeding. And so just this just the emotional component of that memory is there because of the emotional component. Just take, for example, smell.

01:07:40:17 - 01:07:59:16
Delia McCabe, PhD
If you smell the smell of your first girlfriend, it will take you right back to that time with your first girlfriend. And why is that? Because it was a very emotional time. It was probably one of the first times that those neurons had fire together and the olfactory bulb sits right next to the hippocampus in the brain. So they talk to interconnected.

01:07:59:22 - 01:08:22:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
So smell and memory are highly, highly interconnected. But the emotion is what makes that memory really, really a solid, robust memory. And you find this when people get very old. That's one of the reasons when they speak about their childhood, their brain was very neural plastic at the they had a lot of emotional components related to being young.

01:08:22:23 - 01:08:29:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
And so it's easier for them to remember those aspects of their life versus more recent ones.

01:08:29:01 - 01:08:51:18
Mark McGrath
Hmm. Yeah, I smell pine-sol and I feel like I'm right back in a barracks or I smell jet fuel at an airport, and I feel like I'm getting in the back of a helicopter with my Marines, you know, and it is interesting how it triggers in that just that one little sense can really bring you back to to a place in time where you eat certain food.

01:08:51:18 - 01:09:22:15
Mark McGrath
You know, we had a college reunion two years ago, and I had I couldn't think of the last time I had a brought in Wisconsin. You take a bite into it and it just took you back to tailgates at the Milwaukee Brewers games and junior year of college or whatever. But it's interesting how that works. I mean, I think one of the biggest things I'm learning from you is that and I would hope that other people would see this connection that there's so much more than cultural and sociological things.

01:09:22:15 - 01:09:42:22
Mark McGrath
There's there's physiological things that are actually happening to you that you need to be mindful and aware of. So people would say, Oh, I love the experience of having coffee. And I do, and I love the. But then I also have to understand that there's a physiological aspect of that, too. It's not just merely a cultural or a habitual thing that there's, there's, there's chemical things that are happening to me.

01:09:43:02 - 01:09:51:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
I think not spot on, but I think that we can learn to use coffee as well. So when you know how coffee works.

01:09:51:04 - 01:09:52:20
Mark McGrath
Tell me how, tell me how.

01:09:53:21 - 01:10:18:19
Delia McCabe, PhD
You use coffee when you want focus and concentration when you need to get a task done, when you're not going be interrupted. And you just need to focus on what's right in front of you. But when you want to be creative, when you want to sit back and observe something and allow the free flow of of thoughts and ideas to to basically simmer in your brain, then coffee isn't useful because it doesn't allow you to do that to step back.

01:10:18:19 - 01:10:50:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
Why? Because of its adrenaline release and the dopamine and then also it lowers adenosine so we can learn how to use coffee. Absolutely. And You know, a glass of wine at the end of the day, as long as it's organic and as long as it's not, every day can also just, you know, put you in the mood and you with people that you love and this is one of the reasons that it's part of the Mediterranean diet, because it wasn't just the wine, it was the environment, it was the culture, it was the social part of of being connected to a community which is extremely important for the brain.

01:10:51:08 - 01:11:13:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
So we can find these these ways of using what everybody thinks of as negative in ways that support us. And knowing that, you know, two bottles of wine is not is not is not okay at a time for one person. So these are the kinds of things that, you know, that that one can speak to. But the bottom line is, once you understand these things, you then have a different perspective.

01:11:13:10 - 01:11:37:12
Delia McCabe, PhD
And when I do my workshops, I always say to people, you want to know how coffee works? And most of the audience is no. And some people tentatively put up their hand and say, Yeah, they'd like to know. And I show them and I go, Wow. And then I'll say, Well Now, you know, you don't have coffee after 2:00 in the afternoon because the adenosine that you need to work with melatonin to allow you to go to sleep is stopped by a caffeine.

01:11:37:19 - 01:11:48:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
So don't do it off off after 2 p.m. and if you a woman maybe even 1 p.m. because there's a half life, a woman is a little bit longer than for men. So knowledge can be power. If we action.

01:11:48:16 - 01:12:36:21
Mark McGrath
It. Why did I have one question from a physiological neuroscience standpoint, why do people gravitate towards certain things, meaning that, you know, somebody has got a knack for mathematics or someone has a knack for neuroscience, or you can tell by the background here, you know, I'm a liberal arts, you know, history, English. How do people what is there is there like a neuroscience or some sort of physiological thing, why people gravitate towards engineering and versus history or, you know, does that make sense, like or why, you know, why are certain people into baseball and not basketball or why are certain people in the basketball, not baseball?

01:12:36:21 - 01:12:42:01
Mark McGrath
I mean, how do those things develop physiologically, if any?

01:12:42:02 - 01:13:03:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
So that's a big question and it's actually really related to our genes and our environment. So let's see, someone is born to a mother and a father who are very athletically fit and healthy and they're strong. So they have got those genes to start with. Then they're involved in an environment, in a community that plays a lot of baseball.

01:13:03:06 - 01:13:24:01
Delia McCabe, PhD
So they get exposed to that and they're also physically strong. So guess what? They become people that are that gravitate to that someone else is born into a family where both of the parents are university professors. They spend a lot of time in their heads. They read a lot of books. Sometimes the children gravitate to something opposite. They can, but generally they look at the parents and they go, Well, this has been a good idea.

01:13:24:10 - 01:13:53:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
These people are okay. I'm going to follow what they do. Remember, offspring follow what parents do because they think that's going to lead to. So the genes and the environment work in a very interesting and intricate way when you bring gender into it. We have a different discussion because people generally to what they're good at and men seem to be better at concepts and abstract shapes in space where women seem to be better at communication and empathy and sympathy.

01:13:53:09 - 01:14:22:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
You know, as I say this, I can see the work brigade going hysterical. So I will just say one thing. The men in the female brain are more similar then different, but the differences are noticeable and the differences are driven by reproductive capacity and reproductive hormones. So when you look at it from that perspective, that's one of the reasons why more men are engineers and more women are nurses and doctors and teachers it's simply that they gravitate to where they feel these skills are.

01:14:22:10 - 01:15:02:00
Delia McCabe, PhD
And the skills are partly driven by the neuroanatomy. Even in countries where there's a really level playing field and men and women can do whatever they want to. At university, we found that there is that difference in relation to gender. It's a market, it's a complex between our genes, between what we are allowed to embrace and enjoy in our environment, and also some quirkiness, some X factor that we don't particularly understand yet because some people do have a rebellious streak and then turn away from what the environment would suggest that they would have immerse themselves in.

01:15:03:03 - 01:15:25:02
Delia McCabe, PhD
At a very pivotal point in some of these windows of development, that child could have been exposed to something that really caught their attention. And I'll give you a perfect example. We live next to a gentleman who's an ornithologist, and he takes people into the Amazon to go and look at birds and he takes them to Mexico to look at birds in remote areas.

01:15:25:12 - 01:15:43:07
Delia McCabe, PhD
And we ended up having him for dinner and we chatted to him and he told us that when he was about four years old, he got really, really sick and he had to stay in bed for a long period of time. And his father bought him a book on birds and started reading about the birds. And he looked out the window and he saw some of the birds.

01:15:43:07 - 01:16:10:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
And when he got better, what do you think he did? He then started following birds in his neighborhood and he would go to remote areas to look at birds. And he's now a person who's fully, completely immersed in birds and how birds work and how birds sound. He makes sounds that leave us in awe at the age of four, when his brain was very, very plastic and very, very capable of at the environment and picking up on cues.

01:16:10:10 - 01:16:26:03
Delia McCabe, PhD
Guess what it did? It fell in love with birds. So one reads about these circumstances. So this beautiful interplay of circumstance, the particular environment, the parents, the genes all shape us in ways that we can't predict.

01:16:26:03 - 01:16:34:12
Mark McGrath
So so me and my friends. My friends and I, when we were young and we watched Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, it had a different effect on us.

01:16:34:16 - 01:16:39:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
Very different effect. Absolutely. It was not the same. You didn't become an apologist, did you?

01:16:40:20 - 01:17:11:05
Mark McGrath
No. No. But I think what you said you said earlier a couple of times, I mean, really, it comes down to since humans are natural, since we are part of the environment, we are a natural species, survival and breeding. I mean, so this is let me ask you this. How how is this as an assessment from a history major understanding what you've been what I've been learning from you is that anything that we do as a natural species is probably geared towards survival or breeding.

01:17:11:10 - 01:17:24:23
Mark McGrath
And the things that create consternation or trauma or inhibit that are probably interfering with one of those two natural functions that we have as as an animal species, as a human species, that that good.

01:17:25:20 - 01:17:59:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
Yes. That that is a good it's a good summary. However, what I would add, when our circumstances aren't filled with with stress, volatility and uncertainty like the world is filled with, now people can then think of higher exports, if I can put it that way. That's when philosophers could sit and philosophize about why people did what they what they do and discuss for many hours and days and years what made Youmans Human and why and why we are the way we are.

01:17:59:04 - 01:18:17:22
Delia McCabe, PhD
So the circumstance will once again dictate and the circumstances currently are saying, you know, that stress is a huge issue. And so how are we going to survive? And, you know, how is the species going to continue? These are things that happen deep within our DNA. We not aware of it. It doesn't mean that we're not capable of beautiful art and magnificent music.

01:18:17:23 - 01:18:37:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
Look at look at the history. You would know that human beings are capable of magnificent things. But when it comes down to the two brass tacks, our survival as a species will always hinge on what's happening in our physiology. And if that's threatened, that will be what asserts itself. This.

01:18:37:23 - 01:19:01:23
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
That's fantastic. Dr. McCabe You know, I talk a lot about flow flow systems. Also look at the loop as a flow system or representation, one from the physics of flow, maybe even the second psychology of flow. I don't think it can explain the biology or neurobiology of flow, but could you explain what's going on our in our brain housing unit again when we achieve flow, what's happening in our.

01:19:01:23 - 01:19:23:15
Delia McCabe, PhD
Well if you think about all the systems that work together when we achieve flow, everything is in equilibrium. So we don't have one part of the brain asserting itself and going, Hold on, we need to solve this problem. When we get into flow, everything is moving smoothly. And I know that we speak about this in relation to people that are very skilled at something.

01:19:24:02 - 01:19:55:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
They get into the flow of it. And then what happens is that Tom stands still. They don't notice the passage of time. They don't even notice when they're hungry. They just work at what they're busy doing because they're in the flow. I think the same thing can happen in businesses when they get into the flow of what they're doing and everyone's on the same team and everything is moving, moving forward, then They know hiccups, they know there's no stagnation, they know obstacles, do just working beautifully in that robot to be able to get into that flow state, you do need to be skilled.

01:19:56:11 - 01:20:16:12
Delia McCabe, PhD
Very few people that are skilled, that are not skilled can get into to a flat state next for obvious reasons because they're having to check on their behavior is this the right tool? How does this need to be adjusted? Can I call on someone else's help? When you in the flow, you are in the flow because you have some attached to that.

01:20:16:21 - 01:20:26:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
You don't have to do so much thinking. There's a lot of it that's automatic in terms of what you are producing and how you are working. Does that answer your question?

01:20:28:03 - 01:20:44:03
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Oh, that helps. Yeah, that helps out quite a bit. And you know, want to be mindful of your time today. I do want to make sure our listeners know how to contact you. That's pretty important. So if one of our listeners wants to bring you in to do a workshop and or learn more about your work, work? Could they.

01:20:44:03 - 01:21:08:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
Go? I think the best place to find me, Brian is on LinkedIn and they'll find me there under Dr. Delia McCabe. They can go to my website. Well, I haven't been very active on my website for ages, so I think LinkedIn is probably the best place I've tried to follow my what I know, which is to engage on vast quantities of social media platforms.

01:21:08:17 - 01:21:22:10
Delia McCabe, PhD
And I try and limit the time that I spend as well because I want to make sure that my can stay creative. And so I know I can do that. So yeah, LinkedIn is the best place. Thank you.

01:21:22:10 - 01:21:33:22
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
I have not seen you engaged in any conversations about no fly zones with me, so. That's right. I don't I used to be a no fly zone expert for Europe, but I've never engaged in those conversations online, so I know exactly what.

01:21:33:22 - 01:21:52:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
You're talking about. I trying to limit the conversations because you find that there's generally an agenda behind what someone is trying to tell you. And especially as relates nutrition, because there's always someone trying to tell you that their diet is the best and I just follow the science. So that's the way I do that. But I don't really always like to look at it from that perspective.

01:21:52:20 - 01:21:59:17
Delia McCabe, PhD
So I try to limit the way I communicate online.

01:21:59:17 - 01:22:03:07
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Well, we appreciate your time today. And Mark, do you have any parting thoughts?

01:22:03:08 - 01:22:12:23
Mark McGrath
Well, the only I guess the only thing we were remiss and asking you, you're talking about how somebody gravitated towards ornithology. How did you grow grad gravitate towards neuroscience?

01:22:13:14 - 01:22:36:06
Delia McCabe, PhD
Well, it's a good question because I was very intent on becoming a talking therapist, you know, a clinical psychologist, trying to help people talk themselves better. And I was working with a group of really smart school who were really underperforming at school, the kinds of kids that parents and teachers just throw up their hands. You know, they know these are really bright kids, but they're just underperforming.

01:22:36:06 - 01:23:00:12
Delia McCabe, PhD
And I was looking at all the different psychological variables related to this underperformance. And one of the things that all of the underperformance performance loved was junk food. And it's pretty unusual in research to find, you know, such a clear distinction. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. And it happened at the point in time I was pregnant, my first child, and we were busy moving to another part of South Africa, a safer part.

01:23:01:00 - 01:23:20:14
Delia McCabe, PhD
And I thought, I'm going to take a little bit of a break after I ended my master's thesis in an investigate this and just imagine, this was 25 years ago. No one spoke about nutrition in the brain. And I just did more research and more and discovered that I actually didn't want to try and talk people better when their brains were malnourished.

01:23:21:02 - 01:23:46:09
Delia McCabe, PhD
Because I understood that a malnourished brings a lot harder to support change within. This is a brain that was optimally nourished and that basically was I took the road less traveled. And so I discovered this beautiful, wonderful, sophisticated, sensitive piece of flesh between what is that is so poorly understood. And I knew I'd never understand it properly. It was the perfect thing to do and start investigating.

01:23:46:09 - 01:23:50:20
Delia McCabe, PhD
It will keep me busy for the rest of my life, huh?

01:23:51:15 - 01:24:05:16
Mark McGrath
Well, we appreciate we're glad that you're doing it. We're certainly learning a lot. Look forward to having you back on. And we'll we'll keep the conversation going about it because it's fascinating. And I hope that people got a lot out of it because I certainly did.

01:24:05:21 - 01:24:06:23
Delia McCabe, PhD
Thank you very much, Mark.

01:24:07:07 - 01:24:08:21
Brian "Ponch" Rivera
Same here. I appreciate your time.

01:24:08:21 - 01:24:12:04
Delia McCabe, PhD
Very much, Brian. Thanks again and have a good weekend.