No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Navigating Stress, Technology, and Brain Health with Dr. Delia McCabe
Discover the intricate dance between our brain's natural tendencies and the relentless flood of modern information. Learn how stress and anxiety can disrupt cognitive biases and alter our perception of the world. Our discussion kicks off with an eye-opening study on neurophysiological responses to polarized environments and the influence of technology and social media in reinforcing echo chambers. We examine the crucial role of discomfort as a catalyst for change, reminding listeners not to demonize opposing viewpoints. Highlighting Marshall McLuhan's 'global village,' we explore how electronic media thrusts us into the affairs of distant places, questioning whether this interconnectedness is more burden than boon.
Our conversation branches into the strain of information overload on our cognitive capacity and its profound effects on decision-making processes. We challenge the brain's finite limits, drawing on Dunbar's number and examining how stress can inhibit creativity and innovation in organizational settings. Dr. Delia McCabe joins us to share her expertise on the transformative potential of shifting mindsets and the role of holistic integration in stress management. From the potential appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in health policy to the complexities of food systems, our dialogue touches on the intricate connections between physical health and brain function.
But the exploration doesn't end there. We venture into the therapeutic potential of psychedelics like psilocybin, offering fresh insights into their role in enhancing mental well-being. Our discussion with Dr. McCabe reveals the importance of experienced guidance during psychedelic experiences and warns against the allure of constant enlightenment. We close with a nod to New Year's resolutions, urging listeners to embrace change and aesthetics as we dive into the fascinating world of neuroscience, societal impacts, and the power of art and nature. All this and more await your curious mind on this engaging episode.
AGLX Confidence in Complexity short commercial
Stay in the Loop. Don't have time to listen to the podcast? Want to make some snowmobiles? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive deeper insights on current and past episodes.
Find us on X. @NoWayOutcast
Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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
Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
Why are we all quiet right now? What's going on? What's happening, people telling us to? You can't say things like that on podcasts, or you can't write something like that. So a lot of things have changed. I want to know in your mind what's top of mind for you today. What do you want to look at?
Dr. Delia McCabe:There's so many things Watching the world change and, as we all know, the more complex the world becomes, the more things there are to pay attention to. So I came across some research this last year which I really was very grateful to have come across, but also very surprised that it hasn't gained more traction. And it's not as if it's new research, but it ties into what I have looked at, which is chronic stress and anxiety, and it also ties into what's happening from a political perspective. So I'll just give you a bit of a background. There was some research done in 2010, and these researchers I can send you the link to the research for anyone that's interested in having a look at this and the research looked at it was a very cleverly done project, because what they did? They looked at creating these political candidates and they allowed participants of this research project to become acclimatized to these political um, these, these politicians, these avatar politicians. And then they started seeing if there was a tipping point when these participants would start changing their perspective about these political avatars, and they found something really, really fascinating. They found that when these people were exposed to disconfirming information, that information that didn't support their initial beliefs about this politician. They didn't immediately start changing their minds about these hypothetical politicians and they looked at whether there was a tipping point.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Now, why I found this interesting from my perspective because of my interest in the neurophysiology of brain function was that up until about 14-15%, people actually dug their heels in. Percent people actually dug their heels in, they actually decided against taking note of the disconfirming information. But after 15 percent, and probably close to about 28 percent, their anxiety levels got so high that they started changing their minds. Now I found that really, really interesting because, well, there are a few things that we can have a look at here.
Dr. Delia McCabe:But firstly, when you have a conversation with someone who has a different perspective to you on anything now I'm not saying that we can extrapolate this research study into every aspect of our conversations with people and the way we change our minds but if you consider the conversations you have with people, when you touch on something that doesn't fit into their paradigm, their perspective, then you do notice that they go no, but do you know this and do you know this? And then, when they're exposed to more information, then they start maybe thinking well, maybe I don't really understand it, but I think the important thing behind this research is that, and that can really help us today, is that trying to argue with people doesn't work. They have to get to the point where they themselves decide. Oh, I feel uncomfortable now, and this is actually a.
Dr. Delia McCabe:This is a physiological response. It's basically an affective response. It's an anxiety response that leads to them changing their mind, because that is overriding the cognition that's saying hey, I really want to believe this thing. Now, the challenge we have today is that people aren't exposed to disconfirming information, because they naturally choose the thought bubbles that support their perspective.
Ponch RIvera:Not only that, the algorithms choose that for them, right.
Dr. Delia McCabe:So we are now in a situation where we're not able to actually harness our natural response, our natural human response to a situation, because technology has basically hijacked that. The minute you get into a situation where you feel like I don't like this, this is disconfirming the way I see the world. If you don't get past that 15% and then get closer to the 28%, guess what happens? You just keep on digging your heels in. So I thought that was pretty interesting. What do you guys think?
Mark McGrath:Well, I mean, this is a great John Boyd conversation and, Delia, it would have been great to have you on our live broadcast yesterday, because a lot of the stuff that we're talking about in the information warfare we're realizing that these things are not only happening inside of echo chambers but they are being synthetically reinforced. I've told as an example, so we've been doing these broadcasts of this show live on X and I've told people, hey, we're going live on X and they look at me like I'm crazy. They say, oh, I left X. And I'm like, why? Well, because Elon Musk bought it and I'm out and it's just filled with people that don't agree with my worldview.
Mark McGrath:And I kind of thought that that was what the problem of Twitter was was that it was reinforcing groupthink. It was reinforcing, it was deciding for you and it made it a very inhospitable place. That's why I left Twitter. It had nothing to do with Jack Dorsey, it had nothing to do with anybody. But when you see this coming out now with, as you say, their biases are all confirmed, because he thinks differently than I do and I only want to be around people that agree with me, that seems like a very dangerous precedent, because assumptions are being challenged. People aren't, you said, uncomfortable. Ludwig von Mises said that if we don't feel discomfort, there's no that way we could decide to even act in the first place.
Dr. Delia McCabe:There's no way we could change our circumstances to improve. Well, mark, that's where the challenge lies, because if you take this research and you just extrapolate it, and you look at our neurophysiology always wanting to stay at the status quo, not changing anything homeostasis is the goal, predicting energy and that whole aspect then you can see why we're becoming more polarized.
Mark McGrath:And it's to the point where it's like anymore I don't disagree with that person.
Mark McGrath:I think if that person thinks opposite of me, that they should be wiped off the face of the earth, that they shouldn't exist. And that scares me because, having studied a lot of history and politics, when you think of things like you know I remember when we lived in West Germany as kids and my mother teaching us like regular, regular Germans fell for horrible, horrible, horrible things because they're afraid to leave the tribe. You know, or they're afraid to leave the sort of the enforced view, or they find comfort in the group or something, as you're saying, neurophysiological, that can set a very dangerous precedent where the one person that says I object to this they're exterminated or they're cast out or they're liquidated. That would challenge that assumption and I think that what I hope in the information warfare and the information environment, that information does flow freely, such that we can isolate and identify those types of things, because I think they're leading us to ruin. I mean, let me ask you, aren't they tapping into neurophysiological things about us to make us want to click, get the likes, get the reposts?
Ponch RIvera:That's interesting, you bring that up, mark, as Doc McKay was talking about this research, the first thing that came to mind was to me it was the halo effect, and you know I've got a quick image that I could share with you here, and this is something that we've done in courses with folks, and that is, just, given the order of words intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. If we flip that around and for those of you that are listening to this, we have a picture of Ben and Todd, and if we flip those words around where Todd is now envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent, chances are we're going to want to have dinner with Ben, right? Intelligent, industrious, also critical, stubborn and envious. So this is wired into the way we are as humans, right? So I think a lot of that research that Dr McKay was just bringing up there is we're predisposed to see worlds again based on our orientation, right? So that genetic piece of it is critical in this.
Ponch RIvera:Again, that's the halo effect. I think I got that right with that example. But there are things, heuristics or biases, that drive us to act the way we do, and we talked about tribalism with John Robb quite a bit the red tribe and the blue tribe, and I think Mark did a great job in explaining what happened in the past with that. But, dr McCabe, can you tell us more about the heuristics I guess the biases how they're driving our behaviors now?
Dr. Delia McCabe:their heuristics, I guess biases how they're driving our behaviors. Now. Well, something else. Just to bring up which kind of ties into this, I'm busy writing an article for my sub stack at the moment based on the event that happened in December that again caused a huge challenge Luigi Mangione's alleged murder of the healthcare insurer CEO. And something else that I looked at was again the neurophysiological response, because a lot of people had an outcry about how many people were glad about this happening and they said you can't do this, you should not do this. And my immediate knee-jerk response was as an ex-clinical psychologist, I'm really really curious about all the different factors that led to this man doing this thing, which is really murder. But I was more curious about why there was such a response from the public that was so positive, and so I've dived into that in this article and I'll publish it in the next few days.
Dr. Delia McCabe:But the interesting thing is that we as humans most human beings have a natural affinity to fairness and from a very young age there's research to show from a Punch and Judy show, if I'm recalling it correctly from Jonathan Haidt's book the Righteous Mind children knew immediately in that little scenario who was the baddie and who was the goodie in terms of the puppet, and then they wouldn't touch the puppet that they saw as being the baddie because they understood the fairness. Okay, so let's just step back for a moment. The part of the brain that registers fairness is the same part of the brain that registers disgust, and it's a visceral, instant response. It's a response that bypasses cognition and just deals with emotion, and so when I looked at this and this is part of the thing that I'm going to discuss in this article is that the response online was immediate. It was an immediate response. People didn't sit back and go, oh wow, this is really bad, this is murder. They immediately responded because they are sensing that there's a deep unfairness in what's happening in the healthcare industry.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And, as an outsider, the other thing that I point out and I bring up a whole lot of graphs where there's a report that has compared the American healthcare system to many others around the world and, being an Australian, australian comes out as the top, as the top one, and so I can observe this at a distance, and for me that was very, very telling this instant response, which is again a neurophysiological response. So technology has allowed us to respond instantly to any news we come across, regardless of what thought bubble, emotion bubble we're living in. Whatever news we're watching, whatever influencer we're watching, we can respond instantly, and one of the things that the research has showed that I uncovered for this article is that these responses used to be found on niche platforms. Now they are coming onto the major mainstream platforms, like you know, even LinkedIn, instagram, facebook. They used to be on sub-culture issues. So what is that saying? That is telling us something about society shifting and changing, and technology is enabling us to act on our natural neurophysiological responses.
Mark McGrath:Marshall McLuhan's entire book. I mean, the medium is the message, and that's exactly what has an effect on our senses and our sense-making capabilities completely.
Dr. Delia McCabe:But what does this mean?
Mark McGrath:So the technology is what shapes us, the medium, which is the plural of media, which is technology, environment, that's actually what has an effect on us as a species.
Dr. Delia McCabe:The challenge is that things are changing so quickly. You know, mangione was December, then we've had the New Orleans, as he said.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, he predicted this, yeah you're right.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Then the New Orleans, then we had the Las Vegas. Now we've got the fires in California. We're constantly having to reorient ourselves, and I always go back to first principles. You both know that that's what I do. And so, from a neurophysiological perspective, what does this mean? This means that our brain is constantly having to readjust, having to assess something, having to say okay, this is the next thing that's come up. How do I respond to this? What are the possible consequences? And so we have this ongoing cascade of neural energy being expended to assess an environmental kaleidoscope, if we can put it that way. And where is this leading us? Now I'm asking this question because I know where it's leading us. It's not good.
Mark McGrath:No, there's a level of. So back to McLuhan, and it would be great to have an X Live with Delia and Andrew McLuhan, who's his grandson, who's been on our show and has done some X Live with us. Andrew McLuhan, who's his grandson, who's been on our show and has done some X Live with us. But what I'm hearing you say is that because of the wait, what McLuhan says because of the amalgamation or the widespread, pervasive use of these technologies, particularly the electronic technologies, that are actually bringing us closer together to what he called the global village. But it wasn't a good thing and what it meant was that we're basically all in each other's business.
Mark McGrath:So me sitting here in Manhattan and you sitting there in Austin and Ponch sitting here in Virginia, we're supposed to stop what we're doing and pay direct attention to what's going on in California as if it affected us in our own environments, in our own lives, in our own things. And that's basically what he saying, something I have to pull up the quote. But we're basically going to be inside of everybody's business and it's not going to be a good thing. And you're going to be across the seas and something's going to happen over there and you're going to think that it's happening where you are and it's not, but you're going to have, you're going, you're going to be, uh, massaged, cause that's the other thing that he said. The medium is the massage. You're going to be massaged into believing that it should be your business, that you should base all your decisions and actions off of that.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, that's just simply because of how the brain works Whatever's in front of it, it perceives it as being important and it could be an imminent threat. And we've never, ever before, been exposed to this amount of information. I just did a quick check before this call and we are now exposed to 403 million tetabytes of data. That's how much data we are now exposed to and as humans, you know we naturally.
Mark McGrath:Where did you pull that stat off?
Dr. Delia McCabe:I just looked at Google. I just Googled it and I said, hey, that's the amount of data, and I've actually got a very long article where I give references to that in my sub-stack as well, about information overwhelm. It brings me back to something that I forgot about, and then I read about it last week and I thought, yeah, this actually ties in really well, and it's something called Dunbar's number. I don't know if you know about Dunbar's number, brian, I see you nodding your head.
Ponch RIvera:Of course we do, yeah yeah.
Mark McGrath:Absolutely For the audience. Break it down for us in layman's terms.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, dunbar's number is a number, 150. And this researcher from the 1990s basically said that, based on our neocortex, which our prefrontal cortex is part of, we can only really have relationships with 150 people. So it goes on a continuum of five really close friends, then 15 that are a little bit less close, and so on and so on, up until we get to the number of 1,500, which is recognizable. You would be able to recognize that person, but you don't have anything meaningful to do with them. And it made me think of the fact that I think we probably have a limitation to our cognitive capacity to examine and analyze and consider information.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Because, the same as the planet is finite, the human brain is finite and we know that the prefrontal cortex, which is the place where we have higher executive functioning and we do all the analyzing, all the consequential thinking, you know, basically massage information, where our working memory, you know, is facilitated with our hippocampus.
Dr. Delia McCabe:We know that the prefrontal cortex is the greediest part of a very, very metabolically active organ, the brain, and it's to ultimately only last between four and five hours. And when you think about that, think about how much information we're exposing ourselves to continuously throughout the day. Now, there is a limit to that, and it all boils down to neural energy, because the prefrontal cortex doesn't have any automaticity. Now, that just simply means it doesn't have neural pathways that are already established that it can just run through and go. Okay, this is the way this works, like the limbic system and the amygdala have. So for me this means that we are nearly exhausted all the time, and when you are nearly exhausted, we already know that decision-making is compromised and creativity is compromised. So we have a lot of challenges on our plate, just purely from the finite capacity of this beautiful brain of ours to cope with this world we're now immersed in.
Ponch RIvera:There's so many places we can go with the Dunbar number. I'll do that on another episode. I do want to ask. So we have this mental exhaustion happening, but we also have the food we're putting in our body, which you've talked about in the past lack of exercise. It's not just one thing. Right, it is possible that we can survive with this information overload if we do things deliberately. And I'll give you an example Trying to stay focused on one thing for a short amount of time. Right, that means getting rid of the electronic nicotine that's in front of you. That means getting outside, grounding yourself on planet. Take your shoes off, ground yourself, be outside, do things like that. So I'm curious how does food fit into this? How does exercise fit into this? What else can we be considering when we're dealing with technology?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, the first thing I'd like to say is I think that, yes, absolutely, we can optimize how our brains function to cope better with the onslaught of information, but I don't think that we can do that indefinitely. I don't think we can just keep on adding more and more information and think that if we optimize our physiology and our neurophysiology, we don't have a price to pay. I think that the you know, your circle of concern and your circle of influence, and that whole thing that everybody knows and is quite hackneyed now, I think, really does still play a very, very big role. I think all the things that we can't control are the things that bring us that sense of overwhelm. You know the VUCA world that we live in. We need to try and minimize that capacity. So, as you said, mark, knowing what's happening across the ocean doesn't serve us. So maybe we should limit our knowledge of that happening, even if we can't have a conversation with somebody about that, and just go well, it's okay to say I don't know anything about that.
Mark McGrath:I get it all the time. Delia, living in Manhattan. Of course People think out here in whatever town in middle America, I read this thing on the news and that everything's going like this in Manhattan and I'm too afraid to come to Manhattan because I'm going to get shot in the street or burned alive on the subway or blah, blah, blah. And people in Manhattan are looking around like I don't know what they're talking about. But I mean, it's not that there's not things that happen here, but the way it's described and portrayed and depicted on social media and others. You would think that it's happening literally everywhere and that the whole town is burning down. Imagine that the entire city of Los Angeles is not burning down right now, I would suspect. I'm sure I understand there's a part of it that is, but the way people are talking it's as if all of California is burning.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So trying to minimize that constant input of information allows us to spend time on the things that really do matter and that we can control. So that's the first point, brian. But yes, I think that the role that food plays is a really significant role, because you can't make a neuronal connection unless you have the raw materials, and many people are battling with just the basics of what allow neurons to make new pathways. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that chronic stress is really expensive from a neuronal perspective.
Dr. Delia McCabe:We don't just make adrenaline and cortisol out of thin air. It gets made from nutrients, and many of those nutrients are the same ones that are used to make energy within our mitochondria and they're the same ones that are used to make serotonin and melatonin. So we have these neurotransmitters that are relying on nutrients for their synthesis. So nutrient-dense food is just a no-brainer Excuse the pun. We need to have food that has as many many nutrients in it as possible, and that just means that ultra processed foods need to be very, very limited in our food choices. They don't just contain too little of the nutrients we need, they also contain anti-nutrients. There are some chemicals and the one that comes to mind is tartrazine. Tartrazine is anti, is actually an anti-zinc chemical. So the more tartrazine you consume, you're actually leaching.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah, where do we find tartrazine? Give us an example of wherever we find it.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Tartrazine allows ultra-processed foods to have a very bright color and it's still allowed in America and mostly in Europe, and I know in Australia it has been banned.
Mark McGrath:And it depletes zinc. You say yes.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And when children consume a lot of that food, the zinc that they require for optimal growth and development and neurotransmitter synthesis is depleted. It gets depleted by urine. So that's just one example of an ultra-processed food additive that is an anti-nutrient. Then you have people. You have neuroscientists helping ultra-processed food manufacturers to produce food with fantastic mouthfeel, and we know that the best mouthfeel is crunchy, creamy, a little bit of salt, sugar and really a lot of fat. So now you've got them helping ultra-processed food manufacturers produce food that's really cheap for people to consume and also help the body to synthesize endogenous opioids so they feel calm and relaxed when they eat those foods. So then you build a psychological habit into this neurophysiological habit that's forming as well. So we have a number of different ways that this is impacting people. And then many people live in food deserts and food swamps. They don't have access to whole foods, which is a food desert, and a food swamp is where they've got only access to fast food. So food is critically important, because without food you cannot do what you need to do. So your aggression levels will go up, your blood glucose will be spiking, which leads to weight gain, leads to more adrenaline as well, because when your blood glucose dips, you get a message hey, find food. And one way to do that is to send glucose to muscles via adrenaline synthesis. So you've got all of these different mechanisms operating when you don't have enough good food and those nutrients are missing. That is definitely the first step.
Dr. Delia McCabe:When I work with people, that's the first thing I do. I say to them what did you have for breakfast? What did you have for lunch? What did you have for dinner? What are you eating as snacks? And then we have a look at what are in those foods. Are what in those foods enough to sustain that brain with what they expect from that brain every single day? And I can tell you, there is not a single time where I look at what people are consuming and I can say great, you're doing a wonderful job and you can support that busy brain that you are expecting so much from every day.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Because you spoke about being able to pay attention for a period of time, brian, and you know to be able to do that means that your prefrontal cortex has to be in tip-top shape. Why? Because your prefrontal cortex is what allows you to inhibit intrusion. Okay, now just imagine and this is why, towards the end of the day it's so much harder to pay attention because it, towards the end of the day, your prefrontal cortex is where I'm out of here.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I've tried all day, you know, to keep you focused, to analyze this, to think about the consequences of that, and at the end of the day just can't do it anymore because it can no longer inhibit what you are trying to not do and that's problem. So if you have blood glucose going up and down, up and down all the time, the prefrontal cortex isn't capable of not picking up when your phone has a notification. So you actually have to have another level of protection. You have to make sure that the notification doesn't arrive, because if the notification arrives then you've got to inhibit the response that you want to have to it. So you're building in another layer of protection to protect the prefrontal cortex.
Ponch RIvera:So sanitizing your area is important, changing things on your settings on your phone and the way you wake up in the morning and make sure you don't engage with something bright like your phone or your iPad.
Dr. Delia McCabe:That happens in our house from time to time. Yeah, yeah 100%, but it goes further than that. You actually have to put your phone outside of your room so that you don't look at your phone, because if you look at your phone, you have to inhibit yourself from picking up the phone. So you're protecting yourself on a number of different levels, because all of that inhibition costs neural energy and nobody has excess of that today.
Mark McGrath:I saw something on I guess it was on Instagram and that the blue light at night. The worst thing you could do is look at your phone. You use your phone as like a light, you know in the dark, and it showed how to turn it into red light, like how to turn your iPhone where the screen at night would be red, not the dimming, not the dimming that you normally can do on it, but actually go in and adjust the color settings so that the screen is only emitting red light and it doesn't screw up your.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah, when we're with clients, we give them that information. We have a lot of that information already where we can hand them, like how do you set your iPhone up to go to gray and turn off your alarms? There's many things you can do that you know. We just show folks, hey, you can do this, but I can't enforce it, right.
Dr. Delia McCabe:But look, even having your phone on Flux, which is one of the softwares that you can use for your laptop.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Even doing that, that is just impacting the melatonin release. Okay, so that's the one aspect of this. What about if you're on your laptop, and so you're not having this huge impact on melatonin, but you read an email that is very disturbing and you feel now you need to respond to that email. So what are you doing? Your brain is now going to go oh, I need to concentrate on that because it's important, because what happened? You had a spark of adrenaline. Now you can't just switch that off when you put the light off and put your head on your pillow, because your brain is still busy trying to solve that problem. It is a problem for the brain as much as the rustling in the bushes that a tiger was a problem for us. So it's not just, you know, setting up that one level of melatonin with the blue and the red light challenge. It's not looking at your phone, not looking at your laptop after a certain period of time, because you still set off those thought processes, which is where the challenge comes in.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah, I have some numbers that I'm going to go over real fast and these may or may not be true, but 36 times an hour we check our email. 56 times a day we're disrupted. We actually get 11 minutes of focused work done in a single day, which is very little. You think about it. That's 11 minutes. 10 point IQ fall or fallen IQ points when you get disrupted about 20 minutes to go from task to task. You know once, once somebody interrupts you, it takes about 20 minutes. So there's a lot of other statistics out there that I know that just keep coming in. But going to your point earlier in the conversation, that you know, if you argue with me that I need to put the phone down, do these things I'm going to, I'm going to push back right of course you're going to.
Dr. Delia McCabe:so there we go. When I show people what's actually happening at the neuronal level, they then go aha, and all we can do is expose people to more of this information until they become uncomfortable. I put a post up I think it was on Monday about there are only two reasons people change their behavior. There are only really two reasons. The first one is fear and pain, and the second one is a deep desire to gain something. A deep desire to gain something so, which is often based on pain and fear. So just take as an example your father died of cardiovascular disease. You go to the doctor. The doctor says you headed down the same path. You got to change. You change because you have a deep desire not to let that happen to you, but it's based on a fear.
Dr. Delia McCabe:So human beings respond very well to pain and fear, but we don't respond very well to an idea that something could happen at some point in the future. So to that point, when people feel enough pain, when they're not sleeping and it's really impacting their decision-making and they're seeing a financial repercussion to that, are they prepared to then change? So most people just kick the can down the road. That's what we do as humans. We kick the can down the road. We don't have to change our mind. The energy that we have to expend to make the change just seems like too much, especially when everyone's exhausted. So to answer that question, it's a challenging one. Are you experiencing enough pain? If you're experiencing enough pain, you're prepared to change Until that point well made, sorry.
Ponch RIvera:We have a saying in our house and we joke around about it all the time. I always say that, hey, that's future Brian's problem, not current Brian's problem, right?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Yes, exactly, and part of the challenge is that with the brain particularly and I will always go back to that it takes about 20 years for challenges in the brain to become symptoms that you notice and that other people notice. And why? Because the brain is so good at workarounds, it is so good at finding a different way to perform what it could have performed in a much simpler way. So you find brains that are functioning really really well use energy very, very efficiently, and we know this from functional MRIs. Brains that aren't functioning really well don't use energy really efficiently. Why? Because they've got to do all these workarounds, but people only want to change when they notice.
Dr. Delia McCabe:My memory is completely. I can't remember somebody's name. I'm battling to make connections where logic and reasoning used to be second nature for me. By the time they notice those challenges, 15 to 20 years of damage has been happening under the surface. Now that's where we have the real problem. So kicking the can down the road in relation to things that are the underpinnings of things like dementia and vascular dementia and Alzheimer's, which is the most common form of dementia, that's a huge problem. And so when I speak to people and I speak about adult diapers and I speak about dribbling. I'm trying to make them fearful of what the consequences of not doing something now will be. It doesn't always work, but I feel that it's important for people to know that this beautifully sophisticated brain is so sensitive but it's really really smart at all those workarounds and those workarounds are what's going to cost you not making the changes that you need to make.
Ponch RIvera:Is that sobering? Well, it's destruction creation. Well, it's happens and occurs from that drinking alcohol, what that does to you over the long term, what that does to your brain. And again, flying fighter, aircraft and then eating poorly, running over to Wendy's, not getting enough sleep All these things matter. So we'll look at that on a TBI perspective to see what that looks like and just going to check in with you right now if that'd be something you'd be interested in participating in.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely, brian. I think it's really important because TBI's impact the brain significantly, but, once again, the brain will always try and do workarounds. The challenge with TBI's is that anything that interferes with the brain will interfere with the endocrine system, which means it interferes with hormones, and so when the brain becomes damaged and isn't no longer in homeostasis, the endocrine system is like the next level of challenge. And so for me that's a really big conversation, because hormones and we know that when men experience TBRs, a lot of experienced functional doctors will prescribe things like testosterone because they know that the endocrine system has become compromised and of course that also impacts the adrenal glands, which impacts the stress response, because the adrenal glands are part of that whole process, and of course it impacts the metabolism. So, yes, that's a very important part of this conversation. I mean, we always come back to first principles what damages the tissue damages everything.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah. So I'm curious about this. We know that systems drive behaviors from complex adaptive systems thinking and theory. I'm curious. We've got a lot of changes that are potentially going to happen in the next few weeks, few months. We might have Robert F Kennedy in the HHS position. I believe it is health and human services position what is needed from a systems perspective to help change our behavior. Are there any possibilities in what may happen here in the future? Will they contribute to a better both brain health and physical health?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Look, I think one of the things that the Make America Healthy movement has done it's actually highlighted the horrendous food system that has been underpinning both the physical challenges and I believe from my research the mental health challenges.
Dr. Delia McCabe:So one of the things that needs to happen is that the education system needs to start supporting health, and there are quite a few ways to do this, and I actually I watched the Senate hearing around this towards the end of last year and I heard some of the speakers. None of them spoke about behavior change in the detail that I wanted it to, that I think it should be addressed, and they also didn't speak about getting neuroscientists involved to make healthy food more attractive. They also didn't speak about taxes that ultra-high processed manufacturers should be paying. Instead of getting tax breaks, they should make that food really, really expensive. People won't buy it if it's really expensive. That's just a really simple solution. But from a neuroscience perspective, we can make healthy food tastier. So I don't see why neuroscientists should be working for the bad guys. I think they should be working for the good guys as well.
Ponch RIvera:Something else that needs it has to do with money. Right, it has to do with money.
Mark McGrath:Absolutely. Yeah, that's an interesting point too, isn't that? Usually the case is like someone says oh, I got a grant to study this drugs effect on whatever, and pharmaceutical company X is underwriting my grant. I mean, do you think that that's open inquiry or do you think that's going to have a heavy scale tip on it?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely. I mean, if you follow the money, you see where this leads to. People don't believe that neuroscientists are helping ultra-processed food manufacturers make food more addictive. We need to do this for the good side as well, so I think that's an important point. The other challenge is that mothers are the ones that make most of the food. They make the food decisions and they open the fridge. They're tossing the food together If they're only. We need to make it easier for mothers. I don't know how we do that from a systematic perspective, but we can't just have men on this Make America Healthy great bandwagon. We need to have women there saying, okay, where are the ready? Big pain points for women and when I work with women, I know where those are. We need to make it as easy for them as possible to toss a great meal together that the family will love, that the kids won't argue about, even if they're picky eaters, and we need to find ways to change the children's behavior so that they're more open to eating food well.
Mark McGrath:So it's an educational and a family perspective, and we need to do it really quickly, because I really believe we are impacting the intellectual genetic potential and the evidence supports this yeah future generations, because we're not giving the brain what it needs to develop optimally we have a guest that comes on quite a bit on x live that was, that lives in italy and he was speaking about how he moved his parents over to europe to live with him in italy and I think that he said that without any change of like the quantity of the diet, like eating the same type of meals that they would have eaten back in the States, one parent lost like 50 pounds, the other one lost like 40 pounds with no real change, just speaking to the ingredients and the preservatives and the chemicals and things that are actually in the foods. Here I can speak from personal experience. I went to Israel for two weeks and I thought I was eating like a horse and I lost like seven, eight pounds, you know, because just the food is completely, completely, utterly different. I took my daughter, who is now 21, but then 11. And she said Daddy, can I drink a Coke? And when you look at the Coke label it's like real sugar, it's like just a completely different experience. And I said, sure, he looked at things like candy and they didn't have ingredients I couldn't pronounce. You know, it really is unique. And then, if you go north of the border, I remember the first time I ever took my kid to Canada.
Mark McGrath:They were curious about the ketchup. Why does Heinz ketchup taste this way? And we looked at the label and it said sugar, tomatoes, vinegar, salt, not sugar, high fructose, corn syrup and all the other stuff. So I hope things change. I mean because otherwise we are in a culture where things have changed such that when you look at old historic pictures, in the old days someone that was corpulent or overweight or obese, that was a sign of status. They were, they were wealthy, they had access to things and and and people on the other side of the social scale were all starving. And now it's now it's almost the other way. You know well-to-do people are fit and people that are not well-to-do or obese and I. How can you make the argument that it wouldn't be food? You know and what they're ingesting?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, food is definitely the major, major, foundational piece of that. But unfortunately chronic stress adds to that, because when you're chronically stressed you're more prone to eat emotionally and you're more prone to want those endogenous opioids which the UPF foods provide. You're more prone to have blood glucose spikes.
Mark McGrath:Are we, as humans, supposed to eat grain and grass and the things that are the bulk of the food pyramid? Are we supposed to be? Are humans, with our physiology and our coding and everything, are we supposed to be eating?
Ponch RIvera:grain. Mark, you need to go eat your plant-based meat right now, brother.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Come on, Just look at what is in a plant-based meat. It's horrendous. There's so many additives you just don't want to be having those.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Good question. I think when we became more of an agricultural species, as humans, we did what we normally do. The pendulum swung completely the other way, and so we started focusing too much on them. I think grains in moderation, unrefined grains are fine If you're doing a lot of exercise. We use carbs as a form of energy. What we end up eating more of, we end up carrying. That's the challenge.
Dr. Delia McCabe:However, the whole carnivore paleo diet is also another swing of the pendulum in the wrong direction. Because the paleo diet is really another swing of the pendulum in the wrong direction, because the paleo diet is really an evolutionary oversimplification of the thousands of years that humans lived through the paleo period. If we only relied on eating meat, we would have all died, because we couldn't always go out and kill animals. We had to rely on berries, we had to rely on grubs, we had to rely on small animals, we had to rely on the fruit that was ripe in the region at that time. Those are all things that need to be taken into account, and we know from robust research that the Mediterranean diet is the one that ticks every single box, not just for physical but also for mental health, but that doesn't mean living on pasta or crackers or cookies.
Mark McGrath:I want hummus, I love hummus.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And that's a fantastically nutrient-dense food item, but if you have it with pita breads all the time, then you're going to end up with a problem. So we need to balance the research that we have. We need to balance the fact that we are omnivores. We meant our alimentary canal. Our gut tells us, just from its pure physical state, that we can happily consume animal products and happily consume plant products, and the research supports the fact that that is how we evolve to thrive. Today, in a few small pockets in the world, you find that they are low in stature, they are full of of worms, they are miserable and they're very, very hungry. They are not thriving. The whole carnivore paleo image is a is a very robust, muscular, tall creature that steps out of the stream with its fish in its hand and its bison, you know thigh in the other hand, and and that's the image. That is not the truth at all, but clever marketing and spin led to that belief.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Just speaking to what you said about Israel, I came to America from Australia. Australia is very much more involved with clean eating. There's a lot more organic produce there. A farmer's market I've battled to find a farmer's market in Australia that focuses just on organic food. I could go to my organic farmer's market on a Sunday, every single Sunday in Australia, where everybody at that market was certified organic. So it's harder for you to eat well in this country.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I came and I spent a couple of hours at Whole Foods reading every single label of every single food item that was processed. And it's not that I eat a lot of processed foods, but a rice cake, you know, coconut milk berries in a frozen bag, excuse me, why do you have to add sugar to them? So I was very curious and it was a hard thing to do that. So just to come back to your question, brian, about you know, what are the systems that need to change? There are a whole lot of systems that need to change, but we need to make it harder for people to eat bad food and easier for them to eat good food. And if we underpin that by an understanding which should start at the educational level and it can start at the educational level with kitchen gardens, with having part of the curriculum based on how does the brain function, how does the body function, those are the changes.
Ponch RIvera:This is fantastic. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the neuroscientist role in organizational change. Can we hold back?
Mark McGrath:Can I just finish what Delia said? I just ask one thing. The first podcast that we published this year was Nick Delgadillo, from Starting Strength, and what I wanted to know is everything that you're saying. It sounds like, uh, because one of their arguments is that if, if we do strength training, like if we're training our, our bodies and in their case it's under compound barbell movements five, five simple compound barbell movements that we're actually teaching our body, we're rewiring our body to promote positive, like cytophagy metabolism.
Mark McGrath:They're they're very good about like what you should. You know the type of diet that you should have to maintain strength and that strength being a central part of your physical existence as a as a human. To have a healthy brain, I have to have a healthy body. To have a healthy body, I have to have I'm putting in the right things, but I also have to be doing the right type of activities, and I think that that there is some kind of primal connection where they're talking about lifting heavy things and outrunning saber-toothed tigers or whatever, but it taps into the design. I think it taps into our design. I don't know if you've ever looked at that as a physical complement to the nutritional things that you're talking about.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely. One strong-fit body we know supports a stronger and fit brain. The first obvious reason for that is we increase blood supply and oxygen to the brain and we know from fMRIs that when the brains of people that are fit function more efficiently than the brains of people that aren't, and it's just simply because of the blood and because of the oxygen. And with the blood comes the nutrients to the brain.
Mark McGrath:They say not just fitness, but fitness in the sense of physical strength, the ability to produce force.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely. If you think about how we used to operate, there's a group of people and I forget what their name is they basically get people to move in an environment where they've got to jump over logs, climb over rocks, move like we were meant to move, which means force, yes, lifting heavy things, moving heavy things, climbing over things that we can't just step over. So, 100%, we know that our bone density even impacts our immune system. So there are all these interconnections. We are embodied beings, the problem and we just circle back again to this information overload.
Dr. Delia McCabe:We spend so much time in our bodies, so switching off and, as you said earlier, brian, go into nature, put your feet on the ground, touch a tree, climb a tree, or definitely don't stop children from climbing trees. All of these things enable us to use our body intelligence, which is part of the proprioception, part of the interoception, part of the nociception, all of those aspects that inform how the brain functions. So, yes, I love the idea of being strong physically. It also improves your locus, locus of control, which is a psychological aspect to this, because if you feel that you're strong enough to lift things, you feel you're strong enough to protect the woman, the children in your life. Guess what? You feel more confident psychologically, don't you? I see you laughing at that, brian.
Ponch RIvera:No, I worked out today, so.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I keep telling my family.
Ponch RIvera:One more day I'm going to be totally ripped, just one more day. I know that.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well there we go.
Mark McGrath:You definitely have to eat, though. You can't get strong, you can't be fit, without fueling your body correctly.
Dr. Delia McCabe:You can't, and that's one of the challenges that happened with the intermittent fasting. You know, brigade, because they said, oh, intermittent fasting is the secret, because that means, you know, you increase atrophagy, you increase cellular functioning capacity, energy production and all of that's fine. But you can't do that as well as train for a marathon and go and work out every day and lift heavy weights. And it's different for women as well. Gender impacts this fasting window.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And the other thing is, if you're chronically stressed, intermittent fasting has some very negative benefits, some negative consequences, and the benefits are not as positive. So just to mention here and we're going to get to your question in a moment, brian the human brain really likes dichotomy. It really likes yes, no, up down, wrong, right, black, white, red, blue. You know it doesn't like the gray area and what we have done on this planet, we have increased the gray area significantly. This is what complexity has done, and so when humans are naturally low in neural energy which is happening now and when they're confronted with all this information, they will much more easily jump to a simple explanation that provides clarity, even if it doesn't provide accuracy. So it makes, I want to say, the human brain prefers clarity, which may not be accurate, because it makes it simple to think about that thing. You don't have to think further, you don't have to say well it reduces energy, right it to say well.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I'm the sun. It reduces energy. Right, it's a way to reduce energy 100%. There you go, 100%.
Ponch RIvera:And what we know about the brain is we want to minimize surprise we want to minimize energy. There we go. That's a nice connection.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Spot on, absolutely so. That predictive ability is becoming less and less accurate because of the onslaught of information that we now are exposed to. And so what's the knee-jerk reaction? Give it to me in two minutes, give it to me in one minute, give it to me in a 20-second soundbite, give it to me in a three-second meme, even better. And it may be completely wrong, but I'll gravitate to that, because my brain wants to save energy and you just explained why the linear OODA loop is so popular.
Ponch RIvera:Popular because you don't have to think.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Spot on, and that's why, whenever I see something like that on LinkedIn, I don't even bother, because I can't have this conversation in a LinkedIn comment. It's just much too complex, but that's why people love that, brian, and you see, the problem is and we're just diverting a little bit now the problem is that when you get used to looking at things from a very simplistic perspective, what do you do? There should be an anthem for this. You build a neural pathway for that way of thinking, and that is the biggest challenge we have in our education system, because you're now building a neural pathway for the brain to easily grab onto the simplest thing that it sees. And guess what you'll do next time. You're faced with something that's a little bit gray, a little bit complex, you go. No, I'm going to go the easy path.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And if you do that during these beautifully neuroplastic windows of opportunistic development, my biggest, biggest fear is and that's why I started my Substack is that we are going to have generations of children following us who do not know how to look at something and go. You know what. I don't have to decide right now. You know what I need to know a little bit more. You know what I'm going to go and ask someone else. They're not going to. They're going to take that two-second, three-second meme soundbite idea and they're going to run with that because that neural pathway has become so robust so that probably needs another whole podcast.
Ponch RIvera:That's fantastic. I think it connects well into why are organizations failing right Because people are looking for the simple answer. They're conditioned to do that.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, let's just talk about some more research, which is really also interesting, and I mentioned this at Lisbon, I think two years ago, and you may have heard me speak about this, brian. When the brain is chronically stressed, what it does, it exploits what it knows and it doesn't explore something that it hasn't yet uncovered and why. Once again, we're back to neural energy. Okay, so it was a really interesting experiment. They induced stress, so they provided a person with an event that produced acute stress, and then they also assessed their long-term chronic stress, and then they got them into a situation where they had to decide whether they were going to exploit the situation they were in or whether they were going to explore the situation they were in. I'll give you the link to this research as well. It's a little complex, but it's really good, and they discovered that, whether it was acute stress or chronic stress, what these people would do, they would always stick to the decision they'd made or the environment that they knew. They were very, very hesitant to expend any energy. They didn't maybe think of it that way, but they didn't want to expend any time on investigating something, on exploring something that they didn't know anything about.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Now, that answers the question you asked earlier, probably about 15 minutes ago, about the role of neuroscience in organizations. You are not going to make decisions that are creative and that are innovative in an environment where the prefrontal cortex is actually from a neuronal perspective. So just think about this From a neuronal perspective, those neurons cannot make those new connections because of the presence of cortisol. So just think about that. You are in a part of the brain that's looking at all this data, it's trying to analyze this data, it's using working memory, it's looking at what it knows from the past in terms of deep, deep memory. It's looking at the skills and the knowledge it has available and it cannot make a new connection, which is what creativity is all about. It cannot make a new connection from one neuron to the next neuron because of the presence of cortisol.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Okay, so it boils down once again to first principles. The automaticity isn't available there. It has to be a new connection. So you get these people sitting around board tables and you get these politicians making these decisions and you get them responding, always on a knee-jerk response to what they know. They don't investigate what they don't know, those adjacent possibilities. They're not looking at them. And they're not looking at them because they're stubborn and they're difficult and they're not smart. They're not looking at them because from a neuronal perspective, they cannot make those connections in the presence of cortisol.
Ponch RIvera:Having fear in an organization. Does that increase cortisol?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely. Fear is of the unknown, fear is of the unexpected. You'll have high levels of adrenaline. They continue for long enough. You start producing cortisol. That's just the way it works and until that is addressed, you're going to continue having human beings on the back foot all the time, making a decision too late, looking at a situation and deciding that this was the right decision to make, but we should have made it two weeks ago. This is where we have that problem and this is where we have distributed and inbound cognition. There are too many people making decisions on their own instead of using distributed cognition, but distributed cognition with brains that aren't stressed. Now that's when consultants come in. They say, oh no, we're not stressed, we can think clearly about the situation, and they sell people on that instead of saying how are you thinking? Let's think about it this way, what are those adjacent possibilities, and so on and so forth.
Ponch RIvera:So it's a holistic approach. Now We've seen this evolve over the last few years the idea of flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work, and you get the flow from the Toyota production system. You get theory of constraints, you get all these constructs of flow. So if we're to bring them all together and not enforce it but try to apply it to an organization, it's a fractal, right. You have the individual level how are you sanitizing your work area? The hygiene with technology? Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you exercising? Are you building strength? Are you coming into work? Are you getting focused work done? Do you have too many meetings? Do you have psychological safety? Are our leaders creating that for you? So there's all of these things. To me it's a fractal. It just scales throughout the whole organization. So it's not one framework. You can't come and go. Here's a framework you got to use and follow this and you create agility, resilience and safety. It's a holistic approach that has to be backed by science. Correct, yes, yeah.
Mark McGrath:Okay, it's OODA loop sketch punch. It's not OODA loop formula, it's not linear. Ooda loop yeah.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely, and because every organization is like every brain. It's a fingerprint, it's evolved over time with all these different variables that have impacted it. You can't separate. You can't say well, we did it there and that's going to work and so we're going to do it here. So when I work with people, you know I start with what is their gender. Or with groups what is the gender, what is their age. All of that impacts brain function. You know, what did you do before? What is your stress level at the moment? What do your bloods look like?
Dr. Delia McCabe:You need to look at all of those things when you put a solution together or you start providing some scaffolding for people to start asking the right questions, because sometimes you don't know what the right questions are. You have to start somewhere and then you inch your way forward and you figure it out. But you're 100% right, that's what you do. It is a fractal, but that's where neuroscience comes into it. You can't go into an organization and tell people to change their behavior, and this is what they need to do. They have to find a benefit for them in changing that behavior. How is it going to benefit them when you improve their well-being so that they perform better at work and they become more creative, more innovative and so on. Guess what happens? Their relationships at home improve. A whole lot of things happen there as well. So you're actually you're impacting the whole person.
Ponch RIvera:You're not just impacting them when they walk into the office and do their work. I want to come up with a new mindset that we can enforce on the or you know force on the companies. So if you've got any ideas I'm kidding, by the way we're not going to do any- mindset.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I was just listening to mindset and I was thinking you lost me there, brian. At mindset.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of folks pushing mindset, mindset, mindset. We've talked about that in the past and it's just kind of funny. I'm like I think it's been debunked, isn't it? Is that true A little bit?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Look, when you think about a mindset, your mindset changes all the time. If you were sitting at your desk now and you went to gym this morning, you had a great workout, you're feeling confident and positive, but someone walked in and gave you the worst possible news that you could ever hear. Suddenly your mindset would be completely different, and that's why I hate using that word. Mindset makes me think of something that's established, something that's stable, something that you can count on. You can't do that. I talk about habits of mind. That's much more useful than mindset and the research you know that underpins this whole mindset. You know the growth mindset and the limited mindset, the research that underpins that. I found a researcher that commented on that research and they said that research only works when the primary researcher is present in the experiment and that's always a problem and it comes back. You know the replication issue. Really, to boil down to to basics, that's why I walked away from clinical psychology all those years ago.
Ponch RIvera:Uh, speaking of clinical psychology, I saw on your uh reading list for 2024, you had this book on there. Uh, I did, and then, uh, you had a few others on there. We've had, uh, norman oler uh, you had him on his on your list of trips Great book. I want to go back to that list of you know you had a few others on there. Any other recommendations from?
Dr. Delia McCabe:your book reading list from last year. You know I really enjoyed how Minds Change and that's where I first came into the research that we started this podcast on. You know about the Emerson research about the 14, 15%, 28%, 30% shifting minds. I really like that because I think that's one of the problems we have on this planet. It may be one of the biggest problems we have is the incapacity to change our minds. So that, for me, was a really good one.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I loved Abigail Shry's book because it highlighted the challenge with education in relation to social emotional learning, and I didn't know that that was a thing in America. So for me it then highlighted a whole lot of the things that I hear people talking about. They're always in therapy. They're always focused on their feelings and their emotions. They're always focused on an internal state, not an external state. So that was also really a good book. I also love your Brain on Art. It was a bit of a lighter read in relation to the others, although there was a lot of research in it, but it also explained really clearly how we are so sucked into facts and figures and looking at science from that perspective, but beauty and art and nature is so much part of who we are as humans as well, and we ignore that, and we ignore it to the detriment of our children as well, because they express themselves differently when they work in a variety of art mediums. So that's another one that I really enjoy.
Ponch RIvera:Any connections to geometry in that art book at all, or music, or, I'm curious, any fractal patterns that you came across.
Dr. Delia McCabe:They did speak about music as well and something about music and the way it interacts with the brain, but they refer to another book which is focused entirely on music in the brain. So I can't answer that question right now, but I can look it up and I can send it to you as well. Okay, right now, but I can look it up and I can send it to you as well.
Ponch RIvera:A reason I bring that up is you know, we've talked to Professor Bijan from Duke In his book Art, was it Beauty? Yeah, you know the sea you get into sacred geometry why we are attracted to things out in nature. I'm just curious Are there patterns that are inside our brain that connect to the external universe? Is that any correlation there or connection there to art inside our brain that connect to the external universe.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Is that any correlation there or connection there to art? I can't say that. The book highlighted that, Brian. However, there seems to be something about being in nature and observing art that impacts our parasympathetic nervous system, and that's the side that I focused on and that I enjoyed most, and that's probably because of my background and my bias. And that is really important because it's one very simple way to recalibrate our autonomic nervous system just by being involved more with nature. So it's very likely that our eyes see fractals and see connections in nature that we are not conscious of I mean most. Just think about this Our consciousness is only 5% to 10% of our cognition. The rest of it is unconscious. So it's very likely that we are picking up patterns and seeing things that resonate deeply within our brain, but we haven't yet figured out exactly how to measure that and I don't know whether we actually need to.
Dr. Delia McCabe:And as a researcher, that's a weird thing for me to say, but can't we just enjoy something for the pleasure of it and enjoy the feeling of awe because that's something else that's really good? That's another book that I didn't put on my list, but because I've read it before. It didn't come on my 2024 list, but Dachner wrote a book called All and it's a beautiful exploration about how humans interact with nature.
Mark McGrath:I want to know what Delia thinks, because we've had a lot of guests on the show talking about it and you mentioned Norman Oller's book. Who Norman Oller's? Twice a guest on our show. Delia, what do you think about psychedelics?
Dr. Delia McCabe:I think that psychedelics hold an enormous potential for improving our quality of life and our experience as humans and the future that we create. However, the caveat is that when people experience these psychedelic experiences, they do need to have someone with them that can walk with them as they experience this, and I think that that is something that has been overlooked.
Mark McGrath:Having a guide to lead you on your trip.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Absolutely, and having a guide that has no vested interest in what you discover.
Mark McGrath:Yeah.
Dr. Delia McCabe:So you know, I've spent quite some time looking at the research underpinning psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, and I've spoken to people who run the clinics that are involved with veterans that are benefiting from this and that was via your introduction, brian and I've spoken to people that facilitate these experiences and I've spoken to people who've had really bad experiences with people who have not been able to help them.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I've actually spoken to people who have had a negative result because of a therapist, and when this person explained to me what the therapist asked them during this experience, I was like my goodness. You know, I didn't even have to put on my clinical psychology hat to know that that was just nonsense and it really could have led to a huge challenge. So I think the potential is enormous. I would like to see it gain traction, significant traction, but I would also like to see people really getting behind, having someone that's very experienced lead these sessions, because if you don't have that, you can have a negative result, and then you know, the problem is that people don't want to try it again if they've had a really negative experience, a bad trip as they say.
Ponch RIvera:There's one psychedelic that I don't want to try again, and that's Ibogaine. I only did it once and there's no need to do it ever again. Some people will do that a couple of times, but it's not a fun thing you're the second doctor we've asked about this in uh 24 hours.
Mark McGrath:We had a guest on yesterday, uh, who's a practicing psychiatrist and a medical school professor talking about psychedelics, and you know they're they're, they're coming out of the underground and they're coming into the light and the irony is is that they've been around for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. These are necessarily, they're novel in the Western industrial sense, but they're not novel in the worldly cosmological sense, I suppose.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I think the pharmaceutical industry and what happened in the 60s really was a travesty, because I agree with you 100% They've been around for thousands of years. They've grown in places that also felt sacred to the people that lived there. So there was this beautiful synergy, but they always had a shaman or a wise person to help their integration and help their use. And I think part of our analytical left brain just speaking from Ian McGilchrist's perspective, just the left brain analysis, paralysis analysis, focus of our current brain state means that we want to analyze every tiny little detail. And I can't say that I didn't do that.
Dr. Delia McCabe:When I read the research you know, I was interested in which serotonin receptor was responsible for how psilocybin functions. I can't say I didn't fall into that. But I think we've lost that holistic perspective as a species and we want to isolate things and put it in a pool and you take it at 4 pm Instead of hey, you take it when you're having a holiday, you take it with the right person, you take it with the right, you know perspective in mind.
Mark McGrath:Well, that's important and that's what Punch says all the time. We remind everybody that's listening that we're not endorsing the recreational use of psychedelics at all. We're talking about therapeutic applications which can make people better from trauma, from anything in the mental health arena, and we're a little biased because we know plenty of veterans that have committed suicide and we wonder if they were one trip away from healing versus being addicted to psychoactive drugs and alcohol and other stuff.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Mark spot on Absolutely. The therapeutic use is very different to the use that people have. You know, go out to a nightclub and have some and speaking to that, you know way of thinking. I really do want to mention that I speak to people who microdose and.
Dr. Delia McCabe:I have a problem with that and, simply because of how psychedelics work, I don't know if microdosing can actually give you the benefit if you haven't had the Euro's journey, and that's a challenge. So when people say, oh no, I don't want to try a big dose, I'll just microdose, they may be fooling themselves into believing that they're going to get a real benefit, and I'm not sure that they do.
Mark McGrath:Well, the book was on your list and we've all read it and we've had him on twice. But Norman Oller talked about, when he was discussing Tripped, how LSD was. The pursuit of producing LSD was actually a mental health drug and what they realized it was a one-time use mental health drug and not something that I would be chronically addicted on for the rest of my life.
Ponch RIvera:Yeah, you don't get addicted to psychedelics. It's a thing as far as we know.
Dr. Delia McCabe:No, you don't. You don't get addicted to it from a physiological or neurophysiological perspective, but certain people with certain personality or certain tendencies get addicted to the use of it in the pursuit of something, some nirvana that they're searching for. These are people that you would also call… Psychonauts, yeah, or the Beatles.
Mark McGrath:The Beatles or Jimi Hendrix.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Maybe yes, but also people that maybe have some kind of hole, some kind of gap some kind of psychological challenge, and so they're looking for solutions. But it's the same as the person that's running to the doctor for every single ache that they've got.
Mark McGrath:That's a mental thing, though that's more of a mental thing than a physiological thing, right?
Dr. Delia McCabe:100%. Yeah, that's what.
Mark McGrath:I'm saying 100%.
Dr. Delia McCabe:That's what I'm saying. It's more a psychological thing.
Mark McGrath:There's a great video, I think he was on the Dick Cavett Show. It was George Harrison talking about the use of LSD and he was saying about how using it enlightened him and he was able to see things differently. He said the problem was using it more than once. I think something along the lines of he only needed it once, not all the times they took it. You only need it once, not all the times they took it.
Ponch RIvera:So, doc, there's a book out there called Alien Information Theory, psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game. It's by Andrew Gallimore. We'd love to get him on the show, but the reason I bring this up is he's bringing. He's connecting things like fitness landscapes, so complex adaptive systems to the free energy principle, to getting into the receptors of the brain and talking about where DMT triggers things right. So there is some pretty awesome research and work out there where the connection between psychedelic assist therapies, dmt, plex, adaptive systems, thinking and even the latest and greatest coming out of like free energy principle and active inference are coming together. I'm just throwing that out to you as a possible source for you, but I found his work just absolutely fascinating.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Thank you, I will. I'll go and have a look at that. I think the more we realize how things are connected, the more we realize how much we don't know, we don't know, and I think that makes it really exciting, but also sobering, because we do need to maybe step carefully into what we don't yet know, that we don't know.
Mark McGrath:I don't think John Boyd could have said that better himself.
Ponch RIvera:Great. Hey, well, Dr McCabe, thanks for being here today. This has been awesome. We're definitely going to check in with you to see if you can join us on the TBI call that we have on LiveX on X. We'll check in with you after we stop recording here, but how can our listeners get in touch with you and what's the latest thing you're involved with at the moment?
Dr. Delia McCabe:Well, I can be found on Substack so you can share the link for that. I'm also on LinkedIn, but I'm going to be less active there this year and more active on Substack. I'm busy working on two big programs for clients at the moment, which are pretty exciting, and one of them is about using brain function, using neuroscience, using what we know about the brain to help leaders function more efficiently, specifically in relation to the younger generations that are coming into organizations. So that's what I'm busy doing.
Mark McGrath:Phenomenal. Well, thanks for coming back on Delia, Dr McCabe. Dr Delia McCabe, we recommend your Substack. It's connected to ours, the world of reorientation, and we'll have you back again, as you know. We'll see you soon.
Dr. Delia McCabe:Fantastic. Enjoy the rest of your day and, yes, always a delight. And Happy New Year to you and to everyone watching. Happy New Year.
Mark McGrath:Thanks, Doc.
