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Oct. 25, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

03:41:23

The Legendary Freedomain 'Bomb in the Brain' Series

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	Hello everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	This is True News.
	The bomb in the brain.
	The aftermaths of child abuse.
	Part 1 of 4.
	So what is the purpose behind this series?
	Well, we can't heal the world.
	We can't make the world peaceful and loving until we know why it is violent and hateful.
	We can't heal the world until we know why it is sick.
	And the main causes of violence, drug addiction, promiscuity, suicidality, and other dysfunctions are very clear.
	There's no doubt about it at all.
	The data has been around for quite a long time, but remains obscure to most people.
	And I guarantee you, after watching this presentation, you will never look at the world, and perhaps yourself, the same way again.
	This is a four-part series.
	This is the first part, The Bomb in the Brain.
	The second is an interview with the Director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, Dr.
	Vincent J. Felitti. Part 3, the psychology and neurobiology of violence.
	Part 4, disarming the bomb in the brain, cures and healing.
	So we constantly hear about risks to children in particular, risks to life and health, grossly misrepresented in the media and in culture as a whole.
	Swine flu, BPA and baby bottles, lead in children's toys, tiny chances to actually hurt children, constantly referenced, pounded over and over again.
	Compared to what?
	Well, compared to an incredibly prevalent problem that has lifelong effects on health and well-being, such as a 48% greater chance of contracting cancer, a reduction in lifespan of up to 20 years, massive increases in drug addiction, promiscuity, alcoholism, criminality, suicidality, depression, anxiety, and so on and so on and so on.
	Do you know what it is?
	Very few people know what causes these terrible risks to life and health, and almost all social and violent problems that we face.
	It's a shameful omission in our culture.
	Let's remedy it. Child abuse.
	So I'm going to be referencing the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which is data collected from over 17,000 Kaiser patients in an ongoing retrospective and prospective study of adverse childhood experiences.
	And although these are well concealed, they are unexpectedly common, have a profound negative effect on adult health and well-being a half century later, and are a prime determinant of adult health status in the United States, and we can very easily say worldwide.
	Child abuse causes physical changes within the brain.
	So here, for example, is a healthy three-year-old brain on the left.
	On the right, we can see from a child suffering from neglect and sensory deprivation, child abuse causes physical destruction of the brain.
	So what this study has examined are these adverse childhood experiences, and you can get a full definition of these at acestudy.org.
	This is physical, verbal, emotional, sexual abuse and neglect.
	You can take the test yourself, I did, and the results can be very interesting.
	So this presentation will explore the relationships between adverse childhood experiences and future physical and mental health issues.
	The average age of the study participant in these studies is 57 years old, so 40-50 years after the abuse occurred.
	Now, we will look at the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences, but I wanted to caution you that they are almost certainly vastly underreported.
	Why? Well, the sample size in this study is middle-class, upper-middle-class participants with excellent health insurance.
	It doesn't include poor drug addicts, criminals, those whose life is too disorganized to get health insurance, who, according to the study findings, would be vastly overrepresented in terms of adverse childhood experiences.
	So this is almost certainly much, much, much lower than it would be with a broader cross-section of society.
	And of course, it relies on self-reporting, which has strengths and weaknesses, of course, but most likely people are not going to say that they experienced abuse that they did not, but they're more likely to ignore abuse that they did for a variety of psychological reasons.
	Child abuse damages the efficacy of the hippocampus, which stores long-term memory, so people have blank spots in their childhood, and we'll see the proof of this very shortly.
	So, let's have a look at the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences in this middle-class population.
	So those who report zero, men, women, 30-35% who have had zero.
	A smaller percentage have one, reported one or two, smaller still three.
	But unfortunately, when we get into truly chaotic households, the numbers begin to go up again quite sharply, and we have some significant reporting.
	A combined total of about 10% of those who have four or more adverse childhood experiences.
	So the minority of people have zero, and the majority have one or more.
	The biology of violence.
	Over the past few decades, startling new research has come to light about the psychology and neurobiology of violence.
	During the first four years of life, the latest research shows 90% of a child's brain develops through the experiences of that child.
	We are not born broken, but it is through our experiences, if they're dysfunctional, that we shall receive the brain damage that results in lifelong problems.
	In the past two decades, over a hundred careful studies have shown that violence in adulthood is the result of insecure or disorganized early attachments, and we'll get into the biology of that in the next presentation.
	I just wanted to touch on it here.
	Some more indicators. Careful studies of UK childhood sexual assaults show two-thirds of girls and one-third of boys claim to have been used sexually.
	US figures are comparable.
	This is from a study from about 20 years ago.
	Physical abuse is even more prevalent.
	Two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in their first year of life.
	And in the next two years, 97% said they hit their children at least once a week, most a good deal more often using straps, belts, canes and sticks on the boys.
	A longitudinal study of 442 boys born in 1972 found that one out of every three boys, those who have a specific version of a gene who were maltreated during childhood, will be almost certain to exhibit antisocial or criminal behavior as an adult.
	All too tragically, as a society, when we harm children, we reap what we sow.
	Child abuse is strongly linked with obesity.
	In the studies that will be cited in the interview following this presentation, 66% of participants reported one or more type of abuse.
	Physical abuse and verbal abuse were most strongly associated with body weight and obesity.
	And obesity risks increased with number and severity of each type of abuse.
	And we'll see this repeated all too tragically often in the graphs that we'll look at shortly.
	Child abuse is associated with illicit drug use.
	Compared with people with zero ACEs, those with greater than or equal to five were seven to tenfold more likely to report illicit drug use problems.
	Addiction to illicit drugs and parental drug use seem to account for one half to two thirds of serious problems with drug use.
	So let's look at some of these numbers.
	Along the bottom is the number of adverse childhood experiences, and on the y-axis is the percentage of people who have used hard drugs.
	Those who have had no adverse childhood experiences, 0.3%, 1, 0.5%, 2, 1.4%, 3, 2.3%, greater than or equal to 4, 3.4%.
	Child abuse and alcohol.
	Adverse childhood experiences are strongly related to ever-drinking alcohol and to alcohol initiation in early and mid-adolescence.
	And the ACE score had a graded or dose-response relationship to these alcohol use behaviors, and we'll see that in just a second.
	Initiating alcohol use by age 14 was increased two to three-fold by individual ACEs.
	ACEs also accounted for a 20-70% increased likelihood of alcohol use initiated during mid-adolescence 15-17 years.
	Let's have a look at the numbers.
	Those who had no adverse childhood experiences, 2.8% became alcoholics.
	Those who had one, 5.7%.
	Those who had two, 10.3%.
	Those who had three, 11.4%.
	Those with greater than or equal to four, 16.1% became alcoholics as adults.
	A powerful, graded relationship exists between adverse childhood experiences and risk of attempted suicide throughout the lifespan of an individual.
	The lifetime prevalence of having at least one suicide attempt was 3.8%.
	Adverse childhood experiences in any category increased the risk of attempted suicide two to five-fold.
	Compared with persons with no ACEs, the adjusted odds ratio of ever attempting suicide among persons with seven or more experiences was 31.1%.
	So these are adverse childhood experiences versus percent lifetime history of attempted suicide.
	Those with zero, 1.1%.
	Those with one, 2.2%.
	Those with two, 4.0%.
	Three, 5.6%.
	Four, 8.4%.
	Five, 13.8%.
	Six, 21.8%.
	Seven or more, 35.2% of them have a lifetime history of attempted suicide.
	Child abuse and the leading causes of death in adults.
	A strong graded relationship, that means the greater the ACEs, the greater the risks, exists between the breadth of exposure to abuse or household dysfunction during childhood and multiple risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults.
	The number of categories of adverse childhood exposures showed a graded relationship to the presence of adult diseases, including ischemic heart disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases, skeletal fractures, and liver disease.
	The seven categories of adverse childhood experiences were strongly interrelated and persons with multiple categories of childhood exposure were likely to have multiple health risk factors later in life.
	The leading causes of death, more than half of respondents reported at least one and one fourth reported greater than or equal to two categories of childhood exposures to these negative events.
	Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared to those who had experienced none, had a 4-12-fold increased health risk for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt.
	2-4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health, greater than or equal to 50 sexual intercourse partners and sexually transmitted diseases.
	A 1.4-1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity.
	Those of you who've seen my interview with Alison Gopnik may remember that she talked about how smoking was an attempt to self-medicate a lack of connectors within the brain.
	So, if you've had 0 adverse childhood experiences, 5.5% likelihood to become an adult smoker.
	If you've had 1, 6%, 2, 8%, 3, 10%, 4 to 5, 12%, greater than or equal to 6, 16%.
	Adverse childhood experiences and chronic depression.
	This is broken down between women and men.
	And we can see that if you've had zero self-reported adverse childhood experiences, women have an 18% chance and men have an 11% chance of contracting chronic depression throughout their lifetime.
	If you've had one, 24.
	For women, 19% for men.
	If you've had two, 24.
	35 and 25% if you've had 3.
	42 and 30% if you've had more than equal to 4.
	58% for women and 35% for men.
	The difference being the classical distinction between women who aggress against themselves through depression and men who aggress against others through violence.
	ACEs and antidepressant prescriptions.
	This is 50 years after the abuse.
	0, 32.6.
	1 ACE, 50.1.
	2, 65. 3 ACEs, 73.
	4, 97.
	Greater than or equal to 5.
	99.5.
	ACEs and hallucinations.
	This is broken down between those who say they have never abused alcohol and drugs and those who say they have.
	I'm not going to read off the numbers.
	If you're listening to the audio, if you can please look at the presentation.
	But here we can see in the chart, clearly increasing hallucinatory problems, whether you have or have not.
	So we've gone from the very beginning, 1.2% for those who say they haven't, 2.7% for those who say they have, if you've had greater than or equal to 7, 8.9% versus 10.1%.
	ACEs, sexual abuse, and unexplained symptoms.
	This is people who show up at the doctor's office and can't say what's wrong with them.
	They know that there's a problem, but they can't find any physiological basis to it.
	So we can see here, the more that people have experienced these ACEs, the greater the likelihood that they have a number of unexplained physiological symptoms that cause them pain and discomfort, for which they cannot be found a physiological basis.
	ACEs and impaired childhood memory.
	Those who report significant amnesia in their childhood.
	Those who've had no ACEs, 9.7%.
	Those who've had 1, 12.0%.
	Those who've had 2, 18.9%.
	Those who've had 3, 22.1%.
	Greater than equal to 4, 34%.
	The brain damage that occurs through child abuse causes memory loss.
	ACEs and impaired job performance.
	I won't read these all off, but we can see that as you get greater and greater numbers of adverse childhood experiences, you get significant and proportionately greater absenteeism from work, significantly proportional and greater reporting of serious financial problems and serious job problems, from 5% all the way up to 23-24%.
	ACEs and teen sexual behaviors.
	Again, I won't read off all these numbers, but we can see significant and correlational increases in the percentage of intercourse by 15.
	Teen pregnancies, teen paternities, all increase based upon the number of adverse childhood experiences.
	ACEs and promiscuity.
	The likelihood of having greater than or equal to 50 sexual partners over your lifetime.
	1% of those who have no ACEs.
	1.7% of those who have 1.
	2.3% of those who have 2.
	3.1% of those who have 3 greater than or equal to 4.
	3.2%.
	ACEs and liver disease.
	The ACE score here, relative to the prevalence of liver disease, goes up significantly.
	Hepatitis and jaundice, of course.
	This would be, of course, related to the alcoholism.
	ACEs and COPD, chronic obstructionary pulmonary disorders, I believe that is.
	Breathing problems. Those who've had zero ACEs, 6.9%, 1, 8.2%, 2, 11.1%, 3, 15.5%, greater than or equal to 4, 17.5%.
	ACEs and antipsychotic prescriptions.
	Here we can see again the numbers not quite as solid but definitely correlational.
	Prescriptions per 100 person years.
	Those who have zero around two.
	Those are four or greater than or equal to five at around ten.
	Five times the rates of antipsychotic medication prescriptions.
	Anti-anxieties, ACEs, and anxiolytic prescriptions.
	Those who have had 0 ACEs, around 15%, 34% or so for those who had greater than or equal to 5.
	Now this is chilling.
	ACEs and life expectancy.
	ACE scores decrease with age.
	So this chart, it's a little hard to read, but I'll step you through it.
	Those who report 0 ACEs, ACEs are over-represented in the greater than or equal to 65 age group.
	Whereas those who report ACEs of four have a much tinier number of those who are greater than or equal to 65 years of age.
	And that's because they're dead.
	Life expectancy drop for significant ACEs is about 20 years.
	20 years life expectancy gets shaved off with significant child abuse.
	On average. It's not inexorable.
	It's not inevitable. You can do things about it, but you have to, of course, realize the risk categories first.
	Intimate partner violence.
	As the frequency of witnessing interpersonal violence increased, the chances of reported alcoholism, illicit drug use, intravenous drug use and depression also increased.
	Exposure to physical abuse, sexual abuse and intimate partner violence in childhood resulted in women being 3.5 times more likely to report being the victims of intimate partner violence.
	Exposure to physical abuse, sexual abuse, and IPV in childhood resulted in men being 3.8 times more likely to report IPV perpetration.
	Who should we focus on?
	Child abuse and neglect by relationship to victim.
	In the category of other, 5.9%.
	Unknown or missing, 3.9%.
	Professionals, doctors, I would imagine priests, 1.1%.
	Unmarried partner of parent, living boyfriend or girlfriend, 4.1%.
	Other relative, 6.5%.
	Parent 78.5% Next, we have an interview with the Director of the ACE Study, Dr.
	Vincent J. Felitti, focusing on adverse childhood experiences and their relationship to adult obesity.
	Thank you so much for watching, of course.
	You can check out the references at fdrurl.com forward slash tn underbar abuse one.
	And I know it's a little grim, but really you cannot understand the world and the problems that it has without understanding the long-term effects of child abuse on mental health and well-being.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	Thank you. Well, this has been going on for a long time.
	I mean, the origins of the ACE study In one way, it began about 1990, but in another way, it went probably back 20 years prior to that, simply based on counterintuitive patient observations in medical practice, where we were helping people accomplish things that conventionally were conceived as incontestably good and wonderful.
	And finding that patients often fled their own success, were terrified, etc.
	And it really was dealing with those counterintuitive responses to what we viewed as successful treatment of problems that ultimately led to the ACE study.
	And certainly one of the unusual findings in the ACE study was that many of the conditions that we view as public health problems are indeed that but perhaps more importantly are also unconsciously attempted solutions to personal problems that are never raised,
	that are never recognized, that are basically buried in time and then further hidden by shame and by secrecy and by social taboos against exploring certain areas of human experience.
	That's a very, very important idea.
	A quick insight into that might be provided by the street drug crystal meth, methamphetamine.
	Pretty much everybody understands that crystal meth is a major public health problem.
	The demonized drug, crystal meth, Virtually no one seems to remember and this is really a very interesting insight.
	Virtually no one seems to remember that the first prescription antidepressant introduced for sale in the United States in 1940 by Ciba Pharmaceuticals was methamphetamine.
	Methamphetamine was the major prescription antidepressant in this country for the next 20 years Until the advent of the tricyclic antidepressants.
	Right, right. I mean, one of the things that really leaps out at me in looking at your work and the work of others is the degree to which health and dysfunction or addiction to negative things like smoking or alcoholism, illicit drug use, bad nutrition, overeating, high-level promiscuity, as you phrase it, the degree to which that can be, I think, quite accurately interpreted as a self-medication for psychological trauma.
	Is that an unfair way of putting it?
	Absolutely correct, yes.
	That's a nice way of putting it.
	Yeah, because it really is...
	I think there's a quote, I can't remember who it comes from, that you talk about in the article, it's hard to get enough of something that almost works.
	I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that, because I found that fascinating.
	In the early years of the obesity program, when we really had no idea what the hell we were doing, I mean, we thought we did, Because we were using this technology of supplemented absolute fasting that allows one to take a person's weight down non-surgically about 300 pounds a year.
	It's very, very dramatic to see.
	The impressive results perhaps understandably led us to believe that we must know what we're doing.
	I mean, my God, look at the results!
	And it was people fleeing from that or occasionally doing something dramatic like being uncontrollably suicidal as a result of these enormous weight losses.
	It was really the pursuit of why these counterintuitive reactions were happening that led us first to stumble into the issue of childhood sexual abuse and then gradually into related issues of growing up In massively dysfunctional households.
	So back in those years, interestingly, when people had achieved a certain level of success with weight loss in the program, we gave away this coffee cup with that sentence on the side.
	It's hard to get enough of something that almost works.
	And we thought it was kind of a cute saying and obviously we're inhibiting ourselves from fully understanding what it meant Because it probably took another 10 years for us fully to understand what we were saying there.
	And that would be applicable for food, it would be equally applicable for smoking, for street drug use, for alcohol, for promiscuity, etc.
	It was a profound idea that obviously at some primitive level we recognized, but certainly the conscious Recognition that it completely escapes us.
	Right, Ryan. Of course, one of the great challenges is, I mean, as you mentioned, the average age of people in the study was 57.
	And it's not like you're going to...
	Your first thought is not to look at what happened when you were five, because it's so much later.
	The body has completely regrown, in a sense, over that time period, yet the scar tissue of early trauma seems to remain and continue to do its negative work, you know, as you said, 50 years after the abuses may have occurred.
	Yes. That's quite shocking.
	Now, there were a few things.
	I mean, I have a lot of questions, of course, and whatever time you can give is gratefully accepted.
	I mean, the numbers, of course, for those who are not familiar with these kinds of statistics, the numbers of people with significantly adverse childhood experiences is quite shocking.
	But I think that a case could be made that, despite the significant amount of the numbers, they may actually be underrepresented.
	And two things, I guess three things sort of popped into my mind.
	I'm wondering if you could speak to these.
	The first is that these are middle class people who have really good health insurance.
	That's the sort of control group of the population that you're limited to by the nature of the study.
	And so, in a sense, the people who've had more significant problems Because of high ACEs would not be represented as greatly in that population because they may not have even made it to the life of the middle class with health insurance and all the other things.
	So the people who are more functional are in your study than less functional, I would say.
	The second, of course, is there's under-representation in general with people talking about trauma because people don't like to talk about it.
	And I guess third, there is the problem of amnesia, right, of people who really can't remember stuff.
	So I was wondering if you could speak to that.
	Well, the issue of amnesia is potentially an important one and an interesting one.
	I had never really given it much credence in terms of everyday practice, thinking of it mainly as It was a theatrical device of Hollywood movies of the early 40s.
	About 1985, I was talking with a woman in the weight program, and we were going through her life year by year.
	You know, what did you weigh when you were born in kindergarten, sixth grade, etc.?
	And if you can't remember, we were the fattest kid in class, the skinniest kid, ordinary size, and so on.
	We got to age 23, and she tells me that at 23, she was raped and in the year subsequent gained 105 pounds whereupon she looks down at the carpet and mutters out loud overweight is overlooked and that's the way I need to be.
	I didn't know how to respond and I said nothing.
	We finished our conversation and several weeks later when she had lost 35 pounds she abruptly disappears for two and a half years It comes back obviously having regained the weight.
	The interesting thing was she had no recollection of our conversation and here I, 24 years later, remember the pattern on the carpet that she was looking at when she muttered that memorable statement.
	That prompted me to look into the issue of...
	So the interesting thing is Two and a half years later, she has no recollection of our conversation and that prompts me to look into the issue of amnesia and so we looked, I believe it was, into 300 consecutive patients in the weight program.
	Lo and behold, 12% of them have no recollection of some period in their life, typically the few years right before weight gain began.
	I don't mean absolute amnesia, but I just don't remember anything from 10 to 13.
	I don't know why.
	It's just not there.
	That kind of thing.
	That was a real surprise and that of course supports the point that you're raising.
	That the data probably are worse Certainly no one would expect them to be better if you're looking at people living on the street or in prison or from some destroyed culture or coming out of some war zone and so on.
	Right, right. Because the majority of people have at least one negative ACE and I think if you would expand that to a wider population than is available to you, it would probably be higher because you would be dipping further down the economic chain.
	And that's not to say it's an absolute correlation between family dysfunction and economic poverty, but I think the two would have some relationship for sure.
	You're raising a very important and interesting point.
	And it may not be universally applicable in the world because one notes that in other countries poverty is associated with starvation.
	Here it's associated with obesity.
	But in the United States, poverty is commonly viewed as a causal factor.
	I'm sure it's hell not arguing that poverty is good for anybody.
	But what we've seen is that very often it's clearly an outcome.
	Yeah, and one of the things that struck me is the degree to which an increase in ACEs is correlated with an increase in negative appraisal of job performance problems with employment, all of which would be associated with impairment to income potential.
	Exactly. I was also very interested in the fact that you said women are 50% more likely than men to have experienced, was it five or more categories?
	Five or more, yeah. Right.
	Now, do you think that's self-reporting or do you think that's like it's more honest self-reporting in a sense or less amnesia or do you think it's an actual increase in the abuses?
	I believe it's an actual increase in the abuses.
	I mean, women are in general more vulnerable.
	They're, to some degree, brought up to be more vulnerable.
	They're more likely to be the object of sexual molestation, etc.
	Right, yeah. And that's, of course, particularly tragic when it comes time for them to be mothers, right?
	That's how some of the cycle came. Absolutely.
	Now, you also had a sentence in your paper, the one that you sent me, which gave me pause, because we like to think that there is a general increase in the quality of parenting over time, and something that you pointed out, I'd like to get a little more information on to make sure I understand it correctly.
	You wrote, of overall adverse childhood experiences in various age cohorts spanning the 20th century.
	To me, that sounds like it hasn't particularly improved the number of ACEs over the 20th century, but I'm just wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that.
	That's literally what we found.
	Now, to go back to your original point, we like to think that parenting has improved.
	I think that's true.
	I think if you were to compare current practices With the 14th century, they would be back.
	I'll give you that for sure.
	Change is obviously a lot slower than one would hope.
	The one thing that clearly is different is media attention to items now that 50 years ago or 100 years ago never would have appeared in the media.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I certainly would agree with that, although there tends to be a sensationalization of child abuse in the media where the most egregious cases are put forward, which in a sense, like looking at something on the other side of the sun, obscures the more common and destructive forms of childhood trauma that are revealed in your study because people say, well, you know, there's this terrible case where they locked a child in the cupboard for 14 years and so on.
	But I think what you're pointing out, which is enormously underreported in the media, and of course I'm trying to do my little bit through my show to change that, Is that we really can't understand society unless we understand the effects of this kind of abuse.
	I mean, we hear, you know, oh, there's BPA in baby bottles or whatever, lead in children's toys, and that's harmful to children.
	But, of course, that completely pales in prevalence and significance to the kind of stuff that you guys are detailing in these kinds of studies.
	Certainly so.
	Make a note, write down the name Einar Helander, first name E-I-N-A-R, last name H-E-L-A-N-D-E-R. Einar Helander is an unusual man.
	He is a Swede, a cardiologist, who spent his life working with the World Health Organization.
	Basically in some of the most ravaged countries of the world studying the issue of child abuse.
	He has two books out.
	You can read about one of them on Amazon or I think perhaps you could get other information just sticking his name in Google and seeing what's on the Internet.
	He was for many years chief physician of the World Health Organization And his writings on the subject of child abuse around the world are really extraordinary.
	I'll see if I can snag him on this show.
	I'm really trying to get his information to as many people as possible.
	Okay, he lives in Portugal, but he speaks quite good English.
	Maybe I'll go on-site and visit him during the summer months.
	that could be very very important okay so there's something else I mean there's so much that's fascinating in this report the reduction in healthcare costs so what I Correct me where I've gone astray, if you don't mind, was that this was not formal counseling.
	This was not psychotherapy or psychiatry that was being applied to the people who were in this study.
	But there was some form of group work.
	I know that there was in the obesity program, but also I think in some of the other programs that you were working with, which had, to me, extraordinary reductions in things like doctor office visits and emergency room visits and even hospitalizations to a smaller degree.
	Could you tell me a little bit about the kind of group work or conversations that people had that did result in the alleviation of these?
	In the first place, I should say that most people had nothing done beyond talking about these experiences once in the course of a complete medical evaluation.
	Oh, and what was the question?
	Sorry, you noted the question.
	Was it what happened and how do you think it's affected you in the years?
	That was our generally most useful response.
	In other words, we'd be in the examining room with a patient and say something like, I see on the questionnaire that you were raped as a young woman.
	Can you tell me how that has affected you later in your life?
	Or, so I see on the questionnaire that you were the one who discovered your father's body when he hanged himself.
	Tell me how that has affected you later in your life.
	The answers are really quite extraordinary and surprisingly concise.
	So basically that was the nature of the kind of conversation and it would last, you know, two, three minutes, etc.
	Only a very small number, I mean a really small number of people were ever referred to psychiatry.
	Certainly a minority of people, a small minority of people went into the weight program or into the smoking program where the group activity occurred for two hours every week for a minimum of 20 weeks.
	That was enormously important and one of the things that we saw was the importance of simply providing people a support system to be part of a group of a dozen or so individuals, men and women, with similar problems.
	Because most of them really had no functional support systems at home.
	That was a surprise all the way around.
	So we did this simply because it seemed the right thing to do.
	And then an outside firm in the data mining business, about two or three years after we had radically changed our questionnaire, came along and hoping to use me as the vehicle for snaring Kaiser Permanente as a customer, did this big survey as a gift.
	A survey of over two years' work which involved for us, I mean this was a very unusual high volume setting, Involved the comprehensive medical evaluation of somewhere over 120,000 individuals.
	To my absolute amazement, they come back with a report.
	They were using the interesting technique of neural net analysis, a rather sophisticated data mining approach.
	They come back with the information that there's a 35% drop in doctor office visits over the subsequent year.
	And smaller drop in ER and even smaller in hospitalization.
	Now the next piece of that was that two years later everything reverted back to the prior baseline.
	So there was a one year improvement after this few minutes of conversation about these traumas and effects.
	And then it disappeared.
	And so the question that I'm always asked is, you know, what did you do and how come the effect disappeared?
	Well, what we did We're simply talking about things, talking about things overwhelmingly for the first time, doing it comfortably so that people were able to leave without having the feeling that, oh God, even the doctors are uncomfortable with this, how awful this has been, etc.
	Slowly I came to realize, you know, it's kind of interesting.
	This is not too different from what's done in the Catholic Church and called confession.
	And that technique has been around for about 1800 years.
	It's a brief conversation with an important person about things that one doesn't ordinarily talk about.
	There's the pronouncement made that you're still a decent person.
	This can be fixed.
	There's no psychologist outside the confessional door.
	There's no referral to elsewhere.
	The whole process is remarkably brief and yet its persistence for 1800 years suggests obviously that there must be some social benefit out of it if it's lasted that long.
	It is really chilling to think that the people who are in these people's lives, the husbands, the fathers, the mothers, and so on, that such relief could be provided to people from just a few minutes of concerns and, I guess, neutral, in a sense, questioning, that such relief could be provided, but it's not, and that's so incredibly tragic to think about.
	Certainly so. I mean, there's an enormously high price...
	That is being paid for secrecy.
	It's certainly comforting to other people which is really its function.
	Right, right. Yeah, because the costs, I mean, it's hard to even imagine the dollar figure that would be associated with a 35% reduction in doctor office visits, an 11% reduction in emergency department visits, and a 3% reduction in hospitalizations that would run into the billions and billions of dollars, I would imagine. Without question.
	Without question. And that's a two-edged sword.
	I mean, there are two sides to that.
	If you're a physician in solo practice in the community, If someone comes wildly enthusiastically speaking about a 35% reduction in doctor offices as well, it may not be greeted with wild enthusiasm.
	If, like me, you're someone working in a closed system on salary, well, that's potentially of great interest because the outpatient budget for Kaiser Permanente in Southern California It's $14 billion a year.
	So if this is replicable, and I believe it is, you're talking potentially then a $4 billion savings.
	Now, there's a two-edged piece to that too.
	The naive outside view is, oh my God, people at Kaiser are going to be thrilled about that.
	Well, on more careful viewing, what one sees is, That there are not many administrators who would be eager to step up to the plate to take a swing at a $4 billion pitch, correctly perceiving that if they screw that up, people are going to remember them.
	And equally correctly perceiving that they were hired to keep the ship on course, not to make a right angle turn looking for the Northwest Passage.
	So there are counterintuitive aspects to all of this, often in the most unexpected places.
	Right, right.
	Then additionally, the reversion back to prior baseline to two years.
	That was fairly easy to understand because we use a unified medical record.
	Everything that happens is in this one chart.
	And so there are our notes literally printed with laser-like clarity, okay, about what has happened in the past and so on and our thoughts as to how that relates to what's going on now.
	They might just as well have been printed with invisible ink because almost never did anyone pay any attention to those and integrate that into ongoing care.
	I mean, that was just, you know, So when they would go back to their doctor, the issue that came up in the Kaiser Permanente survey was not addressed in any way going forward, is that right?
	No one would imagine that a 3-5 minute conversation cures decades of long-lasting and physiological, by this point, trauma.
	I wouldn't say that it cures decades, but produces a significant and measurable improvement in things.
	Yeah, it would be interesting too if there was a way of subdividing those who went into, say, personal therapy or psychotherapy as a result of this conversation.
	But of course, I'm sure that would be very hard data to get.
	But it would be interesting to see whether the effects tend out to be more permanent or even increased over time.
	Without question.
	Now, you say, of course, that doctors in some ways would be resistant to a 35% drop in patient visits, but if I got the emotional undercurrents of something that you were talking about in both the obesity and the childhood trauma studies that you sent me, There seems to be among physicians, if I understood what you were writing correctly, a kind of nervousness around, I think you phrase it, patients who present with illness but no disease.
	People who have problems, physiological problems, that are to them very real, with no physiological basis.
	Didn't have to deal with that, which must be enormously stressful and time-consuming and difficult, that they may actually prefer to have patients not come in with stuff that can't be cured by medicine but needs a different kind of approach.
	All of that's true.
	But what you're leaving out is the fact that it's uncomfortable thematic material to deal with.
	Here's a good insight into this.
	Remembering that the speaker At meetings is the only person typically who can see the faces of everyone in the audience.
	In presenting this to large medical audiences, several hundred physicians, what's striking is that reliably by eight or ten minutes, the level of anguish on people's faces in the audience clearly exceeds anything that you would sensibly attribute to empathic responses.
	It looks pretty clearly like personal ghosts are being awakened.
	And often times people will come up afterwards and make that explicit.
	It's tough for me to deal with this stuff because I have some ACEs that I haven't processed or whatever.
	Is it something like that? Exactly.
	And I would imagine too that doctors...
	I mean, we have this weird dichotomy within our society that goes all the way back to the Greeks.
	It's sort of the mind-body dichotomy.
	If it's all in the mind, it can't be in the body.
	The two are completely separate.
	Or if it's in the body, it has no origins within the mind without looking at them as a sort of ecosystem.
	And I think that I've been speaking with a bunch of people who've been doing this work recently.
	The degree to which the brain is formed through early experiences so that it becomes a different brain than it would have otherwise, that the mind and the brain and the body are very much an ecosystem that very often self-reinforces these kinds of traumas.
	I think doctors would have a hard time saying to patients, it's all in your head, but it's not all in your head, which is kind of an ambivalent or complex thing to say, if that makes any sense.
	You can't really make the split.
	Here are a couple of common examples that everyone is familiar with but never really think about the implications of them.
	Getting cold hands under nervous tension.
	That's due to the selective spasm of arteries carrying blood into the skin of one's hands.
	Same thing with feet, getting cold feet, the expression.
	Turning pale with fright, same idea, selective spasm of the facial artery or blushing which is selective dilation of the facial artery.
	So something is happening emotionally in your brain that is causing this rather gross physical manifestation The physiology of which is well understood, making it clear of the inseparable relationship of what's going on in your mind and what's going on in your body.
	Right, right. And of course, if there were some toxic substance out there in the world that, you know, with a significant portion of people resulted in a 20-year reduction in lifespan, a 45% or 48% increased chance of contracting cancer and so on, I mean, the media would go completely insane about that.
	And there would be people dragged in front of Congress and so on.
	But when the toxic element, so to speak, within a child's life is caregivers, people seem to kind of Draw up short before that reality and get very uncomfortable.
	Yes. Well, a related example would be child obesity.
	I don't see children, but I'm impressed that in seeing adults, with obese adults, the single most important question is how old were you when you first began putting on weight?
	And most people not understanding the profundity of that have no particular problem answering it honestly.
	The follow-up question is, why do you think it was then?
	Why not three years earlier, five years later?
	Why then? And some people will know and others will not want to know, but that's really the most important starting point.
	And the coincidence of that age with parental loss, typically through divorce, is really striking.
	And I have never seen anything about that in the literature.
	I would guess that it's because so many of us have been divorced that it's really an uncomfortable subject that we'd rather distance ourselves from.
	Right. And, I mean, that's a good segue.
	If you have a little bit more time, I would love it if you would talk a little bit about the obesity studies.
	I mean, I'll put some details out before the show about the ACE studies, but if you could talk a little bit about, or a lot about, if you like, the obesity studies, which I found also extremely fascinating because it's not something that is intuitive.
	And, of course, that's where I think the most original and creative thinking goes on, which is the stuff that is counterfactual or counterperceptual in a way.
	But it's really striking the correlations that you found between ACEs and particular kinds of ACEs in particular and obesity.
	As you say, there is no baby that's born fat.
	The only thing that's determined genetically is where the fat is going to sit on your bones, so to speak.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	Well, the obesity program, which is a big program here, the obesity program really was the origin of the ACE study.
	In a very real way, the ACE study was set up to determine whether the things that we were finding in our obese patients Were represented in the general population?
	And if so, what sort of long-term consequences did they have?
	And when I say things that we were finding in our obese patients, I'm talking about unexpected early childhood adverse experiences.
	And that was, you know, well, I mean, here is the memorable case.
	1985, a young woman comes in, 29 years old, Can you help me with my problem?
	Our first mistake was in accepting her definition of what the problem was.
	She weighed 408 pounds, and so we bit into that, and we said yes, and in 51 weeks took her from 408 to 132 pounds.
	Sorry to interrupt, but this is on the 400-odd calorie with correct electrolytes and minerals and supplements and so on, right?
	This is the nearest starvation without medical consequences, right?
	Exactly. Right. And so we, of course, assume, my God, you know, this is really terrific that we can do this, etc.
	So she stays at that weight for several weeks and then, in one three-week period, regains 37 pounds, which I previously thought to be physiologically impossible.
	Wow. In pursuit of why, ultimately it turns out that she was sleep eating.
	She was eating in a somnambulistic state and eating very large amounts, perhaps larger than might have been ingestible in a fully conscious state.
	And that coincided with the day that some guy at work propositioned her.
	That's kind of interesting.
	And so in pursuit of what seems like kind of an extreme response to being propositioned, then comes the lengthy incest history with her grandfather.
	And so suddenly even her job makes sense.
	She's a nurse's aide on the night shift in a convalescent hospital.
	That is to say, She's paid to stay awake and on her feet all night long while the old people are in bed.
	Oh boy! That's almost like the Avigdala gets up for a snack, right?
	It's that deep down in the fight or flight mechanism.
	Yeah, so she quickly is back over 400 pounds and disappears for 12 years.
	She then comes back and joins a group that we had put together for people in the 400 to 600 pound range.
	And after being a participant in that for about two months, comes in and announces that her family has collected $20,000 for her to have bariatric surgery.
	She has the surgery and at a point where she has lost 96 pounds, which is not clearly obvious to me.
	I mean, you know, I took a word that she had done this, but the volumetric reduction of 96 pounds is not that clearly visible when you're starting out over 400.
	At a point where she's lost 96 pounds, she becomes interactively suicidal.
	She's hospitalized five times within the ensuing year, gets three courses of electroshock to try to control the suicidality, etc.
	And then on video, in a lengthy video interview, she says very clearly, In response to, you know, why did this happen?
	Why the suicidality?
	Her answer is, the weight was coming off faster than I could handle it.
	My wall was crumbling.
	My wall was crumbling.
	Right, so the fat is a shield, in a sense, against unwanted sexuality, which awakens the trauma of the history, right?
	Overweight is overlooked, right?
	Exactly. Being fat was not the problem.
	Being fat was the marker of the problem.
	In fact, it was a very real solution.
	And do you recall or do you know what happened to this brave?
	It was a very interesting story.
	The video interview that I have with her is about an hour long.
	She's now in her early 40s and she's fairly thin, you know, 250 pounds or so.
	And she's comfortable speaking.
	And the reason she's comfortable is because she knows she's going to die soon.
	And the reason she's going to die is because in the intervening years she has developed a condition known as primary pulmonary fibrosis.
	If one went back ten years, primary pulmonary fibrosis would have been a rock-solid example of a strictly Organic biomedical structural disease.
	It has no known cause.
	It's not related to smoking or air contamination and so forth.
	No one knows why.
	In the past few years, however, it's become clear that at least some significant minority of primary pulmonary fibrosis is associated with major chronic emotional stress.
	And guys like Bruce Perry and Bruce McEwen have written extensively about this, that with major unrelieved chronic stress, one develops high levels of circulating cortisone.
	That's damaging in its own way, like taking cortisone, say for rheumatoid arthritis, creates its own problems given time.
	But furthermore, When one is well into this process, in a number of instances, there occurs the release of pro-inflammatory chemicals known as pro-inflammatory cytokines, cytocell kind,
	K-I-N-E action, chemicals effecting inflammatory changes in the lining of small blood vessels.
	Closing those vessels off and causing the scarring and destruction of the tissue that would be supplied by those vessels.
	So the irreversible scarring of primary pulmonary fibrosis, in at least a significant minority of cases, appears due to the release of these pro-inflammatory cytokines, decades into situations of chronic major stress.
	And cortisol, I believe, has also been implicated by some researchers at McGill as being one of the reasons why those with significant histories of child abuse have a much higher rate of contracting cancer, because the cortisol interferes with the ability of the body to detect and destroy the cancer cells.
	And I'm speaking as a complete amateur way out on a limb, but that's what I understood from the study.
	No, no, no, no, no, no, correct, correct.
	And, I mean, a straightforward example of that that many more people would be familiar with It would be the fact that if someone is on lifetime immunosuppression as a result, let us say, of an organ transplant, that the prevalence of malignancy in those people is higher as a result of the lifetime immunosuppression.
	Another way of putting it is all of us every day are having a few bacteria run through our bloodstreams.
	You know, brush your teeth, A minor cut, a hard bowel movement, whatever.
	Our immune systems process those things out and we never know the difference.
	The same thing in terms of malignancy.
	We're all forming malignant cells at a very low rate and they're routinely processed out.
	So getting cancer means one of two things.
	Either the rate of production of malignant cells increases markedly exposure to carcinogens to heavy smoking and so forth or something is damaging the body's immune system's ability to process those abnormal cells out and that's what you're dealing with when you're talking about long-term hypercortisolemia or other forms of immune suppression such as Such as are used in situations of organ transplants.
	Right, right. I also found it interesting, and it's a very sensitive subject, as of course is everything that we're talking about here, but the sensitive subject that I thought stuck out in the obesity program was the, I think as you phrased it, the unrecognized and unspoken benefits of obesity.
	Now, we talked a little bit about that, but if you could expand on that, I'd appreciate it.
	Well, that's really interesting.
	Every week, every Thursday evening, and if you're ever in San Diego, let me know ahead of time because you could sit in and hear this firsthand.
	Every Thursday evening we have here a meeting for people who are thinking that week of joining the obesity program.
	And I'll explain to them that rather than describing the program to them, we're going to give them a free sample.
	We're going to do some stuff typical of the program with them and they can use that to decide whether they want to or don't want to join the program.
	And I explain that the same dozen or so people meet for two hours every week with the same counselor basically working on answering certain questions as a group That we have found productive in the course of treating successfully and unsuccessfully about 30,000 people now.
	And so here's the first question.
	Tell me why, not how, how is obvious.
	Tell me why you think people get fat.
	The answers are spectacular.
	Stress, depression, people leave you alone, men won't bother you.
	What the hell?
	Don't you read the magazines from the supermarket that your metabolism is ruined?
	Right. People don't say genetics.
	People don't say because processed food or corn sugar or whatever happens.
	They do, but maybe every three weeks.
	I'll point out to them, look at your list.
	Notably, look what's missing from your list.
	If you've been here last week, You'd have seen a very similar list or last month, etc.
	Okay, second question.
	We all know, God knows we know here, that sometimes people who lose a lot of weight regain it all, if not more.
	You know, lose 100, regain 120.
	So when that happens, why does that happen?
	And always people will quickly respond because if you don't deal with the underlying issues, it'll come back.
	That's rather a profound insight.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, and I do want you to continue, but it just repeatedly has struck me, in reading this and in other material that I've read, how incredibly close we are to the truth in life at all times.
	It just takes one intelligent, sympathetic question for it all to come out.
	It's not like digging for gold in the Arctic.
	It's right there when you just ask one question.
	Yes, certainly so.
	And it's really hidden In many of our everyday phrases, and I'll come to that in a moment.
	So always that answer comes up, you know, if you don't deal with the underlying issues, it'll come back.
	Maybe 60% of the time someone will propose it comes back because major weight loss is threatening.
	Usually to the person losing the weight, but sometimes to people close to them.
	The third question, tell me the advantages of being fat.
	I mean, an ugly question.
	Not being heavy, not being overweight, or being fat.
	Always, the answers will break into three categories.
	It is sexually protective.
	That's fairly easy to understand.
	It's physically protective.
	think of the expression throwing your weight around.
	You mean there's a kind of intimidation factor or...?
	Yeah, sure, sure.
	I remember years ago we had two men in the program that lost between 100 and 150 pounds a piece.
	They were guards of the state penitentiary.
	They made no bones about it.
	They did not feel comfortable going into work regular size.
	They felt a lot safer going in looking as big as a refrigerator.
	And the third category Is that it's socially protective.
	People will expect less of you.
	In what way does that show up?
	I was a little confused by that.
	Okay. Let's say you're a middle-aged unmarried woman and you have married friends.
	To whom will you be more acceptable to those married friends?
	Slender or obese?
	Right. And they would also pressure you, in a sense, less to get married or do things that you may be averse to if they won't introduce you to others and so on.
	Sure. All of that. In terms of, well, you know, social expectations, well, you know, I really can't go.
	I can't go.
	You know, it's just too hard for me to walk up the stairs to get there.
	People expect less of you at work.
	It may be unfair, but you show up weighing 400 pounds, people will unconsciously attribute, you must be kind of dumb or slow or ineffective or unreliable, etc.
	So in all sorts of ways, people's social expectations are reduced.
	You may be somebody who's not looking to have expectations reduced, But there are a lot of such people in the world.
	Sorry to interrupt, but it also struck me that if it seems to be the case with a significant number of obese, particularly women, if some sort of sexual molestation or exploitation is buried in the past, as it is, in a sense, under the flesh, the weight loss may You know, like a tide coming out to reveal a body in the sand, the weight loss may trigger memories or problems, and so in a sense, the family doesn't want the weight loss to occur, again, at a very unconscious level, because of the crimes that may be revealed in the past.
	All of that's true. Yeah, so should you ever be in San Diego on a Thursday, let me know ahead of time, and you might be interested in sitting in and hearing this firsthand.
	Oh, I certainly would be. Thank you.
	It's quite extraordinary.
	Right. The truth is right there.
	Everybody has the answers right there.
	You just have to ask the question.
	Most people, of course, will go through their whole lives surrounded by people who love and claim to and all this without asking those basic questions that can be so enormously liberating.
	And I think the absence of those questions is felt almost every day by people in this kind of distress.
	Oh sure, sure.
	And think how at some level, you know, we have some awareness of these things built into various phrases, you know, throwing your weight around, the expression, a fucked up kid.
	Everybody knows what that means.
	It's an uncouth expression, nice people don't talk about that, etc.
	So it's a way of comfortably distancing oneself from something that you do understand at some level.
	Right. Or comfort food. The other advantage is self-medication, the anxiety avoidance of simply drugging yourself with carbs and sugars and so on.
	Absolutely. Some of this has been well depicted in motion pictures.
	There was some years ago the movie Home for the Holidays with a guy named John Candy who is a quite obese movie actor who subsequently died of the complications of obesity.
	Home for the Holidays was the depiction of a family get-together for Thanksgiving.
	Although it was Although it was advertised as a comedy, I mean, this was a lethally serious movie, showing this family coming together, and there's a couple who have withdrawn into an alcoholic stupor.
	Joe has withdrawn behind a cloud of cigar smoke.
	Two other people are eating themselves into oblivion, etc.
	Right, right.
	So part of the reason why so much eating goes on at the holidays is not out of joy, but it's out of anguish at the disparity between what's hoped for and what is often delivered.
	Right. Now, you also mentioned the psychoactive properties of food, which is not something I know much about, but it's very interesting because if it is a form of self-medication, you would expect it to have, like drugs and nicotine and, I guess, caffeine as well, psychoactive properties.
	Well, you know, think about it for a moment, buried in the expression, sit down, have something to eat, you'll feel better.
	For many people, it's an effective, certainly easily available way of reducing anxiety, reducing anger, and assuaging depression.
	And those same properties are held by nicotine.
	Yeah, and there seems to be some theories that nicotine actually replaces some brain connectors that may have been inhibited during childhood trauma, that it is a very precise form of self-medication.
	Yeah.
	There are two broad categories of neural receptors in the central nervous system.
	One is the category of nicotinic receptors and the other is the category of muscarinic receptors.
	So it has a fairly broad, you know, This broad range of neural activity.
	Again, on a more simple level, you think back to the peace pipe of American Indians.
	They weren't burning oak leaves or moss in there.
	They were selectively burning nicotine leaves.
	Right, and if it gives you a relief, in a sense, from the symptoms of childhood trauma, then the withdrawal is not just biochemical, or I guess it is, but it also uncovers, again, like the surf pulling back to reveal the body in the sand, it uncovers some of the prior traumas as well.
	Sure, sure. And so one commonly used substitute is food.
	And so many people stop smoking only to put on weight.
	Right, right. Now, I was also fascinated to see every single diet pill safe one has a potent, prior to a recent one, antidepressant activity.
	Yeah, exactly. And recently there have been a whole new category that have come out of so-called fat absorption blockers.
	Simple enough idea.
	But the thing about antidepressant activity is an important one.
	Starting back in 1932 with dextroamphetamine and proceeding up through all sorts of variations on that, the only exception having been fenfluramine,
	which was half of the combination of fenfen, which was fentramine, potent antidepressant activity, and fenfluramine Right, right.
	And the two major predictors that you identify of regaining weight after being lost, the history of childhood sexual abuse and currently being married to an alcoholic, was also, again, you know, almost every other sentence or paragraph sends a chill down, I think, a sensitive person's spine, that those two things, being significant predictors, of course, they have nothing to do with nutrition or exercise, I mean, as the cause of these issues, but are very much environmental and we would assume a reproduction of prior traumas.
	Well, you see, you bring up an interesting point because oftentimes the discomfort of dealing with the serious underpinnings of obesity is concealed by quick referral to a dietitian as though lack of knowledge is why you're fat.
	You know, we need to teach you how to eat right.
	Well, so if you take my patient who is raped at 23 and gains 105 pounds in the next year, That kind of thinking would imply that she must have obviously had the knowledge to eat right for 23 years because she was slender, and then getting rape that causes that knowledge to fall out of her brain.
	Right. Or she says, I like food, is why I eat, but of course did her food relationship change so substantially at the time of the wreck?
	Well, of course not, right? Yeah.
	Right. Right.
	Now, curing type 2 diabetes, this blows my mind a little bit.
	That's certainly interesting.
	Very few physicians are aware of that.
	Most would not waste time stopping to think about it, even if they believed it possible, because they'd say, well, yeah, sure.
	I mean, how the hell are you going to get 100 pounds off somebody?
	But in fact, that was our finding.
	I believe we had a sample of 320 consecutive type 2 diabetics that we studied and lo and behold, at the end of the program, average weight loss was 62 pounds.
	At the end of the program, it was either 71% or 74% of them were no longer diagnosably diabetic.
	I don't mean they were better controlled or anything, I mean they were no longer diagnosably diabetic.
	Right, and the idea that type 2 is even, like, controllable in a sense, but in a sense, it can be eliminated through the diet programs that you run, which rely heavily upon an examination of the psychological or historical causes behind food as self-medication for trauma.
	I mean, that really is a very long link, but it seems that the data completely supports it.
	Yeah. And I really do appreciate your time.
	I really wanted to end up with this statement.
	Michael Ballenta, you quoted him, but he said, Patients see doctors because of anxiety, while doctors see patients because of disease.
	Therein lies the problem between the two.
	Now, obviously, we could spend hours just talking about that one statement, but you included in that for, I think it sums up a lot of the work that you do very well, if you could expand on why that quote is so important to you and had such great resonance for me.
	Well, we're often working at odds.
	We're not working on the same problem.
	What's perceived as a problem to a physician may be perceived as a solution by the patient.
	I have never yet met anyone who smoked two or three packs a day to get lung cancer or heart disease or bladder cancer.
	People smoke for relief.
	Because of the psychoactive benefits of nicotine, which has potent anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, appetite suppressant, and anger suppressant properties that have been well documented in the world's medical literature, certainly in the first two thirds of the 20th century.
	Interest in pursuing that line for the past third of a decade or so, third of a century or so has fallen off.
	Coincident with the huge public health onslaught against smoking.
	But that's interesting, you see, because here in Southern California, I mean, it is very difficult to smoke comfortably.
	You can't smoke in office buildings and hotels and bars and restaurants and so forth.
	You can't even smoke on a public beach for God's sake.
	Now, the interesting thing is that in the past 13 years, in spite of this ever-increasing public health onslaught against smoking, in the past 13 years, there has been no net decrease in cigarette smoking in the United States.
	It's about 22%.
	You know, a huge decrease in the 60s and 70s with the first Surgeon General's report and so forth.
	You know, all of the nickel and dime smokers kind of dropped out.
	The people who weren't smoking, or who smoking was not a symptom of significant prior trauma, were able to drop the habit relatively easily, but there's the hardcore people for whom it's a necessary self-medication in the absence of alternatives.
	Exactly. And the benefit of nicotine will occur with inhalation in 15 or 20 seconds.
	The risk of it, which is quite real, will occur in 15 or 20 years.
	And most of us Faced with major current problems, we'll end up selling out the future to get current relief.
	Right, and of course, if you've grown up in a troubled household, the deferral of gratification is not something that you will have been taught much about, sadly.
	Well put. Not everyone is interested in serving out a full life sentence.
	Right, that's a very powerful way.
	I mean, I remember a year or two ago, with the third question in the obesity meeting, What are the advantages of being fat?
	Some guy in the back row who hasn't said anything blurts out, don't last this long.
	What doesn't last this long?
	Your life. Okay, well taken point.
	I mean, we don't pay attention to that.
	Depression is a huge issue underlying obesity.
	I mean, I've never met anyone who got fat out of joy.
	Right, and of course, in that mindset that life is a disease that you cure by overeating, it's a Yes.
	Now, I mean, I've only been working in this dataset for a short period of time, though I've been working with trying to help people to understand the links between prior trauma and current dysfunction for years and years.
	So, clearly this information needs to get, I think, to a wider audience, but as you point out, I mean, Freud was the first to discover that certain kinds of illnesses previously diagnosed as hysterical or whatever actually had their roots in childhood trauma, and I mean, that's over 100 years ago, and there still seems to be such a large barrier to getting this information out.
	Do you have any suggestions or thoughts?
	I mean, I'm sure you do, but what are they in terms of getting this information out to a wider group?
	I'm hoping to find some capable author who would be willing to write a book for general audiences on the ACE Study.
	The title that I would propose would be Turning Gold into Lead and the subtitle would be The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
	In terms of trying to do something that would be usefully preventive and we've thought a lot about this.
	My belief is that the most usefully preventive thing that I can conceive of would be to figure out how to improve parenting skills across the country.
	Understanding full well that there are going to be people who are going to murder or otherwise destroy their children and we really don't know how to pre-identify those.
	But there are a huge number of people Who have had no first-hand personal experience with supportive parenting in their own childhoods, many of whom want to do better, might do better if they only knew what the health supportive parenting looked like.
	So how could one provide that information affordably, acceptably, etc., and not run into problems like, you know, Goddamn government's not going to tell me how to raise my kid.
	And the one thought that occurs to me recurrently is the enormous potential that soap operas would have.
	I wasn't expecting that, so please tell me more.
	Huge audiences.
	The bill is paid for.
	What we're talking about is thematically lurid material in the hands of capable writers.
	What if you were to weave into the storyline of a soap opera, an illustration of what destructive parenting looked like and how it played out over time, contrasting that with an illustration of what supportive parenting looked like and how that played out over time.
	Basically, you're not giving lessons.
	You're telling a story. So you're flying below the radar of resistance.
	Right, and of course, the majority of people who were watching it would be stay-at-home moms.
	And of course, the hand that rocks the cradle, carves the future, rules the world, however you want to put it, right?
	Yeah. So I'm looking for someone who'd be interested in developing a pilot for that, to test it out.
	When you think of the enormous Influence that programs have had for children, Sesame Street, Mr.
	Rogers, Captain Kangaroo and so forth.
	I'm talking about the same concept, but for adults.
	Well, you know, I'm arm and arm with you there, brother, about the need for, we can only create a better world through improved parenting.
	What we can do after the fact, you know, after the brain has developed and been carved into the particular channels that it has, is such a resource-intensive program that, you know, in this, you know, a pound of prevention is worth four tons of cure.
	And so I completely agree with you that the improvement of parenting is the most pressing problem, Yeah,
	we've gone to the moon and back and we can't do the same thing with reaching our children's hearts, so to speak, in a consistent way.
	Let me give you a name of someone you might be interested in talking with someday.
	a Canadian psychologist out in British Columbia, I believe at the University of British Columbia, a guy named Bruce Alexander.
	The point of talking with him would be about the so-called rat park experiments.
	I was always troubled, for instance, in thinking about addiction, about these studies where you have some rats in a cage and you give them a drink of water versus a drink of water with heroin in it and they prefer the water with heroin, implying that there was something intrinsically addictive about the heroin and so on.
	So he has the dazzling concept that maybe a rat in a cage, even though it's a clean cage in a warm room with three square meals a day, is not in a peaceful setting.
	And this is a highly stressed animal and that makes the difference.
	So what he does is he sets up a so-called rat park, an outdoor scene caged, an outdoor scene fenced and so forth with dirt and rocks and bushes and trash and so forth, a nice homey place for a rat.
	And interestingly, when the rats are given the choice there between water or water plus heroin, there's no selective choice of the water plus heroin.
	So if you're ever thinking about addiction, He's an interesting guy to keep in mind.
	Absolutely, yeah. I mean, this goes all the way back to Desi Morrison, the human zoo from the 1970s, where he talked about modern cities and perhaps even modern families as being as sort of natural to our nature as a zoo is to an animal, and that zoos create dysfunction, particularly sexual dysfunction, in animals, and that also may be the case with us in these stressful environments that so many of us grow up in and live in.
	Yes, yes. Do me a favor.
	Sure. If you have your radio program posted on the internet or if you can make a CD of how you're going to use this, I'd be interested in listening to it or getting a copy or what have you.
	Oh, absolutely. I will send you a link to...
	I usually publish with video and with audio.
	I will send you a link to both. I really do appreciate it.
	I think the work that you are doing and your colleagues are doing with this ACE material is...
	Incredibly important. I mean, there is a lot of significant theorizing that's been starting over the last 10 or 20 years, and I spoke recently with Stuart Shanker from York University, Alison Gopnik, to really try and publicize as much as possible the degree to which lives can be dominated by early trauma.
	It's really, I think, impossible to understand conflict and criminality and aggression and I think the more we can unearth these bones, so to speak, I think the far better I mean, parents don't want to do this fundamentally.
	They don't go through the stress and the struggle of pregnancy and childbirth and child raising and getting up at night.
	They don't do that fundamentally in order to torture their children.
	That would be to have a view of human nature that would be diabolical.
	But I think you're right.
	It's in the absence of positive role models.
	And most people know, like if you ask them what good parenting is, they would say the right things.
	But there's such a gulf between theory and practice and how people live that the more we can get people to understand what they're doing to their children, if they allow the children to be exposed to trauma, what they're doing to the world as a whole.
	I really do believe that people will change, but I think it's just not clear yet.
	Children are conceived to be, or believed to be, incredibly resilient, and it really doesn't seem to be the case.
	However well-functioning they may appear as adults, the resilience is just not there at the neurological level.
	Certainly so.
	A woman named Emmy Werner is a big publisher on resiliency and one of the things that I remember most from one of her books is the comment that amongst a group of people that they had considered to be highly resilient,
	in other words, were doing well by conventional standards in spite of disastrous histories, They were shocked and surprised to find how much organic disease was present in that group.
	Right, right, right.
	I mean, and you can see this even as we talked about in the beginning of this conversation with the Kaiser Study members who are...
	You know, able to afford really good health insurance, whose language skills are great, who can ask and answer questions easily, and they still have a very high prevalence of these kinds of problems, which have the objective health consequences.
	So it's really challenging to think just how much worse it is further down the economic ladder.
	All right. Well, thank you.
	Thank you again so much.
	I really do appreciate your time.
	I will send you a copy of this, and I will also ask if anybody's interested in helping you out with your various projects, Thank you kindly.
	Best wishes for the holidays.
	Yes, you too. Thank you very much.
	Bye-bye. Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	This is True News, The Bomb in the Brain Part 3, The Aftermaths of Child Abuse, The Biology of Violence.
	Let's take a quick tour of the organ that we're about to have a look at.
	And remember, I'm just a podcaster.
	I'm not a doctor or an expert, so please do your research.
	I put the references to this series at the end of these slides.
	These are just some information gathering, but I think it's very, very useful stuff to know.
	So first and foremost, we have, right at the base of the brain, the amygdala, which has the primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, particularly the very primitive but very powerful fight-and-flight mechanisms.
	The hippocampus, spatial navigation, and long-term memory, this is what gets damaged in the realm of child abuse, where people simply have blank spots in their childhood histories.
	The corpus callosum, this facilitates communication between the two hemispheres, And the prefrontal cortex, also known as the moral center, this is for planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision-making, and moderating correct social behavior, in particular delaying gratification.
	So here's a map of the brain.
	You can see the prefrontal lobe just behind the eyes.
	The corpus callosum wrapped around the hippocampus.
	The biology of violence.
	What is it that makes us violent?
	If we want to solve the problem of violence in the world, from bullying in the schoolyard to wars in the world, we have to understand why people become violent to begin with.
	Over the past few decades, startling new research has come to light about the psychology and neurobiology of violence.
	During the first four years of life, as mentioned in the last presentation, 90% of a child's brain develops through the experiences of that child.
	In the past two decades, over 100 careful studies have shown that violence is the result of insecure and disorganized early attachments.
	What does that mean? Let's look at infancy and brain development.
	The mind and emotional content of the brain are created in the first few years of life through the attachment bond between the infant and the mother.
	They're created. We are not born violent.
	We are not born warlike.
	We are not born aggressive.
	The mind and the emotional content of the brain are created.
	It is mainly the right hemisphere of both mother and infant that regulate early emotional states and cope with stress.
	Romanian orphans put in cribs at birth and fed regularly but smiled at or sung to usually die since they have black holes in their brain scans rather than healthy functioning right hemispheres.
	Not all of them, but many of them.
	Rhesus monkeys separated at birth from their mother's gaze grow up fearful and violently attack other monkeys.
	Insecurely attached children display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached peers.
	The baby's brain, according to the latest research, is literally tuned by the caregiver's brain to produce the correct neurotransmitters and hormones.
	Experiments showing how depressed or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached infants who grew up to be violent adults, the so-called Ainsworth studies of emotional neglected childhood, now run into the hundreds worldwide.
	It seems to be about as established as anything can get in this realm.
	Depressed and angry mother produces insecure attached infants who grew up to be violent adults.
	A dislike of children.
	A study of 900 American mothers found that they most enjoyed socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV, and cooking more than taking care of my children.
	Even more crucial are the studies that show that 80% of mothers experience either mild baby blues for months after birth, postpartum depression for up to several years, or puerperal psychosis, which again, of course, is relatively minor, but less emotionally available to their children.
	This is not scientific, of course, but Anne Landers asked her readers if you had to do it over again, would you have children?
	Out of the 10,000 responses, 70% were a resounding no.
	Abuse and cortisol.
	Cortisol is a hormone that helps the body prepare to cope with stress through its effects on metabolism and the immune system.
	Abusive mothers who are either depressed or angry, and the cortisol levels of both depressed and angry mothers are elevated both in the mother and her child.
	So if you're depressed or you're angry, your cortisol levels are higher in both you and in your child, because the mother and the child are a system, particularly for the first few years of life.
	Studies have shown that many infants and children who have been maltreated have abnormal secretions of cortisol indicating that their body's responses to stress have been impaired which has significant health effects down the road.
	The Neurobiology of Terror Sure, Ledoux and other neurobiologists provide massive evidence that the neural circuitry of the infant's fear system is located in the right brain in two main mood regulators.
	The prefrontal cortex, the regulator, could also be known in Freudian terms as the superhego, and the amygdala, the fear system, or the id.
	The role of the amygdala is to remember a threat, to generalize it to other possible threats and carry it into the future, right?
	So if you get attacked by a bear, the amygdala will imprint that bears are dangerous and give you that fight-or-flight mechanism the next time you see a bear, so you don't go, oh, look, a different colored bear, I'm sure I'm safe.
	It's very helpful. Human subjects whose brains were electrically stimulated in the region of the amygdala reported a sense of being reprimanded by an authority.
	The greatest predators that we have are other human beings, not animals of course.
	The amygdala of insecurely attached children are hyperactive and larger than those of securely attached children.
	They have a greater surging of fight and flight, of adrenaline, of cortisol.
	Plus, their prefrontal cortices are smaller and so they're less able to control their fears or angers or other irrational emotional reactions in response to later interpersonal difficulties.
	This is lashing out. This is acting out.
	There is a physical problem in the brain.
	The fight and flight mechanism is strong.
	The restraint mechanism is weak and you can see this in a brain scan.
	When children experience maternal abandonment fears and maternal abuse, they release cortisol, which shuts down their prefrontal cortex and makes their amygdala hyperactive.
	Right? Because you have to act quickly when you're in a situation of threat or danger.
	And this indelibly imprints or burns in the memory of the threatening mother in their amygdala module.
	The brain becomes broken.
	Brain scans reveal that an enduring pattern associated with destructive defensive rage is imprinted into an immature, inefficient orbitofrontal or cortical system and amygdala during relational trauma in early childhood.
	Fight or flight kicks in with very little restraint.
	This is physical in the brain.
	The right amygdala has been measured to be larger and more excitable in psychotics, depressives, those who have anxiety disorders, and murderers.
	In addition, all these violence-prone products of early relational trauma suffer from elevated neorepinephrine, acting out neurotransmitter levels, and depressed serotonin or calming hormone levels.
	The child uses the output of the mother's emotion-regulating right cortex as a template for the imprinting of circuits in his own right cortex.
	We inherit this template of how our mothers deal with emotions.
	Do they control their own emotions?
	Do they talk about their emotions?
	Or do they lash out? We receive that as an imprinting.
	The same way the ducks imprint on the first thing they see on coming out of the egg.
	Later, when adult human subjects are shown fearful or angry faces, it immediately depresses their right cortices and activates their right amygdala, as when they are racially biased white subjects who are shown faces of African Americans.
	So it depresses the control suppression moral center and activates the fight-or-flight mechanism.
	Mirror neurons.
	One further important area of the brain becomes damaged during early stress, the insula, a deep area of the cortex that contains most of the mirror neurons that make people capable of empathy of the emotional states of others.
	Neuropsychiatrists have examined abuse and neglected children with brain scans and shown the damage done that affects their need for violence later on.
	Bruce Perry has published a huge number of studies showing abnormal brain development following neglect and abuse in little children, including significantly smaller brains, decreased activity in their prefrontal cortex, the moral center, the restraint center, the maturity center, hippocampal damage, long-term memory, amygdaloid overexcitation that produces electrical storms, similar to those experienced by patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, seizures that cause hallucinations and violent behavior.
	People who say, I heard voices telling me to kill.
	The prefrontal cortex.
	So to go into a little bit more detail about that which has withered away during child abuse, the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain just behind the eyes, which has been termed the site of the moral decision module and the sense of self, It's so damaged by early mistreatment that all impulses are released from control, both violent impulses and sexual impulses.
	And if we remember from the last ACE study, negative childhood experiences were associated with promiscuity.
	As Kona puts it in his study of human nature, ethnic violence, and war, Child abuse produces frontal lobe damage that contributes to violent tendencies.
	Epileptics with seizures in the amygdala have aggressive outbursts.
	People with records of criminal aggression have more EEG abnormalities than others.
	Reduced brain serotonin activity lowers the threshold for aggressive reactions to frustration.
	Impulsively violent and antisocial individuals have low levels of serotonin.
	In addition, a prefrontal cortex with low serotonin means the subject experiences delusions and hallucinations, which, because of early structural damage, means they cannot catch errors and correct them before they become violent, reacting to imaginary threats.
	Violence and Crime Bessel van der Kolk, the most famous expert on dissociated mind states, concludes, People with childhood histories of trauma, abuse, and neglect make up almost the entire criminal justice population in the United States, with abusive childhoods causing dissociative states.
	Robert Forreston reports all his suicidal patients hear parental voices telling them they should kill themselves.
	Violence in prisons According to James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who has spent his life talking to violent criminals in prison, He reveals that they were all horribly abused as children.
	He writes, As children these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by the mothers who were their pimps, Some people think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money, but when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody.
	Boys and Girls The only neurobiological condition inherited by boys that affects later violence is that they have a smaller corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the right and the left hemisphere.
	here.
	Boys who are abused had a 25% reduction in sections of the corpus callosum, while girls did not.
	Boys grew up with less attachment strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys less.
	Because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are at much higher risk than girls for serious violence against them, and because boys are continuously told to be tough, not to be a wimp or a weakling, not to be soft or a sissy.
	Abuse and neglect produce equally damaging results in the brains of both boys and girls, but girls tend to respond more with dissociative, internalizing symptoms, withdrawal, depressions, helplessness, dependence, while boys tend more to act out fight-or-flight responses, externalizing impulsive and hyperactivity, which is one reason why they're diagnosed more as hyperactive or ADHD or oppositional-defined disorder.
	So boys are hit more, and it has a worse effect on them in terms of later violence than it would with girls.
	The effects of child abuse Abused and neglected children have poorly integrated cerebral hemispheres.
	This poor integration of hemispheres and underdevelopment of the orbitofrontal cortex is the basis for such symptoms as And think about this in terms of your life or the lives of people around you.
	Difficulty regulating emotion.
	Lack of course and effect thinking.
	If I do this, then bad things will happen.
	If I steal this, I might go to jail.
	They have lack of course and effect thinking, which is to do with the deferral of gratification.
	An inability to accurately recognize emotions in others.
	An inability of the child to articulate the child's own emotions.
	An incoherent sense of self and autobiographical history that's related to hippocampal damage and a lack of conscience.
	Perhaps you were raised by somebody like this.
	It's very important to understand this.
	Children who have been sexually abused are at significant risk of developing anxiety disorders, two times the average.
	Major depressive disorder is 3.4 times.
	Alcohol abuse, 2.5.
	Drug abuse, 3.8.
	and antisocial behavior, criminal, 4.3 times the average.
	Meaning.
	Early interpersonal experiences have a profound effect on the brain because the brain circuits responsible for social perception are the same as those that integrate such functions as the creation of meaning, the regulation of body states, the regulation of emotion, the organization of memory. the regulation of emotion, the organization of memory.
	and the capacity for interpersonal communication and empathy.
	These are depressed people or angry people who feel that life has no meaning or who are nihilistic.
	It's a kind of brain damage.
	Memory and stress.
	Stressful experiences that are overly traumatizing or chronic cause chronic elevated levels of neuroendocrine hormones.
	High levels of these hormones can cause permanent damage to the hippocampus, which is critical for memory.
	So if you have black holes in your childhood, it's important to look at what is around those black holes.
	Is it stress? Was it abuse?
	Based on this, we can assume that psychological trauma can impair a person's ability to create and retain memory and impede trauma resolution.
	If you can't remember it, you can't deal with it.
	Emotions. The effects of early maltreatment on child's development, as we're arguing here, are profound and long-lasting.
	It is the impact of maltreatment on a child's developing brain that causes effects seen in a wide variety of domains, including social, psychological, and cognitive development.
	The ability to regulate emotions and become emotionally attuned with another person depends on early experiences and the development of specific regions of the brain.
	Early maltreatment causes deficits in the development of these brain regions, primarily the orbitofrontal cortex and corpus callosum, because of the toxic effects of stress hormones on the developing brain.
	Too much stress in too long a period of time is toxic, it is a poison on the developing brain.
	stress.
	Brief periods of moderate predictable stress are not problematic.
	In fact, they prepare the child to cope with the general world, tests and sporting events and so on.
	The body's survival actually depends upon the ability to mount a response to stress.
	But prolonged severe or unpredictable stress, including abuse and neglect, during a child's years, particularly the early years, is highly problematic.
	The brain's development can literally be altered by these experiences, resulting in negative impacts on the child's physical, cognitive, emotional, and social growth.
	This chronic stimulation of the brain's fear response means that the regions of the brain involved in this response are frequently activated.
	When they are, other regions of the brain, such as those involved in complex thought, cannot also be activated and therefore not available to the child to learn with.
	What that means is that when you're in your fight-or-flight mechanisms or your fear response or your amygdala is overstimulated, as it is during chronic stress and abuse, you can't learn as effectively.
	You're dissociated, you're tense, you're stressed.
	This is, of course, why learning disorders, despite high intelligence, are often associated with these kinds of issues.
	Persistent fear response.
	Chronic stress or repeated traumas can result in a number of biological reactions.
	Neurochemical systems are affected which can cause a cascade of changes in attention, impulse control, sleep, and fine motor control.
	Chronic activation of certain parts of the brain involved in the fear response, such as the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, HPA, can wear out other parts of the brain, such as the hippocampus, which is involved in cognition and memory.
	Early experiences of trauma can also interfere with the development of the subcortical and limbic systems, which can result in extreme anxiety, depression, and difficulty forming attachments to other people.
	Chronic activation of the neural pathways involved in the fear response can create permanent memories which shape the child's perception of and response to his environment.
	And of course, so often children are blamed for not paying attention, for being in another world, for being a daydreamer, for being nervous, rather than recognizing that their brains have been damaged through stress and abuse.
	Hyperarousal. Less fun than it sounds.
	When a child is exposed to chronic traumatic stress, his brain sensitizes the pathways of the fear response and literally creates memories such that his fear response becomes almost automatic.
	He doesn't really think about it.
	This is called a state of hyperarousal.
	This brain is adapted to a world that is unpredictable and dangerous.
	It is hypervigilant, focused on nonverbal cues that may be threatening.
	Dangerous parent, a drunken parent, a drugged out parent, a violent parent.
	The regions of the brain involved in the hyperarousal response are always on.
	And because of this, the child may frequently experience hyperactivity, anxiety, impulsivity, and sleep problems.
	Their horses are constantly charging.
	It's a constant stampede.
	Dissociation. While hyperarousal is more common in older children and males, dissociation is more common in younger children and in females, children who often feel or are immobile or powerless.
	Dissociation is characterized by first attempting to bring caretakers to help, and if this is unsuccessful, becoming motionless or freezing and compliant and eventually dissociating.
	This is often called the surrender response.
	People describe children in dissociative states as numb, non-reactive, or acting like they aren't there.
	And it's true, though, not just saying it's related to these children, it's true that a lot of people who commit atrociously violent acts have no memory of it afterwards.
	Even if shown footage of their violent acts feel like it wasn't me, I wasn't there.
	Disrupt the detachment process.
	Much of a child's emotional development, as we're arguing here, is rooted in his relationships with his early primary caregivers.
	For example, it appears that aggressive, submissive, and frustration behaviors may be genetically encoded.
	If relationships with the caregivers are positive, the child's cognitive structures learn to regulate these emotions and behaviors.
	If the relationships are negative or weak, the lower brain responses become dominant, and the cognitive regulating structures do not develop to their full capacity.
	The young child may not fully develop the cognitive ability to control his emotions, nor develop an awareness of others' emotions.
	So we're born with the capacity for this kind of violence, and positive relationships intervene in that and give us maturity and self-control.
	Children who have been abused and neglected often lack empathy and truly do not understand what others feel like when they do something hurtful.
	Neglect and Empathy Babies need to experience face-to-face baby talk and hear countless repetitions of sounds in order to build the brain circuitry that will enable them to start making sounds and eventually say words and form sentences.
	If babies are ignored, if their caregivers do not provide this type of intense verbal interaction their language development may be delayed.
	If a child does not receive kindness as an infant he may not know how to show kindness as an adult.
	If a child's cries for attention are ignored as a toddler he may not know how to interact positively with others later.
	These capacities may not fully develop because the required neuronal pathways were not activated enough to form the memories needed for future learning.
	Abuse in learning. To learn and incorporate new information, whether it be a lesson in the classroom or a new social experience, the child's brain must be in a state of attentive calm, a state that traumatized child rarely achieves because they're on this electrical storm of hyperarousal.
	It's not uncommon for teachers who work with traumatized children to observe that the children are really smart, but they do not learn easily.
	They're often diagnosed with learning disabilities.
	Summary. The effects of abuse and neglect on the developing brain during a child's first few years can result in various mental health problems.
	For example, diminished growth in the left hemisphere may increase the risk for depression.
	Irritability in the limbic system can set the stage for the emergence of panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
	Smaller growth in the hippocampus and limbic abnormalities can increase the risk for dissociative disorders and memory impairments.
	Impairment in the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been linked to symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. The Effects of Abuse From Scientific American, a difficult childhood reduces life expectancy by 20 years among adults.
	Family Research Laboratory, the University of New Hampshire, conducted a large study involving over 3,000 mothers of 3-5 year-old children during the late 1980s.
	They found that 63% of the mothers had spanked their child at least once during the previous week.
	Among those spanks, they hit their children a little over three times a week on average.
	The researchers found that the children who were spanked the most as three- to five-year-olds exhibited higher levels of antisocial behavior when observed two and four years later.
	Of course. This included higher levels of hitting siblings, hitting other children in school, defying parents, and ignoring parental rules.
	Dr. Murray Strauss, the co-director of the laboratory, noted how ironic it is that the behaviors for which parents spank children are liable to get worse as a result of the spanking.
	Corporal punishment and IQ. The Family Research Laboratory of the University of New Hampshire released a study which showed that the more often a child is spanked, the lower they score in IQ tests four years later.
	We've just looked at the physical basis for these kinds of findings.
	The researchers do not attribute the lower IQ tests directly to physical injuries sustained during the spanking.
	Rather, they believe that That parents who do not spank are forced to use more reasoning and explaining while disciplining the child.
	Some parents think this is a waste of time, said the researchers, but the research shows that such verbal parent-child interactions enhance the child's cognitive ability.
	Yes. 13% of the parents reported spanking their children 7 or more times a week.
	The average was 3.6 spankings per week.
	27% reported using no physical punishment.
	Again, that's self-reporting.
	It's probably lower.
	Those children who were spanked frequently averaged 98 on their IQ test, a below average score.
	Those who were rarely or never spanked scored 102, an above average score.
	The four-point average decline in IQ among the spanked students is sufficient to have a negative functional effect on these children.
	And for those who are going to ask, yes, they did normalize for everything under the sun.
	Spanking and antisocial behaviors.
	This is a quote. Even minimal amounts of spanking can lead to an increased likelihood in antisocial behavior by children.
	This study provides further methodologically rigorous support for the idea that corporal punishment is not an effective or appropriate disciplinary strategy.
	I would go even further and say I have no idea why children need to be disciplined at all.
	I'm a father and I think I have something useful to say about it, but we'll talk about that another time.
	A 2006 study based on a national survey on mental health found that physical punishment in childhood is associated with an increased rate of major depression and alcohol abuse or dependence later in life.
	Physical punishment was defined in the study as minor assault, such as being slapped, spanked, pushed or shoved.
	If you spank your child, you are increasing their risk of alcohol abuse or dependence and major depression later in life.
	It is abusive.
	A person with an adverse childhood experience score of greater than 4 was 460% more likely to be depressed than a person with an ACE score of 0.
	A 2002 study, quote, The meta-analysis also demonstrates that the frequency and severity of the corporal punishment matters.
	The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to have mental health problems.
	Another 2002 study.
	For males with a certain gene, 85% of the boys who were abused during childhood turned to criminal or antisocial behavior as adults.
	Spanking and punitive political beliefs We found that, particularly for males who had never had any psychotherapy, when they reported a high level of childhood punishment, they were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies, like support for the death penalty, opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force.
	What we have found, really broadly, is the higher level of punitiveness among political conservatives is really strongly associated with experiences, generally, of harsh punishment from childhood.
	It's not just going to be that they were spanked.
	There's a whole family climate, and punishment is just going to be one of those indicators of that.
	In our research, we also found that when we gave people the statement, the amount of physical and sexual abuse in this country is greatly exaggerated by the mass media, conservatives were significantly more likely to agree with that.
	This could be partly because, in my opinion, the hippocampal damage of child abuse says they can't remember it.
	Physical abuse and cancer.
	Even after counting, for age, race, sex, childhood, stressors, adult, health behaviors, and adult household income, individuals who had been physically abused as children were 47% more likely to develop cancer than individuals who had not been abused.
	Just tragic.
	As St. Augustine said, in my beginning is my end.
	One theory is that chronic stress that an abused child is constantly under brings up levels of the fight-or-flight hormone cortisol.
	Increased levels of the hormone might interfere with the immune system's ability to detect and get rid of cancer cells.
	I talk about this in my interview with Greg Siegel.
	Thank you.
	Child abuse and depression Child abuse and neglect were associated with a 51% increased risk for current major depressive disorder in young adulthood.
	Major depressive disorder is a serious, serious thing.
	It's not the blues. It's like can't get out of bed and stuff.
	Children who were physically abused had a 59% increased risk of lifetime major depressive disorder.
	Those who experienced multiple types of abuse had a 75% increased risk of lifetime MDD. The risk of current major depressive disorder was 59% higher for those who were neglected, but not abused.
	And we'll talk about the cures again very briefly.
	And, you know, just to remind you, I'm just a podcaster.
	Please do all of your own research.
	Make no decisions based on anything I'm saying.
	Talk to a professional.
	The two that seem to be important, and the two that have certainly worked for me, I had an adverse childhood experience score of 8, which is horrendously high.
	And these are the two that have worked for me, and there seems to be some research that supports their efficacy.
	So the effects of psychotherapy, this is talking cure, this is not medication on brain function.
	Unipolar major depressive disorder, MDD, is a debilitating condition with a lifetime prevalence of 17%.
	Recent epidemiological evidence indicates that MDD is the fourth leading cause of disease burden and the leading cause of disability-adjusted life years.
	It is a major, major illness.
	What are the effects of psychotherapy on brain function with regards to this?
	Well, the data seems to show that effective psychotherapy can robustly change brain functioning in specific brain areas related to cognitive control, self-referential processing, cause and effect, denial of gratification and so on, reward-based decision-making, and assigning emotional salience to external events.
	The relapse occurred in 76.2% of those receiving medication for major depressive disorders, while only 30.8% of those who received psychotherapy.
	So that's quite effective.
	And here's some examples.
	This is a sagittal view showing brain air is responsive to a 12-week course of behavioral activation therapy from a functional or MRI task that assesses anticipation of rewards.
	The red crosshair demarcates the left chordate, part of the brain's striatal reward system.
	So what this means is that when people have had a 12-week course of psychotherapy, they anticipate greater rewards from things.
	They're able to think that things will be better in the future.
	If they go for lunch, if they get a new job, they expect better rewards, which raises their motivation, gets them out of the funk.
	And I talk about this in an interview, which I'll publish after these studies as well.
	The benefits of exercise are huge.
	In children, college students and young adults, exercise or physical activity improves learning and intelligence scores.
	Moreover, exercise in childhood increases the resilience of the brain in later life, resulting in a cognitive reserve strength.
	The decline of memory, cortex and hippocampus atrophy in aging humans can be attenuated by exercise.
	Physical activity improves memory and cognition.
	Exercise protects against the brain damage caused by stroke, promotes recovery after brain injuries, can be an antidepressant.
	How does exercise improve the brain?
	With exercise, the number of neurons increases in the hippocampus, a brain structure, as we've looked at, that's essential to memory and learning.
	Also, synaptic plasticity increases in a certain part of the hippocampus due to exercise, the dentate gyrus.
	Now, again, I'm no expert.
	Synaptic plasticity means that more connections can be made.
	Spine density increases in certain parts of the hippocampus.
	Exercise also increases and improves the small blood vessels throughout the brain.
	Exercise can change the function of neurotransmitters and can activate the monoamine system.
	Cognitive behavioral therapy.
	How effective is CBT? CBT deals with an examination of core beliefs of the thoughts that precede the emotional states of the interpretations that provoke, in a sense, the emotional reactions.
	Well, let's look at CBT versus a panic disorder with agoraphobia or a fear of open spaces.
	A review of approximately 150 research studies has shown that 87% of people with PDA improved with only a 10% relapse rate for CBT as compared to a 60% improvement rate with a 35% relapse rate for antidepressants and a 60% improvement rate with a 90% relapse rate for anti-anxiety medications.
	Which, to me, makes a fair amount of sense.
	If you're only treating the symptoms rather than cause, when you stop treating the symptoms, the cause will create the symptom again.
	Cognitive behavioral therapy for panic disorder without agoraphobia has an improvement rate of 90% with a 5% relapse rate.
	Part 4 of this series will be up next.
	Thank you so much for watching and listening.
	You can find the references at fdrurl.com forward slash tn underbar abuse one.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
	Thank you so much. Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well. This is True News, The Bomb in the Brain, Part 4, the aftermaths of child abuse, the etiology of belief.
	And here it is that we're going to put everything together.
	That we've been studying in the Bomb and the Brain series as well as in the psychological interviews that I have been conducting with the subject matter experts into one glowing motivational punch to the neofrontal cortex on how to change the world.
	If you've spent any time trying to convince people, as Socrates and philosophers onwards, and libertarians and objectivists and anarchists have onwards, trying to convince people about being better, being more rational, looking at the reason and evidence more objectively, you'll realize that it is a little bit like putting your forehead up into a cheese grater and repeatedly nodding your head, or rather shaking it, because people don't respond very well to reason and evidence.
	And yet we find it very hard to give up reason and evidence as our primary ways to communicate about truth, because we have what I consider an erroneous perception of what is actually occurring when somebody has a belief.
	There's a perception that most people have that what we start with is a kind of blank slate.
	We start in the Lockean blank slate state.
	And then, from that blank slate, we receive reason and evidence.
	Arguments, sense, perception, and so on.
	We read books, we see documentaries, we go to school, and we get reason and evidence.
	And starting from a blank, unbiased state, we are presented with reason and evidence or go out to pursue it.
	And from there, we get our beliefs.
	And therefore, what most people who want to change the world do is they focus on reason and evidence.
	and libertarians, and objectivists, and free marketeers, and even communists, and fascists, and so on, they say, well, look, you have the wrong reason and evidence, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you better reason and evidence, and that is going to change your beliefs, because your beliefs are derived from reason and and that is going to change your beliefs, because your beliefs But if you spend any time trying to debate things in the real world, you realize that this does not work.
	It does not work.
	What happens is you give new reason and evidence, and people ignore it, or they will accept it grudgingly and then forget it the next day, and so their beliefs do not change, and if you're attempting to change people's beliefs by changing their reason, the reason and evidence that they have, you are engaged in a chaotic quest, which will lead straight off a you are engaged in a chaotic quest, which will lead straight off a yawning, dull, Thelma And you have to be willing to throw away that approach.
	At least I believe so.
	And maybe this comes...
	I'm one of the few free marketeers who's actually spent a lot of time in the cutting edge of the free market as the CTO of a small software company.
	So I'm used to throwing out even my most cherished beliefs for the sake of what the market actually demands.
	And this is what I have done in my approach through Free Domain Radio.
	So I'm often asked, well, why do I deal with early childhood?
	Why do I deal with family history?
	Why do I deal with self-knowledge?
	And why do I suggest therapy?
	Well, because I like facts and I am an empiricist and I like to do things that work.
	And when I find that I'm doing things that don't work, i.e.
	arguing from reason and evidence and not having it work, I like to change my tag so that I can do things that work.
	Call me a crazy empirical rationalist, but that's my approach.
	So, let's look at the facts of belief, the biological facts of belief.
	You have to know this stuff if you want to change the world.
	In the same way that if you want to help people lose weight, you have to study some nutrition, at least.
	You have to study how the brain processes beliefs if you want to change beliefs.
	So, the first thing to understand about the brain is that the evolutionary primacy of the brain's fear circuitry make it much more powerful than the reasoning circuits.
	When people become anxious or afraid, and particularly when they don't know why they're feeling that way, or if they don't even know that they're feeling that way, the neofrontal cortex, the reasoning centers of the brain, shut down.
	So when you approach people with a belief that makes them anxious, their amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight response, which shuts down the neofrontal cortex.
	This is very, very important to understand.
	Now, the amygdala, we talked about this before, is sort of the base of the brain.
	It's the reptile side of the brain, the T-Rex of the human brain.
	The amygdala has a profusion of connections to higher brain regions.
	But these are neurons that carry one-way traffic from the amygdala to the neocortex.
	One-way traffic, so the fight-or-flight mechanism rises up to swamp the neocortex, and very little, very little information goes from the cortex to the amygdala, however.
	So it's mostly one way. When people get anxious, their reasoning shuts down, their higher brain centers shut down, and they react on instinct, which is evasion or avoidance or dissociation or anger or rejection or contempt, but they're all just running on automatic.
	It is not a thoughtful process when people get anxious.
	Now, you can change this, as we have talked about with some of the experts.
	You can change this, but it requires a conscious process of trying to understand where your impulses are coming from.
	I'm a big fan, of course, as an amateur, of the approach to psychology that tries to deal with core beliefs, as is cognitive psychology.
	So this is the reality of the brain.
	So it allows the amygd to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa.
	Again, this is where we start without self-knowledge.
	And this, of course, makes good sense.
	Fear is far, far more powerful than reason, and I will give you the sources to all of this information.
	Just to the right, there'll be a link.
	Fear evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint, there's nothing more important to that.
	So fear is not only more powerful than rationality, it's also absurdly easy to evoke for reasons that lie deep into our...
	Evolutionary past. It makes sense, right?
	You would rather jump away from a stick that turns out not to be a snake than not jump away from a stick which turns out to be a snake.
	So fear overrides reason and that is entirely beneficial to us throughout our evolution.
	So the brain is wired to flinch first and perhaps ask questions later.
	You may, after you jump away, look to see if the stick is a snake or maybe not.
	Lots of experiments have been run, and I will cite just a few here, but if you look into my references, there are many, many more.
	So classic experiments. Scientists compared people's responses to offer of flight insurance that would cover death by any cause or death by terrorism.
	Of course, logically, death by terrorism is subsumed under the umbrella category death by any cause.
	But the specificity of the word terrorism combined with the stark images that the word evokes triggers the amygdala's fear response in a way that by any cause does not.
	People are willing to spend more for terrorism insurance than death by any cause insurance.
	It's not rational. But when you are afraid, when you are anxious, when you are frightened, the fear response shuts down your reasoning centers and you act in a very primal way.
	And philosophy does this to people all the time.
	It is like a tsunami on this small, trembling fishing village of prior bigoted cultural preconceptions.
	Death and ideology. So another experiment.
	Volunteers who identified themselves as political conservatives were given reminders of mortality.
	After that prompt, they rated gay marriage, abortion, and sexual immorality as greater threats to the nation than they had before the reminders.
	This is called priming. You unconsciously give people sequences of words that provoke a particular response later on.
	So the researcher says, quote, when you remind people of their mortality, they defend their worldview more strongly and reject those who challenge it.
	Biology and ideology.
	New research suggests that such different reactions and perhaps all political beliefs might have a basis in biology.
	And biology does not in this case mean genetics, although there is some component, but it means that it's deep in the brain.
	It's a biological response.
	So these two fellows quiz people on their political views on topics ranging from the war in Iraq to capital punishment and premarital sex.
	All the participants had strongly held beliefs that identified them as socially liberal or socially conservatives.
	Well, what happened? So a couple of months after the survey, the researchers showed the subjects random pictures while measuring how imperceptible changes in their perspiration affected skin conductivity, which is a marker of the fight-or-flight mechanism.
	When an image of a bloody face or maggot-filled wound appeared, conservatives sweated more than liberals, even after accounting for differences that might be due to sex, income, age, or education.
	The same trend held for blinking in response to a loud, random noise.
	Conservatives blink harder than liberals in innate response to a threat.
	So conservatives are hardwired to respond to threats more strongly.
	So some genetic differences do underlie our political leanings.
	So if you have a genetic difference, say for instance that certain mutations affect how a region of the brain called the amygdala, which we've talked about, reacts to fearful images.
	If you have an amygdala that reacts more strongly to fear, then you are more likely to be a conservative.
	I know it sounds weird, but these are the facts which we have to work with.
	And whenever we get lost, we take out the compass of empiricism and science and we look for the facts.
	What about will?
	See, I'm sort of making the case that a lot goes on in our brains that we're not conscious of, and a lot goes on in the brains of those we talk to about truth and reason and evidence that they're not conscious of.
	So, do we really will as much as we think we do?
	Well, when linked to electrodes, subjects were asked of this experiment to move their fingers, quote, at will.
	And researchers found they were able to identify three distinct blips in the electrical impulses of the brain throughout the course of action.
	The first was the readiness potential, i.e.
	I'm about to move my finger.
	Sometime after the readiness potential came the experience of willing the finger.
	And then there was a third distinct movement which was actually moving the finger.
	The researchers discovered that the subject's readiness potential occurred distinctly before the subjects themselves perceived consciously wanting to move the finger.
	The experience of the conscious will, it appears, arises at some point after the brain has already begun the action.
	Right? So, they're asked to move their fingers randomly, but the brain starts to move the fingers before they make the decision to move the fingers.
	The will is an effect of an unconscious impulse.
	In other words, the will in this instance is somewhat of an illusion.
	This is very important.
	Sorry, you know that. So, free?
	Let's look at another one.
	Another study research has put a series of subjects into a transcranial magnetic stimulation device, which has been found to cause, through a directed magnetic impulse, the involuntary movement of different parts of the human body.
	Without explaining the operation of the device to the subjects, the experimenters asked them to move either their right or their left finger, whichever they chose, whenever they heard a click.
	The click was actually the sound of the device turning on and forcing the movement of a particular digit left or right hand.
	Although the magnetic impulses led the subjects to move the finger they moved, the subjects nevertheless perceived that they were choosing which finger to move and then moving it, right?
	So the machine was sending an electrical impulse to make the fingers move, but the subject said, no, I chose to move it.
	Again, here the will is an illusion.
	When asked whether they had voluntarily chosen which fingers to move, participants showed no inkling that something other than their will was creating their choice.
	So will, and we'll get to free will in a sec, is an illusion in many cases.
	So the researcher says the experience of will is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation.
	This is going to be crucial when we look at the development of belief in a minute or two.
	So here's another example.
	Subjects viewed a computer screen that flashed strings of letters and were asked to judge whether they saw words in what flashed.
	The screen would go entirely blank each trial either after the subject pressed the response button or automatically after a very short time if the subject failed to respond.
	The intervals were so quick it was difficult for the subjects to tell whether their response triggered the blank screen or whether it had automatically gone blank.
	One group of subjects, however, was subliminally primed with a flash of the word I or me.
	Subjects reported not recognizing it just prior to the flash of letters that they could consciously see and were to evaluate.
	This is priming. This is giving you the words which you're not conscious of.
	They go into the unconscious. You're not conscious of them.
	I or me. The researchers found that subjects primed with the terms I or me were more likely to conclude that they had caused the screen to go blank.
	Then were the subjects who had not been so primed.
	The subjects, it seemed, were influenced by the unconscious priming of self to attribute an ambiguous action to their own.
	The inscrutable unconscious.
	Our experience of will, then, is not only an internal illusion in many cases, it is an internal illusion that is susceptible to external situational manipulation.
	Quote, This is from a researcher.
	The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do.
	In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action.
	Unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as the cause of the action.
	So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.
	We feel the impulse, we act, and then we have a story Or a belief about what caused our action.
	We say this again because we'll be coming back to this and pounding it hard when it comes to political ideology.
	We feel an impulse, we act, and then we create a story about why we did what we did.
	This is called the positional effect.
	So subjects were asked in a bargain store to judge which one of four nylon stocking pantyhoses was the best quality.
	The subjects were not told that the stockings were in fact identical.
	The stockings were presented to the subjects hanging on racks, spaced equal distance apart.
	A situation would have it that the position of the stockings had a significant effect on the subjects' quality judgments.
	In particular, moving from left to right, 12% of the subjects judged the first stockings as being the best quality, 17% of the second, 13% chose the third, and 40% chose the fourth.
	So it clearly is going up in a very staircase fashion.
	The most recently viewed pair of stockings.
	When asked about their respective judgments, most of the subjects attributed their decision to the knit or weave, sheerness, elasticity or workmanship of the stockings that they chose to be of the best quality.
	So it was purely situational, or largely situational, but people made up these amazing stories as to why they chose what they chose.
	Subjects provided a total of 80 different reasons for their choice.
	Not one, however, mentioned the position of the stockings or the relative recency with which the pairs were viewed.
	Nobody got that it was the last stocking that people viewed as the highest quality.
	None, that is, saw the situation.
	In fact, when asked whether the position of the stockings could have influenced their judgments, only one subject admitted that the position could have been influential.
	The researchers concluded that what matters is not why the position effect occurs, but that it occurs.
	And that subjects do not report it or recognize it even when it is pointed out to them.
	This is why Socrates started with know thyself.
	Know yourself. Look into your unconscious.
	Look into yourself. Introspection, self-knowledge, therapy.
	It's so essential because otherwise you're being run by forces that are unconscious and you will only create the illusion of the self, the illusion of will, the illusion of ideology, the illusion of philosophy after the fact, after you have had the impulse, after you have acted, you will make up a story about what you did.
	And most people do that and that's not good.
	Consciously processed information can override these emotional and experience-driven biases if we devote enough time and attention to the decision.
	This is not my opinion. This is the opinion of the researchers.
	I happen to agree with it, so I think that's important.
	But we can examine and override these unconscious impulses if we devote enough time and attention to the decision and to self-knowledge.
	Experiments show that the information we're not aware of can more strongly influence even the most deliberative, non-emotional sort of decision, even more than does the information we are aware of.
	It is a great danger to go through life blindfolded to the self because we act, we feel impulses, we act, and then everything that we come up with in terms of beliefs and ideology is ex post facto reasoning to justify what we just did because we don't really know why.
	The unconscious is culture.
	In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson notes that the brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously.
	The brain can absorb about 11 million pieces of information a second, of which it can process about 40 consciously.
	So if you're not harnessing and understanding the power of the unconscious, you are absolutely crippled when it comes to knowing the world.
	The unconscious brain handles all but 40 if a million, 11 million pieces of information.
	You need to get a hold of this supercharged part of the brain.
	Alright, so let's start and turn to political beliefs.
	The brains of liberals and conservatives may be constructed and work differently.
	Scientists at these universities, you can look at the presentation if you're just listening to the audio, found that a specific region of the brain's cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberal than in self-declared conservatives.
	It has to do with switching gears.
	The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual responses would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.
	Now, criticisms of the liberal brain, which we'll get to.
	But let's look at the conservative brain.
	So, a review of the research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity, and less open to new experiences.
	Some of the traits associated with conservatives in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression, and tolerance of inequality.
	So, what was an experiment that was run?
	So participants in this experiment were college students whose politics raged from very liberal to very conservative.
	Scientists instructed them to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in a knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.
	Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in their anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency, pressing any key, and a more appropriate response, not pressing a key.
	Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W. Researchers said liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M. What were the numbers?
	They were significant. Liberals were 4.9 times more likely than conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and were 2.2 times more likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.
	Here are some brain scans of Democrat, Republican, and Independent brains.
	You can see that what's being lit up is very, very different.
	You're dealing with a different animal when you're dealing with political ideology.
	The brain is different.
	If you're trying to change someone's mind, it is not just reason and evidence.
	It is more akin to teaching somebody a new language, or perhaps more appropriately, it is very much closer to rehabilitating somebody from an injury.
	The ideological brain is an injured brain.
	It is a damaged brain.
	And it is rehabilitation to make it better.
	It is not just an argument with reason and evidence.
	Overall, liberals showed higher tolerance for ambiguity and complexity on psychological tests and that conservatives tended towards needing greater structure and order.
	Now, I have some criticisms here, which I'll just drop in very briefly.
	Structure and order are not bad things.
	Science and philosophy and math and engineering all rely on Structure and order.
	And liberals a bit more in the highly relativistic postmodern camp of way too much ambiguity and complexity and not enough structure and order.
	So I don't view that as necessarily superior, but there are some significant differences between these two brain sets.
	Conservatism is quite associated with fear.
	When people fear death or terrorism or in a state of uncertainty, they tend to become more conservative.
	For instance, a study of World Trade Center of Survivors after 9-11 reported that 38% grew more conservative in the 18 months following the attack, as compared with only 13% who became more liberal.
	Politics is prejudice.
	Politics is bigotry.
	Politics is bias.
	So, this is a very powerful study.
	Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting facts get in the way, an 06 study shows.
	And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that is contrary to their point of views.
	Politics is a drug.
	Ideology is a drug.
	So, researchers ask staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information That threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 presidential election.
	The subject's brains were monitored while they pondered.
	Still bias. The researcher says, quote, We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning.
	What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.
	So people are presented with information contrary to their biases and their reasoning centers do not activate.
	The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, these researchers found.
	Then with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust.
	But they actively spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix.
	So when you're presented with information that threatens your mental model, You feel anxiety, you feel disgust, and then when you reject that information, the negative emotions quiet down and you get a positive rush, very similar to what an addict gets when they get a fix.
	Politics is an addiction, as I've always argued.
	The study points to a complete lack of reason in political decision making.
	And for those of us who argue politics or philosophy or libertarianism or objectivism with people, we know all about this.
	I'm just pointing out the physiological basis.
	And the reason I'm doing this is to help you avoid the Randian trap of disgust and horror and revulsion at the world for being so irrational and so hypocritical.
	Well, we're dealing with brain damage, people.
	So politics is irrationality.
	The researcher says, none of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged.
	Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want.
	and then they get massively reinforced for it with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.
	Notably absent were any increases in the activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.
	It is all emotional self-management, anxiety reduction, and the pursuit of the hit of confirmation bias.
	So, the thesis.
	Thank you.
	Some researchers have made an extremely compelling, if unsettling case, that, quote, most of a person's everyday life is determined not by her conscious intentions and deliberate choices, but by mental processes that are put into motion, by features of the environment that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance. by features of the environment that operate outside of conscious A thesis they acknowledge is difficult for people to accept.
	The unconscious bias and bigotry and prejudice and scar tissue and early traumas run people's lives.
	And when you present them with contradictory information, they're...
	Amygdala spikes, their neofrontal cortex, their reasoning center is shut down, and all they do is manage the anxiety by rejecting the information.
	Isn't this a perfect description of what you have faced every single day you have debated with people your life over?
	It's good to know that there's science behind it, isn't it?
	Social psychologists studying the phenomenon have concluded that in our daily lives, our conscious will, quote, plays a causal role in only 5% or so of the time.
	And this is most people who pretty strenuously avoid self-knowledge.
	Now, there are limits, right?
	Before every determinist howler monkey comes chewing on my jugular, there are limits.
	None of the researchers in this field of social science have concluded, and neither do I, that the conscious will is purely and totally an illusion.
	What is asserted and what ex-researchers have demonstrated is that the experience of willpower is far more widespread than the reality of willpower.
	This is not absolute. This can be changed with self-knowledge, with getting the coaching of a great therapist, with journaling, with introspection.
	But first of all, you need to know that you don't know what you don't know.
	So, this is a summation.
	And this goes all the way back to the very beginning of the Free Domain Radio podcast series, the arguments that I made around the need to resolve childhood trauma and early difficult experiences in order to access the reasoning centers of the brain and to have the potential to become truly rational and wise.
	Look, anything which increases amygdala activity automatically tends to swamp the reasoning centers of the brain.
	That is science.
	That is fact. And we know, based on the Balm of the Brain earlier series, that childhood trauma increases amygdala activity significantly.
	Significantly. The degree to which people cannot reason or reject reason and evidence because of anxiety and emotional self-management is the degree to which they have been traumatized.
	I don't just say most people are traumatized because I like the sound of the sentence.
	This is the evidence that is presented, and the evidence that is presented is what you see whenever you debate with people, and they just get angry or upset or dissociate or reject reason and evidence or believe for a moment and then flash back.
	This is all evidence of trauma, because this is what the science tells us.
	Human beings at present are in a state of pre-philosophy.
	It's very, very important. What is occurring for most people whenever they pretend to debate about something is that deep brain impulses drive emotionality, anxiety, fear, anger, fight or flight, which then create actions, which then drive these ex post facto justifications.
	Right? So you say something like taxation is theft and people get angry at you and then they assume that you're wrong because they're angry.
	Right? You say something which is against their worldview, their amygdala fight or flight kicks up, their negative emotional centers in their brains light up, neofrontal cortex shuts down, and the information is rejected in order to calm the brain storm that is occurring from the brain stem.
	It is not a rational process, which is why more reason than evidence does not change people's minds.
	Ideology is not just like a drug, it is a drug.
	People's beliefs or their ideology is a form of self-management or of magical thinking, religious in essence, that is designed to justify their pre-existing internal states.
	People are drawn to be pro-military because they are afraid of the world.
	Why are they afraid of the world? Because of their early childhood experiences.
	This is the reality of the world that we're dealing with.
	We're trying to play basketball with people in wheelchairs.
	We need to rehabilitate them into being able to stand up, or they rather need to do it themselves with the help of a trained therapist.
	The greatest factor we've also seen from the experts, the greatest factor influencing internal states is early childhood experiences.
	And I'm talking not about genetics, but that which is under the control of humanity.
	Thus, and we put all of this together, this is why I have always focused on early childhood experiences and the alleviation of early trauma if it has been experienced, and also focusing on self-knowledge.
	This is the key that Socrates held open 2,500 years ago, which is you have to know yourself first.
	The unexamined life is not worth living because if you don't examine your life and yourself, you're not really alive.
	You're just bumping around like a bumper car or a pinball off various emotional states being provoked by external stimuli.
	There is no way to improve rationality without improving people's childhoods.
	There is no way to do it.
	Reason and evidence will not work because reason and evidence is not the source of people's ideology.
	What is the actual sequence that science reveals?
	Well, let's go left to right.
	The actual sequence that occurs within people's minds There is some form of trauma.
	Trauma doesn't have to be parental.
	It can be based on religious terrorizing.
	It can be based on the frustrations of really bad public schools or even really bad private schools.
	It can be any number of things.
	But trauma occurs. Trauma leads to dysfunction within the brain, to brain damage, as we have seen from a variety of conversations with the subject matter experts.
	The brain damage produces an ideology which is designed to shield the person from the knowledge of the trauma and of the brain damage.
	I am not dysfunctional, say people.
	I am not broken, say people.
	The world is dysfunctional.
	The world is broken.
	Once you have an ideology which arises out of a dysfunctional brain environment which results from early trauma, Once you have an ideology, you then go in a little circular revolving door called reason and evidence, where you go and seek out that which confirms your bias and you reject information that is contrary to it.
	Because reason and evidence is an effect of trauma, brain damage, and the resulting justifications after the fact to explain the behaviors that come out of trauma and brain damage, reason and evidence is the wagging tail on the dog.
	And attempting to change people's minds by appealing to reason and evidence is really attempting to wag the dog.
	It is managing an effect, not a cause.
	And we know that because, A, it doesn't work because people will just reject anything.
	That occurs. And this is why the only way for the world to become more rational, more humane, more empathetic, more peaceful, more caring, more loving and happier Is to, as an adult, examine yourself, examine your own impulses and your own thoughts.
	Always suggest therapy.
	You cannot achieve excellence without coaching.
	You cannot achieve excellence in virtue and self-knowledge without a competent coach, in my opinion.
	If you can't do it, try to do it.
	If you can't do it, at least start on your own so that when you do go to a therapist, you will save some money because you'll be further up the learning curve.
	But this is the reality.
	This is the reality of what happens in people's brains.
	This is why reason and evidence don't work.
	And this is why we need to improve our relationship with ourselves, uncover and resolve early traumas, become better parents to our children, and then, and then, and only then, do we get a free, happy, peaceful, and prosperous world.
	And there's no other way.
	Thank you so much for watching this series.
	I appreciate your patience. The references are here.
	FDRURL.COM forward slash TN Underbar Abuse 4.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful life.
	Thank you so much for watching. We have here today Stéphane Molyneux.
	He is the founder and he runs a philosophy show which boasts a 65 million download, which is something pretty incredible.
	Please put your hands together for Stéphane Molyneux.
	Thank you. Thank you very much.
	I normally do pyrotechnics and cartwheels and confetti cannons for my speeches, but this is going to be a sort of data transfer.
	This is going to be like a matrix plug-in of what I call the bomb in the brain, which is the effects of child abuse on domestic violence.
	I think to me domestic violence is one of those words that artificially separates the violence that we see all around us in the world from the violence that has its origins in the family home.
	Really all violence, I would argue, is domestic violence because you cannot become an adult with the capacity to inflict violence on people unless you have first experienced violence And so I think that domestic violence is all violence,
	and if you want to solve the cycle of violence and you wish, as all good people do, to have a civilized and peaceful world, you must first focus on the origins of violence, the origins of war, the origins of abuse, and human predation, which occurs in the womb, it occurs in infancy, it occurs in toddlerhood, and the bitter fruit is found in adulthood.
	When the spurned and hurt child is big enough to take vengeance on a world that either hurt him, ignored him, or supported and enabled his abuser.
	So we're going to go fairly rapidly.
	I have about an hour, and I'd like to leave a little bit of time for questions.
	So I'll go at nine times speed, but I think you can slow down the recording later if you like.
	So I think every generation gets these...
	Scare stories in childhood.
	For me, when I was a kid, and you can let me know what it was for you.
	For me, when I was a kid, razor blades in Halloween candy.
	Did you... Is that still...
	Younger people here, did that still occur for you guys?
	Fabrication. Yeah.
	Well, mostly. I mean, it was very, very rare.
	Ailar in apples. Do you remember that?
	There's supposed to be some poison in apples.
	Does anyone else have anything as scare stories as kids?
	I'm sorry? Tylenol.
	Well, the Tylenol thing was fairly real.
	I mean, but for kids that they talk about, this is really scary.
	Stranger abduction, again, it's real.
	But of course, most violence occurs within the home.
	But there's lots of things that people hear about or talk about.
	We remember the panic about swine flu.
	There was massive concerns about BPA in baby bottles, lead in children's toys.
	And these are all real issues but very small.
	Relative to, there is an amazingly and terrifyingly prevalent problem in society that has lifelong effects on health.
	And the data is still coming out about this.
	It can contribute to a 48% greater chance of contracting cancer.
	It has an average effect on the human lifespan of reducing it by 20 years.
	And it triggers massive increases in drug addiction promiscuity, STDs, alcoholism, criminality, suicidality, depression, etc.
	And it is in general, though the data is discussed in professional journals, as yet misunderstood or not understood or not visible at all to the general population in society.
	It is a terrible omission within the culture that we do not talk about something which produces such horrendous negative effects, both to individuals and to society as whole.
	So, there is a study that is ongoing, and I had the head of the study on my show.
	17,000 Kaiser Permanente Patients or holders of insurance policies were studied over many years.
	And these are middle class people, generally pretty affluent.
	They don't even represent where significant portions of the victims of child abuse end up, which is in the lower stratas of society or the invisible black and gray market stratas of society.
	And the head of the study, Dr.
	Vincent Felitti, developed something called the ACEs, Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
	And he tried to figure out why some people got so sick, why some people died so early, why some people were so prone to addictions.
	And it has profound negative, child abuse has profound negative effects on adult health and well-being decades later.
	So, here's an example of a...
	This is a three-year-old child.
	On the left, we have a child who is developed in a relatively healthy environment.
	And on the right, we have a child who has been abused.
	And as you can see, the brain mass is significantly different.
	And I would argue that we actually develop almost as different species When we go through child abuse, almost as different species.
	We like to think of sort of one common humanity, and certainly that is the goal, I think, of all people.
	But certain people who are exposed to, they have a genetic predisposition to and are exposed to significant violence or the effects of violence within the womb.
	I mean, when the mother is stressed, the fetus is bathed in cortisol and other hormones and...
	Pathogens which harm the development of the brain.
	Capacity for empathy is diminished and so on.
	We'll get onto that. So I would argue that the child on the right is going to grow up to be most likely some form of either self-destructive or other destructive human being.
	Either a predator of the self or a predator of others.
	And it's this, I think, that we really have to focus on to build a better and more peaceful world.
	So adverse childhood experiences, I guess the first question is how prevalent are they?
	And adverse childhood experiences, I won't go through the whole list, but it's all the way from divorce to being physically or verbally or sexually abused.
	It is having a family member addiction in family members, incarceration within family members and so on.
	Things like neglect or being put in daycare at a very early age, which children or infants put in daycare for more than 20 hours a week experience the same symptoms as children completely abandoned by their mothers and fathers.
	So it doesn't even count that.
	It doesn't count neglect so much, but it counts pretty egregious abuse.
	And as you can see, up to 40%, 30%, 40% of people have zero.
	Good. But as you can see, the prevalence goes down.
	And the real tragedy is the greater than 4% Which is when things go bad in a family, they tend to go really bad.
	I mean, it tends to be a real domino effect.
	Alcoholism leads to job instability, leads to financial insecurity, leads to moving around a lot, leads to a lack of continuity.
	I mean, it just goes on and on.
	So this is the prevalence that has been found so far.
	We'll do a little bit, I'm going to go through this stuff fairly fast, but to understand what happens in the brain is very important because it does develop in different ways.
	My sort of belief is that our brain from conception onwards is, in a sense, scanning for what kind of environment it's going to have to survive in.
	Now if there's peace and calm and not yelling and the mother is well fed and relaxed and so on, I think the developing brain assumes that negotiation and peace and trade and all that kind of good stuff is going to be...
	How you flourish. It's going to be a peaceful and trade-based society.
	That's how you flourish. And therefore, hair-triggered tempers, violence and so on is not going to be the way that you're going to flourish.
	If, on the other hand, the mother is subjected to shortages of food, if the mother is subjected to massive amounts of stress, if there's loud noises, bangs and yells, I believe that the brain then develops To anticipate a time of scarce resources and massive social conflict, in which case peaceful handshakes and cooperation are going to get you plowed under the general tidal wave of sociopaths in charge.
	So it is my belief that the brain is scanning from conception onwards, what do I need to survive?
	We adapt, we evolve from the womb onwards to what social cues are coming in, even before we're born from the mother's stress system and so on.
	And this shows up quite a lot here.
	So just very quickly, I'm sure you know some of this stuff.
	So the amygdala is memory, emotional reactions, and controls the fight or flight.
	Some people call it the lizard brain, although I find that lizards are pretty peaceful for the most part.
	Hippocampus, long-term memory and spatial navigation.
	Corpus callosum, communication between the two hemispheres.
	And there are one of the significant brain differences between boys and girls is in that area.
	The prefrontal cortex, this is what we would call the ego.
	It's really the top rational part of us that allows us to intercept the impulses.
	From the amygdala.
	And you really, statistically, only have about a half a second to intercept an impulse from the amygdala to yell or to hit.
	And it is this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that delays gratification, that interferes with that lizard brain that says, no more cheesecake for you, or whatever it is.
	This is a very important part.
	When that gets damaged, our capacity to have a civilized society goes down with it.
	Alright, so with regards to the biology...
	Oh, sorry. Yeah, let's move on.
	That was a little animation.
	So the biology of violence is important.
	So after the past few decades, and this is relatively new information, the psychology and neurobiology of violence is very important to understand.
	And the consensus appears to be, and this can always change, but I think the consensus is really beginning to be, that during the first four years of the life, 90% of a child's brain develops through the experiences.
	Now, when I was a kid, there was genetics and then there was environment.
	Like, there were just two opposite things.
	That has now blended together with something called epigenetics, which is that genes are turned on and off depending on your environmental exposures, depending on your environment.
	My genes will get turned on and off depending on my adult life experiences.
	And so it's not as simple as, you know, we're born a certain way and then that certain way is shaped Environment and genetics are in a constant interplay.
	So when we look at a violent human being, the general cop-out in society is, well, you know, like George Thurgood says, born to be bad.
	You know, just born with a bad gene, born with the warrior gene, born a mean guy.
	And then the parents generally portray themselves as victims of some evil spawn Damien-style child, which I would challenge with a fair amount of science.
	Over a hundred careful studies have shown that violence results from insecure attachments and so on.
	So the emotional The content, the emotional triggers within the brain are created in the first few years of life.
	And I'm happy to share this. I know some people taking notes.
	I'm happy to share this presentation with anyone who wants it.
	Insecure bond between the infant and the mother.
	An insecure bond, I think, trains the brain to recognize that there are going to be a shortage of resource and negotiations are win-lose.
	The essence of violence is that the negotiations are always win-lose.
	The essence of free trade Ideally, is that it's win-win, right?
	Like if I have a dollar and you have a pen and we trade, I would obviously rather have my dollar and the pen.
	But if I trade voluntarily, I clearly want the pen more than my dollar and you clearly want the dollar more than my pen.
	So that's win-win. But violence is always win-lose.
	Somebody wins and somebody loses.
	So if you bring win-win to a win-lose environment, you lose.
	If you bring win-lose to a win-win environment, you lose.
	Which is why the brain is always trying to figure out, are we in a win-lose or a win-win environment?
	That's what I need to develop my emotionality in accordance with what is going to be optimal for my survival strategy in the environment that I'm born into.
	So it's mainly the right hemispheres of both the mother and the infant that regulates early emotional states and copes with stress.
	I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for five and a half years now, and babies get a little stressed.
	You know, they're very selfish.
	You know, very self-absorbed.
	Never ask me what I feel like.
	Never ask me if I feel like getting up in the middle of the night.
	And are always discontented that my boobs only come with floss and not milk.
	They're just terrible that way.
	But learning how to self-regulate emotions, the children, the babies, their emotions erupt, which is natural because they need to get attention and resources, and then you soothe them and you teach them, model how to soothe them down from their emotional escalations.
	30% of children have been found through research that if they have a problem, they actually prefer not to go to their parents.
	Because if they go to their parents, the problem will get worse.
	And so this is when you then teach children that they alone have to deal with their problems and that if you go to your parents, it makes things worse.
	That creates a very difficult, self-regulatory, self-soothing environment for children to grow up in.
	So as you may have known, Ceaușescu in Romania had these orphanages where Children were fed, they had medical attention and so on, but they were put in cribs and basically were not touched much at all.
	And a lot of them just died.
	Just died. Yes, if you give them all their nutritional and health requirements but do not touch them, the baby will die.
	Which is an amazing thing that we actually feed on contact.
	Our brain feeds on intimacy, on connection, on eye contact, on caresses, on touch.
	That is what we live on and for.
	Now, a lot of these Romanian orphanage children were adopted by French people because, you know, the horrors of all of this came out after the fall of Ceaușescu.
	And the French couples had an unbelievably difficult time of it.
	This appeared to be irreversible damage in the development of the child.
	It's the sort of analogy that I use is, if your sort of genetics say you should be six feet tall, but you get insufficient nutrition, and you only end up five feet tall, it doesn't matter how much food you get as an adult.
	That is the way you have become.
	There is neuroplasticity, so there is some potential within the brain to heal early damage.
	But as Gabor Maté has pointed out, he's a Vancouver physician who works with drug addicts, the part of your brain that would want to heal is the first part of your brain to go.
	And so you don't actually have the capacity for many people to heal this early damage.
	Eye contact is a sign of connection between healthy people.
	But eye contact with a human predator is considered a sign of aggression.
	Right? So if the baby has eye contact with the mother, I think they're growing up in the win-win environment.
	But if the mother is either not present or not giving eye contact, that's because eye contact is considered to be a threat in a win-lose, in a violent-based society.
	Does that make any sense? It makes a lot of sense, but it's very, very interesting.
	Because think of all those young mothers out there in the world who are...
	Who are nursing and may not be aware of the importance of that eye-to-eye contact.
	Yeah. No, I think eye contact is essential for building that sense of empathy as well.
	I mean, it's very hard to read people without their eyes, which is why, you know, you get in the South stopped by some cop with those mirrored sunglasses on.
	They might as well be a cyborg because you can't get, you can't read them through their eyes.
	So, I mean, you've probably heard of these studies.
	If you separate rhesus monkeys from their mother's gaze, and even if you give them like simulated monkey moms, Great name for a band.
	Anyway, if you give them all of that stuff and you give them all, so they get the fur, they get it, but it's not eye contact.
	They still grow up aggressive and anti-social, which is important.
	And they just come up and attack because then they win loose.
	Insecurely attached children display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached peers.
	That is staggering.
	Staggering. 900% more.
	Isn't it amazing that eye contact can end war?
	When you think about that at a very deep level, just how easy it is.
	We have lots of people who will chain themselves to tanks and lots of people who go and protest and so on.
	But I would argue that the end of criminality, the end of abuse, has a lot to do with eye contact and everything that that entails.
	So as we mentioned, the baby's brain is tuned by the caregiver's brain to produce the correct neurotransmitters and hormones.
	We're a whole mess of opiates and neurotransmitters and dopamines and all of that kind of stuff.
	So learning how to self-soothe, which is how you don't escalate into violence, is often trained by the mother.
	Now, again, I'm aware that there are paternal caregivers here, but for the sake of...
	So depressed or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached...
	Infants who grew up to be violent adults.
	These studies, they're called the Ainsworth studies.
	They run into the hundreds. It is about as established as it can be in the social sciences.
	Now, so if violence produces these problems, let's ask ourselves, what is the prevalence of abuse?
	The ACEs do not include spanking.
	Spanking is still legal in Canada.
	From the age of 2 to 12, you can strike a child except in the face.
	UK childhood sexual assaults, two-thirds of girls and one-third of boys have been used sexually as children.
	Now that is a win-lose situation, as you can imagine.
	Physical abuse is astounding.
	And I've triple-checked these figures because they're just jaw-dropping.
	Two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in their first year of life.
	Two-thirds. Routinely.
	Routinely. 97% they hit their children at least once a week, most a good deal more often using straps, belts, canes, and sticks on the boys.
	Boys are hit much more often than girls, which is one of the reasons why we need conferences like this.
	442 boys studied in 72, one out of every three boys with a particular gene maltreated during childhood, almost certain to exhibit antisocial criminal behaviors in adults.
	This is not determinism.
	There are some people who smoke, like George Burns smoked his whole life and lived to be over 100.
	So the carcinogens of the cigarette smoke or the cigar smoke just didn't happen to hit his genes that way.
	But you don't know ahead of time what's going to happen, what is going to happen.
	And so you don't know if you have a kid with one of these genes or not or whether it's some other combination.
	So this is one of these don't smoke, don't hit kind of situations.
	You know, society talks a lot about how children are...
	The future or children or everything, there's nothing I wouldn't do for my kids, but there are really not a lot of positive feelings that people have about children.
	Study of 900 American mothers, they enjoyed socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV and cooking more than taking care of my children.
	Now, if you've seen a lot of Americans, they don't appear to like exercising at all.
	And the fact that they like their children even less is not good.
	80% of mothers experience mild baby blues for months after birth, postpartum depression for up to several years, and puerperal psychosis.
	Obviously the latter is much more rare.
	So my particular belief is if you combine it with the information in the previous slide, I believe in deep body and brain memories that are in the hippocampus, And if these mothers were hit as infants and then they have a baby, I think that it awakens very primal memories in them that they may not even be conscious of.
	And I think that contributes to this.
	And Landers asked, if you had to do it over again, would you have children?
	Out of 10,000 responses, 70% were a resounding no.
	To unwish the lives of your offspring is pretty chilling.
	And if that's how they felt years later when their children were grown up, imagine how they felt when the children were babies and much more needy.
	So we're going to go very quickly through abuse and cortisol as some of the medical grounds or basis for this.
	It's a hormone that helps the body prepare to cope with stress throughout its effects on metabolism and the immune system.
	So cortisol is designed for you get away from the lion Or you don't, right?
	So the lion roars and jumps at you and it spikes like crazy and then it's supposed to go down.
	Cortisol is the sprinting mechanism.
	You cannot sprint through a marathon and life is a marathon.
	This is why people wear themselves out with stress.
	We have a life now with constant stressors that keeps a lot of people's cortisol levels elevated, which is a carcinogenic risk.
	So, when you are a baby or a toddler subjected to abuse, then your cortisol levels are significantly higher, which has long-term negative health effects.
	Many infants and children who have been maltreated have abnormal secretions of cortisol.
	So they're basically in a permanent fight-or-flight situation or response.
	Now, when you are in a permanent fight-or-flight situation or response, it's my belief that you seek external stressors because you just get addicted to it and it's just what you need to live.
	And you're so used to managing it.
	And Aaron, of course, this was the book to some degree that you wrote in the 70s, which is that people then seek to recreate that situation because that's kind of what their bodies are attuned for.
	I'll race through this pretty quick because I do want to get to some of the good news.
	The fight-or-flight mechanisms of babies who are insecurely attached are more active, they're larger, hyperdeveloped.
	When you're in fight-or-flight mode, your actual seed of reasoning, your neofrontal cortex, I would say the highest human part of us, shuts down.
	Which is, you know, you don't ponder the existence of life when a lion is chasing you.
	You want to continue the existence of life, but you're not pondering it very much.
	So, you know, when you're in the don't die scenario, you're not coming up with a lot of creative and fertile ideas.
	And they have found that when they electrically stimulate the amygdala, people have a sense of being reprimanded by authority.
	I don't know whether that's divine or schoolmaster or what, but they do have a sense of being bad in the eyes of authority, which I assume would be a parental echo.
	And when children experience maternal abandonment fears and maternal abuse, they release this cortisol shutdown, as I mentioned, in the prefrontal cortex.
	makes their amygdala hyperactive, according to one researcher, indelibly imprinting and burning in the memory of the threatening mother in their amygdala, amygdala and module.
	So the brain scans reveal an enduring pattern, according to a researcher, associated with destructive defensive rage is imprinted into an immature, inefficient orbitofrontal or cortical system during relational trauma in early childhood.
	This is changing the brain.
	This is changing the brain.
	Our environment has as much to do with our brain as our eating has to do with our bodies.
	And the right amygdala, which is really the fountain of the fight or flight, is larger and more excitable in psychotics, depressives, those with anxiety disorders, and murderers.
	And it is fed and created through abuse.
	So, sorry to skip some of this, but I would like to talk just a little bit about the mirror neurons, which are fairly new in the science.
	I actually, I cut my tongue the other day when I was eating.
	And I was like, oh, you know, it bled a little bit.
	And my daughter was sitting across from me and she looked at me and she said, oh, dad, I felt that in my own tongue.
	I'm like, yes, mirror neurons successfully implanted.
	She can now be cruel to no one.
	Yay! But these mirror neurons are very important, and if there were a wider dispersion of mirror neurons, then all of the ugly hit-in-the-groin home video shows would stop, right?
	Because when you see a guy getting hit in the groin, if you have mirror neurons, you'd pay good money to not see that because...
	You kind of feel it, right? But a lot of people will laugh at it.
	Or if you see, you know, those shows where they wake some peacefully sleeking guy up with an air horn?
	I mean, that really annoys me.
	I think that's incredibly cruel.
	But, of course, a lot of people find it funny for tragic reasons.
	So these mirror neurons, when the neuropsychiatrist examine the abused and neglected kids, they can actually see the damage done that really affect their need for violence later on.
	This guy Bruce Perry has published a huge number of studies, abnormal brain development, following neglected blues in little children, significantly smaller brains, decreased activity in the interception of violent impulses or strong impulses.
	And the violent impulses, I don't just mean for violence, sexual impulsivity, extreme risk-taking behavior, storm chasing, I mean, who does that?
	Another guy just died recently who was a storm chaser.
	Anyway, so it can be impulsivity around other things, taking dares to do silly things and so on.
	You sit there and you think about it, if you do, and you don't do it.
	But if you have that impulse with that lowered capacity to intercept your impulses, then you're much more likely to do things without really thinking about the consequences.
	Hippocampal damage. A lot of people call into my show with life difficulties, and I say, well, how was your childhood?
	And they're like, I don't remember. I don't remember.
	Now, one theory is that it's repressed, which is one of these, like most Freudian theories, you can't disprove it.
	There's no null hypothesis.
	If it's there, it's proven.
	If it's the opposite that it's there, it's a reaction formation.
	If... If it's not a reaction formation, then it's repressed.
	But there does seem to be good evidence that when you experience a lot of trauma as a child, you actually don't recall.
	Your capacity to remember and your capacity to retain memories is significantly damaged.
	And I think that empathy has a lot to do with memory.
	If we remember what it's like to be hurt, then we can't really hurt others.
	If we have no memory of being hurt, then everything is kind of like for the first time.
	I remember when my daughter fell for the first time, she was so surprised.
	It hurts. And if you don't have the memory, I think it's easier to hurt others.
	So we move on. We're going to do a little bit on the prefrontal cortex.
	Then we're going to skip to some of the health effects of this stuff.
	This is normally sort of a two-hour thing, but it'll be a little faster.
	So this is the seed of the moral decision.
	We want to find the moral muscle in the brain and strengthen it.
	I think this is the most fundamental task of moralists.
	It's not just Socratic argument, it's biological engineering to strengthen our capacity for moral decision-making, for the deferral of gratification, for the development of mirror neurons, and to some degree we cannot work with bad clay as social shapers.
	You know, we have to work on the next generation.
	There's some things we can do, and I'll talk about the effects that exercise and psychotherapy has in helping with these issues.
	But we have to go with what is.
	And a lot of people are very physically damaged in the brain as a result of trauma.
	And we can't fix them.
	At least I don't think there's any way to fix them easily.
	But we can certainly attempt to help the next generation.
	And I've also, on my website at freedommanradio.com, I'm reading an audiobook by Lloyd DeMoss, who's the editor of the Psycho History Journal, called The Origins of War in Child Abuse, which is, again, quite fascinating, although some of the grimmest reading this side of Stephen King's Bad Nightmares.
	I used to read it very quickly.
	Child abuse frequently produces frontal lobe damage that contributes to violent tendencies.
	And when you do things that strengthen impulses and lower the suppression of impulses, you end up with a very chaotic and aggressive society.
	Violence and crime, the links are more and more clear.
	And to be clear, almost everyone who's a criminal was abused as a child, but not everyone who was abused as a child becomes a criminal.
	And that's, of course, very important to remember.
	Dissociated mind states, dissociation is when you have no contact with your own emotional state, and it is a prerequisite for cruelty.
	Because if you do not have contact with your own emotional state, you cannot empathize with others.
	So going into a disassociative state or dissociative state is a prerequisite for committing violence against others.
	And interviews with criminals and so on basically say the knife went in.
	They never have personal agency.
	It's not like I stabbed the guy.
	It's like this happened, you know, and I was merely reacting in self-defense when, of course, it might have been just a glance.
	That eye contact that provokes aggression.
	So we want to have personal agency and self-empathy is, I think, the only way to ensure a reduction of violence.
	A researcher says people with childhood histories of trauma, abuse, and neglect make up almost the entire criminal justice population in the US. Robert Firestone, a prison psychiatrist, reports all his suicidal patients hear parental voices telling them they should kill themselves.
	And James Gilligan, another prison psychiatrist, says, as children, these men were shot, axed, scolded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps.
	Some people think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money, but when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody.
	When you are raised in a win-lose paradigm, a gun means you win.
	And that is what you've been programmed for.
	You're tired of losing, and by God, you're going to win this time.
	Let's just touch very briefly on boys and girls and then we'll move to the effects.
	Now, the only big difference that affects later violence is that Boys have a smaller corpus callosum part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres.
	Boys who are abused have a 25% reduction in sections of the corpus callosum.
	Girls did not, even if they suffered from abuse.
	One of the things I think that's very powerful and important in the men's rights movement is to overthrow the myth of the invulnerable boy.
	Boys are incredibly fragile.
	They have incredible potential, as do girls, but they are very fragile, and we prey upon them, in general, outside of sexual abuse the most, in terms of physical abuse and emotional abuse.
	But boys are very fragile, and a society that thinks otherwise is only setting itself up, I think, for further cycles of violence.
	Boys grew up with less attachment strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys less.
	It's that eye contact. Because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are much higher risk than girls for serious violence against them.
	And boys, of course, are continually told to suck it up, man up, be a man, don't feel, and so on.
	It's interesting, there's an American television or radio host named Glenn Beck Who weeps sometimes in his show, and the amount of mockery that he is subjected to is, regardless of what you think of his politics, the man feels stuff.
	And to display that in a public sphere is very much mocked, which is terrible.
	Abuse and neglect produce equally damaging results in the brains of both boys and girls, but girls tend to respond more with dissociative internalizing symptoms, withdrawal, depression, helplessness, dependence, while boys tend to act out in fight-or-flight ways.
	So, very briefly, we're going to do They have poorly integrated cerebral hemispheres.
	You need both sides of the brain to self-regulate, to manage your own emotions, to have the common sense to count to ten when you're upset, to not punch people, to not throw drinks, to not drive too fast, to not drink and drive, to not eat too much, all the things that lead people into trouble.
	This poor integration of these hemispheres and the underdevelopment of the orbital frontal cortex, the seat of reason and restraint, is the basis for difficulty regulating emotion.
	Lack of cause and effect thinking.
	If I do this, like I've never understood people who do stuff and then they're like, oh, now I'm going to jail for 10 years.
	It's just a complete inability to project yourself forward in time to empathize with your future self.
	Right? Again, I would say it all comes down to a lack of empathy.
	Inability to accurately recognize emotions in others.
	A casual glance can be perceived as a significant threat.
	And an inability to articulate emotions within a child, which leads to frustration, and there are some people who argue, which I think is not a bad argument, that all violence is the result of tension, all violence is the result of frustration.
	And if you cannot articulate your own emotions and get your needs met, then it becomes win-lose.
	An incoherent sense itself, an autobiographical history.
	In my conversations with people who've had a history with violence, and I've had quite a lot of them over the years, they have...
	A very chaotic personal history.
	And their own descriptions of themselves are like random people writing an autobiography who have no sense of the previous or the next paragraphs.
	And they also have verbal cues which actually inflame their anger.
	I did a show recently which is doing very...
	It goes into great depth into Elliot Rodger, the California shooter recently.
	And he continually uses the same language to inflame himself.
	It's completely unjust. It's completely unfair.
	I'm the perfect gentleman. Why don't these women want me?
	And you can see him continually building this edifice of imminent aggression through language.
	And there's no bouncing off empiricism.
	It's all just self-created, self-constructed.
	I know it's a very fast and intelligent crowd, so I'm sure you got all that.
	I also wanted to mention as well, we obviously want people to be more intelligent and Spanking, which I do consider child abuse.
	I really could care less what the law says.
	Slavery was legal at 1.2, didn't make it any more moral.
	And it has been shown to shave four plus IQ points off children.
	That probably has to do with the continual activation of the amygdala and the resulting shutdown of the neofrontal cortex, which is where IQ primarily sits.
	And also, every time you hit a child, you are not negotiating with the child.
	You are not teaching that child how to negotiate for win-win.
	You are imposing a win-lose paradigm on the child, which is going to reduce empathy and provoke aggression.
	And it doesn't work. A study a guy just had on my show did a study where, within 10 minutes of being spanked, children were back to doing whatever it was beforehand.
	And also that the mothers initiated spanking within 30 seconds of the conflict beginning.
	Which means there's no possible time to negotiate in any way, shape or form.
	And there was massive under-reporting.
	Parents said, oh, I only spank about 18 times a year.
	It turns out that they actually spanked, the mother spanked 18 times a week.
	A week. 900 plus times a year.
	Being hit by someone five times your size, 900 times a year?
	Anybody who thinks that does not have an effect on violence in the world is fooling themselves.
	It provokes antisocial behaviors, oppositional defiance disorder, and when children cannot connect and cannot relate, then they tend to want to dominate or be dominated by, and this is where you get the foundation of gangs and pecking orders and so on.
	Something very interesting as well.
	There's a lot of interesting research.
	I'm sorry for the person who's doing that.
	If we can go on to spanking impunitive political beliefs.
	I'll just read this quote. It's very interesting.
	So people found that, particularly for males who've never had any psychotherapy, which I think is very, very important.
	So males who have not gone through therapy, who have reported high levels of childhood punishment, were significantly more likely to endorse a range of punitive public policies I.e.
	support of the death penalty and opposition to abortion, support for the use of military force.
	Isn't this one of the left-right differentials?
	And I think that's very interesting.
	I think that if you are punished by an authority figure as a child, and if you've not gone through therapy to deal with the pain of that, you tend to evangelize or put on a pedestal your abuser.
	And then when you're thinking of the government, the government will then take the place of the parental alter ego, and you're in support of more punitive punishments.
	Because if you justify punishment against yourself, you create punishment as value, and therefore when the government is putting forward punitive policies, I think you're likely to be more...
	I think you went too far.
	Okay, so this Kaiser Permanente study...
	How am I doing for time, by the way?
	Completely lost track? 205?
	Okay. And listen, if you have questions, I'm certainly happy to hear.
	So, even after accounting for age, race, sex, childhood stressors, adult health behaviors, and adult household income, individuals who had been physically abused as children were 47% more likely to develop cancer than individuals who had not been abused.
	Have you ever heard that before?
	I know those who are in the know, but whenever there's a slight cancer risk increase, what do you see splashed all over?
	The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, the news, the media, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, cancer risk!
	But this one, which is one of the greatest cancer risks in the species, is not discussed.
	Which is... A continuation of the abuse because you're not informing the children of cancer risks that they are subject to.
	So they can't alter their behavior to lower that risk.
	Emotional abuse seems to have longer and deeper term psychological effects than physical abuse, because physical abuse is recognized as wrong within the society, for the most part, and also is hidden, and also is experienced by the child as a significant negative.
	Emotional maltreatment is harder to pin down, is harder to get outraged about, and emotional neglect is even tougher too, because it's in absence.
	Rather than the presence of something.
	So I think it gets tougher and tougher to define.
	Well, we know in general that children prefer abuse to neglect.
	Because it's parental attention.
	Which is why children act out and get punished when they know they're going to get punished rather than laying low.
	They would rather have negative attention than no attention.
	So children experience...
	Because you can survive a parent who hates you.
	You cannot survive a parent who doesn't care at all about you because they will just wander off.
	So if you at least become...
	Something necessary for the parent's sadism, then the parent will feed you.
	And this is a dark way of putting it, but if you become something that the parent needs whatever ugly, however ugly and dark that purpose, then you can survive because you will get the food and attention.
	To look at government as an amoral resource-maximizing institution, which is not the only way, but it's one way to look at it.
	They spend several hundred million dollars in daycare, which gets more women into the workforce, and they get several hundred billion dollars in taxes.
	It's a very good investment for them in terms of money.
	The ethics of it are another issue, which, of course, we're hoping to raise.
	But I worked in a daycare for several years when I was younger, and no matter what your best intentions, there were two of us with 35 children ages 5 to 10.
	You simply cannot give one-on-one attention.
	And for babies, it's impossible.
	I mean, you've got to change them.
	You simply can't play with them.
	And it is, I think, a desperate wrong that is going to have negative effects for many generations.
	All right. If we can move on.
	Sorry, was there anyone else?
	I want to simply pause for questions.
	Thank you. Spanking is assault.
	I mean, why we have lower standards for children who are the most vulnerable in society is incomprehensible to me, and it's only because so many people have spanked that they can't look at it objectively.
	That's all. A 200 pound man beating a 100 pound woman is absolutely immoral on every level and a horror in society.
	But the woman is generally there by choice.
	We don't have arranged marriages that often in Canada.
	And she has the legal right to leave at any time.
	She has adult independence.
	She can earn her own money.
	There are shelters.
	She can go her own way at any time.
	Children do not have those rights.
	They do not have that independence.
	And therefore, to commit aggression against a child is infinitely worse than committing aggression against a woman.
	What happens politically as a result of that is not that consequential to me, because you can't be controlled anyway.
	But we do need to at least have that basic moral distinction, that children are not there by choice and cannot leave and have no independence.
	And therefore, we should have the highest standards of care and behavior with them.
	Do the studies make any correlation between contact sports, children participating in contact sports, and becoming criminal?
	I don't think so.
	and I'm not an expert on that area, but what I have read is that sports, in particular team sports, tend to ameliorate some of the effects of child abuse.
	Because team sports is win-win within the team.
	It's win-lose with the other team.
	But particularly for women, it gets them into looking at their bodies not in a sexual way, but in a healthy, exercise-y kind of way.
	And I think that's to the best.
	It's a big legal challenge, of course, because if you throw an abusive husband in jail, the wife can survive.
	But what do you do with the kids of abusive parents, right?
	I mean, it is a very challenging...
	We can talk afterwards, maybe.
	Let me just sort of finish up the last little bit here.
	Then we can talk afterwards. Okay, so child abuse and depression.
	Children physically abused have a 59% increased risk of lifetime depression.
	Major depressive disorder, that's the MDD. Multiple types of abuse are 75% more.
	Childhood abuse and obesity is very, very important.
	And actually, I just read this morning that divorce is also causal, correlated, still being worked out, divorce and abuse.
	Child abuse and illicit drug use.
	You want to fight the war on drugs intelligently and effectively.
	Educate parents on peaceful parenting.
	That is how you can deal with it.
	Gabor Maté said that there was not one heroin addict that he ever treated, a female heroin addict who was not sexually abused as a child.
	It is a form of self-medication.
	I just spoke about this a month or two ago at Upper Canada College.
	So if you look at this, it's dose-dependent, right?
	This is the real understanding.
	If we can go to the next one, drugs and ACEs.
	So this is prevalence, percentage of people who've injected drugs relative to ACE score.
	Tell me that's not a pretty clear cause.
	Initiating alcohol abuse by age 14, two to three-fold by individual ACEs.
	ACEs also accounted for 20 to 70% increased likelihood of alcohol use initiated during mid-adolescence.
	Child abuse and suicide.
	Compared to persons with no ACEs, Prevalence of attempted suicide, 1.1%.
	The adjusted odds ratio of even attempting suicide among persons to seven or more was 31.1%.
	It makes life unbearable to go through this kind of childhood.
	Here we go. Next slide.
	ACEs versus percent lifetime history of attempted suicide.
	I'll just let the numbers speak for themselves.
	You couldn't get mathematically a more horrifying distribution.
	So, which still, because the graphs I think are the most important.
	Let's go to ACEs and smoking, which is a slide or two down, please.
	ACEs and smoking also is the same.
	Smoking supplies the neurochemicals that a happy childhood supplies, right?
	So most of us start at a happiness level of 100.
	If we take a drug, it goes to 110, 120, then goes back down to 100.
	People who've had significant adverse childhood experiences start with a happiness level of 20.
	And they take a drug, say like cocaine, which takes them to a happiness level of 100, which they didn't even know was possible.
	And then it takes them down to 15.
	So all most drug users are trying to do is become normally humanly happy.
	What you and I would consider a normal state of contentment.
	They're drugging themselves in the same way that somebody with chronic pain takes painkillers.
	The war on drugs is the war on violent parenting.
	ACEs and smoking. And...
	The last slide I just wanted to leave you with.
	I focus a lot on parenting in my show.
	I mean, as a philosopher, I'm dedicated to what's called the non-aggression principle, which is the non-initiation of force against others.
	And people say, well, why are you focusing so much on parents?
	Well, like the guy who says, why do you rob banks?
	That's where the money is. Why do you focus on parents?
	If we can go on to child abuse and neglect by relationship to victim.
	Well, because it's parents.
	We go back one. It's parents who do it for the most part.
	Or it's people that parents put in charge of their children.
	If it's babysitters, the parents choose the babysitter.
	If it's a priest, the parents are going to that church.
	So we really, to end the cycle of violence, we need to focus on parenting.
	We need to remind parents how important it is to negotiate with children.
	I have never raised my voice at my daughter.
	I have never hit her. She experiences no punishment whatsoever and she is an incredible delight to be around.
	She's easygoing. She's social.
	She's done a show with me a couple of times.
	She is curious. She's always asking me about my shows and all of that.
	She went through the grade one curriculum in six weeks.
	If you deal reasonably with children, the world can be a paradise which we almost cannot imagine.
	We cannot imagine it as yet.
	But the simple act of applying rational ethics to parenting is the single greatest revolution that humanity and the future is capable of.
	And I think if we continue to focus on that and encourage and remind people that we build the Cathedral of Peace in the future brick by brick on every peaceful interaction and positive interaction and intervening interaction that we have with children, There really is no limit to what we can achieve as a species and we've barely begun to even taste the sweet nectar of the gods we can get from the future through consistent and peaceful parenting.
	Thank you so much everyone. This is a bit of a postscript to the Bomb and the Brain series, and by the by, I hope that you will spend a few minutes, or even better, a few hours, spreading this information around the playlist for the Bomb and the Brain series is fdrurl.com forward slash b-i-b.
	If you could post this to message boards where people are interested in this kind of information, I, and I think the world in the future, would be massively...
	Massively thankful. So I would appreciate it if you do that.
	Thank you so much. A little bit more evidence came up just today, which I wanted to mention before going on to a few summary thoughts.
	So this is a study that was done in Japan.
	A fellow scanned the brains of a bunch of people in their 20s and asked them to fill out a survey about their relationship with their parents.
	During the first 16 years, the researchers used a survey called the Parental Bonding Instrument.
	And it asked people to rate their parents on statements like, did not want me to grow up, tried to control everything I did, and tried to make me feel dependent on her or him.
	The team found that those with overprotective parents had less gray matter in particular areas of the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of the brain we've really been focusing on in this series, than those who had healthy relationships with their parents.
	Neglect from fathers, though not mothers, also correlated with less gray matter.
	And by the by, you want to do some research on this, or if you're really curious, I can share the research I've done.
	The development of empathy in children is strongly, strongly correlated with warm, loving, protective, caring, nurturing, intimate relationships with fathers.
	Fathers are essential in the development of empathy in their children.
	So if we want to make the world a better place, of course we need to focus on both aspects of parenting, but often the blame is placed on the mother or the focus is placed on the mother, but the relationship of the father to the children is absolutely essential in the development of empathy.
	So this part of the prefrontal cortex develops during childhood and abnormalities there are common in people with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
	And it's perhaps due to the excessive release of the stress hormone cortisol, which we talked about earlier in the series, due either to neglect or to too much attention and reduced production of dopamine as a result of poor parenting leads to stunted gray matter.
	Growth. Anthony Harris, director of the Clinical Disorders Units at WestMed Hospital in Sydney, Australia, says the study is important for highlighting to the wider community that parenting styles can have long-term effects on children.
	And they also theorize that perhaps children born with this deficiency have less of a strong relationship with their parents, so it still remains up in the air.
	But I would go with the first causation that seems the most obvious, which is strongly backed up by the other information that we've talked about in this series.
	That poor, deficient or abusive parenting and neglectful parenting leads to significant brain problems in children.
	Now, a number of people have written to me to ask me, dude, when did you first come across this information?
	Well, it was about 15 years ago I read in a book that for the life of me I cannot recall.
	I do recall that there was a cover painting on the book called When Will It Stop?
	And please, if you know which book it is, please send me a message, which talked about that people who have survived child abuse Generally have stronger problems or more permanent or stubborn personality issues and a stronger post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome than soldiers in a combat zone.
	And the reason being, of course, that soldiers in a combat zone, the stress that's hitting you as a soldier is hitting an already preformed and adult brain and personality, whereas that which occurs to you as a child is actually forming.
	Your brain as we've seen in this series.
	So I remember reading quite a bit about that and having an enormous amount of awakening when it came to the effects of early childhood abuse.
	I don't believe that back then there was the same degree of brain scans, the same technology that allowed people to peer inside the brain to such a level of detail.
	But the theories that were around a decade and a half ago or longer have been very strongly validated by the science that has been occurring more recently.
	So I've had this information for a decade and a half or more, and it has strongly, strongly influenced my thinking and reasoning and approaches as a philosopher into making the world a better place.
	People have often also asked me, I'm considered to be, I guess by some, you know, a Nancy Negative, right?
	A Pollyanna Downer.
	And what they say is, well, enough identifying problems, what about solutions?
	Well, of course, there are millions of solutions in my podcast.
	And people have also asked me, well, if it's not going to be politics, what is it going to be?
	Well, I have a very short and succinct approach to solving these sorts of problems in the world.
	It's sort of a five-year plan because, you know, you really want to follow the Soviet model as much as possible.
	The five-year plan is this.
	Two years in therapy.
	Just do it! Do it!
	Do it! Right? If you want excellence, get a great coach.
	That's just a natural thing.
	So if you can't or don't, at least before you have children or if you have children, take some parenting classes to learn non-aggressive, non-violent ways of Interacting with your children.
	My daughter is almost 15 months.
	We've never had to raise her voice.
	We've never had to correct her behavior in any aggressive manner.
	She is very respondent.
	Because they're always very gentle and positive and enthusiastic and we praise her for complying with sensible directives.
	So that is perfectly possible and is much, much better for everyone involved.
	She's never heard a harsh word.
	She's never heard a raised voice.
	Of course, she's never been spanked or anything like that.
	There is absolutely no need for any of that in parenting.
	And we will, at some point, we will apply the same ethical and moral approaches to children that we do to wives.
	So in the past, wives were considered recalcitrant and disobedient, and you had to thrash them in order, and you have to yell at them.
	And then feminists came along, thank heavens, and this all began to change.
	women do not have to put up with abusive relationships, just as I suggest, adult children don't have to.
	They don't have to, to aggress against a woman is unholy, as it of course is to aggress against anybody.
	We will slowly but surely begin to apply the same moral rules to children, except even more powerfully to children, Of all the moral rules in the world that could ever be applied to anyone, we need to be the most tender, solicitous, empathetic, kind, gentle and positive and moral with children, because it is out of gentleness and empathy with children that all other virtue in the world will flow.
	And of course, A wife, to some degree at least, will choose her husband, whereas children don't choose the households that they're born into, which means that the standards of behavior for parents need to be the very highest of any standard of behavior anywhere in the world with any relationship with anyone.
	There is no greater power disparity In the world, then between that, between a parent and a child, the greater the power disparity, the more gentle and positive the exercise that that power needs to be.
	And the less choice there is in a relationship, the more virtue needs to be in that relationship in order to make that relationship positive and happy.
	So, go to therapy ideally.
	I say two years.
	And why do I say two years? Well, I went for a couple of years.
	I went for three hours a week, which is quite a lot.
	And I did another eight to ten hours a week of journaling.
	And so that may be more than you can do.
	I happen to be in a place in my life where I could do that.
	It may be more than you can do. At least take a parenting class and vow to yourself, just as you do with your other relationships, right?
	You don't go and yell out and slap your friends.
	You don't yell out and slap your wife, I hope, or your husband.
	You never yell out. Call names or slap your child.
	You just don't do it.
	It's just completely off the table.
	You need to find other ways to interact with your children, recognizing that, of course, their brains are immature.
	You need to find other ways to interact with your children.
	Parenting classes, if you can't afford parenting classes, there's a Parental Effectiveness Training is a pretty good book for checking that sort of stuff out.
	There are tons of books out there.
	You just need to make that commitment to not be aggressive with your children.
	You just need to make that commitment.
	Out of that is the single greatest thing in terms of developing the ethics of the world that can possibly occur.
	So therapy, ideally, parental classes for non-violent, non-aggressive ways of interacting with your children, second best, third best, simply just reading books, but you have to make that commitment.
	You just have to make that commitment.
	And I also strongly suggest...
	That if it is even remotely possible, and I would move heaven and earth to make this possible as I did for myself, be home for the first few years of your child's life.
	Ideally, if both of you can be home, fantastic.
	What does that mean? Does that mean you have to move out of your house to an apartment for a couple of years?
	Do it. I mean, what do you care about your house relative to your relationship with your precious and beloved children?
	What is the use of a house when your children become surly and aggressive teenagers because you weren't around when they were children so the bond didn't develop?
	Don't be the parents who go out to work for...
	10 or 11 hours a day with a commute and see their children for an hour or two a day.
	I mean, don't be those kinds of parents.
	That is disastrous and destructive to children.
	Be home with your children.
	If you're going to have kids, save up, make whatever modifications, you know, sell your car, take the bus, live in a one-bedroom apartment in a small town for a couple of years.
	Just be there for the first couple of years of your children's life.
	That I consider to be Absolutely essential.
	That's a two-part plan. It's five years.
	Two years in therapy or self-study or parenting groups or whatever and three years or perhaps even a little more at home with your kids when they are toddlers and infants.
	It is absolutely, absolutely essential and that is the way that we change the world.
	I mean, we have to raise a new generation of people Who are not afraid of authority.
	Who do not view the power of authority as controlling and destructive and negative.
	Because when we raise children...
	I said this in a recent radio interview.
	What we want to do is we want to raise children if we want to be free of something like the state, which we do.
	What we want to do is we want to raise children to look at the state as a bizarre foreign ritual.
	So if you and I head off to Thailand and we come across some village and they worship a giant...
	Stone chicken, right?
	We would look at that and say, well, that's completely weird.
	Why would you worship a giant stone chicken?
	We would see that as the bizarre local superstition that it is.
	However, if we were to grow up in that village, Then we would look at that giant stone chicken the way that your average Christian looks at Jesus, as something with depth and power and resonance and mythology and truth and virtue and all of this sort of stuff.
	So we need to raise children in such a way that when they encounter the concept of the state, it looks to them like a giant stone Taiwanese chicken idol worship thing.
	Just like a weird foreign ritual that has no particular emotional impact.
	That's how we outgrow the government.
	That's how we outgrow the state.
	I think that this series has shown reasoning won't do it.
	What will do it is empathy and love for our children, being home with our children, putting our children first, genuinely, completely and totally.
	Maybe you save to go for vacation, right?
	You save for your old age.
	You save for all of these things.
	Save for your children.
	That is the very greatest thing that you can do.
	To help make the world a better place is to just completely and totally be there in a non-aggressive way for your children.
	That will have us outgrow.
	Outgrow the state. You can't out-reason the state.
	You can't out-fight the state.
	Flying planes into buildings is completely pointless and worse than pointless.
	But we can outgrow the state.
	But that means... Positive, non-aggressive, and present ways of raising our children.
	So, last thing that I will say is that when you do this work, and I hope that you have done it, and I hope you will do it if you are going to do it, but once you've done this work, I think it's really, really important to have respect for the work that you have done.
	As was shown in part four of the series, the vast majority of processing in other people's minds occurs in the unconscious.
	And the unconscious is incredibly good at sniffing out hypocrisy and a lack of adherence and consistency with one's own values.
	And so I think it's really important for you to have respect for the work that you have done.
	And that's the only way that other people will genuinely have respect for the work that you've done.
	And that means living with integrity rather than just preaching, you know, all of these arguments without the basis of inhabiting them in your own body and in your own life, in your own actual empirical verifiable choices.
	I mean, I say kids are everything, and so I'm full-time dad.
	I mean, that's what I do, and I do this show, and I thank you for your donations that keep this show going, but that's been my focus.
	I say go to therapy. I've been to therapy.
	I say don't have abusive people in your life if you can at all avoid it, and if they can't be recovered, that's what I... I mean, I don't sort of prescribe anything, any pill that I haven't already taken, and that I think gives me a kind of credibility when it comes to Talking to people in the world about what to do.
	And it's all worked beautifully.
	I mean, it's worked even better, and you can listen to my series on parenting if you like.
	It's worked even better than I could have imagined.
	So, you know, when you really know something works, you're much more convincing.
	So, have respect for the work that you've done.
	Recognize that if you've done a lot of work in self-knowledge, and I started when I was 16, I'm now 43, And so there were 25 years of work on myself.
	If I've spent 25 years studying anything, Mandarin, jazz, piano, anything, I'm going to be an expert.
	And if other people have not spent that amount of time, they're simply not going to be experts.
	So I think it's really important to respect that you've done that amount of work on yourself, or whatever amount of work you have done, and recognize that if you walk into a room with other people who haven't done that work, then...
	Treating them as equals is completely irrational.
	I mean, if I've spent 20 years studying Mandarin, I don't walk into a room where nobody speaks Mandarin and start talking Mandarin to them because it's just going to be annoying to everyone involved.
	If I've trained for 10 years to run marathons, I don't just grab fat smokers from a couch and drag them along with me and think that it's going to work out.
	Hopefully I can inspire them to quit smoking and exercise, but...
	I have to respect the work that I've done, that I've become an expert, that I've trained in something very profound and very fundamental, and that other people, most other people, just haven't.
	And so to treat them as equals is unjust to the work that you've actually done on yourself.
	I'd really, really strongly recommend that.
	If you're a university professor of mathematics, you don't walk into a kindergarten and start teaching people quantum physics equations.
	You don't start teaching them the mathematics behind Schrodinger's crap cat and the theory of relativity.
	Of course not. It would be ridiculous.
	It would be completely non-empirical.
	And the empirical fact is very few people pursue self-knowledge to any particular degree.
	Very few people. It is an elite pursuit that is reserved for very, very few people at the moment.
	It will change in time, in the future, but right now...
	It's, you know, how many people do you run into who speak fluent Klingon?
	Well, I think there's more people than you will run into who speak fluent self, right?
	Self-knowledge. So have respect for the knowledge and the work that you've done.
	You know, don't... If you've studied jazz piano for 25 years and you're a renowned world expert in jazz piano, don't just break out your keyboard at dinner table and expect people with a couple of jazz albums to be able to do anything other than just make an unpleasant noise by playing the piano with their forehead...
	The guitar with their knees!
	Recognize the skills that you have, which will give you some patience, I think, as a teacher and an instructor and a communicator of truth and virtue of self-knowledge.
	So really, really, if you've done the work, have that respect, and that will help other people to respect what you've done and hopefully motivate them to pursue self-knowledge in the same way.
	Thank you so much, so, so much, everyone, for watching, as always.
	Please drop by, if you'd like, the Sunday show.
	It is 4 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.
	Just drop into the freedomainradio.com chat room to listen in or to join in.
	I look forward to chatting with you.
	And remember, if you're going to be around, or you'd like to be around, in San Francisco, July 1st to 4th, 2010, for the Libertopia Festival, I hope that you will come.
	Libertopia.org is the place to find out.
	It is a truly stellar group of freedom thinkers.
	And I have a keynote speech that I think will blow your socks wide across the room.
	And so I look forward to seeing you there.

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