Salus Forum: May 7, 2025

Bill G

I don’t think we labeled it specifically, but you’re bringing up a topic that’s been concerning me since our last discussion, and that is a category of false objectivism narrative. And we’ve seen that just the other day after our president met with the new prime minister of Canada. He spun a narrative based on a lot of facts that he spewed out about what Canada actually did and didn’t do, what the deficits really were and weren’t, what the relative tariffs really were and weren’t.

It was a facts-based narrative on the face of it, but it turned out when the commentators drilled down below it that basically none of the facts bore any relationship to the reality of the situation. So, it’s not just objectivism versus other types of narratives. It’s the sort of intentional or unintentional ability to weave an objectivist narrative that is based on blatant fabrication. And I think we’re seeing more and more of that, particularly in our current political environment.

Joe

I’m listening to all this and I’m getting a little schizophrenic with the flight of ideas. We’re talking about mental health. We’re talking about various psychological idioms and ways. And as a neurosurgeon, I’m a mechanic. I deal with structural problems of the brain, tumors, aneurysms, blood clots, things of this nature. But I’m almost helpless to deal with functional problems of the brain. So I see mental health problems when we think of the structural problems of the brain and how the brain is wired in terms of our 86 billion neurons, our 100 trillion synaptic connections, and the various networks that get devolved into the salience, the executive, the default mode, and how the nodes and the edges are all connected, and how we think, feel, function, and act.

As psychologists, Gay and Bill B can more fully appreciate these functional problems. But I become terribly frustrated by seeing the epidemic depression, particularly in young folks, and quite frankly, the suicide rate in medicine and residents, which was recently written up in the Wall Street Journal. I go back to what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth. He wrote: “How does one pluck from memory some rooted sorrow, erase the written troubles of the mind, and with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the bosom of that perilous stuff that weighs so heavy upon the heart?” You know, this is what Gay does every day with her neurofeedback. I’ve kind of looked at neurofeedback from a structural viewpoint in the sense that it’s just too hard to sit down like Gay does for hours at a time. She is trying to get the wires and the networks and the fiber tracks reoriented.

So, I give a talk about frontal lobotomy and how it evolved from 1934 with Egas Moniz in the Lisbon Mental Institution. He made a hole and then injected alcohol into the frontal lobes. This was done by his neurosurgical colleagues up until the 60s and 70s. Now we’re using transcranial magnetic stimulation, direct current stimulation, and low-frequency ultrasound to treat addiction, to treat depression, and deep brain stimulation. So, we’re trying to reorient the fiber tracks and the networks.