35: A Basic Brain Model (Building Bounce: Ch 3) | S4E35

(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Welcome to Season 4, episode 35. Hello, Father.

(00:04) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter, It’s a nice day today. I’m enjoying the weather.

(00:09) Stephanie Warner: It is a very nice day. Yeah, a good day to be together. And we’re pre-recording this as it is coming out, and you’re coming back to me. You’ve been in Europe. So I hope you enjoyed that. Lots of training and a little vacation.

(00:27) Marcus Warner: Yeah. Projecting into the future. I’m sure I loved it.

(00:32) Stephanie Warner: I’m sure we’ll do more updates about that when we are actually in the future and know things. But, yep, praying for you and happy to be with you right now. We are continuing with our book study going chapter by chapter through Building Bounce. So I’ve got my book here. The goal of this series is to help you go deeper on your walk with God by helping you thrive with more emotional resilience. We can all use a little bit more of that. We also have a free study, a downloadable study to go along with this book that you can find in the description. Sometimes when I get excited, I can’t talk, so here we are.

(01:17) Marcus Warner: Good thing our podcast is not exciting.

(01:23) Stephanie Warner: You know, this is good practice. Talk through excitement. So today we are getting into Chapter 3. It is especially important that I can talk for today because we’re going into brain science. That’s right. This chapter is called, “A Basic Brain Model.” So, wow, let’s dig into it. Father, why do we care about brain science in this book?

(01:47) Marcus Warner: The reason we care about brain science is that it helps to inform how exactly we grow emotional resilience. Before that, we knew a lot of strategies and we knew a lot of patterns and things, but we didn’t know why they worked. So understanding the brain science helps us to know why it works. And it gives us a clearer focus on exactly what we’re trying to do in growing emotional resilience. The brain science we’re working on I learned from Dr. Jim Wilder, almost exclusively. He got it from Dr. Alan Schore out of the UCLA Med Center and Daniel Siegel and some other pioneers in the neuroscience field.

And he has stayed up to date with all of the medical journals and things like that until right up to the moment. He’s researching right now and getting ready to write a new book on some brand new topic that we haven’t discussed yet. So I am looking forward to that, but that’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to take the basics of what I have learned from him and just spell them out for people because they were so fascinating to me and they helped to clarify a lot of subjects.

(03:01) Stephanie Warner: So that’s kind of where it’s coming from. So as we’re talking about emotional resilience, why is it so important for us to understand this basic brain model?

(03:10) Marcus Warner: As we go through the model, that’ll become evident. What we find is that God has designed the brain to run on the fuel of joy. And joy is what is crucial to resilience. And so understanding how God designed the brain to operate helps us understand what needs to be developed in order for us to be as resilient as possible. And then what we find is that a lot of things we do are things that the Bible talks to us about doing, but the brain kind of connects the dots and helps us understand how it all fits together.

(03:49) Stephanie Warner: So we’re gonna spend a lot of time this episode going through what you call the “Joy Elevator”.  But before we start unpacking, is there any other setup that you want to give us?

(04:01) Marcus Warner: Well, in this chapter, in Building Bounce, I explain the brain a little bit differently than in most of the other books that I’ve been a part of. We talk about the brain in four quadrants, and I think of it like a grid. And so if you think about an X-Y axis, which is already making me sleepy just talking about the X-Y axis, because I can never remember. I was terrible at this stuff. So if X is the horizontal line that marks the division point between our conscious and our subconscious minds. And what we mean by that is, the activity taking place in the top above that line is the activity in my brain that I am aware of. I am aware that I am thinking. I am being conscious about thinking about it. I am aware of my emotions. I’m consciously thinking, ‘this.’

Whereas if it’s activity happening below that, it’s happening at a subconscious level. In other words, it’s activity that’s happening in my brain, but I may not be aware of it, or I have to react to it rather than it being caused by my conscious activity. That’s the first line. So you think about that as the X line, the middle line. That’s the difference between conscious and subconscious, what I’m aware of and what I’m not. The vertical line, the Y, line divides beliefs from connections or like beliefs from the relational engine of the brain from the narrative engine of the brain.

The narrative engine is focused on beliefs and problem solving. The relational engine is where I am focused on acting like myself and remaining relational. Both sides play a role in emotional regulation, but I would say the heavy lifting in emotional regulation is on the right side here, really in the connections or relational side of the brain.

(06:02) Stephanie Warner:  Okay, so with that framework, we talk about a Joy Elevator. Walk us through that, what do you mean?

(06:13) Marcus Warner: Let’s stick with the relational engine side of the brain. On the relational engine side of the brain, there are two subconscious levels and there are two conscious levels. And so you can think of those as the first, second, third and fourth floors of an elevator. All of them are designed by God to help us experience relational joy and be able to return to joy from upsetting emotions. And so that’s kind of what it’s designed to do. And so at the subconscious level, there are the first two floors of the elevator which are attachment and assessment.

And then at the conscious level, the elevator is attunement and action. And I would say the most conscious of those is the action part. That’s the one we’re the most aware of because that’s where I’m making decisions and I’m making choices. I’m aware of my belief systems and I’m bringing everything together from all parts of my brain, it’s the control room. And the premise of the idea of a joy elevator is that I want my fourth floor action center to be in charge of my behavior.

And I don’t want my elevator to get stuck along the way because if my elevator gets stuck along the way, I’m not going to be resilient. I’m not going to be the best version of myself. It’s going to be very difficult to handle emotions that come my way.

(07:35) Stephanie Warner: So when we’re at that attachment level, what is the key thing to remember there?

(07:43) Marcus Warner: The core image I use to think of the attachment level is a light bulb. What forms my attachment level are two parts of the brain called the nucleus accumbens and the thalamus. And the nucleus accumbens, especially, is the center of our cravings. And so you can think of it as lighting up when I crave something. Well, the number one thing that I crave in life is joyful, relational, attachment.

Babies come out of the womb and they are more focused on attachment than they are on food, which shocks some people. It’s like they don’t come out of there going, I need food. They come out of there going, I’m alone. I need to be connected to somebody. So it’s that desire for attachment. It can be thought of as a light bulb that comes on when I have that craving. So the deepest pain that humans can feel is when this light bulb comes on craving attachment and it’s not responded to.

I want to be with somebody who doesn’t want to be with me, or I want to be with somebody who can’t be with me. Whatever the reason, I have deep pain. And when that happens, this part of my brain will begin to form attachments to non-relational experiences and substances.

That’s where I get addictions. So I get addicted to sexual experiences. I get addicted to adrenaline. I get addicted to substances, drugs, alcohol, and all the other things that go with that. So what happens then is I will develop cravings for those things because I have formed an attachment with them. So at the attachment level is where it all starts. And if things go well, my brain basically learns that my cravings are often satisfied with joyful relational connection.

And as a result of that, I have a pretty joyful approach to life. But if I have never learned how to form those joyful relational attachments because of the way I was raised and the family I was in, then it’s going to be hard for most of the rest of my life not to bond to people in fear. And so we said the whole point of the relational engine is joy. To get us into joyful relational connection and to help us be resilient with our emotions so that we can still get back to joy from them. And it starts right there. God wired us to crave that joyful connection more than anything else in life.

(10:31) Stephanie Warner: It’s so interesting going all the way back to babies and the similarities between craving for food and craving for attention or attachment. I think Jim has talked about if you’re wandering around the house and you’re like, I want chocolate cake. Well, maybe you’re actually wanting a person to connect to. But there’s that part of you that is having the same light bulb…

(10:57) Marcus Warner: Well, and to bring those two together a little bit, the core people that we attach to are the people who feed us. This goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Who fed Adam and Eve? God’s like, I want to be the one who feeds you. In Revelation, he’s like, I stand at the door and knock, I’ll come in and I’ll eat with you. And he’s going to provide the meal. He’s not saying, I’ll come eat with you if you fix it. No, God wants to be the one who feeds us.

And so he says, I’ll give you manna, I’ll give you bread from heaven. My word is food. Jesus said, my food is to do the work of him who sent me. God wants to be the one feeding us, feeding our soul, feeding our bodies. And thus he wants us in response to all that, to have a joyful attachment with him. Like, I love hanging out with this guy, he feeds me. So that’s kind of the idea. And babies do the same thing. That’s one of the things that bonds them immediately, especially to mom when mom is the one feeding. We naturally are wired to bond to the one who feeds us.

(12:05) Stephanie Warner: This is really good and obviously we could keep going in. This is a very robust topic. So let’s move on to assessment.

(12:13) Marcus Warner: It’s just the brain. I mean, really, we can get through this quickly.

(12:15) Stephanie Warner: It is just the brain. I know a basic brain model, but it’s still a lot. So yes, I’ll be sure to link different resources and other episodes that we’ve done and stuff. So if people want to slow down and go deeper, you can do that, but assessment.

(12:32) Marcus Warner: Assessment. This is still in the subconscious part of the relational engine, the joy elevator. This will be the second floor of the joy elevator, but still in the subconscious level. This is the amygdala. So earlier it was the nucleus accumbens and the thalamus. This is the amygdala. The amygdala assesses whatever has become personal to us. And so when the light bulb goes on it is because I crave it or because it’s personal to me. Those are the two main things that’ll cause this light bulb to come on. When that happens, then it goes to the second floor.

At the second floor, the amygdala then assesses this attachment that I have formed and it can only give one of three assessments of the attachment that I just formed. And that is, is this good? In which case the elevator keeps moving, everything’s fine, there’s no interruptions. Or it can say, this is bad. In which case my elevator might get stuck, it’s gonna slow down. Something’s gonna have to happen to deal with that before it’ll keep moving. But if it says, this is bad, what’ll happen to the amygdala is that it will send out like chemicals into the body that suck the energy out of me. So they’re like energy sucking chemicals.

They make me not want to get out of bed, not want to do things, want to get away from people, and want to shut down. And so those are the shame, sadness, disgust and despair reactions that we have. So that’s all related to a, “this is bad” assessment. The third assessment the amygdala can give is, this is scary. And if it says, this is scary, it’ll send out a different kind of adrenaline mix hormone that hyper-energizes my body so that I now want to run. That would be fear or I want to fight, and that would be anger. And that’s why we call the high energy scare response a fight or flight reaction.

And people are like, well, what about “the freeze”? What’s that? And the freeze happens when the fight or flight are so big that I don’t have the capacity to handle it. And everything just kind of stops right there. I can’t keep moving forward. Because what’s supposed to happen is that I have enough emotional capacity and I have enough to handle my amygdala firing like this and still be okay. I’ll feel it. I’ll sense it, but it won’t shut me down. When I freeze, these things get so big that I shut down. And that’s what that’s trying to describe.

(15:05) Stephanie Warner: The amygdala does so much.

(15:09 Marcus Warner: Yeah. We talk about an on and off switch in the brain and that is way oversimplified, but the on switch is largely the amygdala. What we’re talking about here is that when the amygdala fires, that’s the key that is sending us the signal that something is wrong and needs our attention. And if it’s too big of a signal, or if the signal is bigger than we have the capacity to handle, that’s when my switch starts going off in my brain.

(15:42) Stephanie Warner: And it can be a dimmer, which we’ve talked about too. It’s not just you’re completely on or you’re completely off.

(15:48) Marcus Warner: It can be both. It can be a dimmer, it can also just be on and off in an instant.

(15:54) Stephanie Warner: Anything more you want to say on assessment? I know there’s more that you can unpack in that. If you don’t actually have the book and you’re just relying on the podcast, thank you for being with us. Get the book and it will unpack a lot more of this at a slower pace. This is good stuff. Alright, level 3, attunement.

(16:15) Marcus Warner: So we’re now crossing that line from subconscious to conscious. And one of the implications here too is, trauma below the subconscious line could be a memory we can’t remember. Because I’m not conscious of it. And then when I get across it, now it becomes conscious. That’s a big topic in and of itself, but for some people who have run into that, that’s part of what’s going on. The attunement center is the conscious part of my mind that I would say, most of the time I am not aware of it or focused on it. It’s job is actually telling me what to focus on. So I’m not focusing with this part of my mind so much as it is telling me what to focus on.

For example, one of its jobs is to read body language. And so it’ll give me clues like, this person is crying, maybe you should give them attention. This person is angry, maybe you should put your focus there. Or that person seems to want your attention, maybe you should focus. So it’s reading body language and reacting to that. It’s also just reading the world around us, kind of like radar, it’s picking up on, is this environment safe? Is this environment scary? Is there something going on here? And if it says, no, you should focus on this, it’ll send a signal to the left hemisphere side of my brain going, hey, focus on that. Like, that’s what you need.

And so when we get to the other side, the narrative engine belief side of the brain, that’s where we do our focus work. And so this part of my brain tells us what to focus on. That part of my brain will really dive in and focus on it and try to unpack it, and solve the problems and all the things. So when this is working well, then I read people well. I’m attuned to my circumstances. It’s easier for me to be engaged with the world around me. It’s one of the reasons why the idea of being present or, I forgot the word? The “M” word, not meditating,

(18:25) Stephanie Warner: Mutual mind?

(18:26) Marcus Warner: Mindfulness. One of the reasons you hear so much about mindfulness these days..I think they are largely talking about being present with what this part of my brain is doing as a way of helping it to function properly, and not make it non-functional. When this part of my brain doesn’t function properly, I will misread my environment and I will misread people’s signals. It will cause all kinds of problems. I’ll focus on all the wrong things because I’m getting bad cues.

(19:07) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, it’s an important part and you can also just see how it is all working together. All the different layers are feeding into each other to create the worldview and the lenses. With everything you’re reading the world through, there are things happening that you’re not necessarily consciously thinking about. Your body and your brain are reacting to the world around you because of a set number of things. Do you want to pause real quick and explain why there’s hope for that? If things aren’t functioning properly where you can’t think about them, can you change that?

(19:50) Marcus Warner: Yes. It’s not always a quick fix. I would say the good news here is…let’s just say if your life is miserable, and I told you there’s things you could do and in a month it’ll be significantly better. And in two years, it’ll be totally better. You’d probably go on that journey, wouldn’t you? While there may not be an immediate quick fix of, just do this, just cast out this demon, just do this one thing. There are things that you can do to develop these things and in a month, you can notice the difference. In a year, it can be significantly better.

And in two to three years, you can be functioning at a very high level. So that’s the good news, right? These things can be developed. It’s one of the reasons why our partners at Thrive Today have identified the 19 brain skills that people need to develop. And they’ve kind of broken it down into patterns. We focus on six of those here, primarily. Now that I brought it up, I probably should tell people what they are. It is a lot of information. For those who’ve heard the podcast for a while, they’ll recognize these.

Skill number one is CAKE, I want to keep my relational circuits on by being curious, practicing appreciation, being kind, and making eye contact.

Second one is VCR. That is validating, comforting, and recovering. And so those are core relational skills. There’s some communication skills, like Envelope Conversations. How do you talk about something that you have a disagreement over? How do you do something confrontational in a relational manner? That’s the third one.

We have Joy Stories. It’s a four-step process to tell a story about a difficult emotion and how you bounce back from it. That is basically what a joy story is. That’s the fourth tool. It’s been a minute since I told these. Do you remember where the other two are?

(21:53) Stephanie Warner: I knew you were going to ask me that. I’m trying to think of what we did in…

(21:58) Marcus Warner: That’s what happens when I wasn’t planning to say it, it’s like the first four came and then all of a sudden I got a brain blank.

(22:03) Stephanie Warner: I know where I could find it quickly. You have VCR, CAKE, STEP,

(22:12) Marcus Warner: I know what they are. It’s GAMES and BEST. So GAMES is practicing appreciation to grow our joy and best is skills for quieting our body…

(22:23) Stephanie Warner: And guess what? The next two episodes are actually going to go through GAMES and BEST, and a couple other things. So there we go.

(22:27) Marcus Warner: There you go. So those are kind of the six core relational skills that we focus on at Deeper Walk, but there are more for people who really want to address all of the things going on.

(22:42) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Very good. Yes, I know those six you pull out in the new Heart-Focused Community Course that is coming out soon. And that is very good. Well, let’s move on to action then. So level four. So we went through our attachment, assessment, and attunement. Now we’ve come to action, which you said, is where we should be the most like ourselves.

(23:07) Marcus Warner: Right. The fourth floor of the joy elevator is the action center. You can think of it as the command center. So in my mind, I sort of picture that Pixar movie, Inside Out with a command center in the brain and different people in charge. And it’s not a bad picture of what’s going on, because ideally we actually do want joy in control of that command center. I understand there’s a place for all of the other emotions and what they do, but we don’t want them in charge of our lives. Because who we really are is who we are when we’re living with joy. That’s our true self.

All the other ones are adaptations that we make in order to survive. I want my true self in charge when I act. So we call it the action center. It’s also called the identity center and the joy center, depending on what book you’re reading. At one point, I have called it the joy center, I’ve called it the joy bucket. I called it the identity center, called it the command center. It’s all the same thing.

The technical term is the right orbital prefrontal cortex. I think in our prior episode, we said there are two main developments that happen in order for us to be resilient. And the first is that this part of my brain needs to grow and get pretty big. And the main way that this part of my brain grows is by facing adversity and recovering again and again and again. I’ve got to face a mild level of adversity and overcome it. And then maybe a bigger level of adversity and overcome. I need to be able to experience joy and return to joy on a regular basis. And the more often this part of my brain experiences joy and then returns to joy, that part of my brain will grow. And as it grows, my capacity to act like myself and remain relational increases. And that is at the core of resilience. You’ve got to have a really well-developed identity and a really well-developed capacity for joy. And so when those two things are high, then my resilience is going to be high. And that’s why that’s so important.

I said there were two big things. The other one is pathways. We talked about the amygdala triggering off these big six negative emotions and I call them SAD-SAD just so I can remember them. But it’s sadness, anger, disgust, shame, anxiety, and despair. And I think of those like Frankenstein bolts on our neck.

I’ve got my joy center up here in the front part of my brain in the back. I’ve got these big bolts of the six different negative emotions and I need a separate pathway back to my joy center from every one of those emotions. And it would be nice if there was just one, like I can bounce back from anything because I have one pathway, but that’s not how it works. And so because of that, we can often be better at handling different emotions. Some of us are pretty good with sadness, but we’re not good with anger at all. Or some are pretty good with disgust, but we can’t handle shame and so on.

And so what happens is that I can have weaker and stronger pathways in my brain that connect it. And so I need those to be strong. The better developed those joy pathways are, the bigger my joy center is, the more resilient I’m going to be. And it really just comes down to those two things. The bigger and stronger those two things are, resilience becomes much, much easier.

(26:56) Stephanie Warner: This is one of the reasons why we have joy workouts at the end of every chapter in the book and things to help grow that. Looking at the time, I’m going to move us on to the narrative engine. So can you describe how we get from joy elevator over to the narrative engine, and what that is?

(27:12) Marcus Warner: The action centers at the top of my brain on the right side and the top of my brain on the left side is narrative. These two things are in constant communication with each other. I’ve had people say, the left brain, right brain stuff has been proven to be false and ineffective. And I just want to say, what’s been proven false and ineffective is that right brain people are creative and emotional and all that stuff. And left brain people are more analytical. That’s been proven, that’s not the case.

Both parts of the brain are involved in both things. But there is still a distinction in function between right hemisphere and left hemisphere. Ian McGilchrist is one of the leading non-Christian scientists on the brain who explains this well and what the differences are between the two hemispheres. For our part here, we’d say that the main job of the top part of the left side of my brain is to solve problems. And in the process of solving problems, I need to explain those problems.

Dr. Karl Lehman refers to what’s going on over here as your, verbal logical explainer. Because it’s trying to put words to what you are experiencing. It’s trying to apply some logic to why you are experiencing it as it tries to solve your problems. Narratives are an attempt to organize data in a way that makes sense out of what I’m going through and points me to a possible solution. My brain primarily looks to its own memories for potential solutions in the future. And so all of this stuff is kind of happening in the narrative engine.

And what happens here is that if something is off in the joy elevator, if I’m stuck over here, then I’m going to be sending bad data over to the narrative engine. It’s going to be coming up with explanations that make no sense because it’s not getting all of the facts or all of the data. If I am miss reading somebody and I’m sending that information over then I’m going to come up with a solution like, I should punch that person in the face.

Because that is the solution it came up with. The other part that this engine is going to do is it’s going to try to come up with the solution that will cause me the least amount of damage. And so it’s also going to assess, well punching that person in the face might actually end up backfiring on me. So let’s find another solution. But it’s problem solving. And you can see how if I’m getting bad data over here, I will create a belief system around that data. Now that’s the top part. If you go below the conscious subconscious line on the left side of the brain engine, you hit the amygdala again.

And that means, now I have narratives that go through the amygdala. And so my amygdala can fire twice. It can fire from what’s going on coming up the joy elevator. It can also fire for what’s coming down on the other side. And that’s why I can watch the news, for example, and come to believe something because of what I’ve seen on the news. And my amygdala will fire and go, this makes me angry or this makes me scared.

Or it can be, this is bad and it makes me sad and it makes me feel shame and despair. And so my amygdala can get fired on both sides of the brain. And it takes a different solution depending on what is causing it to fire. Correcting beliefs plays a really big role in quieting our amygdala when the reason it’s firing is our belief system. But when it’s not our belief system that’s causing it to fire, that isn’t going to help.

(31:18) Stephanie Warner: Yeah. And it helps to explain why things can feel so strong and so true and deep because you believe it is true even if it’s not. The facts that you are working with and then the narrative that you were working out of goes all the way back. It’s not just like, I’m cerebrally thinking this, it can be a visceral feeling.

(31:51) Marcus Warner: Exactly. And most of our visceral feelings are happening at the subconscious level.

(31:58) Stephanie Warner: Oh, man, this is all good. I want to let you keep going because there’s so much to unpack. But let’s circle up this chapter with just some takeaways. Given this basic brain model, how would you like people to think about it or what should they do with it?

(32:18) Marcus Warner: There can be another book, A Thousand and One Brain Science Applications. For our purposes here, I just want to introduce a concept called the pain processing pathway. When we experience pain, it’s traumatizing to us when it is not resolved at all five levels that we’ve discussed. In other words, the four floors of the joy elevator all have to resolve that pain and the narrative engine has to resolve the pain. So for me to be “completely healed,” if you will, from a trauma, I need to experience that at all five levels. That’s important. Dr. Lehman calls this, I have to metabolize the pain, which is sort of an academic way of saying, I want my brain to eat it. I want my brain to eat the pain and make it go away. And that means level five of the narrative engine has to do its part and the action center has to do its part.

Attunement, assessment, and attachment all of these have a role to play and they all have to do their part in order for this to be completely eaten up. To be devoured and stop being traumatizing to me. That’s the first implication of this. It’s one of the reasons why just believing the right thing doesn’t always fix your problems. Because just believing the right thing is only dealing with one element. One engine and one part of this and it definitely can’t get to the things that are going on below the level of our beliefs. This also has applications for how we intervene with people.

So for example, at that attachment level I just need somebody to share the pain with me. I need someone to be present and be happy to be with me no matter how I’m feeling. And not try to fix it and not try to make it all better. Just be happy to be with me in this pain to show that somebody can still be present with me and happy to be with me, even though I am in this mode.

That’s sharing, that’s level one intervention. Level two, once the amygdala is fired, there are things that we do to soothe how big this has gotten for me, or to bring some energy when it has sucked the energy out. I am doing something to help that person kind of quiet. or helping that person develop some energy when they didn’t have energy. And so we just call that soothing. When we get to the attunement level, where it’s just constantly reading the body and reading things, then I want to support people. I want to kind of do things with them like, let’s do this together. Let’s take some action together and let’s try to read this situation together.

And so my goal is more of a mutual mind experience with that person. And then I get up to the top part and I want to show or I want to demonstrate and say, look, this is what it looks like. It could be casting vision. Imagine this, imagine doing that. What if we handle it this way? But I’m showing them how to do it. And then finally, at the narrative level, I’m making suggestions. I’m like, let’s interpret it this way instead of that way. Let’s make suggestions about how this ought to be handled using the “S” words.

Go up the model like, let’s share the experience, let’s soothe the overwhelm, let’s support you and do it by doing this together. Let’s show you and cast a vision for what it could be like, and then let’s make suggestions or offer a new explanation for how to look at things. And so that’s kind of the order in which it goes, in terms of our own interventions with people’s problems. So that’s a small little wrap up.

(36:21) Stephanie Warner: And this has been the “Brain Science Special.” Thank you for giving us so much of your time and so much food for thought. This is really, really good, Dad. Thank you everybody who’s been on the trail with us. We are so pleased to be able to offer this podcast for free to people around the world. Thank you to everyone who partners with us as a donor. You are helping to keep us on the trail, so thank you. Father, give us a quick final thought to pull it all together.

(36:55) Marcus Warner: Yeah, I guess my final thought on the brain is that there is the brain and Bible. It’s like, how do they connect together? And I think first of all, we believe that God designed the brain and God inspired the Bible, and they are going to be in sync with one another. What brain science does is it often shines a spotlight on things that we would have missed, if we were just taking all of our preconceived categories into our interpretation of the Bible.

But by challenging some of those preconceived categories, it opens our eyes to notice things in the Bible that we wouldn’t have seen before. And so they’re cooperative, they help us. And we believe that they aren’t going to be in contradiction to each other because God is the author of both. So that probably would be my final thought for today.

(37:43) Stephanie Warner: We’ll see you all back next week.