A brain surgeon watched a patient's frontal lobe, cingulate gyrus, and insular cortex activate as she focused her thoughts, her blood pressure and heart rate dropping measily. His wife connected it to Philippians 4: shifting toward gratitude reduces anxiety. He sees brain surgery as intentional structural change that works.
He saw her kind of curl up her forehead and think about something. And then her frontal lobe started to come online, and her cingulate gyrus and her insular cortex, the parts that are involved in better memory production and processing and thinking about things. And then we saw her physiology change, and her blood pressure came down, her heart rate came down, her respiratory rate came down. And we watched her think about one thing and not another thing. And we watched her brain react, and then we watched her body improve in its physiology. And my wife saw this instant connection between that. And she said, that reminds me of Philippians, chapter four. And I said, what do you mean? And she said, well, that part of the Bible that says, if you don't want to be as anxious, then think about something you're grateful for or switch to something that's good or lovely or trustworthy or kind. And literally, I'm not a person that goes around saying that God says things to me out loud. I don't talk like that very often. But as real as you and I are talking, I heard this idea in my brain that formed. And it was. When I go to surgery and I perform brain surgery on somebody, what I'm doing is intentionally making a structural change in their brain for the purpose of improving their life in some way.
