Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) & My SPECT Brain Scan - SIM Interactive 6/2022 - Patrick Mosher

I'm going to allow you guys to get into my head. This is so good. I know, Keziah, you're still on the road, so I'm going to describe this to you. But you're going to get inside my head. Here we go. You're ready? That's my brain. That's my brain. A number of years ago, I went out to the Amen Clinic. Daniel Amen is a very famous brain person. What his interest was, was to study— he's a psychologist, MD, very famous, all this kind of stuff. And he was like, why in psychiatry are we the only medical practice that doesn't study the organ that we're working with? We talk to people, we have all this stuff, but we never study the organ. It's like, why are we doing that? So he started studying the organ. And so he looked at brain flow, blood flow in the brain. And then he took pictures of it, of other brain waves in the brain. And so if you look at this, this is my story with it. So when the neurologist that I worked with on this, when we went there, we went to Seattle, Bellevue, Seattle. Near Seattle, and he saw this. He saw my brain here. This is the SPECT, called a spectroscopy. And within 90 seconds of looking at just this picture, he said, so you were shy and somehow you overcame that. 90 seconds into the review and I'm like, okay, that sounds like magic to me. Like he had a crystal ball and he said, okay, you're this thing, like a fortune teller, a palm reader or something. But he was looking at this and I was like, in fact, that's true. And I was like, how do you know that? And he said, let me see if I can find it, laughed. Yeah, he said, on the left side of your brain— and actually, I think it was this pic— maybe it was this picture— he said, on the left side of your brain, there's an indentation there, and that part of your brain controls a lot of the emotive functions. And it looks like this was a deeper trough in your brain, but somehow you've created brain flow, you've created flow there that it's like repairing that part of your brain. And that's usually where shyness is. I'm like, dude, who are you? Now, you know me, I'm a geek. I'm just like loving this. I'm like, what? You know, so we had this great conversation about this and the fact that was true. And you guys know the story. I was painfully shy in high school and I walked down the hall and nobody could see me. And then when I went to college, I decided I needed to change that. And so I made a promise to myself that when I went to college, I'd be able to drink beer and talk to anybody in the room. And so I did. And it was hard. And I overcame that. And ever since then, people go like, you're such an extrovert. I'm like, kind of. I'm okay with talking on stage and everything like that, but every once in a while, I need some re-energizing alone time to make this work.