AMEN Australia 2019 Conference: Witnesses Unto Me

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Justin Jackson

A House Full of Darkness

The text that I want to really bring to your attention as we begin comes from Matthew 6, verse 21.

And it says, the lamp of the body is the eye.

If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light.

Now the eye is an incredibly complex structure and we could talk for so many minutes about the eye and its complexity, but really I want to take us behind the eye to where this lamp shines onto, into the machinery of the brain.

Jesus goes on and says if your eye is bad, I don't think he's really referring to, you know, I'm not an ophthalmologist, but if your eye is diseased, I'm not really sure that that's what he's saying.

But he says if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

And if the light, I presume the light that that eye is letting in is darkness, how great is that darkness?

Now, we've all heard the saying, monkey see, monkey do, but did you know that a monkey can actually do without doing?

And this was discovered in the 1980s when Rizzolatti and his colleagues found that some areas in the macaque's brain fired when they reached for a banana.

They quickly noticed something surprising.

When they picked up an object, the same, very same neurons fired in the monkey's brain even though they weren't undertaking that motor task that those motor neurons fired.

The researchers found that they would only respond to very very specific actions and they dubbed them mirror neurons And a mirror neuron that fired when the monkey grasped the peanut would fire when the experimenter grasped the peanut.

When the experimenter put the peanut in his mouth, the same neuron would fire in the monkey's brain.

So these mirror neurons, as they came to be known, have been receiving increasing attention.

They're the only types of brain cells that are known to code the actions of others in tandem with activating our own.

While I can never truly know what it feels like to be you, my mirror neuron system does give me the ability to mentally simulate another person's actions fluidly, rapidly and help us to have empathy and understanding for their intentions.

Now you might not believe me, but I'm looking at all your serious faces changing into beaming smiles as you look at this, this couple laughing there.

Perhaps for those serious faced ones, it takes a little while to, to crack a smile.

This image might, might get your mirror neurons firing.

When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up too, and this initiates a cascade of neural activity that not only triggers a smile, but what did you notice when you smiled?

You felt like those people in the picture.

It evoked the feeling of smiling, of happiness.

I don't need to make any inference on what you're feeling.

I experience it immediately and effortlessly.

The eye let that into your mind and allowed you to experience that?

Fiona Kerr published this paper in February of this year, the neurophysiology of human touch and eye gaze in therapeutic relationships and healing, and she wrote 1 of the most powerful human interactions is face-to-face contact involving eye gaze.

The interaction between trusted individual creates a neural duet.

Now I just, she's put that in italics and I think for good reason.

A neural duet between brains due to the reciprocal firing of the brain social networking areas with a powerful effect on the level of trust and empathy as well as positive attitudinal shift.

Face-to-face contact involves the activation of mirror and spindle neurons.

And we've talked a lot about witness, about patient interaction.

I want to bring us with this thought of a neural duet of trust to a text in Mark.

Text found in Mark 10 verses 17 and also I'm going to point out verse 21 as well.

And it's a story that we all know very, very well.

It's a story of Jesus that says now as he was going out on the road 1 came running knelt before him and asked him good teacher what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?

He made retinal lock with the rich young ruler.

He looked at him, he looked at him, but not only did he look at him, He loved him, the text says.

And I wonder what sort of a neural duet was taking place when this young man looked into the eyes of Jesus.

I wonder what sort of a neural duet takes place when we look into the eyes of Jesus.

We turn to the Desire of Ages, page 519, and it says that Christ looked into the face of the young man.

As Ellen witnessed this event taking place, She describes that Jesus looked into his face as if reading his life and searching his character.

Christ seeing into his character loved him, she says again.

And love for Christ was awakening in the ruler's heart, for love begets love.

Do you think that as we look into the eyes of Christ and then look into the eyes of our patients that they will see Christ in us and love will awaken love?

Christ longed to develop the excellence of his character, sanctify it to the master's use.

This is 1 of the most tragic stories to me in the Bible, as this man looked into the eyes of Jesus but rejected that offer of life.

Alan writes that he was quick to discern, she says, all that Christ's command entails.

We have spindle neurons, as Fiona commented on in the in the paper that we just alluded to.

These fire within 1 20th of a second and they combine areas involved with emotion, belief and judgment, often called trust neurons.

They're only evident in the brains of animals with long-term nuanced social structures.

And they enable individuals to read and respond to social signals.

The more they fire when you interact with a person, the more empathy and trust you'll develop within them.

When we look into someone's eyes, not only do we have these neurons, but neurons have neurotransmitters, and 1 of the neurotransmitters is oxytocin.

And experiments in relation to this hormone and trust are absolutely fascinating.

I want to focus on this paper from Nature in 2005 that tells us that oxytocin increases the gaze to the eye region.

And so this was administered intranasally and you can see there that the facial contact between the oxytocin arm of this trial and the placebo was increased significantly.

So it's associated with maternal bonding and childbirth, and it's associated with love.

And you can see here that the regions that contain a high density of receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin overlap with activity in this functional MRI scan related to love, to love, The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love.

And as the researchers focused in on this, they looked at these 2 kinds of attachments, maternal and romantic attachments, and they looked at overlapping regions in the brain's reward system.

But, fascinatingly, it deactivated a set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment, and mentalizing, that is, the assessment of another person's intentions and emotions.

And So the authors concluded that human attachment employs a push-pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment.

I think that's absolutely fascinating as we look at what love enables us to do.

So as you look at this couple, their oxytocin levels must be pretty high, I think, because to be nose to nose, gazing into someone's face is an awkward thing, unless perhaps you're in love.

And not only that, they're blindly in love, I think.

But that's something that I think perhaps is important for us at times as Christians when we look at our patients to be blindly in love with them as Christ was blind.

Not saying that we need to, you know, turn off our discriminatory functions, but it's interesting the way this is designed.

This paper focused on marital conversations and these same hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin.

And what they did was they asked both partners to pick an area for self-improvement.

They specifically said, look, don't pick something that's likely to be antagonistic or confrontational to your partner.

And then They sat both of them there and recorded the couple in discussion together for 10 minutes.

Some partners would say, well, you're a lousy drinker and you've been trying to give that up for the last 20 years and you've got no hope.

And so they would record that kind of conversation.

The partners would say, well, look, you know, you've been working on this and you've made significant improvements and I think you can get there.

And so they would record these kind of conversations and there's well-validated scales for that.

And what they noticed was couples' positive behaviour was related to their vasopressin and their oxytocin levels.

Now that's all very interesting, but the thing that really, really fascinated me about this paper was that the investigators had made blisters on their skin and then as they measured the time to healing, they found that those with the high oxytocin levels, the couples that interacted in a positive way, healed their blisters 2 days faster than their counterparts.

And so we have really looked at trust and oxytocin and Dan Buechner writes in the Blue Zones this Fascinating insight.

When you ask the most highly functioning seniors how they are, they always say, I feel good, thanks to God.

They may be blind, deaf, and their bones hurt.

The fact that God is in control of their lives relieves any economic, spiritual, or well-being anxiety that they might otherwise have.

They go through life with the peaceful certitude that someone is looking out for them.

And it's fascinating because he was clearly aware of the 8 health secrets, as I'd say, they shouldn't be health secrets, should they?

Pure air, sunlight, abstemiousness, rest, exercise, proper diet, the use of water, and trust in divine power.

And I think we really need to focus more and more on this last, this eighth health law.

Because, I tell you what, if you've seen the game changers, They can present our vegan health message better than I've seen anything ever presented before.

You can read about vitamin D and sunshine.

Back to Menu

A House Full of Darkness

Transcript

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Sound Doctrine