Healing the Unseen: Chronic Illness, The Brain-Body Connection, & Functional Medicine
42:49 Share

Forget frequently asked questions. Common sense, common knowledge, or Google. How about advice from a real genius? 95% of people in any profession are good enough to be qualified and licensed. 5% go above and beyond. They become very good at what they do, but only 0.1%.

Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is Mel Hopper-Koppelman. She's a program director at Synthesis Health Lab. We're going to talk about resetting the nervous system and brain development. Again, Mel is the integrative healthcare practitioner and an educator. She's pioneering a revolutionary approach to chronic illness by connecting ancient wisdom with cutting-edge neuroscience. She works with women specifically,

to try to achieve a 50% or more reduction in symptoms associated with their chronic illness, such as chronic fatigue, et cetera. I'm so interested to hear about our methods. So welcome, Mel. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm a big fan of your show. Oh, thank you.

Tell me, you know, usually with these kind of stories, the person themselves had difficulty, they helped themselves, and now they help other people. Is that what happened with you? Did you have chronic fatigue or other problems in your past? Yes, sir. Yep, that's following that pattern. So you're following the hero's journey. You become the hero for people that suffer from those conditions. That's really cool. No.

No, it's cool. It's a cool, it's an accurate archetypal model of transformation and hopefully bringing back some goods for other people so that they don't spend as much time wandering around unwell as I did. So yeah, I kind of had two different episodes in my own health that led to kind of two different career changes. The first time I got pretty seriously sick was when I was in India volunteering and I developed amoebic dysentery.

which is an infection and it's not that pleasant, but it wasn't treated properly at the time. So I developed a chronic dysentery infection for a couple of years and I don't recommend that. And I struggled to find people to help me treat it for a variety of reasons. I think when I came back to the States, the US healthcare system doesn't really have this idea of like

chronic tropical illness on their radar. So I got kicked around for a while and actually I was told by one doctor in the emergency room that if I'd had dysentery for as long as I was saying I'd had it, I'd be dead. And fortunately, he was wrong about that. So I had to basically figure out how to get myself well. And that was what led me on the path of seeking out help from a

talented Chinese medicine physician who did help me a lot. And also, I was forced to learn a whole lot about nutrition because there's no shortage of people who have very opinionated views on what people should eat. But if your digestive tract is pretty shot, you're going to learn experientially. So

I ended up getting a master's degree in Chinese medicine and a second master's degree in nutrition and functional medicine. I was doing a lot of lab testing. And so I, you know, and it was great. And I was able to get myself a lot better. And I...

I treated patients and folks, clients for quite a few years very happily. And then I was living in the UK at the time and I moved back to the United States. And when I moved back, my system completely crashed in this whole new way where I woke up one morning and my brain didn't. And my body was in intense pain and I had just crippling fatigue. And there wasn't any kind of clear objectivity.

obvious trigger. But because at this point I'd already been in practice and I already had a lot of training, I was optimistic and confident. I was like, okay, I know what to do with this. I know how to handle this. And so I sort of doubled down on what I already knew. I was running lots of labs on myself. I was finding all sorts of supplements to take. I was buying gadgets. And after a year or so, I had to kind of admit to myself that this was not working as well as it should on paper be working. And so this really forced me to just reorient

expand my skill set and kind of in some ways go back to the drawing board about what

what I thought I knew about human health and how to help someone with complex illness. And so I ended up retraining, doing a lot of developmental neurology, which was very relevant in my case and for a lot of my patients. Functional neurology, which is assuming that we have evolved in a reasonably robust way, how to tap into what's going on in the nervous system and to kind of give it the stimulation and nourishment that it needs.

And then also retraining. What was going on with you? Like, what did you discover was the problem? Yeah. It is horrible dysbiosis. What was that? Oh, yeah. A little bit more complex than that. So what ended up being the case? That's a great question. And there's a number of ways I can answer that. I think one of the most important aspects in my case that was sort of like the big player in the room was that while I was

was not sort of diagnosed with anything developmental as a kid. There were definitely clear patterns in retrospect. And the upshot was that I had something called retained primitive reflexes. And I'm really happy to dive into that, what that means with you. But essentially, when we're born, we don't have this kind of full-blown brain yet that lets us do conscious movements. And so when we're in

in utero and the first few months of life, all of our movements are reflexive. And so these are just movement patterns that allow us to do the things that we need to do to stay alive in that early part of life. They allow us to feed from mom's boom and they allow us to roll over and they allow us to signal for help. And then they evolve and integrate and develop as we develop, right? And so we change our

motor patterns. We were able to crawl and we were able to keep doing increasingly impressive things. And what's really not that uncommon, and I would say increasingly common nowadays, is that development does not go optimally.

optimally. And so these reflexes don't get integrated and they get integrated when they do get integrated. It's because the brain is developing in a healthy, normal way on top of them and then coming down and inhibiting them. So after six months to a year of life, if you examine someone, there should never be like a primitive reflex that's positive on a neurological exam. And if it is, it can mean a number of things. One is that it can mean that

that it never went away in the first place, so that the brain did not develop in an even or robust way. The second is that it could be re-emerging from a head injury, or the third is from degeneration of some kind, like unhealthy aging or some sort of neurodegeneration. And so in my case, when I went for exam, a lot of my reflexes were retained, and it just pointed out

or pointed to problems that had been there the whole time, but were not severe enough to cause my system to crash. So I was able to do well academically in school. I was very athletic. I was able to travel. I was able to do all sorts of things. But that brings in the second point about

what happened to me and what happens to a lot of people, which is this issue of cumulative load, which is like the straw that breaks the camel's back. So, you know, someone... The issue of what? The straw that breaks the camel's back. No, before you said that, something load or something... Cumulative load. Oh, it's cumulative load. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, so cumulative load can be any of the things that

people are learning to associate as triggers or stressors of ill health. So you mentioned dysbiosis as one example, environmental exposures like chemicals or non-native EMFs or inappropriate light, psychological stress, financial stress, injuries that don't heal well or scars, all of these things that build up over a lifetime that

you know, sometimes big bad things happen, but, you know, what's very common nowadays, especially with chronic health issues, is that it's not necessarily one big bad thing. It's just the accumulation of a lot of little things that the body has not been able to properly process and heal from. They've kind of been able to get over well enough maybe to keep going, but not to return to a truly robust, healthy baseline. Okay. So what's...

What do you do? How do you diagnose when, you know, what's going on with somebody? Neurologically, you know, physically, et cetera. Yeah. So, I mean, in my practice, I've learned a couple of really helpful frameworks for making sense of the complexity that, you know, humans who are not healthy bring to the challenge of getting well. And so in terms of

assessing the nervous system, you know, and this is why this particular issue is so important to me, that assessing someone, whether they're a child or an adult, for something like retained primitive reflexes is non-invasive and it takes less than 10 minutes. And frankly, it's not rocket science. And I'm not at all of the opinion that this is everyone's problem or this is the cause of all, you know, insert disease here, chronic fatigue or anything like that. But I do believe that it's extremely overlooked and that it's foundational, that if we understand

the importance of first principles and of hierarchies, then the development of your nervous system is really at the foundation of the hierarchy of your health. So that would be a good reason to make sure that you're taking a look at it because we can be looking at a million things at any given time. So why should we put our attention here? Well, we really should put our attention here because if you're in your mid-40s or

and your energy is crashing, you're having all these confusing issues and you've covered a lot of your common sense bases of getting chemicals and crap out of your diet and getting fragrances out of your air, you're trying to do things but you haven't assessed really just the basics of the healthy development of your nervous system, then that's really a

potentially high leverage area for you to understand about how things are going for you and then where to focus your attention for getting well. I don't think that means anything to most people. What does that mean you need to have a healthy nervous system? What do you do? What do you look for? Okay, sure. So, well, okay. I can answer that a couple ways. I mean, talking specifically about retained primitive reflexes, assessing

If they are retained is an examination. So many people will have had the experience of going to the doctor maybe and having them use like a reflex hammer. So that's a type of reflex. But this would be a different exam that is assessing to see if these different primitive reflexes are retained. So for example... Well, what's an example?

Before we continue, I've been personally funding the Finding Genius podcast for four and a half years now, which has led to 2,700 plus interviews of clinicians, researchers, scientists, CEOs, and other amazing people who are working to advance science and improve our lives and our world. Even though this podcast gets 100,000 plus downloads a month, we need your help to reach hundreds of thousands more worldwide. Please visit findinggeniuspodcast.com and click on support us.

We have three levels of membership from $10 to $49 a month, including perks such as the ability to see ahead in our interview calendar and ask questions of upcoming guests, transcripts of podcasts you're interested in, the ability to request specific topics or guests, and more. Visit FindingGeniusPodcast.com and click support us today. Now back to the show. Yeah. Okay. So for example, one is called the Rooting Reflex, and that is a reflex that helps –

infants to suckle from their mom's boob. And so you can try to elicit that by gently brushing on the cheek over the lips. And what should happen if someone has their mouth resting and you gently brush, or it has to be kind of somewhat firm enough that pretty much nothing should happen. But what happens very often in my practice and for various people is that you get like a reflexive and unconscious grimacing on the side of the stimulation. Okay. And so that's not under conscious control.

And that is that brainstem reflex that's being triggered because the

kind of like higher, more advanced levels of the brain are under functioning for one reason or another. So that would be an example. And there's usually, there's different discussions about truly how many primitive reflexes there are. The answer might be between something like 40 and 50, but routinely in general, we test for about 12 or 14 of the most studied and clinically relevant ones. And that can give a good indication if there is brainstem immaturity or not, if there is this type of issue.

Okay. So what do you do about it then if someone has that reflex still? Yeah. Okay. Well, what's the concept? So those are kind of two slightly different questions, but in practice, I suppose now that I'm speaking about it, more people are seeking my care for this issue specifically, but in general, it's more general things like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or autoimmune conditions. You know, I'm working with people who have those and supporting their health. Um,

So in those cases, I've found that it's important to work with a, I guess, a kind of biologically based organization

order of operations in terms of the systems that I help people heal in. And so even though the nervous system is foundational, it's often important to take care of other common issues that are happening first. So for example, many people I see have chronic, either hidden pathogens or viral load or mold or Lyme. And even if they do have retained primitive reflexes, even if

it was developmental issues that led them to be susceptible to having infections or other things that they couldn't get rid of, it is very helpful to address these things first because there's an increasing awareness

brain's neuroplasticity, which is to say the brain's ability to change itself. But just because it can, it can, and it's really wonderful, and it's really important for us to know that, but just because it can doesn't mean that anything will work. And so if someone, for example, is very inflamed, they're not really in a very highly neuroplastic mode, right? So helping to address those things first, helping to address things like gut dysfunction,

gut dysbiosis and chronic gut infections first. And then, so essentially I'm taking people through a process, not a protocol, but a process that involves starting kind of step one and proceeding forward. Primitive reflexes are just one part of that, but essentially the

primitive reflexes are integrated is through stimulation and that is how they were supposed to be stimulated the first time. So by doing a combination of things that stimulate those reflexes and then help stimulate the areas of the brain that are more mature that are supposed to be coming down to inhibit them, doing that in combination we can help to resolve brainstem immaturities and

brain development imbalances if that is part of someone's picture, which I'm finding increasingly, as I say, it's just an overlooked area and can be kind of one of those sticky causes that most people aren't looking at when they've tried everything else. Well, do people have a neurological problem actively their whole life? Or maybe they're okay, they get to be 40 and the stresses of life and work and children and all that just

I don't know, epigenetically put them on a path or this reflex reestablishes itself. Does that ever happen? No, that's a really good question. One way I'd answer that, this area of primitive reflexes presence in adults is grossly understudied. But in terms of your, I guess, you know, I'd say like a reasonable hypothesis, you know, it's like, well, maybe that wasn't there the whole time. And you're right, because they probably wouldn't have been tested. My answer to that, I'm very pragmatic, you know, it's not

To me, what's less important is like what's in the textbook. I want to know how to help people get better. If the reflexes are retained, there's pretty much always things from their history that's highly suggestive of it. So if a 40-year-old, for example, comes to me and they have chronic fatigue and we assess for primitive reflexes and they're there, then as I said earlier, either they never went away or they had a head injury or they have neurodegeneration, right? So if that's the case, we're going to do a good case study

background and explore which of those is most likely, right? So if the person has no history of head injury, then that's probably not it, you know? And then we need to look, okay, well, you know, do they have some sort of neurodegeneration? But if they're that age, then I'm still highly suspicious of a developmental component. But there's usually going to be other things from their history that are suggested. Is there any benefit to having these retained reflexes?

So, okay, I want to answer that really broadly, right? Because the narrower answer is that we are aware of the problems, both with having them retained and what

them being retained suggests. So they're both suggestive of a problem and they cause problems. So being suggestive of a problem is that it's really an objective sign of unevenness of brain development that can lead to direct, let's say, health issues and psychological issues. So it can lead to cardiac issues because our heart is innervated from the left and right side of the nervous system. And if they're getting, you know, signals of different

maturation levels, then that eventually can lead to heart issues. It's also directly related to immune issues. The left hemisphere of the brain promotes inflammation in the body, and the right hemisphere of the brain houses our anti-inflammatory reflex. And so having either of those imbalance creates a different suite of problems. More directly, one of these primitive reflexes fires when you turn your head to the side. So there's a couple of things there. One is that if that reflex is called the asymmetric

tonic neck reflex. If you're an adult and that fires when you turn your head, it's almost impossible to have healthy neck and shoulder biomechanics because that nerve pattern firing is just not consistent with how we're designed to make that movement. And the other problem is that firing is creating neurological noise and static

in your nervous system. Like that signal should not be going off when you turn your head. So when it does, it's really creating interference with what your cortex is trying to do. So that's also...

a bit of a challenge. Because this is the Finding Genius podcast, so I'm wanting to think a little bit more outside the box and find potential benefits. What I would say is that what often comes along with these patterns of uneven development is a combination of gifts and deficits. So we will often see that one side of the cortex is more developed than peers or has developed much greater and the other side is developed much left. So that can lead to

to gifts and that can lead to things that people can do. You know what? Indian savant level gifts or just a little bit of a gift? Yeah, no, no. It's on a spectrum, but it can be savant level gifts. I'll bring up a different...

clinical scenario that's a bit of an analogy that there are documented cases of kids who have had head injuries and they can suddenly play piano at a virtuoso level. And so that's the kind of, if you can take that as a thought experiment, you know, it's like an interesting thing to ponder. I don't have a strong, like, this is good or bad because that's just an oversimplistic way of looking at it, where you can recognize that something has been unleashed and you also can see head trauma

and skill loss that's come with it. Is it good? Is it bad? That's probably not the right frame. I would say with retained primitive reflexes, it usually leads to people...

having challenges using their whole brain together, you know? And so it's, yeah, it's an interesting thing, but most of the time we would see it as something that people tend to function better when those are integrated. Hmm. As you were saying, do people ever lose their savant-like abilities when they regulate their nervous system better or show what happens? Yeah, that's a good question. There's a couple of ways I can answer that. So,

One thing to understand with the hemispheres of the brain is that one of the largest and most important roles of the cortex is inhibition. So inhibiting the lower levels and also inhibiting each side. So a very important job of the right cortex is to inhibit the activity of the left cortex. And a very important job of the left cortex is to inhibit the activity of the right cortex. You can get, let's say, I mean, I guess kids are very commonly studied that also would apply to adults. You can get savant-level inhibition

skills that are so off the charts that when integration starts to happen, some of those, yes, might go away. I know my mentor mentioned a case of a kid who, if you told him

your birthday, he would tell you immediately what day of the week it was and who was president. And this is indicative of a very mature left hemisphere and the left hemisphere being hyper-connected to itself. So it's able to very quickly get this information and has it on hand. Now, as this kid becomes more integrated, or as this kid did become more integrated, he was a bit slower on the

uptake for that sort of skill. So you could say that for that particular skill, he lost some ability, but what he gained was the ability to kind of, first of all, feel his body, know what his own desire was, have his own self-agency, connect with other people, and so on. So what I want to really be clear about in this discussion is that this is not about making people normal or fit in at all. This is really about

helping people to be the truest expression of themselves, which means that the two hemispheres of the brain are able to work together collaboratively as a whole. So do you have them do tasks that require both sides of the brain to work together?

Is that one method where you could help them get into a better neurological state? So that's interesting. So I guess what I would say there is that if we're really understanding this issue that we're describing on a developmental scale, then you're talking about areas of the brain that are years behind in their development. So it's not...

a simple case of having them do like a breathing meditation or even like having them put light on their head to get into a different state to use their brain because what about like uh ballroom dancing or something like that that's like a whole body in here these so these are great ideas and these are definitely ways to use your whole brain but if you in the kind of clinical situation that we're talking about let's say of a child or an adult where let's

let's say, for example, we talk about this savant thing that the left side of their brain is at a maturity level that's many years beyond their right. Dancing is going to be too even of a bilateral stimulus to help

bridge that gap. So if their right brain is functioning at a five-year-old level, which can be the case, and people don't necessarily notice because they're compensating with their skills, then this is a case where you really need to do unilateral stimulation very strong on the underactive side.

over and over again to get it to catch up. Something like dancing is amazing. Most people would do well to have more dancing in their life, but as a bilateral stimulation, it's not going to make much of an effect on bridging the gap between the maturation levels and activity levels of the two hemispheres. And I would even say because the more developed and more active stimulation

side of the brain is more metabolically receiving of stimulation, in some ways it can even increase the gap. So how do you do it then? How do you bring both sides up to the proper level? You know, if there's a part of the brain that seems really underdeveloped years behind, what do you do? Yeah, so this is what I was alluding to before, that you do a proper assessment, you assess

and do a proper clinical assessment, it will often correspond to psychological traits. And then, you know, the gold standard is to put together, you know, a package of care where you are providing bottom-up and top-down stimulation to the underactive side, and in some cases, even inhibiting the kind of more, in some ways, overdeveloped side so that they can come together and work together as a cohesive whole. So when I say stimulation, you know, in some ways, you know, anything is on the table. So that can include light, that can include exercise, that can include

include touch, that can include vibration. So you can put together stacks and packages, but that's really the principle is that if you want to get an area of the brain to grow, then you need stimuli. What are some of the other retained reflexes? Do any of them have to do with breathing, holding your breath unnecessarily? That's a good question. So there is a

primitive reflex called the Moreau reflex, and that's a sympathetic reflex, and that's kind of an infantile startle. So it's often thought to be involved in when we take our first breath when we're born. And then it's really a case where if someone is an adult and doesn't have this

reflex retained and someone kind of opens the door behind them and generally the context is safe, then they'll kind of calmly, you know, in an alert way, turn around just to see what it is. Whereas someone who has the reflex retained, they'll do like an adrenaline dump and, you know, and they might take a sharp inhale, like you're kind of talking about, and then take a look around. So that would be what that looks like. But more generally, breath holding, I don't think necessarily is a retained primitive reflex, but it certainly can be related to general nervous system dysregulation and it's

different strategies that the body has for balancing its blood gases. Okay. So how long is the protocol to help somebody? And like, you know, just pick an example, maybe a patient you had, you know, redact whatever you want. You know, what does their journey look like from sickness to health? What do they do? Yeah, sure. And I mean, I want to be clear as well that, you know, not all of my patients have restriction primitive reflexes, but I do feel really great that I have that lens where I'm at least asking those questions and able to identify them if they do. You know, in general, when people come in

in the program that we're working at, most of them have been sick for many years, some of them for decades. And depending on that trajectory, we're usually able to get symptoms improving in the first few months. In general, getting reflexes that are retained to integrate in an inflamed and unwell adult

It depends. I'm going a little bit on my own experience, my own clinical experience, and also from the work of Dr. Robert Malillo, that it's usually along the order of something like six months to a year, you know, where you need to do that, like that kind of repetitive stimulation to really get it to grow. But there's a lot of factors that depend, you know, depends on if they have lots of infections when they're coming in. It depends on how active they were at baseline. So there's a lot of factors at play. But I like to give, I like to orient people really to longer time horizons, not to put people off or to be pessimistic. But I think

when, well, first of all, when people have been sick for years, then get making meaningful and lasting improvements in the order of months is really great, you know? And that's really, you know, what we should be expecting. If people have been sick for a decade and they're looking to take something that's going to help them feel better in a week, you know, that may not be realistic. And then if we're talking about

neurological development for someone might be, you know, years behind that we can make this meaningful improvement in the complexity of the nervous system in six months or a year, I also think is wonderful. So that's really, I don't know, it's not, it doesn't sound as sexy as it could, but I think that that's really kind of a realistic idea. Oh,

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good question. We're talking about something complex. Yeah. So for the most part, we're looking more at patterns. You know, with the nervous system, there's really great ways to evaluate it, but there are rarely one-to-one correlations between a finding and what's going on. However, with the reflexes, you can find some patterns. So for example, there is a reflex, so it

primitive reflex called the spinal gallant. And this is evoked by, I guess, you know, tactile stimulation. So touching down the paraspinal muscles. So that's like on either side of the spine. And so it's thought to play a role in birthing process. So when there's stimulation down, let's say the right paraspinal and then going out further laterally, so to the flank, there's a contraction of the torso towards the side of the stimulation. So a

I'm kind of acting it out and you can't see me, but basically it's like the shoulder comes towards the head and you kind of go to side like that. So it's thought to help with the corkscrewing motion of an infant being born. And then it can also help us, you know, learn to do different things.

as we're developing, you know, doing our motor milestones, like, you know, crawling and shimmying and things like that. But if you have a retained spinal glottal reflex, especially on one side, that's highly correlated with the development of idiopathic scoliosis. So, and that sort of makes sense when you think about it, right? That if you have, you know, one side, there's a contraction happening, then over years, as someone is developing, then they're going to develop with

a curve in their spine. And the other aspect of it is that the higher levels of the brain develop on top of the foundation of the brainstem and these reflexes. So if you have a retained spinal glans, especially if it's uneven side to side, it's very likely that you're going to have vestibular imbalances as well. And those vestibular imbalances on their own, I believe, can lead to

So that kind of curvature of the spine. So that would be one. I would say I'm comfortable with that as like a generalization of a one-to-one correlation. But in general, most of the time, I'm zoomed out a little bit more and just looking globally. Like, what do we see? How many are there? How strong are they there? What are the symptoms? You know, what else is going on? And looking at it.

What are some of the most severe manifesting retained reflexes that someone can have or that you've ever seen? Severe. Well, let me, I'll kind of see if I can answer that in a way that I think of what you're asking. Because for the most part, you know, this is something that most people are not aware of. And so people are not

quite aware that they have them, except for the moreau. Most people know that if someone, you know, kind of comes into a room and it scares the shit out of them all the time, they kind of know that they have a moreau and it can be very severe. But even the spinal gillant, people don't know that they have it. They know that they have scoliosis. They know they have back pain. They know that's really associated with fidgeting and having trouble sitting still. But

You know, essentially, people walk around and they live their day-to-day life, and that's really part of the reason why I think it's so important to raise awareness. You know, I assess all of these adult nervous systems of people who are, you know, accomplishing great things in their life. These are not, you know, intellectually or physically disabled people, you know, that I think most people associate with a developmental issue. They, you know, they're smart and they have careers and they get married and they run businesses, but they also...

have other issues that they would not have necessarily thought to connect to their nervous system development because most people don't have a model or framework for doing that. So it can manifest, you know, I mentioned before that the left hemisphere of the brain amps up the immune response and the right hemisphere of the brain calms it down so that people can get stuck with lingering infections, for example.

Whereas other people, the overactive or predominant left hemisphere can get stuck with these inflammatory conditions. So people are aware that they have the manifestations of this issue. But for the most part, they're not walking around with this issue visible or that they notice or that they made the connection. What about personality correlations? Are there certain traits that correlate with these retained reflexes? And if you get rid of them or tamp them down, does a person's personality change? Great question. So, yeah, the answer is yes.

And that's not because of the primitive reflexes directly. It's because of the relationship with brain development. So the personality is coming from the higher levels of the brain. And if there's an unevenness in how those develop, then you get certain personality traits.

And also, I just, again, want to be clear because there's so much kind of confusion and like emotions and nonsense around this subject that, you know, there are personality traits and there's a wide variety of them. And many of them are healthy and normal. It's only when things get blown out that they become, you know, kind of notable or you could even say pathological when implied. So, and part of this discussion is that, you know, in the 1960s, there was a doctor researcher named Roger Sperry who was doing a lot of

we call it split brain research. So basically, there were people who had these severe type of epilepsy that was very dangerous and it was spread all over their brain. And so they were doing a procedure where they were cutting the corpus callosum, which is the tract of tissue that connects the left and the right hemisphere of the brain. And the intention was to prevent the seizures from spreading from one half of the brain to the other. And so you get this kind of really fascinating group of people to study in terms of their personality, in terms of their belief and their value. And the first thing they noticed was that

people were surprisingly like kind of normal afterwards and like kind of surprisingly themselves. But once they started to study them and they found different ways of asking, let's say the left hemisphere of their brain questions and then asking the right hemisphere of the brain the same question and getting wildly different answers and other things that emerged. Like what? Like what? What do you mean? I can answer that. Let me give you another example, which is really quite funny. No, I should be more sensitive. It was interesting. There was a guy who apparently with one of his

arms was strangling his wife and with the other arm was trying to take his hand off of the neck. There was a woman, also another guy, who was buttoning up his shirt with one hand and unbuttoning it with the other because they both had different opinions about the shirt. So yeah. Okay, go ahead. Really interesting things have been written about this, but you know, questions about people, you know, what they think about life, what they wanted to be when they grew up, you know, all sorts of things. And it really showed that there were different things going on. At some point, I want to say in the 1970s or 80s, there was a very

like kind of unrigorous pop-sci type of article that was written that was kind of really misinterpreting this data and making these really unhelpful generalizations about the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere and how the left is math and the left is male and the right is female, which is kind of bogus. And so because of that article, the whole theory fell out of favor where, you know, very clear from an evolutionary biology and psychology perspective that they definitely threw the baby out with the bathwater. So in terms of

And because, you know, having two hemispheres of your brain that are specialized to give different contributions to what you're doing is highly evolutionarily conserved. I mean, this goes back, you know, to the Cambrian explosion. You know, the ancient animals had hemisphericity and they had dominance of sight. Even if you look at animals, sorry, look at birds and how the way they'll use one eye to track for predators.

predators above and the other eye to look for detail in the sand below. And those eyes are connecting to different sides of the brain. So this... Oh, really? Yeah. So this is like the fact that we have... So like chameleons, when they, you know, they look with their... Chameleons are really funny. You know, they look with their eye like kind of like out of the corner. They go, oh, shoot, the tongue. I guess maybe the other eye is looking at something else at the same time, you know? It's weird. Yeah. And it makes sense, right? That while they're looking at their food, they also need to, you know, look out for predators at the same time.

I bring up the evolutionary component because it should not be controversial that the left and right hemispheres are specialized for different things. And there's different reasons why confusion gets brought into this. One is that the left hemisphere of the brain is more specialized for movement, for goal-directed behavior, for activity,

for starting motion, and the right side is more specialized and more active for stopping it. So you can look at a brain scan and see that both hemispheres are participating, but one might be participating more like in an inhibitory way or a regulating way than the other. And, you know, it's pretty common knowledge to most people that for most right-handed individuals, the verbal language centers are on the left hemisphere, you know, housed in the left hemisphere.

Is it a strategy then for some people to quiet half of their brain so they can learn an activity or do something better or focus? Are there ways that you've developed for people to do that? That's interesting. I really like that question. I would say, especially based on my experience, the first bit of context to how I would answer that is first to be aware of this thing that we've been talking about here about retained primitive reflexes, only because that's basically saying that the first thing to do is to complete infant development, but

before figuring out the best mode your brain could be in to be at a genius level for solving a puzzle or whatever it is or doing this thing at work, right? So for me, that's like the first things first. But that having been said, if there's a reasonable amount, like balanced development on both sides, and then it's simply a matter of finding strategies, but I would say the best way to answer this question is really about learning how your own system works. You know, there are definitely core patterns to how the nervous system is organized in humans. There's also a lot of information

individuality. So I think maybe just having better ways of knowing how to probe your system. So I don't know, I'll give one example of this, that there's like a common, I don't know what you say, like a strategy for quieting the mind that's given to people that if they're getting overwhelmed by their emotions is to name those emotions, right? And that's great. That's if someone has a predominantly right hemisphere dominant way of responding to things where they're getting overwhelmed by their emotions and then by naming them, they're getting the left hemisphere input

to kind of distance themselves a little bit. But if someone is left hemisphere dominant, they have trouble feeling their emotions or becoming aware of them, then that's really not going to be a helpful strategy at all. That's going to have them do more of what they already were doing. So for that person, it's really more about asking questions of like, you know, if you're feeling pissed off, like how do you know? Where do you feel it in your body? So there's a

There's a lot of different tools and techniques and advice out there. When I look at it, my mind is automatically kind of stratifying it based on people's preferences and dominances. And then I can start to see you picking the thing that's more likely to be therapeutic for that person.

Is there any point in cycling someone back and forth between left and right, left and right? Does that accomplish like a cleaning out or washing out of their emotional state somehow? I like that. So what I would say is that that's really what's supposed to happen. What's supposed to happen is we are supposed to cycle between left and right, left and right. And that's meant to happen as part of our ultradian rhythms, which are cycles that are shorter than 24 hours. That there's...

you cycle between dominance of left and right hemisphere. You can even do a little soft test to see which of your nostrils is more open because I associated with the same hemisphere on the same side. That also is supposed to happen in development. So when we're in utero in the first two years of life, it should be our right hemisphere that's predominantly developed. Then that should switch over to the left and then that should happen for about three years and so on. And then also in the

circadian rhythm, which is the daily cycle, there's also a cycling of left and right. So really the principle is that when things are balanced and things are functioning well, you have, you know, day and night, inhale, exhale, activity, rest, and you have left and right. And so really what I'm pointing to as being a potential problem is when people are stuck and inflexible and are unable to do that.

No, it makes total sense. Yeah, I had heard from a friend that throughout the day, you know, I never have both nostrils clear. And a friend of mine said, you know, well, I think that's pretty common. It seems like throughout the day, one nostril will be clear. And then a few hours later, another one will open up and then that'll close down. And that seems to cycle throughout the day too. You know, just like when you sleep, your brain tissue is supposed to kind of shrink and allow certain channels to open and drains to occur. So I guess there's a lot of cycling going on throughout the day. Yep, absolutely. And when you sleep, sleep is an interesting one. When

When you sleep, for the most part, the right hemisphere should be kind of more active, dramatically active compared to the left. But when you travel and stay somewhere new, it's very common for people to wake a lot during that first night. It's actually called, it's like, it's studied in the literature. I think it's called first night syndrome. And in those cases, the left hemisphere stays more active. And so it's more alert and more sensitive to noises. And it's a little bit of a hearkening back to kind of, you know, when we were dolphins and when we were whales, that...

These ocean mammals, they need to sleep, but they also need to come up to the air to breathe. And so they sleep by powering down one half of their brain. And so it seems like most of the time, if we are in a new environment that we're not familiar with, that we kind of go back onto that old neural architecture. Very good. So where can you help people? Can you do it online or it has to be in person? Like what geographic areas do you serve? Yeah, so these days I see people all over the world archiving.

online in my program at synthesishealth.co. And I think you said in the bio that I only treat women and that I don't know, that was a little bit of a loss in translation. I treat women and men. And I've actually even just introduced an option for people if they want input on their children as they are coming through this process. But it's a really great group. So it's done as a group, all completely asynchronous so people can

watch videos and a lot of people who I work with have brain fog, so I'm going to allow them to come back and see things that they might've missed. But for anyone who's interested, it's completely free to apply to be a guest. And if you're a good fit for the group, then you can come in. You're in the group with annual members who are going through this process to reverse engineer their health. And then you have an opportunity to ask me any questions and see if it's a good fit that you want to go through a long-term transformation.

Okay. And very good. Last question. What do you see as the future of your work? Like what's, I don't know, where is it headed? How's it changing? That's a great question. I mean, the main threads that I've been combining together so that I can have as few blind spots as possible when I'm helping people is neurology, herbal medicine, epidemiology.

and just increasingly understanding the architecture and ecology of the body. And I've gotten to a point where now I feel really comfortable that I can just go deeper and deeper and deeper into those areas, especially the nervous system. The amount of information that we can understand about what's going on with someone just through careful observation without any fancy tests or equipment is really nuts.

what I feel most passionate about is educating people to just know themselves, to understand what's going on with them. It is learnable. And also to figure out how to interpret how their body is responding to what they're trying to do. So instead of randomly guessing and trying different things, that they're using things more like a probe, like in that old mastermind game where they try something and based on how the body responds, they can tell if they're going the right direction or not. So yeah, for me, there's a long convoluted answer, but I think

helping people understand how their body works with the development of the nervous system as the foundation of that. One thing came to mind, have you ever learned or tried muscle testing? You squeeze like the adictropolicus, you know, between that thumb and finger. Hold something, if it's harder, it's no good. If it's softer, it's better.

Or, you know, keep your arm up and you push down on it, that kind of thing. Yep. So that is actually a somewhat loaded question. There's different ways that people use muscle testing. And I want to be clear, you know, a lot of really excellent clinicians use it. So there's no, I don't want to, I don't want this to come off critical. It's really easy to get a lot of variability with the way that that is typically used. However, I guess I kind of think of it as a different way of using muscle testing to directly assess the nervous system.

So, for example, you know, we can we can use a stimulation. Let's say, like, I want to see for a variety of reasons. I think someone's going to benefit from having some light put on their left hemisphere. We can use a grip strength tracker to see if their grip gets stronger or weaker from doing that.

But if I, you know, with muscle testing, like let's say I have them hold a vial of something and they put their arm out, it is really easy just by slightly changing angles or slightly changing, even if they change their head position just by a few degrees, very little things can throw that off. So assessing how someone's strength responds to an input, I think is a helpful thing to do, but it needs to be done in a very controlled and I would say like nervous system literate kind of way to avoid getting false information.

All right. That makes sense. I understand. Very good. Well, thanks for coming on the show. I know I kind of ran you around with all kinds of questions from wherever they came from, but you handled them well. So I appreciate you being here. Thank you. Thanks, Mel. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity. I appreciate it. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

If you like what you hear, be sure to review and subscribe to the Finding Genius Podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And want to be smarter than everybody else? Become a premium member at FindingGeniusPodcast.com. This podcast is for information only. No advice of any kind is being given. Any action you take or don't take as a result of listening is your sole responsibility. Consult professionals when advice is needed.