 Good mental health, I'm your host Matt Kelly. It's a podcast series that examines the tweets of Dr. Neil Maranello, who's a behavior expert with near six decades exploring the human condition, working currently as a life coach in Woodstock, Vermont. We're pleased to have him here on the podcast as our co-host. Our topic for today's discussion is such a natural progression from where we left off last week, which if you remember our topic last week was what I see is not what's there. And our topic for today's discussion is there's what's real, what's not real and what we perceive to be real. And interestingly, Neil, if I were to kind of come to this topic initially, I could even change that word real to say there's what's there, what's not there and what we perceive to be there. Sort of again as a natural progression of where we left off last week again of what I see is not what's really there. Yeah, and there's an interesting distinction between what's real and what's true. But I think when we talk about what we see, we wind up getting into the idea of perception and perception has to do with mostly eyes and ears. So what you see and what you hear may or may not be what's actually there and what's actually being said. Obviously there are mental diseases which distort those things. So for example, in the category of back when I was studying psychology and we basically had three categories of mental illness and they were neurosis, psychosis and personality disorder. Neurosis in my simplistic reductionistic way was you can function, but you don't know whether you can or not. You're anxious about it. Psychosis has to do with what we're talking about today which is you like snow, you see it whether it's there or not. There are various other levels of it but basically psychosis is often manifested in two ways delusions which are false beliefs that you are sure are true and hallucinations which are things you see, which other people don't see. Now in addition, of course, we have the simple fact that what you see and what you and I see and what you and I hear is dependent on how well our eyes and ears work and it's very clear that in the animal kingdom there are many animals whose eyes and ears work much better than ours. And their noses as well. Exactly, especially when you're talking about dogs for example. And then you have personality disorders and personality disorders are people who deal with their problems by doing numbers on other people and often the effect of that is something which affects the thinking of another person. And of course, as I'm sure the previous podcast so pretty well established, how you think has a great deal to do with what you perceive. So what's going on in your mind at any given moment determines what you see. What I've referred to before was the BASC concept in which if you really wanna figure out what's going on, you need an unedited videotape. You need some sort of a tape that you can watch over and over again and determine what's the behavior that's going on, what the emotions are that people are feeling in the incident, what the sensations are they're going through and then watch it over and over again and you finally get some idea of the whole gestalt, the whole which is more than the sum of its parts which we call the knowledge decay. So in reality, we're talking about an awful lot of stuff that is determined by the mind and how we think. And we often are just not aware of that. We often see something, we say, oh yes, that's real. That's real because I see it. The truth is that a lot of stuff that people tell me I have to check through my own perceptual system to determine whether I think it's real or not. Yeah, even our own conversation here, it has to pass through my filter as to how do I interpret it? How does it impact me? How am I able to put that back out into the world or into my reality, so to speak? Yes, and when I'm talking to someone, and this kind of dates me, I'm often looking for what I call whether the nickel drops or not. I may have referred to that in the previous podcast but back when you would get to the old coke machines, it would cost a nickel and you'd drop the nickel in and sometimes it would go all the way down and you could hear it click and then you could get your coke. If it didn't, you had to push the coin return. And you'll have to apologize me because when you're saying this, what's coming up for me, you being a therapist is Lucy in the peanuts where Charlie Brown dropped in the nickel or something and she's like, nickels, nickels, nickels. Right, yes, yes. Therapy costs quite a bit less than what her training was. But the concept for someone who functions as a coach or as a therapist is whether what you say is actually being processed by the person you're talking to. And I'm always looking for my concept of whether the nickel drops whether that person got what I just said. If they did, good, we can go on to the next thing. If not, I gotta find a way to push the coin return and spend the nickel next time so that maybe this time it'll get through. So, how do we take this theory, this tweet of yours and apply it into our everyday life in a way that empowers us because we're gonna have to have the discernment, aren't we, between what's real, what's not real and what appears to be real. And I don't know if we're being trained in discernment in our society today. Most of the time, we're not. Today is my 47th anniversary and I was looking at cards to buy my wife and one of the cards said, living together for a long time means asking what a lot. And that has to do with your hearing, but it also has to do with whether somebody understands what's being said. And from my perspective, that's the question. What is this person hearing when I say something? And I often ask, what did you hear me say? I wanna get the person's interpretation of it. And often there are words which are not understood, right? I was meeting with someone earlier today and she used the word and of course she had the mask on and that's difficult too. And I misunderstood the word and it took us three or four minutes to figure out what she was talking about and for me to figure out what she meant, what she said, what she said. So it's very important to double check. Did I hear you say blah, blah, blah? And very seldom do people say, what's the matter with you? Usually they're very happy to explain what they said and to say it again. I'm reminded of some of our previous chats and podcasts here about the example you gave where somebody may be angry at you because you smile at an inopportune time, but that's what they interpreted it to be but you were actually grimacing because you had indigestion or gas or something. And so again, there's what's real, what's not real and what appears to be real. And in the context of interpersonal dynamics which each of us are forced into every day within the context of living in our own reality, how can we try to avoid those types of misunderstandings and our psyche's ability to create what is not real over something as innocuous as a burp or as a smile? Well, again, the image that I have and the metaphor that I use is if reality is a circle, every distortion starts with a tangent to the circle, starts with a point on the circle that is real. So in the example that I gave before and that you're giving now, my smile is in fact something that really happened on the circle of reality. The interpretation that the person gives to that that I'm laughing at what they're saying takes them and a tangent away from that circle of reality but it leads them logically to, well, if he's smiling at what I'm saying, he's not taking me seriously. Therefore, it's obvious that I have to, not take him seriously or assume that he's just laughing at me and they're often running. And the other metaphor I use is the idea of picking up a fumble of a football and running the wrong way with it and scoring a touchdown to the team. That's all a form of distorted reality but it seems real to the person who perceives it that way because they can draw a logical conclusion. It goes right back to his smile. I know he smiled. Yeah. Wow. And again, it comes full circle again back to interpretation. And it's so interesting simply because, we live in such a digital age here today and how easy it is to misunderstand something online. Even if it's in a visual dialogue or medium such as Zoom, which we're doing these calls on, but less so certainly than if it's just a text or an email going back, you don't hear context often or you don't hear emotion. So you can't hear sarcasm unless it's explicitly stated in quotation marks sarcasm so that you don't have that misunderstanding. So our digital age seems to sort of be a medium right for this lack of discernment. And you have two other aspects of that which even assuming that the initial perceptions are correct cause trouble. And one of them is what you have is a snapshot. You have one particular image of something that occurred. You don't have it in context. So when you show somebody doing something you don't necessarily know whether they were making fun of it or not. One of the recent examples on a TV show I was watching was the show of the chair and the professor makes a joke and in making the joke he's making fun of Hitler and he gives a Hitler salute and it winds up being videotaped by one of the kids in the class and he winds up getting in all kinds of trouble because everybody thinks that he believes Hitler was right. So you have that snapshot concept where you don't get it in context. And then you also have the fact that you see something and you don't necessarily know what was going on in the person's mind before they behaved that way and you don't know what happens afterwards. Without the context of before, during and after you are wide open for all kinds of misinterpretations and an awful lot of that happens. And I have to tell you this is probably one of my biggest complaints right now with media in that any news story that you consume is really only part of the story. It is not the whole in totality or the gestalt of the event, if you will. And if you look at mainstream national news for an example, they only have 22 minutes to cover this volume of stories, even your local newscast. So for me, it's become less and less, I've had more and more discernment, I like to say, because things can be so taken out of context, the story can only be partly told and give you a very skewed impression which then can certainly move the masses. And one of the examples that I specifically wanna give, if you recall here, a number of years ago, there was a young gentleman in our nation's capital and a Native American came up and was drumming in front of him. And the media captured it and portrayed this young gentleman as being somehow racist or whatnot against this Native American or whatnot. But if you go back and you watch the rest of the video and then the story comes out, that is not what was going on here at all. And in fact, the young gentleman, I believe, launched a lawsuit against CNN for their manipulation of the story of what actually happened that led to him being portrayed as the villain, when that was not what was at the heart of the story, he was actually trying to act as a mediator. Yes, and you don't have to go back that far at this point, we're dealing with realities right now. There are facts and facts are things which can be checked and the people who check facts have to deal with the reality that if they say this is a fact and it turns out not to be a fact, then it winds up being embarrassing or perhaps they lose their jobs. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of people that think that Trump won the election. So the concept of saying something, putting it on TV, saying it over and over again, having people watch it, nod their heads, agree, believe it to be true, doesn't change the fact that Trump did not win the election. And you have to actually do the fact-checking and have people that you trust to do the fact-checking. And unfortunately in our society, at this point, many of the fact-checkers, you have to understand what their political position is before you figure out what's real and what's not real. Right, and so again, everyone has their bias. I think that's what we've been able to show throughout this podcast series is everyone has their own reality, which in essence is their own bias that they're going to bring to any situation. Again, it's the rose-colored glasses, if you will. This is my upbringing right here that is filtering what I see and then what I'm going to, and how I'm going to interpret it. And it's not just rose-colored glasses. There's also a brown-colored glasses, which is more the more negative way of seeing a particular thing. But the bottom line on it is if you're not willing to do the research, if you're not willing to get several points of view on something, if you're not willing to do the bask on a video, then you're basically saying, tell me what to think. Well, and we can actually bring this into very real, bring it into context into very real examples. First one from history, which would be our entry into the Spanish-American War. Remember the main, right? Which was a false narrative that was being perpetuated and the results of a mass movement following this false narrative can literally have such implications that it takes us into war. And on a more contemporary basis, the vaccine as an example, there is a whole section of our American society that will refuse to take this vaccine for their own beliefs, regardless of what science may show, they may show science that shows something completely different. So again, it is about discerning, interpreting. So it fits really within your own set of rules. And going back to our previous podcast topic there. Yes, and in both cases and in many other cases, what you're dealing with here is what kind of things people can hang their good guy, bad guy system on. And the good guy, bad guy system, remember goes way back to the animal part of the brain, which deals with survival. And when you're looking at things from the perspective of live or die from fight or flight, then it attaches to, these are good guys, those are bad guys. And going back to the previous podcast, there are exceptions to every rule. There are some people, I have a client who was specifically told by her doctor, don't get the vaccine. You have reactions to many of the ingredients that are in there, therefore, you're stuck at home. That doesn't mean that those people who are going around saying the vaccine causes autism are right. You have to look at the data and you have to look at how it applies to you specifically. And if you're not checking out the science of it, then you're basically saying, I'm choosing to hang my hat on a delusion, fix false beliefs that other people have, that I've chosen to buy into the same way that anybody buys into what a cult leader says and does whatever the cult leader tells them to do during the Kool-Aid. And I think, again, in today's society, it's easier to find your truth, let's say, but it's also more difficult, I would think. It's easier to be let astray. And that's sort of one thing that I notice about my psyche. I'm pretty impressionable. And if you put out a video there that's pretty documented with experts and whatnot, again, living in rose-colored glasses, I'm very susceptible to that line of thought. Yeah, I refer to it as the prosecuting attorney way of thinking, you know, a prosecuting attorney basically has a whole bunch of data and some of the facts support the position the prosecuting attorney is taking and some of them don't. And somehow a lot of those facts that don't support seem to get left out. At the same time, our minds work in such a way that we can make a case for anything. Right, it's always possible to make a case for something. All you have to do is ignore some data and pull me on others and decide that the data that you ignored wasn't relevant anyway. To get a reasonable idea of what the truth is and what reality is, you have to look at all the data. You have to find an explanation for that part of the data that doesn't support your position. So it's possible to make a case for Trump winning the election. It takes an awful lot of ignoring of data, but you can find one or two situations that seem to support it. And then you can, it's like taking a small flame that's on some wood and taking a bellows to it and adding a lot of wood to it. All of a sudden you've got a conflagration and you've proved that it started, it was a big flame. The way of thinking that is tapped into the hypothalamus of the mind, which is the part that's in the animals that determines the four Fs that we talked about before, the way of dealing with that and letting it determine what you believe to be right and what you believe to be wrong without checking it out by looking at all the facts, that winds up determining an awful lot of people's emotions, intensity, rage, panic. It's all connected to that part of the brain, which really has nothing to do with what normal day-to-day life is. It's very seldom that what someone's saying is life and death. On the other hand, if I'm a TV anchor or someone who's writing the news, finding a way to dramatize it is what gets me my audience. Right, right. And that's the double-edged sword in a sense is they're chasing ratings, of course, which determine advertising dollars and what they can charge for a 30-second spot and they need to keep that rate high because investors, if they're a publicly-owned company, need that revenue. This isn't something either that's new. I mean, as much as I point out, the recent controversy, certainly in America, I mean, we've been swayed by media going back to the start of this country. You know, what was it? Payne who wrote his newspaper that was largely responsible for our countries forming and whatnot and whether you were a federalist or a Tory or whatnot, there were media outlets even then championing that cause and painting the other as evil. Yes, yes, and it all comes down to what side are you on? I grew up in the late 40s watching Westerns and in Westerns, there were good guys and bad guys. It was pretty queer and I wanted to be a good guy. At one point I was gonna write a book titled Cowboy Shrink with the concept being that there's right and wrong and you can tell it whenever you see it. The truth is that if you're really looking for what the right thing to do is at any given moment in time and if you're really open to that, you can usually tell what it is but you have to get past all of the belief systems, all of the delusions, all of the BS that gets handed to you by whatever it is, whether it's a commercial or whether it's a news station, you really have to take the time to examine what is this person telling me and is there a way for me to determine whether it's valid or not? And I think what you're sort of talking about here too is to really get a much better communication system with yourself as to how can you evaluate what you see, hear, smell and evaluate it for yourself in a way, again, that serves your reality. And I know again, one of your biggest teachings here is that harms as few people as possible. And one of the things that comes up for me is that nothing is permanent. So even if what you come up with as your own personal truth is as such, if you're fearing a result of it or something, that's merely transitory. That's right, truth is a variable. And anybody who says, this is what's true is basically meaning this is what's true right now to me. Right. Reality is a variable. What's real right now isn't necessarily what was real a week ago or what's going to be real a week from now. If you don't accept the fact that all there is is now and in this now, there is a truth and there is a reality. And if you can see it and perceive it accurately, you're more likely to know the right thing to do. We have to take into account the fact that there are an awful lot of factors that we cannot perceive. Madam Curie died of radiation poisoning and nobody could see it. And so you have this very real fact that there was ultraviolet light, there is infrared light, there are all kinds of sounds that can be heard by dogs that we can't hear, smells as you mentioned. And so if we don't take into account the entire gestalt of what is happening at any given moment in time, we're gonna miss stuff and we're going to probably misperceive stuff and reach conclusions which are not correct. And one of the purest forms that I can use to validate that in terms of, again, my own way to evaluate the veracity of what you just said is like, how many times have I watched a movie? That doesn't matter. You just take whatever movie that comes to mind. How many times have you watched it and seen something new in that movie? Each time you've watched it, something that you missed on the initial time that you watched it. And again, using the analogy that you have in the past where again, there's the projector and then there's the screen and what is being projected is not often what is on the screen except in a real movie. And so I just, I think that's rather interesting to use that as a verification of your statement that- Those who choose to read my tweets, many times, I will start to tweet something in the middle of my watching a Netflix show or watching an Amazon Prime show because something triggered a thought in my mind and then I put the pause button on, followed that thought, counted the number of characters that I used until I get the thought completely formed and then watch the rest of the show. Nervous times when I lost the message that the show was giving, I lost what was really going on. I had to go back and watch it to catch up to where I was at before I took the ball and ran with it. And that, I think again, speaks about our attention here, our attention to detail, our ability to be really present in the now. Yes, it's a very difficult thing to understand how many variables are being manipulated by each of us every moment. There are just so many things happening that you really have to understand that your subconscious is your friend, not your enemy. Well, I mean, it's the butterfly effect too, isn't it? I mean- That's true, yes. But I'm talking about the fact that the conscious mind at best can focus on seven things at a time. And there's a lot of literature that really says you can't really do more than one thing at a time. Right, yeah. I mean, my definition of multitasking is doing several things at once badly. Yeah, exactly. And at the same time, your subconscious is really capable of processing things at many levels, using many senses. And if you learn to trust your subconscious, if people stop assuming that your subconscious is the enemy and think of it as the part of you that is actually a slave trying its best to solve your problems, that the problem tends to be that the conscious mind says, I'm the one who decides what to focus on and I want you to focus on this. And what it's choosing to focus on may or may not be relevant to the current reality. Wow. We're speaking here with Dr. Neil Maranello, a behavior expert and a Twitter user. We're examining his tweets. You can follow the good doctor at coach Dr. Neil. You know, it's interesting as we speak about Twitter, I look at your usage of it as, you know, a real positive and beneficial experience. But again, it's my interaction with the tweets. But that is probably one of the most egregious outlets right now that I can think of in terms of swaying public opinion to the unreal. And so I've pretty much stepped away from that platform. It seems to have become largely one for cutting people down and the cancel culture, which again, can be manipulated by media, which I think Twitter is right for that. Yeah, it's one of the reasons that I have no interest in seeking followers. To me, Twitter is an opportunity for me to express thoughts in my mind that someone may look at, you know, decades from now and say, oh yeah, that's interesting. But the idea of my wanting to find people to follow me it's just, it's not me. The reality is that what I enjoy about these podcasts and about tweeting is that it gives me a chance to say what I wanna say and others can make their judgments and others can decide whether they agree or disagree with me and that's up to them. I'm not interested in convincing people to believe or not believe what I'm saying. If they read something and they trigger something in their minds, good. Dr. Neil Maranello, final thoughts on our topic here today. There's what's real, what's not real and what we perceive to be real. Yeah, I think that it's very important to recognize that there are no absolutes. There is no one thing that is true under all circumstances. The recent experience I had was to get anaphylaxis which is a tick-borne illness. And I was very surprised about that because I seldom go outside except when I'm walking the dog and the most common tick-borne illness, you get a bullseye and you get a, I had none of that. And yet I had all the symptoms and had to go to the emergency room to get it diagnosed and to get the right treatment for it. But often you don't see what it is that's affecting you and you have to be open to all the possibilities in order to figure out what's going on here. And I'll close just to say again, it comes down to good discernment and the ability to interpret as best you can with what you have using that from a previous podcast subject as well. I would add flexibility. I would add how important it is to be open to the possibility that what you're saying and thinking to be true isn't. I really believe that if I am absolutely 100% certain something is true, I tell my clients, if you believe this to be true and you're ready to fight for it and because it's the end of the world, if it's not, you're probably wrong. Dr. Neal Maranello, our topic again has been, there's what's real, what's not real, and what we perceive to be real. It's a podcast series that I'm examining and I'm going to talk about in a little bit. 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