Steve Martorano 
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The Behavioral Corner 
Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano, and this is the Behavioral Corner. You're invited to hang with us as we discuss how we live today, the choices we make, what we do, and how they affect our health and well-being. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner. Please hang around for a while.

Steve Martorano 
Hi, everybody, welcome again to the Behavioral Corner. It's me your host and guide, Steve Martorano. If you are finding us for the first time, shame on you, where have you been? I'll briefly tell you this is a podcast about everything because everything winds up affecting our behavioral health. It's all made possible by our underwriting partners Retreat Behavioral Health, you'll hear more about them down the road. We want to welcome our guest right off the bat, Ben Ahrens, joins us. And he's going to talk about something that I frankly knew practically nothing about something called neuroplasticity. And that has to do with rewiring your brain to improve your health, which is a fascinating idea. Ben, thanks for joining us. Ben is also the co-founder of an organization called re-origin. They are dedicated to this proposition that you can rewire your brain for health reasons. So Ben, let me ask you something as somebody who is reluctant to rewire an outlet in his home, for fear that I'll get that wrong. To hear that one can rewire your brain sounds daunting. Tell me what we're talking about.

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah. So here's the beauty of it. In the same way that you don't need to be an electrician in order to operate a light switch. Fortunately, you don't need to be a neuroscientist in order to rewire your brain. Basically, the tenant of neuroplasticity is a scientifically proven phenomenon that has occurred over research for many, many decades. It basically just says that the brain has the ability to change both its structure and its function in response to new inputs, new activities, new environments, and so forth. And this was actually a was a fairly big breakthrough, when this was first discovered. Several decades back, they previously thought that our brain was fixed, and basically, from the time you're born until the day you die, you're just losing neurons, you're losing capacity, you're losing ability. And once they discovered that the brain is actually changing itself constantly throughout life at any age, and at every age, that there's actually something taking place. It's called neurogenesis where the brain builds new neurons, it builds new connections, and it can ultimately rewire itself to do a whole host of interesting and very useful things. I think some of which we'll get into here.

Steve Martorano 
Well, yeah, yeah, for sure. There's been a lot of research about this. And for sure, we have, you know, it seems to me that cognitive behavioral therapy is sort of, in a way based upon changing one's thoughts, to change their behavior. So there's a relationship between if you think differently, there will be different results. What you've described, though, is the body automatically adjusting to changing circumstances, without any prompting from anybody. But I think what re-origin is saying, and I think you said this at the beginning, you don't need to bring in an electrician, you can do this. Did you give us some examples of rewiring our brain that we may be doing without even being aware of?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I really liked that you made that distinction. It's true that neuroplasticity, or the brain's rewiring of itself, is happening pretty much all the time. One example would be and it's usually a subconscious process. Anytime you see a new face and then let's say, time passes, and you see that face again, if you recognize that face, as to say your eyes recognize the pattern of light that's coming in through the senses, your brain has effectively undergone a form of neuroplasticity or rewiring to create a mental map of that new image. I once heard it said that probably everyone on the planet has a Tom Cruise neural pathway because they can recognize his face. And so whenever we encounter something new, or learn a new skill, the brain is rewiring itself to gain that new capacity. Now the difference in what we do at the origin is we take what has what is normally happening as a subconscious or an unconscious process. And we give people specific tools and a protocol to make it conscious and this is what's known as self-directed neuroplasticity because it gives people the ability to actually have some agency into how the brain changes, and what it enables you to do.

Steve Martorano 
Now, that's a fascinating prospect. It seems to be on some level, the athletes who work very hard for their activity, are doing something similar to what we call muscle memory, as though the muscle had a consciousness and it we're not really talking about that muscle memory is a result of what you just said, if you do something 10,000 times the brain has rewired so that you always do it that way. Is that pretty much an example of plasticity?

Ben Ahrens 
Totally. Yeah, I love that example, too. It reminded me of one of my favorite quotes by Bruce Lee, he said, I don't fear the man that practiced 10,000 different kicks, I fear the one who practiced one kick 10,000 times. The core jam there is that when you do something with intention, and repetition, necessarily, when you practice something, you actually condition or wire in a new pattern, in this case, a movement pattern, facilitated kick into your brain into your nervous system and into your muscles. And they're actually finding now that not only do we have something called muscle memory, and a neurological type of memory, we even have cellular memories, the actual cells of the body retain information. And depending on what they've learned, at one time or another through usually repeated exposure, it will actually change how cells function, how they communicate with each other, and how they either support our health or can lead to its degeneration or pose challenges to us.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people get how deeply the cliche about 10,000 hours of practice would be, or Bruce Lee's quote, about 10,000 practicing of one move. But at the end result of all of that, it seems that what we're doing has become second, nature is kind of silly, but it has become natural, and automatic. We're not thinking about it anymore.

Ben Ahrens 
Exactly. And the interesting thing is like, we're always practicing something, we're usually just not aware of it. For anyone that struggles with a certain behavior or, or anxiety, if we find ourselves getting anxious all the time. That is not to say that you caused the anxious response, but by in a sense, not practicing otherwise, we are unwittingly practicing an anxious response. And so the great thing about self-directed neuroplasticity is that it gives us a sort of framework for taking these previously unconscious patterns and processes that in large part have really been running for many of us running the show running a large part of our lives and experiences. And it gives us a means of wheeling that into the light of conscious awareness, where we can now put ourselves in the driver's seat, and we can save we've been defaulting to a state of anxiety. Whenever it comes to social engagement, or you name it, there is a series of steps that we can take to change that conditioning and to practice a new response. By practicing that new response repeatedly, we can effectively wire in a new default state to the brain, the nervous system, the body, and even the cells.

Steve Martorano 
And this is where of course your organization, re-origin comes in you aid people in doing just what you described, what sort of disorders or problems with this lens, would neuroplasticity, lend itself to help me?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, so there's a large category of conditions, complex chronic conditions that fall within the realm of something known as self-perpetuating inflammatory conditions. These are things that have been notoriously challenging for mainstream medicine. These would be conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, Lyme disease, in my case, even long-term COVID. But anything that usually stems from maybe an initial impact or event, it could be a stressful event or an infection, but then our symptoms persist after the infection or after that initial sort of insult occurred. That is where mainstream medicine has a really hard time identifying what is keeping these symptoms going and most importantly, how we help to improve the situation if we think we've already removed the root cause, so a great example is chronic pain because let's say if you feel a pain in the tip of your right finger, and you look down and you've, you find that your finger is being pinched in a vise, that makes sense, right, that's what's known as a referral pathology. Because it's something in the periphery, it's in the body, something's happening, it's sending a clear message to your brain, you know, move the finger out of this situation, I'm in pain. Now, imagine for a moment that you feel that pain in your finger, you look down, and there's nothing there, there's nothing going on. And then the pain disappears. And that pops up in your left hand and your left finger, and then your left foot. This is the experience that people have with chronic pain and a lot of these chronic conditions, where symptoms will shift and migrate. And there's not a clear, direct cause to point to. This is something known as, instead of peripheral pathology, something known as central sensitization, you can think of that as like the central part of your body, the central nervous system, the control center of the brain has become hyper-sensitized to signals that are coming in. And so the great way to think about this and make the distinction is that well, peripheral pathology or pain due to an acute injury is a hardware problem. These types of elements that have to do with chronic activation of the stress response, you can think of as software

Steve Martorano 
software problem. Yeah, you know, that's fascinating. It goes to the heart of why, for instance, with fibromyalgia, it's a difficult diagnosis, as I understand it, you don't really get diagnosed. For fiber by analogy, you get treated for a sort of constellation of symptoms that nobody could really point to having, as you say, peripheral cause feel this phenomenon. And I'm speaking from personal experience here now. Yeah, it's interesting. There are certain places where the pain will occur, they shift around, and there's nothing going on. And this sense of fatigue overwhelms you, and there's no reason for it to overwhelm you. So that's a software problem. Okay, great. Tell me what some of the techniques would be, to rewrite the software. Yeah.

Ben Ahrens 
First, let me just say that you know, that the hardware and the software are intimately connected, they're very intertwined. Hardware issues can cause or lead to or contribute to software issues, and vice versa. So oftentimes, chronic pain will start with an acute injury. Let's say, you know, there's a case where a person might have a broken arm. And so it makes sense for the arm to be in pain. Well, it's been broken and healing. And then maybe once the wound heals, the pain even subsides but then maybe the person finds years later, that they get into a stressful situation, or they're exposed to a cold environment or something happens that adds an extra challenge to the system. And now all of a sudden, that pain comes back. So here's a scenario where what started as this peripheral pathology, what started as a hardware problem, has created this neural pathway that then lays dormant and can become reactivated whenever the system the whole human being is placed under a significant amount of stress.

Steve Martorano 
Do we have any research to explain why that would happen? Why the the pathway remain open to paint? Do we know what's going on there?

Ben Ahrens 
We do. Yeah. So there's a lot of research actually in this area. And it's really exciting. Just before, to this interview, I was doing another interview with a doctor Afton has set from the University of Michigan who wrote a book called The Chronic Pain Reset. The crux of her research is digging into why and how the brain forms these types of neural pathways. And basically, what happens is, there's a term that was coined by I think, Dr. Donald Hebb. In the in the 90s. He said, neurons that fire together, wire together, and neurons that fire apart, wire apart. And so when there's a certain exposure, the brain basically has two top priorities. The number one priority of the brain is to protect you. It's to elicit a protective response and pain and inflammation are protective responses. When the brain thinks that the body is in danger, and it might be during certain times, it will send out these alarm signals in the form of pain or inflammation to get their attention or to elicit some change in our physiology. However, the brain's second order of business is to strive for efficiency. It always wants to learn from the past in order to protect us in the future. And the way that it does this is by creating shortcuts or neural pathways. So if you can imagine, when you have an accident, you break a limb or something, that's a stressful experience. So if you're under stress, and that pain arises, the brain might learn to associate that pain with stress. And that's why years later into the future, now, let's say the injury has healed, the pain has subsided long ago, but you re encounter a stressful experience. And it could be something caused by something totally different. It could be, you know, life stress, work stress, or relational stress. But for whatever reason, now, that old neural network, that old neural pathway that formed because neurons that fire together, wire together, that associated pain and stress, all of a sudden, it says okay, I'm under stress, because the response is to produce pain, right? Yeah. So even though it's no longer really appropriate.

Steve Martorano 
So let me ask you, this, I'm not here to criticize anybody for using whatever drug they need, particularly chronic pain users. But it seems very often that when we treat something like chronic pain, or even severe anxiety, with drugs, we are treating symptoms and not getting to...we're treating symptoms and hoping they'll go away, but not looking at what's really causing them. There's re-origin and work like this plasticity, sort of get closer to the origin of these things than say drugs do.

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, it's a good question. And, so there's certainly a time and a place for medication, you know if you're in severe pain or have an acute situation. We believe that really, neuroplasticity and working on the level of the brain and the nervous system is very much like taking a walk upstream and working on something at a very high level. And so, you know, by changing the way that the brain has created these neural networks, there's this great quote that we actually refer to the program, one of my favorites, attributed to Einstein, but many quotes are attributed to Einstein. But this one says It's not about finding the solution but undoing the basis of the problem. When it comes to something like Central sensitization, chronic pain, or chronic activation of the immune system, which can lead to a lot of conditions like chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia, I really believe that this rings true. It's not about finding what we think is the solution out there in the form of a pill, but ultimately, about undoing the basis of the problem.

Steve Martorano 
And why did this happen? Right?

Ben Ahrens 
Yes. Why did this happen? How did this happen? And most importantly, what can we do about it?

Steve Martorano 
Right, right. So I know you came to this interest in rewiring one's brain for better health, after an experience with Lyme disease, is that right?

Ben Ahrens 
That's right in my mid-20s, from age 25, to 28...29, I was in critical condition and wound up being bed-bound with a severe case of chronic neurological Lyme disease for three years. Symptoms persisted in total for five years. And it was a real journey, especially coming from someone like myself, who had a background in health and fitness. Prior to getting sick with Lyme. I'd studied physical therapy and Exercise Physiology, and I was working in that field. And so much to my own dismay, when I got sick with chronic Lyme, the mechanistic understanding of the human body that I had developed, fell short, it didn't really help me to solve the issue. I had to take that walk upstream to the software and start to learn about the brain and the nervous system. And

Steve Martorano 
How quickly were you diagnosed correctly? Because I know sometimes the line is miss understood or not seen right away? How long before they knew what you had? Did they begin treating you?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, it took me over over a year, well over a year to get a diagnosis of Lyme. I got many other diagnoses.

Steve Martorano 
What were the what were some of them? What were they telling you you might have? Yeah.

Ben Ahrens 
I mean, most of the diagnoses are fairly redundant and kind of heartbreaking to hear because they, really don't tell you much like fibromyalgia is one that really just translates to muscle pain. Obviously, chronic fatigue syndrome simply means being tired all the time. If you translate it, it's like, I could have told you that I had a program member the other day who jokingly somewhat jokingly said, I went to the doctor with a pain in my knee and I got diagnosed with knee pain. Alright, so that was basically my experience, I also got diagnosed with anxiety with depression. A lot of confusing things with multiple sclerosis was one diagnosis that was thrown out after looking at functional MRIs where they found lesions in the gray matter. And...

Steve Martorano 
How did they wind up circling back to Lyme? Was it a blood test that revealed it finally, or what?

Ben Ahrens 
Finally, blood tests revealed it, and then it was confirmed with a spinal tap. And they test antibodies. One of the reasons why it's really hard to get a diagnosis of something like Lyme is that currently there isn't really a way that you can test for the presence of bacteria or an active infection in the system. It's an antibody test. So they're testing for your body's reactiveness to a pathogen. The problem is, for many people with chronic Lyme, one of the things that happens is the immune system becomes exhausted and depleted. And so it doesn't have the power to react to the bacteria. And so if it's not reacting, then it's not going to produce sufficient antibodies to register in these tests. And then people can easily get false negatives so the tests are not very reliable. If you do get a positive, it can be a good indication. But I will say that, even then, even if you do get a diagnosis of Lyme, that is bittersweet because it is not very well understood what it really is what's really causing all these weird symptom clusters. And most importantly, it is very much not well understood what to do about it.

Steve Martorano 
Right Right. So you say you've had that you had for almost a decade, apparently, the symptoms are that you're feeling like you're feeling well, now, do you suffer any lingering symptoms of Lyme?

Ben Ahrens 
I don't, I can honestly say I'm back to 100% health and I define 100%. Healthy as you don't think about your health that much. It's just not. It's just supporting you in the background. It's, it's something that's there providing you with what you need the energy and abilities and so forth. But it's no longer this front-and-center, question mark of how am I going to

Steve Martorano 
send you you assign this wellness that you've achieved as a result of the techniques that you're now teaching through re-origin?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, so you know, people always ask me, is brain retraining sufficient? Or like, can I just do brain retraining? Can I just do this, this self-directed neuroplasticity, and that will do everything? And I always like to respond that, you know, we have a brain, which is incredibly powerful and capable of amazing things as the control center, really of the body. But we also do have a body, and it is important to support our bodies as well. And so for me, I will say that the neuroplasticity, the brain retraining absolutely had the most profound impact. I attribute a lot of the progress and restoration of my health to being able to tune down this, what I learned was an overactive stress response, and allow my body's self-healing mechanisms to come back online. But it also, of course, helps to support myself with proper nutrition lifestyle factors, and just all the behavioral stuff that we can do to give ourselves the best chance of success.

Steve Martorano 
What role does meditation play in neuroplasticity?

Ben Ahrens 
Great question. Meditation is fantastic for calming the nervous system. When it comes to a lot of chronic conditions, a lot of them are perhaps not caused by but perpetuated by a high what's known as allostatic load, which is just a term for the total amount of stress that builds up in the nervous system. And so you can think of meditation as a tool that can be used to calm the nervous system and to start to reduce that allostatic load so that the body is not in a reactive state. Now meditation or classical medication differs from neuroplasticity training, if you think of meditation, as being aimed at calming the nervous system. Neuroplasticity training is aimed at preventing the arousal of the nervous system in the first place. It allows us to create new associations, such that we can then reenter the world and get exposed to things that might previously have triggered us whether that trigger results in anxiety inflammation or symptoms. And we can now encounter these challenges with a new default baseline of homeostasis that we quickly refined.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, some of the baggage has been left behind. And now you're out there a little lighter, facing the same things but just maybe a little nimbler. Just This final thing about the power of the mind so that we get an idea that this isn't mumbo jumbo about, you know, rewiring your brain there's a well-known phenomenon that has to do with the Lost limb, the phantom limb syndrome where people have an amputation. And yet they still have an overwhelming sense, including feeling that the limb is still there. How does that describe something of what you're talking about in terms of the way the brain works?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, phantom limb pain is a shining example of the reality of neuroplasticity, and how the brain can maladapt. To create these sorts of software issues or software glitches, you could see them as were obviously it's a very clear cut case, and phantom limb pain, because you might be experiencing vivid pain and your right finger, but the whole arm is not even there. And that was something that catalyzed a whole paradigm of research really, you know, headed up and put forth by Dr. Norman Doidge in his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, and he wrote a second book called The Brain that deals are the brain's way of healing. In that book, he talks a lot about using neuroplasticity types of therapies and treatments for people with phantom limb pain. But then they found that you know, this type of pain that persists without a peripheral cause is basically a form of phantom limb pain, it just so happens that might be there. So it gave them a direct way of, yeah, it really helped them to home the tools that they can use to tune down or retrain that pain response.

Steve Martorano 
As we see every day more and more exponential leaps in artificial intelligence. And some people talk about these neuro pathways they're going to create with algorithms and machines. I'm always struck by Well, okay. But it's really going to be it's going to have to be some extraordinary breakthrough before a machine can work the way you've just described a human brain. Now, I'm not saying they can't get there. Some people are scared that they will. But it's an amazing thing that we have in our heads. And this is an amazing field and topic. I'm so glad to have you from re-origin. If people want more information about re origin. Where should they go?

Ben Ahrens 
Yeah, so for anyone who's looking to learn more, you can simply go to re-origin.com. That's re origin.com. You can sign up for a free, free group call every week I do these live calls, and answer questions about neuroplasticity, and brain retraining. I really enjoy it. And last thing on that topic, I'm so glad you brought that up, because this is one area where my thinking I would say really differs from the mainstream, especially technologists who think that and may have a point that artificial intelligence is going to reach this full-on singularity point. I think for me, and from everything that I've learned from everything that I know, through my own experience and research, the critical missing thing in artificial intelligence. And the leg up that a human being has is we have a brain. But we also have a central nervous system, and we have a body. And we can use the sensory mechanisms of that body to interface with the world. And I know there are cameras and sensors and all this kind of stuff. But nothing comes close to the level of perception that the human being and the human body has. And for that reason, I think the brain is incredible. But it's also seated in this magnificent instrument that helps us move through the world and become who we are now.

Steve Martorano 
Yeah, they're gonna get very good at what they do. But I agree with you, I think the ghost will not be in the machine. It may look like it's in the machine. But it's hard to imagine that it will really be there. Re-origin. You can find it online. You do a lot of this stuff right over right over the internet, correct?

Ben Ahrens 
Yep, we have an online community. People can join, they can watch a 28-day brain retraining program that walks them through the ins and outs. very tactical, very practical, and easy to go through. They'll be part of a community they can join group coaching calls all over the internet. So we have people from all over the world, Australia, every part of Europe, India, Asia, you name it.

Steve Martorano 
Ben, thanks so much. Happy New Year. Thanks for joining us love to have you back on the Corner sometime. It's a fascinating topic.

Ben Ahrens 
Thanks so much for having me. I've enjoyed our conversation.

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