“You have to have a high level of psychological resilience, and these cells provide the resilience.”
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Nehls, a molecular geneticist, physician, and author, most recently of “The Indoctrinated Brain: How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom.”
Dr. Nehls advocates for a strong “mental immune system.” His studies look at the critical portion of our brain known as the hippocampus, which processes and indexes memories.
“But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn’t grow. It shrinks. ... And Alzheimer’s is actually a result of the shrinking process,” says Dr. Nehls. “Your life experience, which makes up actually your individuality, is replaced by essentially a commodity—what everybody learns [from] the news—and it’s replaced. And you are left as a human being [who], at the extreme stage, is only remembering the narratives that would create fear and sorrow.”
Watch the clip:
And how might the spike protein contribute to this?
“What inflammation does is it actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus,” says Dr. Nehls.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (58 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S0123MichaelNehls
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Dr. Michael Nehls, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Dr. Michael Nehls: Jan, thank you very much for inviting me. I’m honored to be here.
Mr. Jekielek: You have become an expert on something called the mental immune system. We don’t usually think of things that way. It does make me think of a term that Elon Musk promoted, the woke mind virus. Please tell us about the mental immune system.
Dr. Nehls: As a molecular geneticist, I was working very hard on evolutionary research and evolutionary science. From an evolutionary perspective, it is totally clear that we have to follow a certain imperative, which is to be fruitful and multiply. We know this already from other thoughts. But it’s clear that if our ancestors had not followed these rules, the two of us wouldn’t be sitting here, so it’s obvious.
To be fruitful and multiply, you have to become an adult. In humans, you even have to become a grandfather or grandmother to protect your children and your grandchildren with your wisdom. That was the case in former times, up to the end of the 19th century. It was shown that if you grow up to become a grandfather or grandmother, the likelihood that your grandchildren survive into adulthood actually increases.
In order to be fruitful and multiply and survive to an old age, we need to defend ourselves. Everybody knows we defend ourselves against pathogenic microorganisms quite efficiently. My PhD work was to identify a gene regulator, a gene that regulates other genes of the immune system. Without this gene it would be impossible for our immune system to adapt to viruses, so it was very important work. This is one part of the immune system that we need. But we also have other enemies, enemies which are called pathogenic macroorganisms, in comparison to the pathogenic microorganisms.
Mr. Jekielek: Pathogenic macroorganisms?
Dr. Nehls: Yes.
Mr. Jekielek: I think I know where you’re going with this.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, they usually come on two legs. Most people think of animals, like a big bear or a tiger. But usually the major enemy of humans is other humans. We were probably enemies of other human species 50,000 years ago, when there were several roaming the earth, but now it’s only homo sapiens.
Anyway, we also have to have an immune system against pathogenic macroorganisms. This one is centered on our ability to think, to be curious, to have stamina, to have psychological resilience, and to have a memory of how to react, based on experience. This experience doesn’t have to be our own experience, it can also be the experience of others.
As children, we are educated by our parents or grandparents with their wisdom and their stories. That’s why humans are so eager to learn narratives. Narratives are the food of our mental immune system, so the brain is essentially created for instantaneously memorizing, for the long-term, everything that we experience and what we learn from others. We are social learning machines.
Mr. Jekielek: You say that narratives are very important to building your mental immune system. I might argue that narratives are actually one of the chief weapons being used against us right now.
Dr. Nehls: The point is that we are eager to learn from other people. Narratives are the food, and we are eager to get as much food as we can for this system. Of course, this natural ability can be used against us, like everything. Love can be used against us. Every instinct that we have can be used against us. There are always two sides of the coin, so to speak.
But practically speaking, narratives are a good thing. We learn from narratives. If my grandmother tells me a story, I don’t have to believe it. I’m allowed to question it. That is the nature of narratives. My grandmother had experiences, she conveys them by telling me, and then I have my own experiences. If there’s some conflict, we discuss it, then I can learn and improve.
That’s an adaptation to new situations and that’s exactly what our bodily immune system does. It can adapt to variants of viruses and we have to adapt to variants in situations. That’s what our mental immune system can do.
Mr. Jekielek: In your book, The Indoctrinated Brain, you’re explaining why so many of us might be believing some extremely preposterous narratives. With the slightest scratch on their surface, some of these narratives seem to fall apart. They’re dominant among so many of us, but there’s something actually happening to our minds. Please explain this to us.
Dr. Nehls: The default mechanism of our thinking is also sometimes called System 1 thinking. That goes back to the old mind thinking compared to the new mind thinking. Some people also say it’s the thinking mind. A Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick, did the science on the neural correlates of consciousness. He called System 1 the zombie mode, because it’s not conscious. It’s not consciously acting. System 1 is our default way of acting. It’s learned behavior, but also instinctive behavior.
In addition to that, we have the actual thinking system, which we call System 2. It all goes back to a Nobel Prize for Economics, which was given in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman. He got the Nobel Prize for differentiating these two systems.
System 2, the actual thinking system, is a conscious system and it requires energy. Because we have to live 24 hours a day, we cannot use up all the energy in the morning. If the situation arises in the afternoon where we might need System 2 energy and real thinking, this energy is not there. He realized with his research that this energy source is limited.
By default, our brain operates on System 1. Only if our gut feeling tells us, “Something is wrong in this situation. I should really stop here, think, and not act the same way as I usually do in such a situation,” do we then have to activate System 2 and invest the mental energy.
But what happens if this energy is not there, or if the gut feeling is not strong enough? Then we just continue on with System 1. Of course, System 1 also acts in situations which make us afraid. In situations when we’re afraid, we follow the mass of people. Without thinking, we just follow the mass, because the mass means safety. The question is, “Why do people not activate System 2, and what can we do to improve that?
Mr. Jekielek: Please explain to us what the hippocampus is, its importance in our thinking process, and exactly what you found.
Dr. Nehls: We started this whole conversation with a question about the mental immune system, and I mentioned a few functionalities of the mental immune system. The major part is our autobiographical memory, and that’s exactly where the hippocampus comes into play.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s define the autobiographical memory.
Dr. Nehls: It’s our mental diary of everything that we experience, that we learn, the narratives which we are told, and everything that we have to remember instantaneously because it happens only once. We may go walking and find a nice bookstore, then we go home back again. We have to remember that there was a bookstore. It’s not like a foreign word that we have to memorize by repeating it 20 times. We saw the bookstore, we remember it was there, and we can go back and find it.
This is what the hippocampus is able to do, and it’s unique in that capability. Only the hippocampus is able to remember something that we experience, learn, think, or hear from people only one time, and then memorize it for a whole lifetime. It could be for an eternity, if we put it into a narrative and tell the next generation.
This autobiographical memory is based on these four questions, “What happened, when did it happen, where did it happen, and how did it feel?” You have four questions; when, where, what, and how did it feel? It has to evoke some kind of feeling and emotion, because the hippocampus has a limited storage capacity, and it only stores things that come with emotions. If a story has an emotion, we force the hippocampus to memorize it. If it doesn’t have any emotion, or if it’s routine behavior, we don’t store it.
Mr. Jekielek: It indexes it or categorizes it, correct?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. For the when and where, it creates coordinates in the space and time continuum in the outside world we live in, but also in the inside world in our brain. It indexes when and where we have experienced something, and that’s the index for the memory content of what we experienced and how it felt.
We need the time and space neurons, and there are actually neurons for that. For the space neurons, there was a Nobel Prize given in 2014 for their discovery. In 2016, there were the first papers on the time neurons. They create an index in which the hippocampus will remember forever. We all know that if we want to remember something, it’s always about what happened sometime and somewhere. The memory comes back, because we find the memory traces and reconstruct what actually happened at the time.
We need these time and space neurons, and they are located in the hippocampus. For those who don’t know anything about the hippocampus, it has its name because it looks like a seahorse. They’re like the size of a thumb, and just 1 percent of the brain mass of humans is the hippocampus. They’re in the temporal lobe, very deeply embedded under the neocortex, which is a later development in the evolution of the brain. They’re right under the neocortex.
The neocortex is actually what I call the neocortical hard disk or the hard drive, because every night, the content of the information that the hippocampus has stored during the day is uploaded into the neocortical hard drive, and it is stored there. Only the time and space neurons have the access to it and they allow us to retrieve the information.
Every night when we sleep, the hippocampus is essentially restoring its memory capacity by uploading the information of the day before. There’s only one caveat, which is that the time and space neurons remain. If you grow to age 100—the oldest woman was 122 with no Alzheimer’s—then you have to memorize things for 100 years, so you would run out of time and space neurons to index new memories.
That’s why the hippocampus has another unique feature besides its ability to memorize things instantaneously for the long term. It has the ability to grow new nerve cells on a daily basis. The hippocampus has the potential to grow.
To contain the wealth of personal experience in our mental diary, our autobiographical memory, the hippocampus, this little seahorse, actually grows. It can grow 1, 2, or 3 percent every year. But the sad thing is that in our modern society, it doesn’t grow—it shrinks. On average, the shrinkage rate for adults is about 1.4 percent per year.
Mr. Jekielek: In our modern society, you’re saying there have been studies done that show in one set of circumstances it grows, but in average modern society, it shrinks.
Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. In 2016, I published a paper which is called, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease.” In this paper, I show that if you keep up the growth, you will never get Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s actually results from the reversal of a process called adult hippocampal neurogenesis. It is called adult because it’s the birth of new neurons in the adult, which is unusual, and it happens only in the hippocampus. It is called adult neurogenesis in the hippocampus. It’s complicated, but it’s important. Adult hippocampal neurogenesis essentially prevents Alzheimer’s.
This is based on many functions of these neurons, because they’re not only there to make an index, but they have additional functions. These additional functions are very important if we think about System 2 and System 1. These new index neurons are not index neurons yet, because they have not memorized anything when we wake up in the morning, but they are there waiting. They are fresh, mature neurons. They are ripening and want to be mature neurons that have a function. In order to do that, we actually have to learn something new. We have to make an experience, otherwise there would be no need for them.
Mr. Jekielek: In adults, we have to stimulate them in some way, correct?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, we have to give them a job, like memorizing X or Y. But if we don’t give them a job, they will actually die. They have an internal program of death called apoptosis. If cells, particularly nerve cells, are not needed, they kill themselves. Their survival instinct is to make memories and do their job. They are the neuronal correlates of human curiosity. If you have these cells, you are curious. If you don’t have them and if they are not being produced, your curiosity goes down.
But your curiosity is not everything. If you’re curious and you enter a new space, you may ask questions where you don’t like the answers you get. Everything that is new has the risk of being dangerous in some way. In order to follow your curiosity, you have to have a high level of psychological resilience. These cells provide that resilience. They are actually dictating how high your stress level is if you experience something new. All the antidepressants that are out there do nothing else but activate the production of these new nerve cells. It is key that you activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus to increase your resilience and get out of depression.
Mr. Jekielek: But the hippocampus is getting smaller, and this is reflected in the increased levels of depression and Alzheimer’s.
Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. There is one important function of System 2 thinking. Our frontal brain, which contains the working memory, is only currents in your brain, it doesn’t fix any thought. If you are thinking and want to change your lifestyle or go deeply into a problem that might affect many people, it quickly becomes very complicated with all the different alternatives that you have to consider. It quickly becomes complicated.
Our frontal brain with the working memory can only keep 4, 5, or maybe 6 items in parallel action. Actually, the number of items reflects your IQ. That is important when we come to this later.
Intelligence is reflected by the number of items you can keep simultaneously active in your working memory, but it’s only four or five. A complicated thought might require 10, 15, or maybe hundreds of intermediate thoughts that need to be stored, and only the hippocampus can do that.
When we talk about the mental energy that is required for System 2, we are talking about the storage capability of the hippocampus. If you are running out of new neurons that become time and space neurons for these intermediate thoughts, then your battery is empty. You have no memory capacity. You can still overwrite this, but that is a different story, and I'll come to that when we discuss the process of indoctrination.
Having no index neurons left means that you are ego-depleted. You are exhausted. We all know that a whole day of social activities, narratives you have learned, discussions you have had, and thinking at your desk fills up all these index neurons that were available from the night before, and then there are none left. When a new thought comes in, what do you do with it? There is no storage capacity. You would rather step back and say, “Let’s sleep now. I'll do it tomorrow.” That is what causes ego-depletion, which happens during the day.
But if you wake up in the morning and you have no new nerve cells produced, and if adult hippocampal neurogenesis is not working, then you are starting the day already ego-depleted and you are not able to activate System 2. Then you are in a permanent state of System 1, and you are permanently in the zombie mode.
Mr. Jekielek: When there are valid reasons for fear, that also compromises our ability to create these neurons, correct?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, it has two effects, actually. One effect is that fear creates a high level of stress. We know that high levels of stress hormones undermine the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus.
Eustress, healthy stress, is good. If we have a purpose in life, that is good. We do things that we like to do which should be challenging. That will create new memories and the hippocampus is happy with new memories, and the index neurons are happy. We need a certain stress level to actually achieve something. But if it’s becoming a situation of distress, particularly chronic distress, then the production of these nerve cells goes down.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes a lot of sense in a situation where your life is at stake and when you’re threatened that you need all the energy for fight or flight. You need all that energy. In that situation, the highest levels of stress hormones essentially stop any production of new cells in the body. For example, wound healing is stopped. With chronic stress, the regeneration of blood cells is stopped.
That’s why people use steroids to inhibit cancer cells from growing because it stops the production of cells. The same thing happens in the brain. Neurogenesis, the production of new cells, also stops. But it’s usually an acute situation.
If it becomes a chronic situation, then production also stops, but based on the high level of steroids. Then you have damage to your mental immune system, which consists of curiosity, a high level of psychological resilience, and the memory function.
Now comes the second thing. If you have this fear porn and these narratives that are presented that cause fear, that causes emotions, and emotions cause the hippocampus to memorize. But think about it, you have no index neurons.
Particularly in the evening, you’re tired, you’re exhausted, you’re ego-depleted, and you get the news that the next world war or climate change will kill all of humanity. Then you have these perma-pandemics, as the World Economy Forum calls them, which can kill everybody. We are constantly in the situation of being killed, at least from the narrative point of view, but you have no index neurons to store this narrative.
Nevertheless, you force the information into the hippocampus, but it costs something. It costs the index neurons that have already been used. They are overwritten, because the hippocampus will remember this new story.
Mr. Jekielek: This is literally brainwashing, correct?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s the word washing that comes into play here. It’s even more than washing, it’s replacing. You essentially replace former memories, maybe good memories, and maybe things your grandmother told you. Everything that your life experience which makes up your individuality is now replaced by a commodity, which is what everybody learns in the news.
You are left as a human being that, at the extreme stage, is only remembering the narratives that create fear and sorrow. You are left as a fearful person that only wants to have one thing, an end to everything, You say, “Please end the horror.”
Mr. Jekielek: This is already putting the fear of God into me as you’re describing the mechanism of how this works. You have another part to your hypothesis which involves the spike protein.
Dr. Nehls: There are many reasons why neurogenesis is down, and some of them already began before 2020. I'll come to the spike protein in a moment. It’s very important that people understand that spike protein has a bad function, but we are already in a situation where our mind is not working well enough in society. We are already a System 1-driven society. The majority of people do not have not the ability to engage System 2 when it’s needed.
It’s not their fault, because we live in a modern society where the hippocampus is not growing, but shrinking. Before 2020, the hippocampus was already shrinking. In my paper, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” I show why it’s shrinking and how we can actually remedy it.
If you remedy it, not only do you prevent Alzheimer’s, you also allow your brain to grow instead of shrink, and to be open for new thoughts. You are happier because your psychological resilience is much higher.
Mr. Jekielek: I might add that your individuality, your uniqueness, and your critical thinking grows.
Dr. Nehls: All of that grows, and that has not only implications for you as a person, it has also implications for society. Think of a society that comes across a problem that is important for the whole society. Then you have to find a solution. How likely is it that you will find a solution if the whole population consists of people filled with the narratives that the leaders gave us?
It’s much more likely that a unique individual will come up with the best idea and a solution. As soon as one person sparks the idea, it’s like a fire spreading because everybody knows about it. One person invented the mobile phone and now everybody has one. It’s not like everybody has to invent it, and that goes for every thought.
The broader the individuality is of each individual, and the more individuals we have with a broad individuality, the better the immune system of a society. But the reverse is also true. If you want to dominate a society, you have to reduce individuality, and you have to reduce the number of people. At the moment, both of those are happening.
Mr. Jekielek: You’re alluding to the excess mortality that we’re seeing in the populations right now.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, particularly in the population age 16 to 64.
Mr. Jekielek: Do you think environmental factors are causing this? Is it diet? Is it video games? There are so many different elements.
Dr. Nehls: To be honest, it’s all of the above. It’s all of the above and much more. I wrote a book in 2013 called, The Alzheimer’s Lie, which essentially is the basis of the paper I published, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease.” There I show that Alzheimer’s is not caused by aging. Age is just a prerequisite, because it takes a few decades for Alzheimer’s to develop, while the hippocampus is shrinking to the point of no return. Just because something needs decades of time to develop doesn’t mean that it’s caused by the decades of time.
Mr. Jekielek: Just out of curiosity, how easy is it to measure the size of your hippocampus?
Dr. Nehls: It’s actually quite easy. When we talk about what we can do to improve its size, there are fantastic studies out there which show that the theory is correct. At any age, you can start to regrow it again. That’s the nice story that I’m going to tell. Everybody who reads my book will find out what he can do to improve the size of his hippocampus.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to these neuropathogenic substances. Presumably they have an impact. We know that spike protein is neuropathogenic and neuroinflammatory. That has been documented in the literature.
Dr. Nehls: Everything that stresses the hippocampus will cause damage. You can imagine that if you have an acute inflammation like a respiratory disease, then your immune system reacts to it and first starts to produce proinflammatory cytokines, cytokines that activate the immune system to fight against the pathogenic microorganism.
In this situation, you’re usually sick. Sick is just a reflection of the fight going on internally. You have to withdraw, of course, you have to lay down, and you have to sleep. It makes sense to shut down the hippocampus. You are not eager to make new experiences. You’re not outgoing, you are withdrawing. Inflammation actually shuts down the production of nerve cells in the hippocampus for the time being.
An acute inflammation is pretty much the same. Like an attack which increases the stress hormones, it shuts down the hippocampus. That’s not a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing if it’s chronic, or if the inflammation is not really caused by a virus, but maybe by something else that is mimicking a virus. That is what the spike protein is doing.
When you inject the mRNA, you can produce a spike protein anywhere in your body. Meanwhile, the SARS-CoV-2 has been fabricated to include this furin cleavage site into the mRNA of the spike gene, which then causes the production of the spike protein having this molecular scissor which we call a furin. The furin cleavage is cleaving the spike protein into halves. The outer side, the S1 subunit, is now able to cross the blood-brain barrier and go into the brain.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s disambiguate this a little bit. Typically, we think about the furin cleavage site as being a feature in coronaviruses that hints that it likely came from a lab. It makes it easy for the virus to infect humans. But you’re saying it also has another function.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. It has another function. The main function is to increase its infectiousness. But, practically speaking, it allows now the spike protein to be internally shed from the production site and from the virus, but also from the mRNA when it’s injected, so it really doesn’t make a difference at first glance.
If you are either infected or injected, your cells produce the spike protein. It’s been cleaved by furin, and the S1 subunit was shown to be very effective in entering the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier, which usually protects the brain against the bloodstream, so that toxins cannot enter the brain.
Mr. Jekielek: The reason this lipid nanoparticle delivery platform was used was to get this mRNA into the cells, because cells are set up to avoid getting foreign DNA and RNA into them.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely.
Mr. Jekielek: This is a separate ability to get into cells.
Dr. Nehls: It’s separate. It’s not actually in the cells, but into the space around the cells, particularly the space around the cells in your brain. The lipid nanoparticles were chosen to deliver the mRNA to the cells. It’s actually strange because if you want to immunize somebody, you can just inject the protein, or inhale the protein and then you create immunity where it hits the immune cells.
Why the mRNA was chosen is really unclear, but it’s not unclear that you needed the lipid nanoparticles to deliver it. It is clear that the lipid nanoparticles were specifically developed to get hemotherapeutics against brain cancer into the brain by crossing the blood-brain barrier. They have chosen a vehicle for the mRNA, which was originally actually developed to enter the brain. That doesn’t make any sense for protecting against respiratory viruses, because they never enter the brain.
We don’t need any immunization for the brain. The problem is that the lipid nanoparticles are inflammatory, but only for the short time they’re present. The mRNA is present longer and was modified to stay in the cells longer. What is also shown is that the spike protein in itself, particularly the S1 subunit after the cleavage, is very stable and it can by itself travel through the bloodstream anywhere and can enter the brain and stay there.
There it was shown to activate the immune system of the brain. The brain consists not only of brain cells, but also brain cells that are actually immune cells. We call them microglia. The microglia already have receptors for spike proteins. They have not learned that during your life, they learn that through evolution. The receptor called TLR4 recognizes the spike protein as a pathogen.
It’s tricked because it sees the spike protein and thinks that it is the virus, but the spike protein is just there alone. It has no virus with it, but the immune system cannot differentiate. Now, it activates the fight against this virus which isn’t there and starts an inflammation. But the spike protein doesn’t go away, the inflammation doesn’t go away, and we have chronic inflammation.
We know that the proteins that are produced; interleukin-1, interleukin-6, or TNF-alpha, these proinflammatory cytokines are the most potent inhibitors of adult hippocampal neurogenesis that we know of.
If you have a chronic neuroinflammation, you also have a chronic inhibition of the adult hippocampal neurogenesis. That’s probably the main cause that people are having brain fog, and having this spikeopathy after infection or injection.
Mr. Jekielek: The combination of this fear narrative and prolonged spike production in our body has an extra negative effect on us being able to have good hippocampal activity.
Dr. Nehls: Yes. The fear itself plus the spike protein are probably sufficient to completely stop the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, which means your mental immune system is shut down. Then the content of the fear narratives are still introduced as memories in your brain, but they are overriding previous memories. Then you essentially eradicate your personality.
Mr. Jekielek: You could also create new memories, which are not necessarily these fear-laden narratives that are overriding past memories.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, sure. Let’s say I’m completely ego-depleted in the evening, which I usually am, and a friend calls me and says, “Hey, my daughter is sick. Can you help me?” I’m surely not saying, “No, I’m ego-depleted. Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep now.” I’m surely going to help him. If it’s not routine, I will certainly have to invest and think about what I need to do, and I will remember all this.
What will happen is that since no new index neurons are available, I will override old ones. But better safe than sorry. It’s better to help him, rather than trying to keep a memory of the old times. In this situation, the present is more important than the past.
But that’s an exception. It’s not what usually happens in the evening. But if it happens every day, and if I overdo it every day, then new memories will always override the old ones. That’s a default mechanism of how our brain works.
If I wake up in the morning, I have no fresh index neurons because of the spike protein, but also because of lifestyle. Before 2020, we were already in a situation where the production was down for other reasons. If the production is down and I wake up in the morning, I’m not engaging in complex thoughts. I just want my routine life and I want to be in a routine. I don’t want to question anything. I want to just go along and be happy.
Then there are no memories to override the old ones. One day looks like the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and I can’t remember them. The week is over and there’s not much I memorized from the week, because it was the week like the week before it.
But there are now situations where I’m forced to memorize. Every day we have a new rule about coronavirus, a new rule about our environment, and a new rule about climate change that we have to obey now. There are all these new rules which are forced into our brain because they have consequences if we don’t follow them. We might get a ticket or we might go to jail. We are forced to memorize all these things.
This crisis situation that I described with my friend calling me is something that happens on a routine basis to people that have an ego-depleted mind. Then it becomes really problematic because then you force an override of all your personality in the long run.
Mr. Jekielek: I’m thinking of the book, 1984, with the eternal present. We have no sense of history anymore. Of course, this is an extreme view.
Dr. Nehls: No, unfortunately, it’s not. This condition is overriding history. That’s exactly what is happening.
Mr. Jekielek: These narratives are being inserted into the population that the population itself then self-reinforces. Perhaps they work in the media or they’re an influential person. It ends up becoming a vicious cycle fostering those narratives even further, never mind the constant drumbeat of the propaganda.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s really a problem. But some people like to have their own mind, so they usually stay by themselves. We all experienced that. In my family, there is suddenly a wall between one group and the other group. We have birthday parties where we are not invited, because we are not vaccinated. Clearly, there was a big wall.
To be honest, before 2020, the people on the other side of the wall were already looking strange to me, because they weren’t curious about what I was doing. It was really funny. Sometimes I was asked about what I’m doing. I said, “I’m writing a new book.” They didn’t ask me about it because they were not interested. They were already living in their cozy System 1 world and didn’t want to be confronted. They knew if I was writing a book, it would have real meaning.
Mr. Jekielek: Obviously, not everybody in society is going to be this groundbreaking, visionary, critical thinker, or scientist. But the issue is more about the value we place on that. America is a great, amazing country where we’ve put the people who think differently on a pedestal. These are the people who challenge things and figure out things and are able to rise through merit.
It’s almost like in our current cultural, social, and political moment we’re not valuing that. Again, your whole hypothesis jives with why we might not be valuing that.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely. It would explain it, because if somebody is a critical thinker, he introduces critical thought. Critical thought is different from what you want to hear. You have to be curious and have a high threshold of resilience to dive into what he’s telling you, because he’s telling you something that you might not want to hear. Maybe it challenges your lifestyle, so then you will actually withdraw, unless you are curious.
Curiosity means that you have a strong mental immune system. A strong mental immune system means you would love to learn what he has to tell you because it might improve your life. But before you can do that, the prerequisite is having a strong mental immune system.
When Alois Alzheimer discovered the disease, it was a curiosity. In 1906, it was a total curiosity. In the biggest textbooks on neuropathology 30 years later, Alzheimer’s wasn’t even mentioned as a disease. It was totally uncommon 100 to 200 years ago. When we honor people that changed the world and that created the American Constitution, that was a time when the majority of the people still lived more naturally.
All the things that we are lacking today and that we were lacking before 2020 caused the hippocampus to shrink, and that shrinking causes Alzheimer’s. But Alzheimer’s was not present in the early 20th century. At that time, our society was different. It was more freedom-loving. Nowadays we have a society where the shrinking egos follow the herd, and the herd is taught where to run by the narratives. They run to a new global governance system that is reducing our freedom. We really have to make the herd turn around.
Mr. Jekielek: I can also imagine a scenario where certain people decide they are the enlightened ones. They are the ones who have bigger hippocampus and are able to think critically and change society. They are going to look down on all those other people. Whenever that happens and is allowed to foster, atrocities will happen.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, absolutely. People have always had different abilities. Some people are better at one thing and some people are better at another thing. In the old times, some were better hunters, and some were better fishermen, and some could make a better fire. Everybody has a speciality, and that’s what the social system is about, where hopefully everybody has the chance to do the job he wants to do and is not forced to do anything.
For example, someone invents the mobile phone and others then use it. Does it mean that the people who only use it but were not able to invent it are inferior people? I don’t think so. When I did basic research for over 20 years, I went to the lab by taking the bus in the morning. I was happy there was a bus driver taking me there. I was really thinking that the streets are paved, and that somebody has to do that. If everybody was only driving to the lab and doing research, how would I get into the lab?
Everybody has a job in society. Some people would maybe be overwhelmed doing research the way I did it. Others might be saying, “I'd rather be an artist.” People should choose whatever they want to choose. But at some point, certain groups have a responsibility if they have an idea about how to change things.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. If you do have this awareness and this critical thinking capability, it actually gives you more work.
Dr. Nehls: My wife was really fearful that I would write the book, because she said, “We might be getting attacked by just having this book out. It’s not easy.” I said, “I know that.” But I’m the type of person, if I see a banana peel on the pavement-
Mr. Jekielek: You’re going to pick up the banana peel.
Dr. Nehls: I pick it up because I fear that somebody might step on it and fall and break a leg. It may just be a metaphor. But if you see something, if you have the knowledge that something is wrong, as an individual in a society, you have the obligation to do something about it. With knowledge comes responsibility.
Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t this possibly the thinking of these budding technocrats as well? They say, “We have to make sure society runs properly.”
Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. I can believe they feel the same way, that they know something that others don’t know, and that they have the power to introduce certain knowledge into society. But it’s a problem trying to solve a problem when some are questioning if it’s even a problem at all, let’s say like climate change. Maybe there are other problems which are more demanding and more necessary to solve. Just think about the plastic which we have in the oceans. The point is, societies can only be as strong as the individuals that have an opinion.
Mr. Jekielek: You have to be allowed to challenge the ideas.
Dr. Nehls: In science, when you come up with an idea, you’re not saying that this is the truth. You’re saying that this is a proposition. This is a theory. When I published my paper on Alzheimer’s and how it can be prevented, I said it’s a unified theory. I did not say that this is a unified truth about Alzheimer’s. It’s a unified theory.
Even my new book is a theory. I show the theory and at the end, like a prosecutor, I talk to my reader and say. “Now, you get to be the jury. You can decide if my theory is correct for you.” But even if it’s wrong, it doesn’t really matter, because the science that I show is true. The hippocampus is shrinking in our society, whether it shrinks from certain factors, or if it just happens by accident.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s an emergent property of a lot of different systems.
Dr. Nehls: Yes, exactly. Perhaps it’s happening by accident, and it’s just how culture has evolved. It’s collateral damage that our hippocampus suffers. That’s all possible. But at the end of the day, we need an open mind, like in science. We need to be allowed to talk about the different options. We have to have a receptive community that is willing to accept these alternative thoughts and think about them. They should be free to pick the best thought.
Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, how do you propose to help people with that? Because unbeknownst to us, our ability to think has been reduced and we need to regain that. How are we going to do it?
Dr. Nehls: Your question reminds me a little bit of the situation when my daughter accompanied me here to fly to the United States. The first thing that this flight attendant told us was that if the oxygen level goes down, you have to take the oxygen mask and help yourself first before you help others.
In the last chapter of my book that’s the first step—help yourself first. Make sure that your mental abilities are the best. Even if you are already able to think, you can do a couple of things to make your thinking better. Reduce a couple of deficiencies in your diet. There are a couple of hints about that in the book. But first, you help yourself. Create an even stronger mental immune system for yourself.
If you have done that, you are more able to help others. Don’t go back and just draw a line and say, “These are the others. They are inferior.” Don’t think like that, because you need them, and they need your maturity. Maybe you cannot reach out to everybody or not everybody is responsive to that, but over time, I think more and more people will be.
There’s also a scientific foundation to this thinking, and I actually show that in the book. In the mid-20th century, Solomon Asch did a confirmation experiment. In this experiment, 12 people were asked to observe the length of a certain line. There were three lines, A, B, and C, and the observed line was the same length as one of the three. It was totally clear that line B was identical in size to the observed line.
But 11 of the 12 were asked to say it’s line A, and the 12th one was the actual person that was challenged. All 11 said that it’s line A. He thought, “Wow. But the answer is clearly line B. Why do they all say A?” But it was an interesting result, because 80 percent of the challenged people didn’t follow their commonsense and say B. They actually said A, because the majority had said A.
But when one of the other 11 was asked to say B too, then the 12th person was not on his own anymore. The likelihood that he also said B, despite 10 others saying A, was actually increased by 40 percent.
Mr. Jekielek: In other words, a little bit of courage goes a long way. In one of your books, you talk about the effects of microdoses of lithium. It’s an anti-inflammatory that helps with Alzheimer’s. Is that right?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, it is. On my website, you can find an article I wrote about this, because chronic inflammation is caused by the spike protein, but also by other things that I describe in the book. But the spike protein is very dominant at the current time. This vicious cycle of inflammation that occurs in the brain can actually be undermined.
On my website, in this particular article, I show that this vicious cycle can be interrupted and stopped by lithium. It’s not lithium used in bipolar disorder or in manic depression where you use really high levels which are almost toxic, with a very small therapeutic window. I talk about doses which are a hundred times smaller, which I call essential doses.
Based on our natural history of human evolution, we have essentially grown our mental capabilities most likely in an era where we actually were not just hunters and gatherers, but fishermen and hunters and gatherers. Along the ocean shores in South Africa, there is a lot of evidence for that.
The lithium content in the ocean is a hundred times higher than in freshwater. If you consume mussels or seafood from the ocean, then you actually take in a few milligrams of lithium a day. This small amount of lithium is able to break this vicious cycle activated by spike TLR4, and then activates the immune system by producing interleukin-1. This vicious cycle can essentially be turned around.
Because the hippocampus has a low resilience, you get depression. Depression means toxic levels of steroids, activating the cycle again, and then you’re in a vicious cycle. This vicious cycle can be broken.
This was shown at the University of Buffalo in New York in test cases of 10 people that were given a low dose of lithium. In a very short time, 9 people immediately got rid of the brain fog, a consequence of spikeopathy. In my 2016 paper, “Unified Theory of Alzheimer’s Disease,” I have a whole chapter on low dose lithium, because it was shown to actually stop Alzheimer’s progression.
Mr. Jekielek: We’ve had many doctors on the show who are treating spikeopathy in its various forms. I’m very curious how lithium fits into their treatment regimens. It’s something I'll be looking into now.
Dr. Nehls: It would fit into it because lithium not only breaks this vicious cycle of neuroinflammation, it was also shown to activate neurogenesis in the hippocampus. All the papers are cited in my article. It was also shown to activate autophagy, meaning the removal of proteins, micro-organelles that are not functioning anymore. Another paper cited in my article proposes that it might also work against resident spike protein in the brain.
Mr. Jekielek: There is so much to read up on. Can you give us your website?
Dr. Nehls: Yes, it’s very simple. It’s Michael-Nehls.com.
Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Nehls, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Dr. Nehls: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure being here.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Michael Nehls and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
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