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>> Good evening.

I'm psychiatrist Jay Fawver live from the Bruce Haines studio in Fort Wayne , Indiana.

Welcome to Matters of the Mind Matters.

The Mind is a live call in program where you have the chance to choose the topic for discussion.

>> So if you have any questions concerning mental health issues ,give me a call in the Fort Wayne area by dialing (969) 27 two zero or if you're calling long distance you may dial toll free at 866- (969) 27 two zero.

>> Now on a fairly regular basis we are broadcasting live every Monday night from our spectacular PBS Fort Wayne studios which lie in the shadows of the Purdue Fort Wayne campus.

And if you'd like to contact me with an email question that I can answer on the air, you may write me a via the Internet at matters of the mind all one word at the big that's matters of the mind at WFYI EDG and I'll start tonight's program with an email I recently received.

>> It reads Dear Dr. Fauver do actors change their brain functioning when they assume the role of another character?

Well, that's an interesting phenomenon because there is something called functional MRI where you can have somebody play the role of another actor, put them in a scanner and then see how their brain works and indeed the part of the brain that tends to be necessary to have your self identity or understand your own values.

>> You know who you are as a person is right here on the inside part the brain called the medial medial dorsal prefrontal cortex medial meaning on the inside dorsal meaning down below or up above.

But the medial dorsal prefrontal cortex is an area that is important for the purpose of understanding your self identity and how you interact with others.

Now there's a medial ventral prefrontal cortex which means down below which is right below it medial ventral refers to how you identify yourself and your own personal values but it doesn't matter so much how it affects other people.

So the medial ventral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain where as an actor or actress you shut down and they chernus the MRI scanners.

You shut down that part of the brain when you're playing the role of another character and apparently the better actors or better actresses are the ones who can totally block out their own values or own self identity, their own personal history and in doing so they can take on the role of another person.

>> Now the medial dorsal prefrontal cortex just above that will indeed relate your values and your understanding of the world around you.

>> But it allows you to socially connect with other people.

>> So many people with autism, for instance, will have a hard time with the medial dorsal prefrontal cortex because they need that part of the brain to put their current thoughts into context with other people.

So in the environment with whom they're interacting, they want to be able to maintain that understanding of how other people might take them.

>> So people who have difficulty with with socially interacting with other people will often have difficulty with that part of the brain that allows you to connect with other people.

Now the important aspect of the medial ventral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that allows you to identify your own sense of values and your own identity.

The important thing about that is that when you have sensory input coming in and you have information that you're trying to comprehend, it will go through that part of the brain to try to help you understand how that information that you're receiving from the news from other people from your work environment, how that information is processed based on your own identity and your values so that's why for a lot of people it's difficult to rationally have them connect with objective information that's coming in if it doesn't agree with their personal values and many people will have the this bias and their understanding and that's called cognitive dissonance where people will have difficulty taking in new information that might or might not agree with their own personal beliefs that they've established for a long time.

>> How do you establish personal beliefs?

Well, it goes back to early childhood development perhaps how your parents believe how your peers believed the information you've taken in as a means of trying to identify who you want to be.

So we kind of allow that identity to evolve over the course of time to give ourselves our own identity.

That's the part of the brain that an actor or actress is able to shut down and be able to take on the characterization of another person.

>> Thanks for your email.

Let's go to our first caller.

Hello Jesse.

Welcome to the Mind.

>> Jesse, you want to know how young the symptoms of bipolar disorder can exhibit themselves and how can it affect the quality of life if left untreated as an adult?

A bipolar disorder is a phenomenon that we don't usually discuss until somebody is maybe 14 or 16 years of there are different types of conditions prior to that age where children can be unusually moody.

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder is a term that's used for young children and young adolescents who might have moodiness and it's out of the range of what would be expected at that age but it's not considered to be yet bipolar disorder.

Now if you have an adolescent who has a family history of bipolar disorder, you have a mother, father, brother or sister with bipolar sort of you might be suspecting that young adolescent might need more of a mood stabilizer as you would treat some with bipolar disorder.

>> But the the value of establishing a proper diagnosis early on will tend to give you better outcomes in the long run.

People with bipolar disorder typically will have a higher likelihood of divorce, more likelihood of losing their jobs.

They have consequences because when they're having highs and lows it'll give you difficulty showing up to work and interacting with other people responsibly.

>> So if you can identify bipolar at bipolar disorder at an early age you're more likely to get the proper treatment initiated.

>> But as an adolescent perhaps if you see those kind of symptoms emerging you'd first want to look at the family history if they've been the family having similar symptoms and then go from there as a child and adolescent you have to differentiate bipolar disorder versus attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

ADHD will give you moodiness, irritability, distractibility on a day to day to day basis whereas bipolar disorder those symptoms will come and go and they're based on the person's mood with ADHD.

Doesn't matter what their mood might be, they're going to have difficulty the attention span of distractibility with bipolar disorder it's entirely based on their mood whether they're on the upside or the low side.

Thanks for your call.

Let's go to our next caller.

>> Hello Louis.

Welcome to Mastermind Louis.

>> You want to know can anxiety affect the way you breathe and then and can the way you breathe affect your anxiety?

You know, Louis, I remember when I was in medical school we would hear about these people coming in the emergency room and they'd be hyperventilating.

>> When you hyperventilate you affect your bicarbonate level in your system and it makes you extremely anxious.

>> So hyperventilating and blowing out too much carbon dioxide can create a lot of anxiety.

So if you're anxious and you hyperventilate, you can actually worsen the anxiety overall.

So for that reason some people just need to slow down their breathing and if you slow down your breathing when you take a couple breaths out a couple of breaths in very slow deep breaths, what you're trying to do is slow down your breathing overall so it does go back and forth.

It's thought that you can be more relaxed when you exhale.

So if you slowly exhale and exhale very slowly but don't breathe out a whole lot of carbon dioxide just take your time on exhaling that can be very relaxing to so many breathing exercises will be a couple breaths in three breaths out very, very slowly over the course of time so that you're spending more time exhaling which stimulates the parasympathetic system which is the relaxing system inhale will stimulate the sympathetic system exhaling some stimulates the parasympathetic system, the parasympathetic system ,the system that slows down your heart rate and can actually make you feel more relaxed.

>> Exhaling Will help with that.

But you don't want to hyperventilate to the point where you blow out excessive carbon dioxide.

So not uncommon when people are hyperventilating, they're blowing out excessive carbon dioxide.

They can have an acid base imbalance in the body they can get their hands will curl up sometimes and sometimes it looks like they're almost having a seizure and they're merely hyperventilating.

>> But that is related to anxiety makes the anxiety much worse.

Thanks for your call.

>> Your next caller.

Hello, Jen.

Walking to matters of mind, Jen, you had mentioned that your seventeen year old just began Zoloft and she seems super fatigued.

>> What's the adjustment period for anxiety medication?

I don't like to hear about people having to go through an anxiety or an adjustment period like that.

Jen, if your 17 year old is really tired on Zoloft, she's probably she's probably getting the the dosage is a little bit too high right now.

>> Twenty five up to two hundred milligrams a day will be the typical dosage for Zoloft also known as sertraline and it's a medication that's increasing serotonin if you increase serotonin, it can have a remarkable effect in helping you feel calmer and not being so bothered about things.

>> And if you get too much of a medication like Zoloft, which is a certain medication, you can feel like you don't care.

>> That's not good feeling.

Yeah.

And you don't feel happy.

You don't feel sad.

You just feel kind of flatline.

That's not a good feeling if you're really tired right off the bat.

>> Want to talk to your daughter's clinician about possibly decreasing the dosage ?

I agree that it might take two or three weeks for you to get over those initial side effects.

I don't like people to endure those side effects at all.

I'd rather just slowly increase the dosage as opposed to starting with a higher dosage and waiting out the symptoms because that's not pleasant and feeling fatigued is something that's not necessary starting with a lower dosage and then going up gradually over the course of one, two or three weeks can often be helpful.

So the key with so long after sertraline it can do a great job for anxiety and for some people depression.

But it's a very good medication for anxiety particularly.

But the key is to take the dosage that helps with the symptoms but doesn't make you feel fatigued or doesn't make you feel like you just don't care about things.

>> Jan, thanks for your call.

>> Let's go to our next caller.

Hello Grace.

Welcome to Matters of Mind.

Grace, are there any management symptoms that can help your mother with her hoarding and should you look for other ways that her obsessive compulsive disorder might exhibit itself?

It used to be thought, Grace, that hoarding was a type of OCD.

Now we kind of look at hoarding as being a little bit different phenomenon than true OCD and that's kind of an academic discussion in itself.

The key there is that hoarding would not be so responsive to serotonin and medications where OCD medications are very effective for in treatment so you can use OCD medications like sertraline or Zoloft which I just mentioned and other serotonergic medications to treat Ossy but they want to help with hoarding so much so there's a little bit of a differentiation there.

So with hoarding the he would be how much is your mother willing to give up and sometimes as a matter of negotiating things the reason people will hoard and collect gather things is because they look at the values in which their hoarding is being personal belongings and personal attachments.

So when you ask somebody to throw out a bunch of magazines it's almost like tell them to take take one of their arms off because it's something that they personally have been attached to.

They look at it as being identity.

They look at the hoarding of objects as something that if they give up they give up part of the part of themselves.

So you need to chip away perhaps with your mother's permission of a different things that she would be willing to give up and people will hoard and they'll be more attached to some objects versus the but versus others.

>> So you chip away piece by piece.

>> You can logically try to have her assess what she really needs and what she doesn't need and try to go very, very piecemeal in that way.

>> But it's very difficult to get everything out of the house all at once because there's a tremendous amount of anxiety associated with that because it's considered to be something that is a personal belonging and all the horded objects will often be something inside there will be identified as personal attachment.

So it's very difficult to give that up but it can be done.

But the key will be do it very gradually and piece by piece with her agreement.

>> Thanks for your call.

Let's go our next caller.

Hello Barb.

Welcome to Matters of Mind Barb ,you've heard me talk about kinesthetic learning and how it works.

It's how some people are wired, Barb and we see a lot of this with people with ADHD but not everybody.

But some people are just better learners if they're moving.

And what I'm talking about is if they're moving around, if they're walking and talking with somebody some people can learn very well with auditory learning.

Some people are good visual learners but some people are do just do better if they're standing up and they're walking around.

We see this all the time with people who are able to listen to lectures that could be quite boring quite frankly, but they're doing so while they're on a treadmill or they're on an elliptical, they're on a bicycle and if they're moving there's a different part of the brain that generates the memory downloads and if they're moving around it's called kinesthetic learning.

They can actually comprehend things better.

>> So you figure if you have a an adolescent for instance or a child in grade school, they're trying to learn different things.

A great new school child for instance, trying to learn their spelling sometimes going out and shooting baskets with them as they're learning the spelling and learning history as they're doing something physically active can be very helpful.

And we hear about this a lot of times with cross-country athletes who are often very good students.

Cross-country runners typically are very students because they're disciplined because they have to maintain a running schedule but also it might have something to do with their thinking about their studies while they're running and in doing so they're downloading information a little bit better.

>> So some people just noticed that they can learn better if they're moving around.

Thanks for your call.

>> Let's go our next caller.

Hello Kendall.

Walk in American mind, Kendall, you want me to discuss the stages of brain development and how you can support brain health at Kendall early on in a child's life the front part of the brain is still growing very much so and the front part of the brain continued to grow until you're about twenty four years old as the front part of the brain grows.

>> That's the part of the brain that you're using for judgment, impulse control, trying to decide what's right and wrong, trying to decide what kind of values you have in life .

It's the front part of your brain that's developing your identity in that part of the brain to which I referred earlier the the medial ventral prefrontal cortex is part of that brain that's developing.

That's where you develop your values, your sense of identity ,your desires in life , your goals and so forth.

>> And it's very important in terms of developing as an adolescent and young adult so often telling adolescents and young adults to not be so definitive in terms of your life plans when you're an adolescent because that can change even your identity the direction you want to go.

>> You're highly influenced by your peers, your authority figures as a young child and that's part of the downloads you're getting there in your brain.

>> But as you get older a lot of times you can start to question and verify if some of the things that you learn from your peers in early childhood are really valid and you can start to physically change that part of your brain just by rationally objectively looking at the world around you.

So the key in early childhood development will be try to keep learning things, keep yourself open to new ideas and understand different things around you and question, question, question.

>> I'm always emphasizing to adolescents and young adults to question the world around them, question the whys, just don't take in information blindly because somebody in a professorial position might have told you something, asked them why they believe that how do they get that information and don't be afraid of offending adults by asking those kind of questions.

I know in the Japanese teaching environment that's actually expected that you are to question question question your teachers and that's actually a very good way to learn very importantly and I'm telling this a lot to individuals who are children and young adults adolescents nowadays will be to not smoke marijuana.

I know it's getting much more prevalent out there but marijuana will slow down the growth and development of that front part of the brain probably more than anything else we know more so than alcohol, more so than cigaret smoking marijuana smoking will be something it's very, very damaging and delaying that frontal development and sometimes that can be irreversible where it's going to be an ongoing problem for a lot of people exercise is very good for brain development.

So getting into some kind of physical activity as a child ,adolescent young adult and trying to maintain that kind of expectation as the years go on can be very helpful because exercise not only helps learning but it also helps with brain development in general.

So there some ideas that you can follow.

Be careful about social media.

>> Be careful about the digital environment in which we live.

It's better to socialize and interact with people face to face as opposed to interacting by social media.

Brain development has has shown that with MRI's as people are using more digital media this part of their brain called the hippocampus can actually shrink.

And I'm hearing about this particularly with A.I.

using A.I.

now where you can simply ask artificial intelligence.

A quick question about something you get the answer a lot of times you can forget the answer within five minutes because I was so quick in getting either response so you can look at an answer on A.I.

and within minutes forget what that answer was because it was so convenient.

So be careful about digital media for learning and development.

>> Try to interact, try to talk with other people.

One of the best ways to learn will be to to have discussions with people whether it be on religion, politics, the social goings on of having conversations with people in a real time manner can be very, very helpful as opposed to going to social media and arguing with strangers about different things.

That's not a good way to help develop the brain.

So thanks for your call.

Let's go to our next caller.

Hello Curtis.

Welcome to Matters of Mind.

Curtis, you want to know about the difference between flashbacks and a feeling of deja vu?

Flashbacks will be where you have experienced a traumatic experience and all of a sudden those visions or the the sounds of that bad experience are all of a sudden come back to you.

That's called a flashback.

So it's something where you actually see or you hear something that happened before and all of a sudden you're seeing it again.

It's part of your brain's way of having difficulty processing that memory because it keeps bringing that memory back to you.

Deja vu is a entirely different phenomenon.

>> Deja vu is a very brief feeling valid or not that you've been doing something that you're currently doing in that you're currently doing but you've already done it so deja vu is a phenomenon where the so-called Paralympic system which is right beside that's while para means Paralympic system is right beside the hippocampus here and that part of the brain will sometimes fire off when somebody is having a deja vu experience it could be related to a stroke.

>> It can be related to a brain injury, a past infection.

But something can fire that particular part of the brain right beside the hippocampus, beside the limbic system and in doing so can make you all of a sudden feel like you've been you've encountered that kind of experience exactly as you're doing it now.

>> So it's kind of like a false memory in that way and it feels very real when it's happening.

But there are some physiological reasons for it happening.

It's an entirely different experience than a flashback.

Usually a sense of deja vu is not an unpleasant experience for people.

They just kind of will briefly sit back and say hey, I feel like I've experienced this before.

That's deja vu happens over the course of maybe a few few seconds, maybe a few minutes even.

But then it will fade away and it's not usually going to cause you anxiety whereas flashbacks are something we're often trying to diminish either through therapy or medication treatment because flashbacks can be very disturbing for a lot of people.

>> Thanks for your call.

Let's go on to our next e-mail question.

Our next e-mail question reads Dear to the father why do I have such a letdown after a vacation and Christmas?

There's actually a reason for that from a brain standpoint when you are anticipating something you're actually going to have more dopamine release from the middle part of the brain than you would as compared to if you're actually experiencing it in other words, Christmas is a good example.

>> So many people say they get really excited for Christmas starting in mid-November and then you go through Thanksgiving you're starting to think about Christmas.

Then you have Black Friday where you're starting to buy things for Christmas week by week by week.

>> The excitement is building and building and building prior to Christmas.

Well, what what's happening to that time you're getting a dopamine release.

You're getting a feeling of joy ,happiness, pleasure and you're getting a physiological excitement during that time the actual experience of Christmas itself after all this buildup is often a letdown because the dopamine starts to go down because the the excitement the experience is already here.

>> So whether it be Christmas a vacation, if you're getting ready to do something and you're getting excited about something in the future, yeah.

That can actually be more exciting than the event itself even though the event itself has a lot of meaning to you.

The buildup to that particular event can often release a lot more dopamine than the event itself and we hear about this a lot with drug addictions.

People who are addicted to various drugs will have a lot of excitement in their brain and the doping releases they're preceding their use of the drug, the use of the drug itself might give some brain changes itself and affect the brain chemistry.

But the excitement in the anticipation of using that drug of abuse often will give somebody much more joy and happiness.

>> And that's why when drug addiction treatment is undergone you're trying to decrease all these different type of collateral events that precede the use of the drug because those are the events that will often trigger relapse.

>> So you have to try to keep those all in check whether it be Christmas vacation, something that you're anticipating in the future.

What I often recommend to people is try to have things available where they can look forward to things you want to have some kind of schedule in mind and I tell us especially to people who are unemployed people who are retired people wonder what am I going to do this next week?

>> I have something in mind.

Have something to do even if it's to socialize regularly with people have something is available to do fun, something you can look forward to doing because when you look forward to doing something you're getting that dopamine release and that is helping the mood.

Thanks for your call.

Let's go to our next caller.

Hello Casey.

Welcome to mastermind Casey.

Are there any mental health benefits to keep music and art in school curriculum music and art have their place and I understand what school curriculum is.

There's always a debate what you should you include what should you not include?

>> So when you talk about the arts, your music and art are different than the STEM environment where people are learning science, technology, engineering, engineering and math so the STEM environment are more technically oriented.

>> Math and art are different so it's all a matter of people's preferences on what direction they want to go.

But there's a lot of ways that people can learn.

They can do a lot of extracurricular activities in any of those type of things that are left out of the formal school.

>> Thanks for your call.

Unfortunately I'm out of time for this evening if you have any questions that I can answer on the air or you may write me a via the Internet at Matters of the Mind at WFB org.

I'm psychiatrist Jeff Olver and you've been watching Matters of the Mind on PBS Fort Wayne now available on YouTube God willing and PBS willing I'll be back and then again next week.

>> Thanks again for watching tonight