Controlling one’s thoughts can impact the trajectory of a person’s life as well as the lives of the next four generations in their family, Dr. Lee Warren told the audience Oct. 21 at a North Platte Town Hall Lecture.
Until the early mid-2000s, doctors believed the human brain was structurally fixed by inherited genes.
Then, the advent of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging allowed medical science to observe what occurs physiologically when people think, Warren said.
In 2013, the observation of a functional brain scan at Auburn University changed the way neurosurgeon Warren understood the brain’s capacity to redesign itself.
This created a field called Epigenetics, which studies how environmental factors and behaviors can alter how genes function.
The results of a study published in 2015 reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders, according to a report in Scientific American.
The brain’s structure is physically altered, depending on which thought a person chooses to dwell.
According to Warren, humans have up to 80,000 thoughts each day. Eighty percent of their thoughts are negative, and only one in five of them is true.
Warren encouraged the audience to develop space between thinking a thought and choosing how to react to it.
“When you change what you think about, your brain changes its function to operate better,” Warren said while emphasizing that the process is not a gimmick nor a positive thinking trick.
Warren calls this process self-brain surgery. A person accepts the role as co-creator of their own reality.
“It’s not about the cards you are dealt, but how you play them,” Warren said as he discussed the importance of objective truth.
From 1988-2008, there has been a 400% increase in the use of antidepressants in the U.S. We have “more resources than ever in mental health – counseling, medicine, therapy, self-help books – but more anxiety than ever before,” said Warren.
Suicides continue to rise, and Warren said people are more anxious and fragile than previous generations. He is particularly concerned about the effect on youth.
Kids today are being raised with a sense that they are inherently fragile. This fragility causes them to “develop a lifestyle trying to avoid anything that might harm,” Warren said.
Kids aren’t getting their driver’s license on time and are taking their parents to job interviews.
“They are afraid that something will break them in a way that is irreparable,” he said.
Warren attributes some of this avoidance to social media, as it has created “a society that believes they should be entertained or only encounter things they like.”
Dr. Warren cautioned that social media “allows kids’ position in the world to be defined by people who aren’t in their life.”
His wife, Lisa, told the Bulletin that screens “teach children to only think about themselves with no collaboration” and foster “tunnel vision.”
As a mother and grandmother, Lisa Warren believes parents can help their children by closely monitoring technology. As screen time is removed, children are “no longer self-focused – they can see the world.”
Dr. Warren has begun working on self-brain surgery books for young adults and teens. His next book, Handbook of Self Brain Surgery, is set for release in February 2026. It will be his fifth book.
Warren’s most recent book, Hope is the First Dose, was named the Resource of the Year by Outreach Magazine, an evangelical magazine based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
This report was first published in the Bulletin’s Oct. 23 print edition.
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