Dr. Michael Nehls shares how changes in our brains can make us susceptible to indoctrination.
In a recent
episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek speaks with Dr. Michael Nehls, a molecular geneticist, physician, and author of the new
book, “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. His website is
Michael-Nehls.com.
Jan Jekielek: In “The Indoctrinated Brain,” you explain why so many of us might be believing some preposterous narratives. Please explain this to us.
Michael Nehls: The default mechanism of our thinking is sometimes called System 1 thinking. 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 consciously acting. It’s learned behavior, but also instinctive behavior.
In addition, we have the actual thinking system, System 2. System 2 is a conscious system and requires energy, but what happens if this energy isn’t there? Then we just continue with System 1. System 1 also acts in situations which make us afraid, when we follow the mass of people without thinking 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 and what you found.
Dr. Nehls: It’s our mental diary of everything we experience, the narratives we’re told, and everything we have to remember instantaneously because it happens only once. We find a nice bookstore, then we go home. We saw the bookstore, we remember it, and we can go back and find it.
Only the hippocampus is able to remember something that we experience, learn, or hear from people only one time, and then memorize for a lifetime.
This autobiographical memory is based on four questions: when, where, what, and how did it feel? It has to evoke some emotion, because the hippocampus has a limited capacity and 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.
The hippocampus has another unique feature: the ability to grow new nerve cells. To contain personal experience in our autobiographical memory, the hippocampus can grow one, two, or three percent every year. But in our modern society, it doesn’t grow—it shrinks. The shrinkage rate for adults is about 1.4 percent per year. Alzheimer’s actually results from the reversal of a process called adult hippocampal neurogenesis.
If you have no new nerve cells produced, if adult hippocampal neurogenesis isn’t working, then you’re ego-depleted and not able to activate System 2. You’re in a permanent state of System 1 and the zombie mode.
If narratives are presented that cause fear, you have no index neurons to store this narrative. Nevertheless, you force the information into the hippocampus, but it costs something. The index neurons that have already been used are overwritten, and the hippocampus will remember this new story.
Mr. Jekielek: This is literally brainwashing, correct?
Dr. Nehls: It’s even more than washing; it’s replacing. You replace former memories, maybe good memories. Everything which makes up your individuality is now replaced by a commodity. You are left, at the extreme stage, only remembering narratives that create fear.
Mr. Jekielek: Another part to your hypothesis involves the spike protein.
Dr. Nehls: 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 spikeopathy after infection or injection. The fear plus the spike protein is probably sufficient to stop the production of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, which means your mental immune system is shut down. The content of the fear narratives is overriding previous memories and essentially eradicates your personality.
Mr. Jekielek: America is a country where we’ve put the people who think differently on a pedestal, the people who challenge things and rise through merit. Your hypothesis jives with why we might not be valuing that.
Dr. Nehls: Absolutely. If somebody is a critical thinker, you have to be curious and have a high threshold of resilience to dive into what he’s telling you, something you might not want to hear. So you will actually withdraw, unless you are curious.
Curiosity means you have a strong mental immune system. You would love to learn what he has to tell you because it might improve your life, but the prerequisite is having a strong mental immune system.
When Alois Alzheimer discovered the disease in 1906, it was a total curiosity. In the textbooks on neuropathology 30 years later, Alzheimer’s wasn’t even mentioned. It was uncommon 100 to 200 years ago, when the majority of people still lived more naturally.
All the things we’re lacking today cause the hippocampus to shrink, and that shrinking causes Alzheimer’s. Nowadays, we have a society where the shrinking egos follow the herd, and the herd is taught where to run by 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: How do you propose to help people with our ability to think?
Dr. Nehls: When my daughter accompanied me to the United States, the first thing this flight attendant told us was if the oxygen level goes down, you take the oxygen mask and help yourself before you help others.
In my book, that’s the first step—help yourself. Make sure your mental abilities are the best. Even if you are already able to think, you can make your thinking better. There are a couple of hints about that in the book. But first, you create an even stronger mental immune system for yourself.
If you’ve done that, you’re able to help others.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
