Dr. Mario Martinez is a licensed U.S. clinical neuropsychologist, who is the founder of Biocognitive Science Institute. He's also a bestselling author of the book The MindBody Code: How to Change the Beliefs that Limit your Health, Longevity and Success. He lectures worldwide on his research on the theory of biocognition. Mario has researched centenarians in five continents and has identified a cultural component of longevity and suggests that rather than genetics, healthy longevity is mostly due to cultural beliefs.
Your research on centenarians worldwide suggests that, rather than genetics, that most of our health and longevity is mostly due to their cultural beliefs. In your bestselling book The MindBody Code, you talk about how cultural beliefs affect our immune, nervous and endocrine systems. Could you please share with us some of the most surprising findings?
Dr. Martinez: Yes. When I first started looking at centenarians, I only looked at people over 100, who were healthy (not vegetating in nursing homes), because it was longevity with quality that I was looking for. As a neuropsychologist, I was looking for genetics and I thought it has to be genetics, and it has to be just the way that the genes express themselves. And I was very happily proven wrong, because I found that no more than 20 to 25 percent is genetics. Some of the studies are saying that it's maybe 15 percent. But what I found was about 20 percent. The rest is what I call the biocultural beliefs that they live out and the environments in which they live. So if it's not genetics, then what's going on with genetics is only it’s a predisposition, not a genetic sentence. Then in my first book, I talked about how longevity is culturally learned, is not inherent, we culturally learn longevity. And I began to develop a theory around how centenarians live so that I can explain it in a way that makes sense that it could be operational, and then the most important thing is that anybody can learn centenarian consciousness at any age.
Could you share some of the main differences between North Americans, Europeans and Asians, regarding our cultural beliefs and how we perceive health and longevity in those locations?
Dr. Martinez: That's a very important question and that's where I'll bring anthropology in. Our cultures have a range from individualism to collectivism. So on one side of the scale, the United States, Australia and the UK are very individualistic. You go to Asia and other parts of Europe and it's more collectivist, but it's still a cultural component. In the individualistic culture importance is given to the thriving of the individual, and in collectivist cultures, importance is given to the thriving of the group and the organization. So for example, since the brain I believe is cultural, you give a group of Asians a picture of someone sitting on a bench in a park and you ask them to look at it for a few minutes and then you say “Okay, now I want you to tell me what you remember”. Then give the same picture to individualist cultures like the United States and the UK and ask the same question. The Asians remember the relationship of the person on the bench and the tree and that there was a little rabbit next to the to the person - the relational, contextual. The individuals will say “He was wearing a black shirt with green pants and blue shoes and his hair was blonde”, - being visual. The brain learns culturally how to perceive and that will have positive or negative consequences depending on how you apply it.
In the individualistic culture importance is given to the thriving of the individual, and in collectivist cultures, importance is given to the thriving of the group and the organization.
In your book, you mentioned also “centenarian consciousness”, that we can identify a few misconceptions about aging and replace them with a “centenarian consciousness”. Could you elaborate on that?
Dr. Martinez: I think that what centenarians do is help identify the “causes of health”. In medicine, we study the causes of illness, in biocognition, we study the “causes of health”. And what I find in centenarian consciousness and they have several concepts of life. I'll give you an example of what each of the centenarians I was looking at told me. One is that the present is never too late to make decisions. Number one, example: I asked a 102-year-old man what his plans were. He said, “I'm going to start learning German next week.” The present is always never too late to learn, and that's a constant. What are we taught in our cultural portals like if you are middle-aged and you want to go back to school? Immediately, they tell you “Look, you need to be thinking about saving for retirement”. You are going to be in this state of retirement consciousness. And that's one of the things that I find in working with corporations, that depending on the retirement age of that country, they start going into retirement consciousness and they stop being productive or creating new policies. They don't want to rock the boat because they have another 10 years. So it’s 10 years of nonproductivity. It costs billions of dollars when you are not aware of that. Another example is that they see growing older different than aging. They see growing older as a passing of time. Aging is what they do with that time, and how they live. They live agelessly, and an example is when, Clint Eastwood who is pretty close to 90 was asked, So what is your secret? He said “When I wake up in the morning, I don't let the old man in”. That's it, he's going to be a centenarian. Another one of those premises is forgiveness, which is an act of releasing yourself from the prison that you have created. So it is an act of love to release yourself. But forgiveness is not an intellectual process, it is very existential. An example is when I talked to a centenarian from Estonia, who had been in a Soviet concentration camp.
I asked him “What was your experience there?”
And he said: “Oh, well, it was pretty rough”,
“And what do you remember most?”
He said “Well, I remember that one of the soldiers, who was my age, 19, would sneak food into me because we became friends. That's a beautiful memory that I have”.
And then I said “so what else you remember?”
And he started laughing and said, “Well when I got out, my mother was complaining that I didn't write to her. And I said, ‘Mother, the Soviets didn't let me write’” and he laughed.
But then I said, “So what do you think of those people?”
He said “They were animals, but I'm not going to waste my time upsetting myself with animals”.
But you see they have righteous anger. They know how to be angry, but they don't engage the anger other than in the context. This is an interesting example of the causes of health.
In your book, you have also mentioned the role of shame, betrayal and abandonment in the healing process. Can we touch on this as well?
Dr. Martinez: Yes. What I found in all cultures that I have looked at in: Australia, South Africa, Native Americans, is that you can only be wounded three ways by the culture, which is good news. You can contain it. By shaming, abandoning, or betraying. And that happens in relationships and everything else. And what happens is that the tribe lives within the pale and that's when people say “You have gone beyond the pale”. The pale is an old word for enclosure - you live within the pale. And initially it was good or initially now in anytime it's good because you are a little baby and you have to be taken care of, but at some point, to individuate, like Carl Jung said, you have to get out of the pale and you have to go beyond the pale and for them to keep you within the pale, which is very collectivist, they either shame you, they abandon you or they betray you emotionally, in one way or another. This is why heroes don't last as heroes very long- at first, they are heroes and then they start bringing them down. And each of those wounds I find has a different psychoneurological reaction. Shame is inflammatory. It causes inflammation and it's hot. When people are shamed you notice that their neck turns red, that's inflammation and redness from acid in the immune system, which is responding as some kind of pathogen out there. That's exactly what they do when you have an allergy. Shame is like an allergy. So the immune system is bio-symbolic. Abandonment is cold. You constrict your vascular system. It feels cold and there's an increase in epinephrine, which causes the constriction and also all three of them can actually decrease your immune function. Betrayal, which is the strongest and the most complex, is also hot. And it's based on anger and a sense of loss of trust. But betrayal is very powerful because not only do you get upset with the person who betrayed you, but you begin to question humanity itself and ask who can you trust.
This sounds like a dangerous trend
Dr. Martinez: Yes, betrayal is very dangerous. They each have an antidote: for shame the antidote is honor consciousness, for abandonment it is commitment, and for betrayal, it is a sense of loyalty but to yourself. So it's counterintuitive, it is not an intellectual process. If you get abandoned in a relationship, the abandonment requires the antidote of commitment but to yourself. This is a technique I teach in the book and workshops about how to do it, not intellectually, it has to be done existentially and with contemplative methods. You go into a commitment consciousness when you have been abandoned and an increase in compatibility with the coldness and all the other immunological things that it causes. For example, I treat some of the inflammatory kind of illnesses like fibromyalgia and MS and rheumatoid arthritis. By the way, many of them have a history of shame or inflammatory aspects. I treat them with conventional methods but also by teaching honor consciousness, which I find clinically to be anti-inflammatory. So those are the approaches that I'm bringing with biocognition into longevity.
For shame the antidote is honor consciousness, for abandonment it is commitment, and for betrayal, it is a sense of loyalty but to yourself.
This is also extremely interesting in connection with geographical locations because we carry a lot of that as a nation or as a group historically. You also work a lot with corporations and entrepreneurs. Could you tell me the difference between motivation and inspiration?
Dr. Martinez: Okay, I'm going to upset a lot of people that work on motivation, but I’m going to look at it from a neuropsychological perspective. Let's look at operation. In motivation, you're trying to get somebody to do something that they normally wouldn't do on this reward, either praise or a bonus, that is not a natural process of development. It's artificial. It's what I call “rat psychology”. Inspiration brings out in a person the best that they have without having to entice them to do anything. And the way you do that is by empowering people and giving them an opportunity to find meaning in what they do. And what is empowerment? In biocognition empowerment is very operational. People talk about empowerment, and they don't really give you operational definitions. Empowerment means access to resources to overcome a challenge. That's it. And what corporations do is they motivate you here and there and then they don't give you access to overcome challenges. So you are motivated and disempowered. It doesn't work. So in organizations, there are tribes. The CEO is the tribal leader. What archetype is a tribal leader bringing in? We do assessment of archetypes. As we were talking about earlier, to have the proper archetype, to be a leader you have to be a visionary. You have to watch ahead what's coming in the market, what's coming in everything. You don't want to be a manager, which is another archetype. If you are a CEO who becomes a manager, you are a micromanager and become highly inefficient. Not only that, but our system is set up for hundreds of thousands of years for one archetype to work in a particular context like a hammer for a nail, a screwdriver for a screw. If you break archetypes, it's like trying to hammer a nail with the handle of a screwdriver. It breaks, it doesn't work. So one of the things we do with wellness is get the right archetype for the right context and to shift archetypes, when you get home, you're not a visionary anymore.
I also like your comparison of the body and mind connection and in the business field, productivity and wellness, which are not very often associated. What is the connection between productivity and wellness, and how to be more productive and inspire our employees?
Dr. Martinez: If you look at the wellness model, or the medical model, it divides the body. It says, “Okay, we are going to work on the body and I'm your doctor, but if I can't find anything wrong with your body then it has to be your mind. You have to go to a psychiatrist or you are malingering”, and they separate, partition and split. It is the same thing with organizational science. “This is wellness, we are going to teach you smoking cessation and to lose weight and relaxation. And this is productivity”. You can't separate them. Wellness and productivity are one, so I bring them together firstly by creating, no motivation, only inspiration, and secondly, giving access to resources and then promoting based on levels of empowerment. When people leave a job and they tell you that they leave because they're not getting paid enough - it's not true. If you want to get somebody sick in a corporation, you do two things, and this is what corporations do - a job without meaning, and responsibility without authority. Within six months they are sick. So much for vision and mission statements.
Mario, what is your personal recipe for longevity and health plan for life?
Dr. Martinez: Be aware that there are cultural portals that the culture, depending on the culture, will put you in a portal. The first portal would be a newborn, then a baby, then a child, then an adolescent, young adult, middle-aged, which is really important to look into, and then the elderly. And each is culturally defined. Because if you're in one culture, middle age could be 45 and another one could be 70. And when you ask a centenarian, what is middle age, they say that that's a dumb question, you find out when you die. So the first thing is you have to learn what portal have you put yourself in based on your culture: young adult, middle age, whatever, and recognize that this is a cultural imposition, not a biological imposition. Then be aware of how the culture editors and co-authors will bring you back in when you try to get out of the pale. If a person was middle-aged at 45, a day before 45, they are not middle-aged, but the day that they turn 45, they become middle-aged, they have to dress middle-aged, look middle-aged, get sick, like the middle-aged and plan like the middle-aged. Because each portal has attributions, that tells you this is the cause of this. You go to some doctors and they'll say:
“ How old are you?”
“Well, I'm, 30.”
“Okay, how old are you? 70? Oh, well, what do you want for your age?”
And I have a friend who's a doctor who is 75 and his knee was hurting. So he went to a colleague and said, “Look, my right knee is hurting.”
“So what do you want for your age? You are 75.”
and he said: “I want the same thing that my left knee has which is also 75 and is not hurting”.
So that's how they put you into the portal. The first thing is to get out of the portal. And number two is that family illnesses are only predispositions, not genetics. So look in your family to see if there's a genetic predisposition. Find the outliers, the ones that don't fit the illness and you're going to see that they are different and begin to live like that person. And there are many other things, but the main thing is that we learn longevity culturally, not genetically.
Thank you. This is very inspirational. For anyone interested in learning more about the connection of bio-cognition and longevity, I would like to invite them to your website on Biocognitive Science www.biocognitive.com
Thank you very much, Dr. Martinez.
