TIPPETT: It struck me, this paradox of how different we all are in every one of our situations in living and dying and yet how alike, yet how there are these images of humanity. And how do we make use of that knowledge, or do we just know it? There is a book that I wrote called Lost in America , and there is a quotation in that book. If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears.
Disappears on your part, disappears on their part. I mean, love is such a watered down wishy-washy word in our culture. TIPPETT: I mean, that — but, you know, what that also engenders, the qualities you spoke about: patience, hospitality, compassion — virtues that are at the heart of all the great religious traditions, right?
And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. And these are two different belief systems. It makes no sense. Aquinas was a philosopher and a theologian. All three of these people knew essentially all the knowledge available to anybody at that time.
And they were engaged in the pursuit of bringing science and philosophy on the one hand — and specifically Greek philosophy — science and philosophy on the one hand together with faith on the other hand.
Bad history. Today my interview with the surgeon and author Sherwin Nuland, who died this week. He gave humankind free will, and free will becomes the essence of the whole thing. And the moral sense provides people with more pleasure than anything. We say virtue is its own reward. TIPPETT: This adventure of learning about the brain, which you are steeped in, I wonder how you think this kind of knowledge will begin to reach ordinary people.
You know, are there ways it will turn up in our culture at a more basic level? NULAND: What happens to science, or what has happened to science since the great discoveries began to be made around the middle of the 20th century is that increasingly the public, by reading about some of these technological events and phenomena over and over again, it starts seeping in.
People are very impatient when they want to learn about this stuff. In , just two years after Watson and Crick did their nice thing and published that great paper, nobody could figure out what DNA was. Now everybody knows what DNA is. When people first started talking about stem cells and cloning, they were a mystery except in some sort of comedic sense. But bit by bit, people are recognizing scientific observations and discoveries.
And my guess is that neuroscience, as it evolves, will slowly become something that is apprehensible to most reasonably well-educated people. Of course, it would help if we had a better way of scientifically educating year-olds, but we are not in that situation in this country.
That kind of knowledge is also a form of power. NULAND: Well, I like to think that if people really understand the way their brains work, they would be as overwhelmed with wonder as some of us are, and would have a completely different sense of the human organism and its potentialities and would try to live up to its greatest potentialities.
Thank you so much. Sherwin Nuland died March 3, at the age of He was clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, where he taught bioethics and medical history. NULAND: excerpt from presentation It is my spiritual self that makes me human, it enables me to reason, to sublimate my instinctual drives, to be of use to society, and to love in a way that only members of my species can love. But it also enables me to do harm, to scheme against the interests of others, and to so misinterpret the unconsciously recalled traumas of my childhood that I become depressed, anxious, or a danger to society.
The human spirit can be the high road to the fulfillment of my greatest hopes, but it can be the grim pathway to my self-destruction. Either way, it is the transcendent product of my body and its wisdom and of the most complex structure on the human planet, the three pounds of human brain.
Thank you very much. And follow everything we do by subscribing to our weekly email newsletter. Just click the newsletter link on any page at onbeing. Our destiny is written in the hand. RENATE HILLER: And in hand work, in transforming nature, we also make something truly unique, that we have made with our hands, stitch by stitch, that maybe we have chosen the yarn, that we have spun the yarn, even better, and that we have designed.
You have to find your way, you have to listen with your whole being. And that is a schooling that we need today. When Krista interviewed the psychiatrist and trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published. And The Body Keeps the Score is now one of the most widely read books in the pandemic world. New Here? New to On Being? Start Here. Last Updated March 6, Original Air Date September 29, On Being continues in a moment.
And a theologian. Thank you so much DR. Laughter MS. Music Played. Last Night. All Around Us Artist: Miaou. More After We're Gone. Chasing After Shadows Living with the Ghosts. Finally We Are No One. Sherwin Nuland The Biology of the Spirit. Read Essays Poetry. Home On Being with Krista Tippett. He realized the English language was his passport to America and to worlds he had never imagined. This influence, this passion for words continued throughout his life.
He did his surgical training at Yale, and lived his professional life as a surgeon until his retirement from surgery in He made contributions to the literature of clinical research, surgery and medical history during the years of his surgical practice. Knopf, was for the general reader. Through a series of biographies, he told the story of the history of western medicine from Hippocrates to the 20th century. In the Dr.
The experience of examining ethical issues while being at the bedside of patients was essential to the broader questions that Dr. TED Speaker. Sherwin Nuland Doctor. A practicing surgeon for three decades, Sherwin Nuland witnessed life and death in every variety.
Then he turned to writing, exploring what there is to people beyond just anatomy. Why you should listen Sherwin Nuland was a practicing surgeon for 30 years and treated more than 10, patients -- then became an author and speaker on topics no smaller than life and death, our minds, our morality, aging and the human spirit.
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