Dr. Mario Martinez

I’m here. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Mario Martinez

I was trained as a neuropsychologist and trained that most of it are basically genetics. And that the brain is entirely unrelated to cultural beliefs and cultural entrapments.

In good science, you study what works and then you develop theories to understand it. I thought the best way to do it is to look in people who are not only over 100 years old but healthy centenaries.

Dr. Mario Martinez

What I found was very remarkable. Because after studying hundreds of them all over the world, that the genetics is about 20-25% in their longevity and their health. The rest is related to their culture beliefs and the subcultures that they create and their perception of growing older.

Based on that, I created quite a bit of the theoretical premises that I talk about now and teach all over.

Dr. Mario Martinez

The first book, The MindBody Code was to look at how the mind and the body communicate or how cognition and biology interact with each other. What the communication code is.

On the second book, the one that’s coming out, The MindBody Self, I talked about how the culture shapes that communication. The way that it works briefly, for example, if you talk to some reductionist, a scientist and you say, “Well, how?” They’ll ask, “Well, how can a symbol affect a cell?” or “How can a symbol change biology?” It’s not possible.

If you look at it that way, of course, it makes no sense. But if you look at the developmental process of how we learn, for example, the baby is born. They’re not programmed because we’re neither machines nor computers. They’re designed. They have designed propensities, and they’re designed to pay attention to what I call “Culture editors.” These are the people that at first are going to make it or break it. They are for survival.

Dr. Mario Martinez

The child doesn’t have a name for the breast or a bottle. But they notice that when they’re hungry or uncomfortable and they see a breast or a bottle, and they become comfortable again. They begin to see that. There’s no language.

As they see that, they have a biology going on. They have a hormonal exchange. They have neurological changes in the brain. All these things are happening, and they’re automatically associating that symbol of the mother or whoever is taking care of the child, and then that symbol later comes out with a language, and that language will be a bottle or a mother.

That symbol becomes a bio symbol because you will have a reaction to that symbol that came from early life. We were pre-designed for that, and the culture editors and not only the mother and the father. But they are the people that the culture gives them power in a context. We’re designed to pay much attention to them for our survival, but also, for our sense of meaning.

The culture editors are teachers in schools, clergy in sacred places, doctors in hospitals, and that kind of contextual power.

These people have a lot of authority to enhance or diminish your view of yourself and how you should grow. That is what I talk about that the culture will shape the perception that you’re going to have in the world. That the brain is culture and the brain is acculturated.

The culture weaves a perception, and the brain will read that fabric. That’s how the culture shapes the perception.

Dr. Mario Martinez

It’s one way to look at it in this way.

Dr. Mario Martinez

When you look at it, we think we have the most sophisticated organizational systems, and we have great health care and prevention. The fact is there are about seven trillion dollars that are spent yearly on chronic illnesses in the workplace. 75% of successful executives have some gastrointestinal problems. Why is that?

Dr. Mario Martinez

The answer I think from my research is that it’s not so much what an organization does and what they say to do in their mission statements. Those are kind thoughts and helpful intentions but what they don’t realize is that they’re implicitly creating a culture. That culture is how they communicate with each other and that culture could be either empowering or disempowering.

There are ways to make people sick, and this is what companies do inadvertently. It is so important to teach motivation and inspiration in such workplaces.

You can make somebody sick in any organization. You give them responsibility without authority, or you give them a job without meaning, which causes helplessness.

Dr. Mario Martinez

People get sick in situations like that, and then they think it’s because you’re smoking or they’re not exercising enough. Or because their boss is mean with them. They don’t realize that it’s a process that they’re colluding with without knowing.

Let’s say that you have an organization that has great benefits, a gym, child care, and all those beautiful things. But the communication exchange is a toxic gas and there is also lack of motivation and inspiration.

All the beautiful things in an organization are not going to be sufficient to keep you healthy, along with that you need motivation and inspiration as well.

That’s the way to look at cultures to have more motivation and inspiration. The cultures will put you in a position where you’re not empowered at the local level.

Dr. Mario Martinez

So what I’ve done is it took me about ten years to realize how the immune system can make hundreds of thousands of decisions a second. It does so without consulting the brain hundreds of thousands of decisions a second without consulting the brain or to a central system?

The way that I perceive motivation and inspiration and this is the way how I teach organizations is that the immune system has a very simple model of making decisions.

1. It has local intelligence.
2. It has distributive control.

For example, a neutrophil goes around and looks for any foreign body or infection. When it finds little bacteria, it doesn’t go to the brain and ask permission to what it should do. It goes ahead and acts on it. That’s what I call “E1” or Empowerment 1 which is essential for motivation and inspiration.

What it does if it could ask itself it would say, “What can I do for myself that nobody can do for me?” So they can go ahead. If there are a bacteria, they act on it.

But let’s say it’s a pre-cancer cell that they can’t handle. It’s beyond their abilities. There, they go to E2 which is, “Help. What can others do for me that I can’t do for myself?” Then, the local intelligence creates distributed controls, and it calls the T cells, and the interferons begin to come out.

Now, once that neutrophil has done its job, it goes back to being a neutrophil and it losses the local intelligence control.

Dr. Mario Martinez

As you know, many organizations are very disempowering because people can’t make decisions on their own. They have to check all the way up. They have a job that doesn’t have any clear meaning.

What happens is that we make productivity and wellness one. Just like mind and body are one, productivity and wellness are one, and you can’t plan one without the other. In wellness, it’s not about smoking cessation or working out. Those things are nice. They’re necessary but not sufficient.

What you have to do is we plan quarters in order to strengthen motivation and inspiration. We plan the productivity for the quarter and the wellness for the quarter. Then people advance based on how they met the objectives both on productivity and on the wellness.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Well, E1 and E2.

Anything that you’re doing, whether you’re doing a job or in a relationship, what can I do for myself that nobody can do for me? And then, when you exhaust that, what can others do for me that I can’t do for myself?

Dr. Mario Martinez

If you get stuck in one, which organizations do or individuals, do in an organization. You get trapped in E1, you’re going to be a martyr. You don’t want any help from anybody. You can do it all yourself. Those are the micromanagers and the people that need to have everything done.

On the other side, you have the E2, which are the people that are the victims that everything has to be done for them and they never think for themselves. They go back, and they ask for help, and they’re insatiable in their needs. That’s a very simple way of beginning to operationalize what you’re trying to do. When you do that, what happens is that the immune system kicks in. And you begin to have greater wellness, motivation and inspiration and increased productivity because that’s how we’re designed.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Motivation is a manipulation. We do away with motivation because motivation is trying to get you to do something that you wouldn’t do unless they give you some reward for it.

Dr. Mario Martinez

That’s right.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Yes. Exactly. That’s what happens.

It’s never enough. You give them a 2 million dollar raise within a period, and it’s not sufficient. There are all kinds of psychology behind that, and we don’t have time to go over, but I can give you a quick example.

Dr. Mario Martinez

I operationalize everything because I get to say, “How can I inspire?” Be one with the universe. Hug a tree. That’s not what I’m talking about. They are very simple operational definitions.

Motivation and inspiration means that you give that person an opportunity to have access to resources to overcome a challenge at a local level. When they exhaust that, then they look for resources beyond what they can do.

For example, we’ve tested this with companies. You give them a choice of having a raise or having more responsibility with authority.

Dr. Mario Martinez

I operationalize everything because I get to say, “How can I inspire?” Be one with the universe. Hug a tree. That’s not what I’m talking about. They are very simple operational definitions.

Motivation and inspiration means that you give that person an opportunity to have access to resources to overcome a challenge at a local level. When they exhaust that, then they look for resources beyond what they can do.

For example, we’ve tested this with companies. You give them a choice of having a raise or having more responsibility with authority.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Most of the time, employees choose the responsibility with authority that helps building motivation and inspiration. Because that gives them meaning and that allows them to feel like what they’re getting is worthy rather than getting a raise and still having no meaning.

You can operationalize those things, and you can teach that. Because you can go to a department and you can talk to an individual or department. You can find out whether they’re empowered or not. Because one of the main complaints could be, “We like our job, but any time that we need something to overcome a challenge, we just don’t get the resources.” Right there, you have a disempowered organization or disempowered individual or a disempowered department.

Gradually, we begin to work on that, but also, to be realistic, there’s the 10% – 90% rule, and this comes from psychiatry. In psychiatry and psychology, and in most situations, 10% of the population uses up 90% of the resources.

There are people in every organization that 10% who will use up the resources. Those are what I call “The emotional vampires” and the individuals who are committed to misery. If you tell them, “Why don’t you try this?” They will answer “No. I tried that. That’s not going to work.” But do you have any ideas? “No, I don’t, but that’s not going to work.”

There only two options with people like that. Either you fire them, or you marginalize them because they’re not going to go anywhere, but 90% is very workable.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Yes.

Dr. Mario Martinez

There you go. That’s good.

Dr. Mario Martinez

When somebody asks me a question, I go to different areas.

I’ll say, “Is this an anthropology question? Is this a neuroscience question? Is this psychoneuroimmunology? I look at it that way.

I’ll give you a little bit of anthropology. We, as homo sapiens have been around for 150,000 years, and the trilinear process has been that we create archetypes which are the tools for the right context.

The archetypes or the visionary works well as an entrepreneur, but if you bring the visionary home to your spouse or your partner, that doesn’t work.

You have to be the lover or the partner or the father or the mother.

If you’re the father, in an organization archetype, you’re going to create children. That’s one of the things that we look for the entrepreneurs. What is their archetype and do they know how to shift archetypes? That’s the first part.

Dr. Mario Martinez

The second part, here’s the psychoneuroimmunology. If you abuse archetypes, you begin to become less efficient and in many cases, get sick.

It’s like using a screwdriver to hammer a nail. It doesn’t work. It’s hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error. Hammer is better than a screwdriver. It’s the same thing.

A visionary is better for an organization; a father is better for her child.

That’s one of the things that we first teach. What is your archetype and how to shift archetypes?

I will give you an example.

I was working in a neuropsychiatric hospital when I was practicing, and I was the healer/teacher type of archetype. As I went home, I wasn’t aware that and my kids would see the healer/teacher and they didn’t want. They wanted a father.

What I did as I was developing the theory, I would leave the hospital and get in my car. I would turn the key on, and the sound of the engine was my signal to move from teacher to father. I had a 30-minute drive home, and in that time, I was getting myself to become the father.

When I got home, I was a father. It was incredible the changes and the improvement in health, creativity, productivity, and efficiency.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Exactly.

You become more productive, and your health improves.

Dr. Mario Martinez

The most important are that although we are so controlled and shaped by our culture. The fishbowl effect, we can break away from that and we can create sub-cultures of wellness. We could create subcultures, but you have to go beyond the pale. That’s one of the chapters of the book. It’s Chapter Two. That’s crucial.

The pale was an old English word that meant enclosure, and now, it’s got a negative connotation like “he went beyond the pale.” The pale was the enclosure to protect you, to protect the tribe and the group from enemies and wild animals. That was good. You were working for the collective good, but if you go beyond the pale, you’re no longer a collectivist contributor, and the tribe or the culture will see you going beyond the pale as something bad.

This is why when you succeed, many people from your tribe, love it at first but after a while [20:38] so that they can handle the collectivist.

Dr. Mario Martinez

In everything that our cultures and our civilizations have done, has always been beyond the pale.

Dr. Mario Martinez

That’s a great question. I’ll just mention something very quickly.

Of all the cultures that I studied, I’ve only found three archetypal wounds. I call them archetypal because I see them all over. You can only be wounded in three ways. It could be abandoned which is the most primitive. You die if you’re a child being abandoned. You could be shamed, or you could be betrayed. Those are the three ways.

The tribes, to keep you within, will wound you either of these three; abandonment, betrayal, or shame. You have to be aware that you’re going to have to deal with that process of leaving.

Sometimes, if you’re not aware and you think you’ve done something wrong and you think you need to come back. I worked a lot with people who are stars and country music people who come from humble backgrounds. They make it, and they go back to the tribe.

The tribe, at first, like them but after a while is like, “Oh, so you don’t have any time for me. You’re too big.” They come back either with the drug problem, or they lose all the money they make so they can go back and be one of the guys and be accepted by the tribe again.

That’s the price you pay for the creativity, but that prize is a prize that we all need to pay because we’re here to enhance who we are the best way can.

Collectivism is good for survival, but beyond that, it limits you into what you can do as an individual.

Dr. Mario Martinez

Yes.

The archetypal wounds are critical. But more important is what I call the healing fields, which is a way to heal the wounds. Each of them has a corresponding healing field. The wounds are based on fear. The healing field is based on compassion, empathy, and love.

For abandonment, commitment is the antidote. For shame, it is honor, and for betrayal, it is loyalty.

So you begin, and that’s why I explain in the book that you go into consciousness. In fact, when you are shamed, you will have inflammation. You will have interleukins and other kinds of molecules that cause inflammation.

We’re working now, developing some models and I’ve been able to show it clinically. We’re beginning to look at in neurologically. Honor works as an anti-inflammatory, and many illnesses including depression, have a very strong inflammation proponent.

Knowing the antidotes, what have tremendous power when you leave the tribe or when you’re doing something beyond the pale is to understand, “How can I heal?” or “How can I bring my wellness back now that I don’t have that kind of support?”

Dr. Mario Martinez

My pleasure and thank you for the work you do.