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Sanjay Gupta MD

Psychology of Fear; American Ebola Patients Released from Hospital

Aired August 23, 2014 - 16:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN HOST: Hey there. And thanks for joining me. I'm reporting to you from Los Angeles today.

Just minutes away, we're going to talk about medical history. Two patients with Ebola in the United States now fully recovered and off to live public lives. What they have to look forward to and what it means for the rest of us as well.

Plus, I'm a brain surgeon and I know the brain can play tricks that will blow your mind. The host of Nat Geo's "Brain Games" is going to stop by to talk about it.

First, though, what a week it has been, here at home and abroad. We saw tensions boil over in Ferguson, Missouri. We got news of the ruthless beheading of an American journalist by ISIS in Iraq.

You know, since 2002, the number of journalists killed because of their work has risen dramatically and all of this got us thinking about the psychology of fear. The wounds it can leave behind, how it can drive events.

Joining me to talk a little bit more about this from Ferguson, Missouri, is CNN's Jake Tapper, and also, Nick Paton Walsh. He's back in Beirut now after another stint in Iraq.

Thanks to both of you for joining us.

Before we talk about the psychology of fear, Nick, I just want to ask you, I understand you actually crossed paths with James Foley in Libya, and I ask you about it because I think sometimes, it gets lost, just who was he, what kind of person he was.

Is there anything you could tell us about him?

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I had limited experience of working with Jim. We worked together on a piece about living in a Libyan rebel, in fact, to who was fighting alongside Syrian rebels in Aleppo. This was good two years ago now, on a brief exchange, it was extraordinary, professional, courteous, but, of course, also working inside Aleppo, terrible communication issues. We exchanged Skype messages, that's all we could do in those circumstances and talk to (INAUDIBLE). Courageous in the fact he was there. Professional in the information he passed to us, and, you know, (INAUDIBLE) knowing little things we needed to work out and just generally seemed to be I think great to his profession, Sanjay.

GUPTA: Yes, yes. I mean, obviously in those situations, everyone is so focused on their work, but you do have these interactions that become very meaningful.

But let me ask you, Nick, this idea of psychology of fear, you know, from my vantage point, it seems that this group ISIS, likes many some other groups, have made a calculated use of terror and fear as a weapon that use social media. We saw tweets sent out for the world to see as a warning to Americans.

You've covered a lot of conflicts. I've covered a lot of conflicts. Is this different what you're seeing there?

WALSH: I've never really encountered such a volume of unbelievably disgusting, horrifying, disgusting videos. And that's a relatively recent phenomenon in fact for ISIS. When they started out, they weren't shy of the fact they were brutal, but it wasn't quite in the volume you get know. I mean, it's hard to keep up, frankly, with the number of grotesque things they're willing to post on their Twitter feed. Sort of social media, police can't seem to keep track of.

I mean, I did a story just last week about potentially 1,700 Iraqi recruits at a place called Camp Speicher near Tikrit. Now, that base is overrun and they were herded off on this video to mass execution. Some shot in the dusty field, others taken to a river, in fact, where they just in a line, brought one off to the other shot repeatedly in the head, single shot, dumped in the river. One of the most horrific things I think I've seen certainly on video -- Sanjay.

GUPTA: And, you know, Nick and Jake, you know, we have to make constant decisions as news organizations, what we're going to show, what is appropriate to show.

Jake, it's a different situation obviously in Missouri. You've been there when things got hairy there as well. I've been struck again from my prism, watching on TV, at times, it looked like a complete war zone. It looked similar to some of the things that we've seen in the Middle East.

Is it like that in person, Jake, and how do you give people the whole picture as opposed just a slice of the pie? How do you balance that?

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR, THE LEAD: Well, it's difficult to and it has looked like that at times during this crisis here in Ferguson. It has not in the last few days. The police are employing a different tactic. They're no longer doing the massive show of force militarized vehicles, guns aimed at protesters who are peacefully protesting. They're not doing that anymore. Monday night, they did that, but they have not since they've done a much more crowd friendly strategy, which is stretching out and breaking up into smaller groups of five of six.

It's difficult, it's not quite the fog of war, because it's obviously not a war, but there is a fog. The fog of protest, I suppose, where you might have one scene going on in one place and then three blocks away, a completely different scene. It's difficult and complicated to try to convey the differences.

GUPTA: Have you seen children around, Jake? Was some of the violence -- I know some of -- a lot what's happening at night and they may be not there -- but the children are particularly vulnerable to this sort of psychology of stress and fear. What are you seeing there?

TAPPER: It is clearly something that the children of Ferguson know about. I spoke with the father of a 16-year-old who saw the incident itself. And the father was expressing concern about his son. Obviously, Michael Brown's body lay on the street on Canfield Avenue for four or so hours. So, a lot of people who just lived in that area on a Saturday, which included a lot of children, saw his dead body and I think obviously that has an effect. We've seen children out at the protests. Usually, by the time the protests get going in a major way, it's dark and most children are gone.

But some stick around. Some parents take their children on the marches. It is summer. And school has been canceled for the time being.

GUPTA: Do you have conversations with your own kids, Jake? I mean, they ask where dad is and you're telling them that you're covering a story like this, do you -- how much do you tell your kids about what you're seeing and what's happening there?

TAPPER: Well, my kids are 4 and 6. You know, they're named after a civil rights hero and a suffragist, so we will let them know about human rights struggles. But right now, we're pretty vague and pretty sheltering when it comes to trying to keep ugly facts of humanity from their ears.

It's the kind of thing where when I was covering the BP oil spill, my wife would say things to my daughter along the lines of that I was going down to help clean up the dirty beach. We're just trying to keep them as blissfully ignorant as we can until we have to let them know and we will. But no, they don't know what's going on in Ferguson and it's such a complicated story, also. I don't know that a 4-year- old and a 6-year-old can really handle it right now.

GUPTA: Yes. My kids are 9, 7 and 5 and, you know, the questions, they start to come. I was just curious.

Nick, let me ask you in closing. You know, we cover a lot of different stories. You know, military guys are risk their lives to defend a country. Doctors like Dr. Kent Brantly was out there in West Africa to help save people. Journalists tell stories that I think are very important, but you risk your lives as we've seen.

When you talk to your family and they ask you, Nick, we're worried about you, you're risk your life to cover this story. Can you -- without being too personal I guess, I don't want to put you on the spot -- but how do you -- how do you convince them it's the right thing to do?

WALSH: Well, I'm kind of lucky, I have a very supportive parents and don't have any children to be concerned about. I mean, when I started doing this about 12 years ago, I worked for a newspaper so I could go off to Chechnya for a week or so, and they would know I've gone and I came back and my name popped up in a newspaper or dateline. It's hard to report obviously to kind of keep some of the bare bones away from them, when your job is to go to the worst place and then put that on television.

So -- but they are on the whole, extraordinarily supportive. And, you know, I think, there's, hopefully, an element of trust when they realize the most important thing in all these things is coming back to tell the story. So, we all take huge amount of care as far as we can in terms of safety, but I think there's also the degree where people get used to it after certain period of time.

My father once said to me when are you going to stop being target practice for the Taliban, but now, I think that was his bit of humor than anything else. He's very, very cool about it, and very relax. It must be pretty hard for them to watch some of the stuff we put on there.

GUPTA: We're very worried about both of you. Thanks, Jake, Nick. Thanks to both of you for joining us.

We want to shift gears a little bit now to the remarkable recovery. I've been following the story for a long time. It's the remarkable recovery of both Ebola patients. They were discharged this week from Emory University Hospital. I'm going to tell you what's going to happen to them next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GUPTA: The news has been full of some grim headlines, but late this week, we saw something to make us all smile. Two Americans with Ebola, at one point near death, were now found to be fully recovered.

At Emory University Hospital in Atlanta where I happen to be on staff, there were a lot of questions to answer and I'll tell you, it was quite a moment when one of the patients, Dr. Kent Brantly, walked in.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice-over): It was a day some thought might never come, a day full of lots of smiles and gratitude.

DR. KENT BRANTLY, CURED OF EBOLA VIRUS: Today is a miraculous day.

GUPTA: Dr. Kent Brantly, it's the first time we're seeing him look like this, vibrant, healthy, a far cry from the hooded figure that staggered into the hospital a little bit three weeks ago.

(on camera): But this is standard for --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This would be standard for our unit, yes.

GUPTA (voice-over): Just one day before that arrival, Dr. Bruce Ribner showed me the protective suit he and other staff would have to wear every time they saw Brantly. Today, a completely different picture -- in fact, it wasn't so much

what we heard as what we saw. Brantly, who was in isolation just a day before, now holding hands with his wife Amber, and hugging every one of the 26-member team that he credits with saving his life.

Brantly had moved to Africa last fall with his family, for a two-year medical mission. It had nothing to do with Ebola. But that all changed in the spring.

We were in West Africa as the outbreak began to heat up. Brantly made the decision to fly his family home to the United States on July 20th. And then just three days later --

BRANTLY: I woke up feeling under the weather. And then my life took an unexpected turn as I was diagnosed with the Ebola virus disease.

GUPTA: There's no way to know exactly why he's done so well. A lot of attention was due to a story that we first reported, about an experimental drug ZMapp that he received, the first of three doses given to Brantly as he lay near death in Liberia -- never before had it been given to a human being.

But what happened next was described to us as miraculous. Within an hour, Brantly's doctors said he made a dramatic turn around. By the next morning, he was able to stand up on his own and take a shower.

Coincidence or not, doctors are still being cautious.

DR. BRUCE RIBNER, EMORY UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL INFECTIOUS DISEASE UNIT: Frankly, we do not know whether it helped him.

GUPTA: Brantly's colleague Nancy Writebol also received ZMapp. At one point, according to the missionary group they work for, friends and family expected to plan a funeral. When she arrived at Emory, she was still unable to walk. But, today, we learned Nancy is also Ebola- free and she left the hospital two days ago.

BRANTLY: My dear friend Nancy Writebol, after her release from the hospital, wanted me to share her gratitude for all the prayers on her behalf, as she walked out of her isolation room, all she could say was, "To God be the glory."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: You know, a lot of people have asked, could they still be contagious and I think those hugs that you see there, they kind of make the point. No, they're not. Doctors say there's a theoretically possibility of transmitting Ebola through sexual contact for the next several weeks, but they've been counseled on that and they say the risk is very minimal.

In fact, you know, there's no reason to think these patients can't be as healthy as ever in the future. It's also interesting to note they are now immune to this particular strain of Ebola that's causing the outbreak, in case they choose to go back to Africa, they'd be pretty safe from possible re-infection. Now, up next, what's really going on inside your head? This is

fascinating. I got a chance to chat with the host of Nat Geo's "Brain Games" -- and let me tell you, he blew my mind.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GUPTA: How often do you stop and think, wait a minute, that can't be right, my mind must be playing tricks on me?

Well, the National Geographic Channel has found this smash hit in a show called "Brain Games" and I got a chance to talk with the host Jason Silva, who showed me what's really going on inside our heads.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: I am really excited to have you on the program. I watch the show. A lot of people watch the show I know.

JASON SILVA, HOST, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL'S "BRAIN GAMES": Thank you.

GUPTA: It's fascinating.

And before we get into some of the specifics, how did you get interested in this?

SILVA: Sure. Well, I've always been a really curious person. I love science, technology, the human capacity to transcend boundaries. We do that with the brain, the most complicated object in the universe. Everything starts at the brain.

At the same time, though, we shouldn't get cocky because the brain does have these fixed limitations.

GUPTA: Right.

SILVA: And so, what's exciting about brain games is that we create these interactive experiments. These participatory games that people at home can actually play along with that highlight your misperceptions of reality. And I think that makes you feel a sense of humility, a sense of wonder, a sense of curiosity, as to ambiguity of our perceptions. You learn by doing, you know.

GUPTA: It's mind blowing, literally.

SILVA: Mind blowing. Exactly. Yes.

GUPTA: Let's take a look at the couple of them. And I think the idea again, the limitations of our brain --

SILVA: Right.

GUPTA: And the idea that our brain is going to start to take short cuts to fill in things.

SILVA: Exactly. So, here stare at that dot and focus on that dot. Ignore the rest of the image.

You keep focusing on the dot. What's happening is OK, did you notice that for a second, that picture was a colored picture.

So, what happened --

GUPTA: Show it again while we're talking.

SILVA: So, what was happening when you're staring at this dot, we're actually tiring your color receptors, and so, what's happening is that they're getting fatigued, and then when the actual image becomes a normal black and white image, your brain is filling in those colors. That was never a color image. That was your brain rendering that a color image.

GUPTA: Put an explanation mark on that. We did nothing to that photograph. It was a black and white photograph.

SILVA: A hundred percent.

GUPTA: One more example. Just take a look.

SILVA: Stare at the dot again. And again, that's tiring your color receptors. You keep staring at it.

It looks like a color beach and then before your very eyes, it goes black and white. It was never a color photograph. That was your brain that did.

And I guess that the take away there is the reminder that reality -- what we call a reality, is a co-production between limited signals you get from your brain and then you, so, you get from the world and your brain filling in the blank. With our eyes, we can only perceive low res, 2D images. We go about the world. It's 3D, it's high res, our brain is up converting.

GUPTA: Filling a lot of that in.

SILVA: A hundred percent.

GUPTA: That's how we get by, and we trust that.

SILVA: We trust that very much. And, you know, we're usually pretty good at it, but what this show is meant to do is highlight the ways in which we sometimes we miss a step.

GUPTA: It wasn't a color picture.

SILVA: Exactly.

GUPTA: This is something that you guys do a lot of the show. Sometimes, in a form of brain teasers or stuff like that. I'm probably putting myself on the spot here. But maybe you can give us a few and just explain.

SILVA: Absolutely. There's a great line that says to understand is to perceive pattern, right? That's what it means to be human.

GUPTA: Well, it's interesting because from an evolutionary standpoint, you wanted to recognize patterns and you wanted to recognize and something fell out of a pattern because that could be a threat.

SILVA: That could be 100 percent a threat. That's why we're so nervous all the time, over active amygdalas in the brain. Always afraid, always getting stressed.

Let me give you an example of a riddle and your brain again is looking quickly for a pattern and for completing that pattern, often erroneously.

So, here's a funny one. Mary's mother has four daughters. April, May, June and --

GUPTA: Now, I know, I know -- you want to say July, that's not the answer.

SILVA: Right.

GUPTA: Mary's mother has four daughters, April, May, June and Mary.

SILVA: All right. That is very, very smart, what you just did because you broke it down, you actually listened to the whole question, but you know that your inclination was to answer and fill in the pattern. You heard April, May, June -- well, July comes there.

But wait a minute, what was the question? The question was Mary's mother has four daughters. So, imagine, you go on throughout your life, throughout the world, you're filling in patterns all the time. You're making assumptions about the world that are very, very quick without often looking at the whole picture.

GUPTA: It's fascinating, it really is. And again, this is a glimpse into the brain that many people never get to see. We just take this stuff for granted.

SILVA: Completely.

GUPTA: I'm a fan of yours.

SILVA: I'm a fan of yours.

GUPTA: You got a dollar bill I think for you that we're going to -- you got something you're going to do with the dollar bill?

SILVA: Oh, yes.

GUPTA: This is not your parting presence?

SILVA: No, no. no. Yes.

So, this looks at lag time in your brain games that looks at lag, lag time in your brain's decision to perform a physical action and then telling your body to go on and do it. This is called the bill drop. If you put your finger like this, your hand like that, you would think that the minute I decide to let go of the dollar bill, you have plenty of time to clench it and not drop it, but because the lag time, I'm not going to tell you when I'm going to let go, but you have to pay attention. As soon as I let go, you have to close your fingers.

(LAUGHER)

(CROSSTALK)

SILVA: We could do that ten times and every single time, it would go through because by the time you notice me letting go and you tell your hand close, that's already a lag time.

GUPTA: I thought I was faster than that.

SILVA: Totally. Most of us do, but that's one of those funny games. Anyway.

GUPTA: Stay in touch. Come back any time.

SILVA: Thanks for having me. Such a pleasure, Sanjay.

GUPTA: Thank you.

SILVA: Thanks.

GUPTA: It was a lot of fun. You can see there why that show is so popular. And you can catch the season finale of "Brain Games" Monday night, 9:00 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel.

But, up next on SGMD, you know, there's another part of your body that can also play tricks on you -- As one headline put it, why your gut bacteria wants you to eat a cupcake. We'll explain.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GUPTA: Do you ever feel like your stomach has a mind of its own? Well, more and more research out there indicates that very well may be true.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA (voice-over): This might creep you out, but even when you're eating alone, you've got company, trillions of bacteria living in your gut, helping to digest food and keep your immune system in check.

DR. SHARON BERGQUIST, EMORY UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE: What we're finding is that the gastrointestinal system just may end up being the gateway to our overall health.

GUPTA: In fact, all the bacterial cells in our gut outnumber human cells 10 to one. In order to survive, they thrive on different nutrients. Some prefer sugar, others fat. Some bacteria even like the healthy stuff like fiber. In order to make sure they get the nutrients they need, all these

bacteria can alter our cravings. They can change our taste receptors. Help release hormones that make us hungry. They can even hijack the biggest nerves that connect our stomach to our brain.

But we can also change the make up of our gut bacteria. We can change our cravings by changing our diet, and by developing acquired tastes.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GUPTA: So, when it comes to pizza, fries, chocolate, you really don't always want to trust your gut.

That's going to wrap things up for SGMD today. Time now, though, to get you back in "THE CNN NEWSROOM" with Jim Sciutto.