So what is gaslighting? Take us through that movie since you open your book with that. It's a great story.

And then, you know, where does it happen at work and school and wherever?

So gaslighting back in the day when it entered into popular consciousness in the 40s and 50s was in this Hollywood movie.

How do you think about, you know, abuse, gaslighting and religion?

I've been studying abuse culture and how it works.

And, you know, my answer to that would be abuse culture is so boring.

It's the most textbook thing on the planet.

It has a playbook.

It doesn't matter if it's a church, an institution, a government, a dictatorship, a family, a school, it's the same. Sports, it's the

same. What about churches? I would say, what about them? It's the same pattern. If they put you

into a brain scan and they showed you pictures of Harvey Weinstein and Sandusky and Epstein doing the

kinds of things that they did. And they showed you those

pictures. Your affective empathy neural network would go on fire. It would light up. It would not be

able to tolerate what you're seeing. It would make you feel horrendous. Let's now put Gill and Maxwell

into the same fMRI scanner. Let's show her exactly the same pictures that we showed you.

And you know what you'd see? You would see nothing light up in the affect of empathy neural network.

She doesn't feel the pain of the victims. So there's six different ways in which we could train

our brains to be much more adept at picking out who is the manipulator, who's the liar.

All right. Hey, everybody. It's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer show. Brought to you by, as always, Skeptic Magazine. Hey, you know, Skeptic Magazine.

Here's our latest issue on friendship and fiendship that is altruism and negativity and good and evil

and all that good stuff we have an excerpt in this book on gaslighting you've all been

gas lit before the author of this gaslit article is dr. Jennifer Fraser here's a new

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