CBS Sunday Morning

Our CBS Sunday morning podcast is sponsored by Edward Jones. College tours with your oldest daughter. Updating the kitchen to the appropriate decade.

Retiring on the coast. Life is full of moments that matter, and Edward Jones helps you make the most of them. That's why every Edward Jones financial advisor works with you to build personalized strategies for now and down the road. So when your next moment arrives, big or small, you're ready for it. Life is for living.

Let's partner for all of it. Learn more at edwardjones.com. Good morning. I'm Jane Pauley, and this is a special edition of Sunday morning. Changing minds about mental illness and ending its stigma is the mission of actress Glenn Close, as Tracy Smith will be telling us. 15 years ago, Jessie Close confided in her sister Glenn that she wanted to die. How close do you think you were to losing her? Very close.

I never knew how close. Many people who live with bipolar disorder have deaths by suicide. Change a mind about mental illness and you can change a life. Glenn Close's campaign to rethink mental illness later on Sunday morning. A question for all our human minds to ponder.

Could it be that animals are smarter than us? Martha Teichner was more than happy to look into that. Hi Donna. Certain stories are more fun than others. What's not to like about a polite conversation with Donna the elephant? We're getting up close and personal with talkative dolphins. I had this Sunday morning the pleasures of exploring the animal mind. We'll have those stories and more just ahead. Admiring your own handiwork is a familiar expression containing an important truth about the mind.

We handed this particular story to our Tony DeCopel. Are you the kind of person who actually likes washing dishes? How about folding laundry? Yard work?

Really? What all these have in common of course is they occupy our hands and as it turns out some researchers think that may be key to making our brains very happy. I made up this term called behaviorceuticals instead of pharmaceuticals in the sense that when we move and when we engage in activities we change the neurochemistry of our brain in ways that a drug can change the neurochemistry of our brain. Kelly Lambert is a neuroscientist at the University of Richmond who says our brains have evolved to reward us for getting a grip on the world which is why.

In the 19th century doctors used to prescribe knitting to women who were overwrought with anxiety because they sensed that it calmed them down some and it sounds oh that's simplistic but when you think about okay repetitive movement is increasing certain neurochemicals and then if you produce something a hat or a scarf there's the reward. Of course working with your hands is not always easy just ask Matthew Crawford a part-time mechanic from Richmond, Virginia. There's literally blood on the table right now from earlier. Yeah there usually is yeah. Crawford prefers some nicks and cuts to what he used to do as executive director of a think tank in Washington D.C. Did your hands look like that?

Probably not no they were pretty clean but I was you know I was always sleepy I just there was no amount of coffee that could keep me awake. In the garage using his hands Crawford finds that his mind goes into high gear. And there are times when I crack some nut that way we're all like run over kick the garbage can just out of elation. It was such a revelation he wrote a best-selling book on the subject which taps into the same attraction that makes reality shows like Forged in Fire, Top Chef and Project Runway so popular.

And then you use one color with it throughout. They all glorify Handiwork. If you're making something and painting or cooking and putting things together and you're using both hands in a little bit more creative way ways that's going to be more engaging for the brain. It's something a lot of us crave especially now as fewer of us do much at all with our hands.

As of 2015 jobs requiring social and analytical skills desk jobs had increased 94 percent from 1980 while jobs requiring physical skills went up a mere 12 percent. And that has Kelly Lambert concerned. We just sit there and we press buttons and you you start to lose a sense of control over your environment. She's been using rodents to study the hand-brain connection. Lambert says that rats made to dig for a reward showed greater signs of mental health when compared to what she calls her trust fund rats who got a pass on doing any physical work. When we took an animal that was really in tune with the environment and we just gave them their rewards without having to work for them their stress hormones went up high they lost all of their benefits. Wow so we've turned ourselves into trust fund rats is what you're saying.

I'm scared we are yes. Few of us are as in touch with our hands as Zaria Forman. In her Brooklyn studio she creates stunningly realistic portraits of icebergs all with the tips of her fingers. I always just started using my hands from an early age and I think there's something very personal about feeling the pigment myself with my hands and moving it around and and in a way that imbues a part of me as the artist like into each piece that I make. Do you want to try? Yes I do okay. And while what I made wasn't much more than a smudge now just move it around.

Yeah move it around. What I felt while doing it was something my brain surely appreciated. Before there were podcasts there was television remember? See what's new under the sun every Sunday morning. We love our pets often so much it's easy to be convinced they're lost in profound important thought. So just what are they thinking? We asked our resident animal lover Martha Teichner to investigate. Fenway the Boston Terrier is trying to figure out how to get at the treat hidden inside this puzzle. What's going on in his mind? If somebody asks you is my dog smart like a human is smart how do you answer that question?

I mean what what's involved there? It's not fair or even correct to compare dog intelligence to human intelligence. The real question is what is a dog good at? About seven years ago Dr. Gregory Burns, a neuroscientist at Emory University had an idea. If he could train dogs to hold still in an MRI, a big if, he could get some answers.

Truffles here is living proof it can be done. She's one of more than a hundred dogs who've taken part in MRI experiments involving everything from facial recognition to self-control. Truffles is being shown two toys and knows giraffe means treat, whale no treat. But what about photographs of the toys?

That's what we're looking for activity in that location. That's the reward center of the brain right where it is in humans. The point? To find out if Truffles reacts to the toys and the photos in the same way. Get it Truff, get it.

There you go, good girl. Very good. This is another dog scan. It's too soon to say because this is just one dog, but what that tells me is they're not literally seeing the two equivalently.

They seem to know that one is a photograph and one is real. Right. Yum. Not to be outdone by a dog. Hi Donna. Donna, a 38-year-old African elephant at the Oakland, California zoo makes the connection between a picture of a banana her trainer shows her and the real thing. That's important because if you can imagine an object in your mind that means you can think about that object and plan around that object. Does Donna understand that that picture of the banana represents a real banana?

Because that means that she can imagine that in her mind. Caitlin O'Connell Rodwell is an animal communication expert who studies elephants and teaches at Stanford University. The elephant has the largest brain per body size bigger than human. If size matters and it does appear that size matters then elephants could possibly be smarter than us. Elephants are so much like us. Watching them caring about each other, watching their politics. Elephant politics?

Oh yes, elephant politics. As for communication, elephants understand us better than we understand them. Behaviors Donna was taught to aid in her own care led to the banana test. That's what's so exciting about these cognitive experiments with Donna is that we can now ask her a lot of different questions. Donna understands English.

Now you're a real treat machine. So there's probably a lot more that she understands about language than we've figured out how to ask her. Thanks to technology, researchers are beginning to decipher dolphin language. The chirps and clicks that come from their blow holes.

We looked at how mothers would retrieve their calves, which we can ask them to do on cue. Jill Richardson is a scientist at the University of Miami's Rosensteel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Her work at the Dolphins Plus Sanctuary in Key Largo, Florida has involved identifying each individual's signature whistle, which is like its name.

This is underwater. Yes, so you see the hand, the cue that the trainer is giving and Ding is emitting a call. A variation of the mother's own signature whistle. And then baby comes back. It's like a mom in a room saying like Jill Lauren come for dinner and then the calf responds immediately. It's like having the first and last name. Exactly.

My kids always know they're in bigger trouble when I use the first and last name. I really think we're scratching the surface we know they're chatty. The next step really with their communication is learning how they might string acoustic signals together in different ways to have different meanings like syntax. Do dolphins speak in sentences? These dolphins obey more than 50 commands, but now watch. This hand signal means create.

Do whatever you want. What have the dolphins taught you about humans? Oh gosh. I think the most important thing is that maybe we're not as smart as we think we are and that it's definitely opened my eyes to how we put some constraints on our understanding of intelligence when it might be this much more colorful and broad experience for these animals. Intelligence we underestimate because we don't know any better. So-called magic mushrooms have played their part in America's long strange trip toward an understanding of mind-altering drugs. Illegal though most of these drugs may be, Faith Salie tells us recent research suggests some of them could have legitimate uses. Selexa, Effexor, Zoloft, Trazadone. Eyalet Waldman is no stranger to drugs.

I'm not going to get them all. Lexapro, Wellbutrin, oh my goodness there you are. Diagnosed with a mood disorder, this author and mother of four had tried everything. I was profoundly profoundly depressed. Suicidally depressed.

As bad as it ever had been. I'd never been like that in my life. That's when she turned to a drug that might blow your mind. Kids mommy's going to tell you all about the first time she tried acid. That's right LSD. In secret, Waldman actually began taking a minuscule amount every three days.

It's called microdosing, and it's a controversial yet growing trend among the Silicon Valley crowd. But for her, she says, it worked. You don't hallucinate, you don't see anything unusual, but it just, best way I can describe it, a little more cheerful and a little more effective at work, like a little more productive. So productive in fact, she wrote a book about her mind-altering experiment. And most importantly, her suicidal thoughts disappeared.

But there was a catch. After a month, she ran out of the small supply she'd gotten hold of. Why did you stop microdosing? Because it's illegal.

If it weren't illegal, I would still be doing it. Taking LSD, even a microdose of it, is still against the law and potentially dangerous. But once upon a time, LSD and psychedelics like it were considered potential wonder drugs. Throughout the forties, fifties, and into the sixties, scientists studied them to understand mental disorders like schizophrenia and to treat anxiety, depression, even alcoholism. But when the drugs left the labs and started hitting the streets, and Timothy Leary preached, Turn on, tune in, and drop out. The bad trips and even worse headlines that followed changed their reputation. And then, This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people. The Controlled Substance Act led to a more than three decades-long ban on all psychedelic research. Since 2003, however, the FDA has allowed for a few clinical trials of illegal hallucinogens, drugs like psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient found in so-called magic mushrooms. Trials done in a safe, controlled setting, of course.

Do not try this at home. This is the couch where people have the experience of. This is a very special couch.

It's a magic couch. In 2016, Tony Bosses of New York University, along with researchers at Johns Hopkins University, published their findings of what a one-time dose of psilocybin can do to treat anxiety and depression in cancer patients. In this study, anxiety and depression reduced dramatically immediately after the experience. I just wanted this terrible, daily anxiety to go away. Dinah Baser beat ovarian cancer back in 2010, but the fear of it returning convinced her to volunteer for the study.

In this treatment room, she was given the psilocybin, and her life-changing trip began. I saw my fear, and it was a black mass under my ribs. It wasn't cancer, it was the fear itself. And it made me so mad. I was just, I was furious, and I screamed at it to get out.

And as soon as I did that, it was gone. When the drug wore off, the anxiety about her cancer returning was gone, still is. What remains, she says, is the powerful memory of that symbolic experience. This medicine they take once is out of their system in a few hours, but it generates a three- to four-hour incredible transcendent experience. And it's the memory of that experience that recalibrates how they view life and death and their existence and very spiritual insights. If all that sounds a bit far out, scans have shown psychedelics may increase connectivity among different regions of the brain, areas that normally don't communicate with each other. You know, maybe it's time to take a sober, careful, scientific look at these medicines, to revisit, are they helpful, are they safe, are they effective?

With more clinical trials on the horizon, researchers hope to open more minds about the potential of psychedelic drugs, one trip at a time. When it comes to changing minds about mental illness and ending its stigma, few people are more motivated than actress Glenn Close. She's been talking to Tracy Smith. You just have to be discreet. Oh, God, yeah.

Are you? You're my word. Disagree. Your role in Fatal Attraction is one of your most memorable roles.

Yes, and Alex Horace is considered one of the great villains of all time of the 20th century. But I'm going to tell you it's going to stop right now. No, it's not going to stop. It's going to go on and on until you face up to your responsibilities.

What responsibilities? In that 1987 blockbuster, actress Glenn Close portrayed a woman scorned. You won't answer my calls.

You change your number. I mean, I'm not going to be ignored, Dan. After an affair with a married man, played by Michael Douglas. Looking back on that role now, what do you say? I'm always amazed that when I was researching that role, that no one brought up the idea that she might have a mental disorder. No one said that she might have a behavior triggered by something in her past.

I think if I was offered that script today, I would certainly look at it from a totally different point of view. That's because today, Glenn Close knows something she didn't back then. That mental illness runs in her own family.

Her nephew, Kaylin, has schizophrenia, and Glenn's sister, Jesse, has bipolar disorder. How long did you struggle with mental illness before you were diagnosed? My whole life, until I was diagnosed at 50. Why do you think it took that long? It wasn't taken seriously, and I lived a very fast and wild life, so nobody suspected anything.

They just attributed it to me. That's how I was. I'd stay up for two nights, and then I would think, I need at least a few hours sleep on the third night, which, of course, kicks in depression. And depression, for me, was beyond blackness. It was wanting to die. I had this voice in my head that would just not leave me alone.

Saying, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself, over and over and over. In 2003, a frightened Jesse confided her suicidal thoughts to her sister, and they got help. How close do you think you were to losing her? Very close.

I never knew how close. Many people who live with bipolar disorder have deaths by suicide. The sisters say Jesse's treatment was successful because Jesse wanted help, but they also say far too many people are still suffering in silence. And when I became an advocate, I realized that it is a family affair for one in four of us.

One in four? Yes, is touched in some way by mental illness. So it became obvious to me that we have to talk about it. Change a mind about mental illness, and you can change a life. That thinking led Glenn and Jesse to start a foundation in 2010. Bring Change to Mind creates multimedia campaigns and holds events to get people to talk about mental health. Luckily, I've had the support of family and friends to help me live a full life. It's time to talk about mental illness.

Start the conversation. To let those that might feel marginalized or silenced by stigma to become part of a group and accepted will save lives. Period.

A very, very warm welcome for Glenn Close. Bring Change to Mind also focuses on college and high school students, the age group with the highest prevalence of mental illness, and the subject of recent headlines. It seems like we usually hear about mental illness when it's connected with violence. The school shooting in Florida. Does that present an accurate picture?

No. The biggest majority of people living with mental illness are more preyed upon than preying upon. But it does seem to be that somebody who does one of these terrible acts is suffering from some sort of mental disorder. The answer, she says, is more reliable funding for mental health care and maybe a little more care for each other. A lot of times, a lot of isolation goes on, which is dangerous. Be aware of how connected we truly are.

And if one connection is broken, there can be terrible repercussions. So we can't afford to ignore and to think it's somebody else's problem anymore. Glenn Close and her sister, Jesse, say they'll keep working until mental illness is seen as just what it is, another part of being human.

I never got bunches of roses when I got home from the hospital. If I had had a heart operation, I'm sure all my friends would have been there with food and flowers and people behaving strangely or badly is not considered an illness. But it is. It is. Yeah, it is.

It's just an illness, for goodness sakes. Coming soon, Mobituaries, a podcast on matters of death and life from Mo Rocca. The mental abilities of savants never fail to astonish. Susan Spencer will be introducing us to some remarkable people. How many galleries have you been in?

I'm in three galleries at the moment. Artist George Widener could spend countless hours happily counting. Five, twelve, nineteen, twenty six, February two, nine, sixteen, twenty six, fifty one, fifty two, four, thirty, twenty four, twenty five, you get the idea. Twenty two, twenty nine, so on. His art is awash in numbers and dates and days. And so is his head. If you look at August of 1968, August seven, fourteen, twenty one, twenty eight are Wednesdays.

Pardon? George is what's known as a calendar savant. What exactly is a calendar savant? Savant expert Dr. Darryl Treffert.

Calendar savants are able to identify what day of the week will a particular date fall on in the past or in the future. Your theory is that this is just pre-wired at the factory, if you will. Factory installed?

Factory installed ability. Yes. Most of us need Google. George needs a few seconds. Let me throw a few dates at you here. All right.

His skill is so remarkable, you really do have to see it to believe it. December 2nd, 2018. December 2nd, 2018 is a Sunday. January 3rd, 2015. January 3rd, 2015 looks like a Saturday. Valentine's Day, 1956. Tuesday. That's my sister's birthday. OK. When is Christmas next on Wednesday? 2019 looks like it. You haven't missed one yet.

No. We moved on to the celebrity bonus round. Elvis died August 16th, 1977. And that was a Tuesday. Luciano Pavarotti was born October 12th, 1935. October 12th, 1935 is a Saturday.

President Lincoln, February 12th, 1809. Looks like a Sunday. Indeed. Now, when George produces a date, is this a conscious thought? It's intuitive.

He doesn't need to think about it. It appears. George is a high-functioning savant, able to live independently. And he is doing quite well. I love doing this stuff. You clearly love doing this stuff. At the Manhattan Gallery, where we met him, his art sells quickly for 10 years.

Quickly for tens of thousands of dollars. But George seems happiest about something far more fundamental. It's been wonderful that I've been able to use, you know, what's inside of me and to feel like I have a useful purpose. Good day.

Drive in today. Oh, yeah. Ione and Steve Cooner have been happily married for more than four decades.

Here's to you. But in 2013, they got some shattering news. She was diagnosed at 57. And the diagnosis was? Early-onset Alzheimer's.

It was devastating for both of us. For years now, Steve has been watching Ione gradually lose her grasp on much of daily life. I mean, I love the way you did this. But to his amazement, he has also seen her gain something entirely unexpected.

Tell me about this one first. Ione has started painting. Very intense colors.

You like intense colors. Yes. Something the former dental assistant had never even thought about doing before her illness. Once I finish one, I want to start another one.

And then finish that and start, you know, another one. This almost seems to be an obsession. It is her new occupation. Neurologist Bruce Miller directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in San Francisco. He's uncovered an unexpected and remarkable connection between savants and dementia patients, who, like Ione, suddenly exhibit new talents. So they would have trouble communicating, but they could pick up a paintbrush and paint?

Yes. Some of the most beautiful art I've ever seen has come out of my patients with degenerative diseases. And over here is a painting by Jack. Dr. Miller's office is a small gallery of his patients' artwork. And this is somebody also who had never painted before.

He had never even stepped into an art museum. In his research, Dr. Miller compared brain scans of dementia patients with those of a child savant. We are seeing this same pattern of loss of function on the left side of the brain, increased function in the right posterior parts of the brain, the parts that allow us to take something visual in our mind and put it on a canvas.

His conclusion? In these rare dementia patients, so-called acquired savants, the disease that destroys some brain areas activates others, unlocking hidden talent. Wow, it's fairly exciting stuff. It very much has humanized my patients for me. Does the brain ever cease to amaze you?

Never, never, never. I'm Jane Pauley. We hope you've enjoyed and learned from our journey into mind matters. And we hope you'll join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning.

Yes! There are bad people in the world. The best way to protect the good people is to convict the bad. So here's to us. The Good Fight, the final season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.