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Weimar University

Don Mackintosh

The Basis of Everything

So today, I thought as we end the year, I'd talk about faith and trust.

Title of our sermon was, What is the Most Important Factor?

And I said, maybe today I'll try and make the case that the most important thing is trust.

I've already convinced the Kenzo's are all going like this.

All right, so the rest of you I'm still working on, but Kenzo's are in accord.

Father in heaven, bless us today and increase our faith and trust in Christ's name, amen.

So I read an article this past week and I liked it so much I summarized it and sent a copy to Dr.

I thought he'd like it, you know, he likes Organic chemistry, you know, neuroscience.

The article was making the case that the most important thing you can do if you want to improve the effectiveness of your business or institution, if you want to have more positive profitable outcomes, would be to cultivate a culture of trust.

If you're listening, I trust that you're following along.

To answer this question, the author looked at trust in the animal kingdom.

He discovered that oxytocin, what is oxytocin?

You discover that oxytocin, a hormone that's produced in your hypothalamus and stored and released into your bloodstream by your...

Come on folks, this is a scientific institution.

It's released by your posterior pituitary gland.

Now you can't, How many of you know you have 1 of those?

So it's released into your bloodstream by your posterior pituitary gland.

Let's look at the person next to you and say, trust.

It normally would be the answer to all questions today.

Kind of like Jesus is always the answer to every children's story, usually.

When oxytocin is released in a rodent's brain, it's signaled to another rodent that it was safe to approach that rodent.

In other words, the other rodent sensed that that rodent could be trusted.

So an experiment was conducted to measure trust and its reciprocation or trustworthiness objectively with the rodents.

So they gave a strategic decision test that was developed on the basis of this experiment.

They wanted to see if this could work also in humans.

So a participant was to choose an amount of money to send to a stranger via computer.

The person sending the money knew that the money would triple in the amount of value.

So it's not just sending like a dollar, it's sending like $3.

So he knows that this is a valuable thing he's sending.

They would also know that they could decide whether or not the person they were sending the money to could share in those spoils.

In other words, give them the opportunity to take all the profits.

Person receiving the money could either keep all the cash and triple his earning or be trustworthy and share it with the sender.

Oxytocin levels were measured before and immediately after they made decisions to trust others.

Because we didn't want to influence their behavior, the researchers said they did not tell the participants what the study was about.

So it was kind of a sneaky oxytocin experiment to measure the level of?

Yeah, I have a little bit of engagement now.

The research found that the more money people received, denoting greater trust on the part of the senders, the more oxytocin the receiver's brains produce.

Like for instance, Ashley, if you and I, if she sent me, you and Robbie sent me $5, 000, my trust in you would go up.

I'm not saying you need to do that, but we do have a QR code.

And the amount of oxytocin receivers brains produce, predicting how trustworthy, that how likely to share the money they would be, also went up.

You didn't know what was gonna happen, really.

You just knew, and if you did that, that had the potential for increasing not only the trust of the person you sent it to, but also being a recipient of them trusting you.

I think that's kind of an interesting experiment.

As your mind contemplates this, consider our text for today.

Most of the time we don't paint things on the wall.

Trust in, okay folks, let's all work together on this, this is a group project.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding in all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy way." I heard someone say in any way trust him.

That's correct your life will be directed What does that mean?

This dude, this little guy's life is directed.

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The Basis of Everything

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