Dr. Celeste Vega: Eric, as a software engineer, you know that every great application runs on a solid operating system. But what if I told you that the human brain works the same way? And that the OS we’re all running was coded in our earliest years, full of hidden scripts and legacy code we don't even know exist.

Eric: That's a fascinating way to put it, Celeste. We spend so much time debugging code, trying to figure out why a system is behaving unexpectedly, but we rarely think about debugging ourselves. The idea that our automatic reactions are just 'scripts' running in the background is a powerful one. It shifts the focus from a moral failing to a technical problem.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. And that's the revolutionary idea at the heart of "What Happened to You?" by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey. It reframes our entire understanding of human behavior. So today, we're going to dive deep into this book from two perspectives.

Eric: Okay, I'm ready.

Dr. Celeste Vega: First, we'll explore how our individual brains get wired—our personal 'operating system.' Then, we'll zoom out to discuss the 'systemic bugs' we inherit from the society we live in, like bias and disconnection.

Eric: I love that. From the micro to the macro. It’s about understanding the individual unit and then how it behaves on the network. Let's do it.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Perfect. So, let's start with that personal OS. Dr. Perry explains that our brain isn't built like a skyscraper, with the smart, thinking part on top being the most important. It's actually the reverse. He uses the image of an upside-down triangle. At the very bottom, the most primitive part, is the brainstem—it handles survival, heart rate, breathing. Above that is the limbic system, our emotional center. And only at the very top, the widest part, is the cortex—our 'smart' brain, for thinking and reasoning.

Eric: So information flows from the bottom up. Survival first, feeling second, thinking last. That’s a very different processing order than how we we make decisions.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Precisely. And this is where it gets critical. Our experiences, especially in childhood when the brain is developing most rapidly, create a massive library of patterns. The brain is constantly scanning the world and asking, "Have I seen this before?" If a new experience matches a pattern associated with threat, the lower parts of the brain react the thinking part even gets the memo.

Eric: It's a shortcut. A performance optimization for survival.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. And sometimes that optimization, that shortcut, becomes a bug in the present day. Dr. Perry tells this incredible story about a Korean War veteran he treated named Mike Roseman. This was back in 1985. Mike was suffering from classic PTSD—anxiety, flashbacks, depression. He was self-medicating with alcohol, and his life was falling apart.

Eric: He's stuck in a loop.

Dr. Celeste Vega: A terrible one. One day, Mike calls Dr. Perry in a total panic. He was out with his girlfriend, Sally, and a motorcycle backfired down the street. Mike’s reaction was instantaneous. He threw Sally to the ground and dove on top of her for cover. He was back in a firefight in Korea. Afterwards, he was just flooded with shame and confusion. He couldn't understand why he did that.

Eric: Because his thinking brain knew it was just a motorcycle. But that wasn't the part of the brain in control.

Dr. Celeste Vega: You've got it. When Mike and Sally came to his office, Dr. Perry drew that upside-down triangle for them. He explained that the loud, sharp sound of the backfire didn't go to his thinking brain first. It hit his brainstem, which instantly matched the sound pattern to 'gunfire'—a pattern hardwired into his brain during the war.

Eric: So the sensory input was like a low-level system interrupt. It bypassed the main processing stack and triggered a pre-compiled, highly optimized survival routine. His cortex, the 'user interface,' only got the error message—the shame and confusion—after the fact.

Dr. Celeste Vega: That is the perfect analogy. The reaction was adaptive in Korea; it kept him alive. But in 1985 on a city street, it was maladaptive. It was a bug. And this is the core of "What happened to you?" Mike's behavior wasn't a character flaw. It was a completely logical output from an operating system that had been coded by extreme trauma.

Eric: And that explains so many of our own, smaller 'glitches.' The habits we want to change, the irrational fears, the moments we overreact. It's just our brain running old, outdated code because it's fast and familiar. It’s more efficient to run the old script than to write a new one on the fly, especially when you're stressed.

Dr. Celeste Vega: And that is the foundation. Our personal OS is built on these powerful, often invisible, bottom-up processes. But, of course, we don't exist in a vacuum. Our personal computer is plugged into a massive, complex network: society.

Dr. Celeste Vega: And if our personal OS has these bugs, what happens when we connect to that network, which is full of its own systemic issues? This is where the book gets really powerful, especially connecting to your interest in figures like Rosa Parks and the systems they fought against.

Eric: Right, because Rosa Parks wasn't just challenging one person, she was challenging an entire system's 'code' of segregation and bias. A system that had been programmed for generations.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. And the book argues that these systemic bugs—racism, poverty, disconnection—get installed directly into our individual operating systems. They become part of our personal code. Dr. Perry shares a devastatingly clear example of this. He talks about a young Black child whose first-ever close encounter with a white person was with a police officer.

Eric: Oh, I can see where this is going. That's a high-stakes first data point.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Incredibly high-stakes. The officer pulled the boy's dad over. The situation escalated. The officer was yelling, aimed his gun at the father, handcuffed him, and threw him in the back of the squad car. The little boy was left sitting alone in the car, absolutely terrified, until a social worker came.

Eric: That's not just an experience. That's a core memory being written in real-time. The association being created is incredibly strong: white person, uniform, authority… equals extreme danger.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It's a powerful, one-trial learning event. Years later, that same boy is in a doctor's office. A kind, white doctor comes in to help him, and the boy's system goes into high alert. He's agitated, resistant, maybe even aggressive. To the doctor, who is just trying to help, the boy's behavior seems irrational. He might ask, "What's wrong with this kid?"

Eric: But the right question is "What happened to him?" His brain isn't reacting to the doctor in the room. It's reacting to the memory of the police officer. The doctor is just the evocative cue that's triggering the old, terrifying script.

Dr. Celeste Vega: You've just articulated the entire book in two sentences. And this brings us to the concept of implicit bias. This isn't about the doctor being a bad person. It's about the boy's brain having been programmed by a traumatic, systemic event.

Eric: This is the absolute core of algorithmic bias. You train a machine learning model on a biased dataset, and it will learn to replicate and amplify that bias perfectly. The boy's brain was 'trained' on a single, terrifying data point. His internal threat-detection 'algorithm' became over-fitted to that one experience.

Dr. Celeste Vega: What a powerful parallel. So how do you fix a biased algorithm?

Eric: You have to intentionally introduce new, positive, and diverse data. Lots of it. It's not about just telling the system 'that old data was wrong.' You have to actively show it new patterns, again and again, until it builds a new, more accurate model of reality. For that boy, it means creating safe, positive experiences with people who look like that officer, to slowly overwrite the old code.

Dr. Celeste Vega: And that takes time, patience, and compassion. It requires us to see the behavior not as a flaw, but as a predictable result of the 'code' that was installed.

Dr. Celeste Vega: So, we have these two layers. Our personal code, written by our unique history, like with Mike Roseman. And the systemic code, installed by the society we live in, as with the young boy and the police officer.

Eric: And they interact, right? A personal vulnerability, a 'bug' from your own past, can be triggered and exploited by a systemic issue. It’s a cascade failure waiting to happen. It really underscores how interconnected our individual well-being is with the health of our society.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It really does. And knowing all this can feel overwhelming. But the book offers a wonderfully practical tool. It’s a simple sequence for any difficult interaction, whether it's with a child, a partner, or even yourself. Dr. Perry calls it the sequence of engagement: Regulate, Relate, then Reason.

Eric: An algorithm for connection. I like it.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It follows the brain's own structure. You can't access someone's thinking brain—their cortex—if they are dysregulated and in a state of fear or alarm. So first, you have to help them regulate. Calm the system down. This can be through a calm voice, rhythmic breathing, just being present.

Eric: You're de-escalating the system from a panic state. Bringing the CPU load down.

Dr. Celeste Vega: Exactly. Once they're calm, you relate. You connect with them on an emotional level. Show empathy. "That sounds really hard." "I can see why you're upset." You build a safe relational bridge.

Eric: You're establishing a secure connection. A handshake.

Dr. Celeste Vega: And only then, once the person is calm and connected, can you reason. Only then can you talk about solutions, consequences, or logic. Trying to reason with someone who is in their lower brain is like shouting at a computer that's frozen. It's completely ineffective.

Eric: That is such a useful framework. Regulate, Relate, Reason. It’s a practical debugging tool for human interaction. You can't reason with a system that's in a panic state. You have to calm it down, establish a secure connection, and you can start to analyze the logic. It applies to people, and frankly, it applies to complex software systems too.

Dr. Celeste Vega: It's a universal principle. And it starts with us. The most powerful takeaway from this book is the shift in perspective it gives us for our own lives.

Eric: Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" when we fall into an old habit or an unwanted reaction…

Dr. Celeste Vega: We can take a breath, and with genuine curiosity and compassion, ask ourselves, "What happened to me?" What experience wrote this code? And just understanding that, just seeing the logic behind the glitch, is the first and most important step toward healing.

Eric: It’s the ultimate act of self-compassion. To look at your own source code, bugs and all, and not judge it, but just try to understand it. That’s a habit worth building.