HOUSE OVERSIGHT 029511 my father was. But she had enough ideas in her upbringing to say that the world you experience as everyday reality is not real. She would say that probably because she had heard it an amount of times. But when you're a child, that sticks with you, that the world you experience is not real. So that's my childhood background until I went to medical school. Medical school, I embraced everything that my father had taught about reality being physical, material. He was actually more than___he was almost like Michael Shermer in the earlier days when I was growing up. Matt: How did your parents get along? Deepak: Oh he was a very loving person. Matt: Completely different philosophies. Deepak: Yeah but he was an amazing person in terms of being a physician. I mean this is long before technology. He could listen to a heart with a stethoscope and tell you, which you may or may not know, the PR interval, which means the difference in microseconds between the atrial and the ventricular beat, which you could verify on an electrocardiogram. He was astonishing as a diagnostician. He trained with Wallace Brigden in England who was one of the earlier pioneers in electrocardiography. He was a consultant to the royal heart hospital to the queen at one time before he came back to India, the British army. So, he was an amazing person but he was also very compassionate. On weekends he would see patients free of charge, and my mother would cook food for them and make sure they had enough money for their bus or their train. So there was a very compassionate aspect to him, but he didn't believe in religion or anything like that. So then when I went to medical school I totally embraced my father's constructs. Except for one or two experiences during medical school, which was in India by the way. And it was one of the newer medical schools after British independence, called the Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, and it was funded by, amongst o