Here is the full transcript of author and cognitive neuroscientist Caroline Leaf’s TEDx Talk presentation on Science of Thought at TEDxOaksChristianSchool conference.
Good morning everyone. How amazing that TED is in a school; I just think that’s just so exciting.
Well, I teach people about the brain, and 30 years ago, I asked a ridiculous question. And it really was a ridiculous question. This is the question: can the mind change the brain?
Now that was a ridiculous question, because the view at that time, and the scientists that trained me and my lecturers, we were told that the brain could not change. So if it was damaged, well that’s it; you just basically had to teach your patients to compensate for these things and to kind of get around the problem. But that seemed such a negative thing.
So I asked that question: Can a brain that’s damaged, can it not change, can it not grow? And a brain that’s not damaged, can’t we make that better? Can’t we increase our intelligence?
And so I decided to embark on a journey of researching and studying this and applying it in my practice. I was determined to prove that the mind could change the brain, which implies that the mind is separate from the brain but influencing the brain.
So I started off 30 years ago in practice and I decided to work with people with learning disabilities and with traumatic brain injury, specifically with the learning disabled communities, the older children. So, because we were also told back then that once you hit the age of 10, sort of 10 to 12, well then you’re too old to have much done for you. So you’d have to — you could get some remedial therapy and things like that but there wasn’t a huge amount that you could do for your brain.
So here I was coming out of university, keen to help people but being told that “Well, just teach your patients to compensate”. Well, I wasn’t going to do that, because I didn’t believe that that was the best thing to do for anyone.
I also know that thoughts are real things that occupy mental real estate. And that as we are thinking, we are choosing and we are building thoughts inside of our brain. I also believe that you’re as intelligent as you want to be, so the more you think deeply, the more intellectually challenging — the challenges you put in front of yourself the more you’re going to grow your brain.
So my first few patients that I worked with in my practice group were patients with traumatic brain injury patients that had suffered from severe car accidents and had suffered severe traumatic brain injuries. I also worked with the older learning disabled population. I worked with people from heart attack victims, had strokes, various different things, where they presented with quite major damage inside their brain.
And I decided to throw all traditional methods and started trying to understand the science of thought, and to work with things that actually were meaningful for them. One of the problems with doing the kind of therapy that I was trained to do, was something called carryover where you would teach a patient in a therapy room, give them therapy and then they would have to carry that over into their daily life and carryover wasn’t very good.
So I didn’t think that I would be very good therapist if I couldn’t teach them to change their brain and I couldn’t teach them to make a difference in their life. So I would ask them the question: What is the most important thing that you need to do? And obviously the students that were at school they wanted to work on schoolwork, people that had — former businessmen and women that were now sitting with brain damage, they wanted to get back to their former status. So that was my challenge.
Traumatic brain injury at that stage back in — and I talk about that stage, I’m talking 30 years ago, so back in the ‘80s where it was not accepted that your brain can change. Traumatic brain injury particularly was a disorder in search of data, which means that the scientists believed at that stage that the damage was so diffused that you couldn’t do anything for their brain.
So I started working with a — I had a patient that came to my practice. And this young woman was amazing. She had a terrible, terrible car accident. She was thrown from the car; she was basically in a coma for nearly two weeks. And in that day and age, when if someone was in a coma for longer than eight hours, their brain damage was considered irreversible. So the doctors told her parents that she’d be a vegetable.
Well, 14 months after her accident, the parents approached me. She wasn’t a vegetable, she’d come around; she had progressed. She was so determined she had used her mind, she had pushed through and she was functioning at around about a fourth-grade level. Now that may sound strange but she was 16 at the time of the accident. So she had lost 14 months, her peer group were going into 12th grade and she was now functioning at around a fourth-grade level.
So I was really nervous, that I have to be honest with you because I was just embarking on this field of research. I was learning — I was researching how the science of thought, how thoughts are formed, that thoughts are real that as you are thinking and choosing you’re actually building these — causing genetic expression in your brain and you’re growing these thoughts in your brain, and how can we do this effectively and what is the — can we control our thinking?
So I told them, listen, you know, this is experimental but you can work with me.
And 14 months post-accident is also not the greatest time to work with a patient, because they’ve kind of hit a plateau where they’re not really going to progress much more.
Long story short, eight months later this young girl not only did she catch up and close that gap but she went into 12th grade, she wrote 12th grade with her peer group, went on to finish school. She graduated, went on to get a degree, she changed dramatically.
And what did she do? The big thing about this young woman was she chose to direct her mind; she chose to use her intellect; she was determined, she thought she was thinking so hard about all the things that she was learning. She set with her schoolwork day in and day out for hours applying the techniques that I had been developing and learning.
What’s very interesting and you’ll see the first slide is of her IQ. Now with a traumatic brain injury, basically IQ generally goes down around 20 points, because the kind of damage with traumatic brain injury. Well, her IQ was 100 before the accident, it was 120 after the accident. So here with holes in her brain and brain damage she changed — she actually increased her intelligence.
Now I’m pretty convinced at this stage, because besides her I had been working with lots and lots of other patients seeing the same thing, when these students applied their mind their brain was changing, their academic results were changing. So I was working on the cognitive side, on the academic side, showing them how to process this information how to read, how to think, how to ask, answer and discuss their way through information, how to write that down and capture that information, how to make sure that they go back and compare what they had written down and look at the original work and do they understand and does this make sense, and then being able to reteach that and explain it. These students would spend hours working through these techniques and applying to their school work, and I saw change all over the place.
So then I thought, well this is great, this is wonderful, I’m seeing these incredible changes. And up here on this stage what you will see are two plants, and this green plant over here represents a healthy thought, and the little black tree over there represents an unhealthy thought, or a toxic thought from a negative emotion or a bad learning pattern. If you look — as you study the brain, you can actually see that as your thoughts are forming in the brain, they form on your neurons and they look like trees. So I really believed at that stage that as you were using your mind you could change your brain.
Now in the ‘90s with the advent of brain imaging technology this was proven. So back in the ‘80s to change your brain with your mind was crazy but in the mid-90s and now it’s totally normal. You hear people talking about ‘neuroplasticity’ all the time. Neuroplasticity means your brain can change. ‘Neuro’ means brain, ‘Plastic’ means to change. So your brain is designed to change, but it has to be stimulated to change. You also get something that we understand now called ‘Neurogenesis’- ‘neuro’ means brain, ‘genesis’ meaning new birth. So we are constantly on a day-to-day basis growing new brain cells.
So we have a malleable brain and if we are constantly growing brain cells the more you actually direct your mind, the more your brain is going to grow. So the harder you think, the deeper you think the more you ask, answer and discuss through information, the more you grow your brain, the more intelligent you become — logical deduction. Not back in the ‘80s, it was ridiculous back then. But as I said it’s accepted now. Collectively around the globe now researchers are proving that no matter what kind of neurological, psychological impairment you have in your brain, and even if you just want to improve your own brain by deep intellectual thinking, you can change your brain with your mind.
So then I decided, on working one on one with patients, ‘let me see if this thing can apply in a larger context in larger communities’. So very quickly I just want to show you a couple more slides from this traumatic brain injury patient. I’m just going to go through them very fast. This is in South Africa, this is her English results. What’s interesting here is the dark solid line was, what she was achieving and her trend of her academic results. Where I intervened was, if you look through the middle where you see the dotted line starting to raise, more or less in the middle, that shows where therapy started.
So in other words, what this is telling us is that she was an average student, that was her trend line, that was what she was achieving academically, and if you predicted her performance based on her previous performance, that’s what she would have continued to do. But with the intervention of teaching her how to use her mind to change her brain, there was a dramatic, in some cases up to a 220% increase in her academic grades. Not only did I work on the cognitive, through academics but I worked on that directly — but we also found indirect results happening: her language skills improved and her emotional skills improved. So there was like an all-round effect happening. So we saw the same thing happening in her social studies, we saw the same thing happening in her other subjects as well.
So then I decided to formalize my theories – to formalize my research, I created a theory, don’t worry, I’m not going to spend hours on this. This is just to show you how you think. In this, the top part shows you – it’s talking about your mind, and in the bottom part where you see the clouds is your brain. So what I am basically saying over there is that the way that you think is actually going to change the way that your brain functions, so it is formalized into a theory.
So, in formalizing it into a theory, I decided to work with a group of learning disabled students in a school. So instead of one on one, I started training teachers. And I worked in a school, trained a whole lot of teachers in these systems and then they trained the students. Now we weren’t sure, I wasn’t sure, if this was going to have the same impact because at this point I had been working one on one. Well I am happy to tell you that we had the same kind of results, we had incredible results as well. Let me just go back to that. The first two little blocks over there is the academic trend of the school — the minute that the teachers actually started applying the techniques, we altered the trend significantly.
The point I’m making here is that I wasn’t working directly with the student, I was working via the teacher. I have since trained thousands and thousands of teachers. For 30 years now I have working in this field — working with teachers, corporate, students, people with brain damage, people without brain damage, and I have consistently seen this constant change. The minute you direct your mind, the minute you discipline and work daily on learning, which is a process of building memory, you will change your brain, there is no doubt about it.
Now you can think in a negative way and you will also change your brain in a negative way. If you think in a positive way, you change your brain in a positive way, and that is called the plastic paradox. So this incredibly malleable brain is subservient to what you do with your mind. So if you think you are not going to make it, well, you are not going to make it. But if you think you are going to make it, you are going to make it. So the way you think will drive your brain. Your brain responds to how your mind is actually functioning.
So if you look at the next slide — from working with this public school in a learning disabled environment, I was then approached by government, I come from South Africa if you haven’t already guessed, and at that stage, it was very much the pre-Apartheid era. And I was approached by government to work with a group of schools in Soweto, I am sure you’ve all heard of Soweto, where Nelson Mandela spent some of his time out there. Now these conditions were terrible.
For 10 years, I literally worked in the trenches. I would go into these schools that were poorly performing schools where the conditions were beyond belief. I look at this incredible school that we are standing in today. Those schools — there would be 100 children squished into a tiny little classroom. They would share one textbook. There would be a chalkboard, an old-fashioned chalkboard with little bits of chalk and the chalkboard didn’t even work properly. All of them were starving. Every single one of them had a story, that if you heard their story you would be crying. Most of them didn’t have parents, their parents had died of AIDS. Most of them had some kind of trauma in their life — shocking conditions. Most of them hadn’t eaten a decent meal for a few days. Yet they sat there, listening, completely absorbed. Now I would go into these schools and I would work for five hours at a time. Do you know that they would not move for five hours?
Now what’s very interesting here is that parallel to working in these schools I had my practice and I was working in very privileged schools as well. So I was seeing both ends of the spectrum. I found the children in Soweto to have a far deeper concentration and desire. They saw the opportunity to learn such a privilege. They would sit there for hours; they didn’t want me to leave.
And one day there was one young man, as I was teaching this group of students – just quickly to backtrack there, we did this huge project over a period of time where we worked with thousands and thousands of kids and teachers. And we used to drive into Soweto, now Soweto was very very dangerous days in those days. I’m a white woman driving in Soweto, I never got touched. These people were so desirous of learning, so desperate to learn how to learn, that they protected me, they couldn’t get enough of this information.
Anyway one day, a young man heard about this course going on at the school that I was doing, and he was about 24, hadn’t finished school, he was a pimp, he was a drug dealer, he was everything you do not want. When he walked into that school, they all knew him, the kids just parted, it was like the Red Sea parting, and he walked to the back of the classroom and he stared at me. I could feel his eyes boring through me. As I was talking and explaining, this is how you learn, how your brain works, and how intelligence works, and this is how we do this biology and going through the process of reading, how we process and read the information, and ask, answering and discussing and these children are interacting with me, going through this whole thing, and he’s staring at me, and staring at me, and staring at me. And what went through my head, I have to confess, was ‘Boy when I leave here I better watch my back because this young man is not happy that I am here today.’
At the end of that five hours, and they didn’t move for five hours, I stress again, that young man picks up his pen, when the teacher said ‘Who would like to thank Dr. Leaf ’, that young man ran to the front with tears pouring down his eyes, I will never forget that scene, he held up his pen and he said ‘Dr. Leaf, now I know what to do with my pen.’ He went back to school, he completed school, he went on to become a change agent in his community. And that’s one of thousands of thousands of stories that I have been privileged to be a part of.
One of my oldest patients was a 78-year pilot who couldn’t fly anymore, so he went and studied his second profession at 78, which was to be a CPA, and he qualified at 84. I mean how cool is that, he asked me to give him a certificate when he went to apply for his job that he had done this course.
So my children, my lab rats, I call my children and my husband my lab rats. They’re are sitting at the front here, they’re very friendly, they don’t bite so you can say hello to them if you want to. They grew up with this stuff. I have used this stuff my whole life. What is this stuff? This stuff is that you mind is so incredibly powerful. You have a powerful mind. You have a sound mind. You have a mind that is able to achieve what your dreams are. You are as intelligent as you want to be. I stand up here saying this with conviction because I have seen this over and over and over in so many different circumstances.
When I came to the United States, here is another slide coming up, I did a lot of my initial research as you heard back in South Africa, one on one, traumatic brain injury, learning disability, public schools, special needs schools, and government schools, and also in this country I worked in Dallas for 3 years in charter schools, and we found the same thing happening. I worked a little bit one on one with a few of the students but the majority of the work I did in the schools in Dallas for three years was with the teachers showing them how to learn.
When you direct your attention, when you apply a disciplined, directed, deep focused thinking, when you sit down with whatever it is that you are learning, whether it is on a university level, school level, business level, whatever you are looking at, whatever you are studying, whatever knowledge it is that you are trying to master, when you sit down with your mind and you direct your attention, that repeated effort when you direct your attention in a repeated way will cause learning to take place.
Learning is a process of building thoughts inside of your brain. You’re a thinking being, you think all day long, you’re always thinking. During the day you are thinking, you are choosing, and you are building thoughts. Thoughts are memories and thoughts are real things. Memories are real things. So as you are sitting with your school work, as you are doing whatever you are doing in life, when you sit there daily — it is a daily discipline rigorous process – and you read and you ask yourself, ‘What am I reading?’ and you answer yourself, and you discuss it with yourself.
As you do this disciplined mind work you are driving your malleable brain to grow branches. You are literally growing branches on these neurons inside of your brain. You have an unlimited capacity inside of your brain. Scientists have tried to estimate: is there a limit to what we can fit inside of our human brain? Well some researchers have said you have to be 3 million years old to fill up the human brain. You have an endless capacity to build memory inside of your brain.
So when you direct your attention change happens. Change happens and it’s your mind that changes you brain. You see, you’re not a victim of your biology. So many of those patients that I worked with could have said, ‘I’m a victim. I’ve had a traumatic brain injury, I’ve had a diagnosis of a learning disability, I’ve had a heart attack, I’ve had a stroke.’ Whatever kind of brain damage, those children in Soweto, they could have said, ‘Look at my circumstances. Look at my environment.’ They could have taken all that but they didn’t. You can rise above any circumstance — the truth of the matter is that you cannot control the events and circumstances of your life, but you can control your reactions to those events and circumstances. And that applies on an academic level, that applies on a daily level as you are thinking, choosing, and building thoughts.
You see each and every one of us is not a victim of our biology. We are a victor over and above our biology. We control our brain; our brain does not control that. And research over the years, as I’ve said, has proven that, and collectively around the globe people are proving the same thing.
So here’s the answer to my question. Yes, your mind can change your brain and everyone should be allowed the opportunity to learn how to learn. The key is people need to be taught how to learn.
