Science of Thought | Caroline Leaf | TEDxOaksChristianSchool

good morning everyone, how incredible that Ted is in a school. I think he's very exciting. Well, me and I teach people about the brain and 30 years ago I asked a ridiculous question and it really was a ridiculous question. There is the question. The mind change the brain now that was a ridiculous question because the vision at that time and the scientists who trained me and my teachers told us that the brain couldn't change so if it was damaged that's it you basically had to Teach you to be patient. Rest to compensate for these things and fix the problem, but that seems like such a negative thing, so I asked that question.

Can't that brain damage change? Athon can grow and a brain that is not damaged we cannot do? That better country increases our intelligence and that is why I decided to embark on a journey of research and study of this and apply it in my practice. He was determined to prove that the mind could change the brain, implying that the mind is separate from the brain but influences it. the brain, so I started 30 years ago in practice and worked. I decided to work with people with learning disabilities and with traumatic brain injuries, specifically with the learning disability communities, older children, so we were also told back then that once you reach the age of 10, between 10 and 12 years, then you're too old to do much for yourself, so you'd have to have some recovery therapy and things like that, but there wasn't much you could do. for your brain, so here I was, coming out of college wanting to help people, but when they told me that we were just going to teach our patients to compensate well, I wasn't going to do that because I didn't think it was the best thing to do for any.

I also know that

thought

s are real things that take up mental space and that as we think, we choose and construct types within our brains. I also believe that you are only as smart as you want to be, so the more you think deeply, the more you are intellectually challenged by the challenges you set, the more your brain will grow, so my first patients that I worked with in my practice were patients with traumatic brain injuries who had suffered from serious car accidents and had suffered serious traumatic brain injuries. I also worked with older people, older population with learning disabilities.

I worked with people with heart attack victims who had strokes, a number of different things, they had pretty significant damage inside their brain and I decided to quit. all the traditional methods and starting and trying to understand the

science

and work with things that were really meaningful to them. One of the problems with doing the type of therapy I was trained to do was something called transference, where you taught a patient. in a therapy room I give them therapy and then they would have to transfer it into their daily life and the transfer wasn't very good so I don't think they would be very good therapists if I couldn't teach them. change their brain and I couldn't teach them how to make a difference in their lives, so I was asking them what's the most important thing to do and obviously the students who were in school wanted to work on homework. people who had in a former businessman and a woman who we are now sitting with brain damage wanted to go back to their previous state, so that was my challenge, traumatic brain injury at that stage, and I talk about that increase, I'm talking ago 30 years, back in the 80s, when it was not accepted that the brain could change, a traumatic brain injury, in particular, was a disorder in search of data, meaning that scientists believed at that stage that the damage was as diffused that I couldn't do anything for her brain, so I started working with a patient who came to my office and this young woman was amazing, she was in a terrible car accident, she was thrown out of the car she was in, look, he was basically in she was in a coma for almost two weeks and at that time, if someone was in a coma for more than eight hours, their brain damage was considered irreversible, so the parents were told that the doctors told her parents that she would be a vegetable and well 14 months.

After her departure after the accident, my parents approached me. She was not a vegetable. She had recovered. She had progress. She was so determined. She had used her mind. It may sound strange, but she was 16 years old at the time of the accident, so she had lost 14 months. Her peer group was in 12th grade and was now functioning at roughly a 4th grade level, so I was very nervous about having to be honest. because I was embarking on this field of research, I was learning how I was researching how the

science

of thinking, how

thought

s are formed, those thoughts are real, while you are thinking and choosing, you actually build these quarries that cause genetic expression in your brain and you.

They are growing these thoughts in their brain and how can we do this effectively and if we can control our thinking, so I told them, listen, you know this is experimental, but you can work with me and 14 months after the accident it is too. It is not the best time to work with a patient because she has reached a plateau where she is not really going to progress much further. Simply put, eight months later, this young woman not only caught up and she closed that gap. but she entered the 12th grade, she wrote in the 12th grade with her peer group, she finished school, she graduated, she got a degree, she changed dramatically and what did she do.

The most important thing about this young woman was that she decided to direct her mind. she chose to use her intellect she was determined she thought she was thinking a lot about all the things she was learning she dedicated herself to her schoolwork day after day for hours applying the techniques that I had been developing and learning which is very interesting and you will see that the first slide has finished an IQ, your IQ now with a traumatic brain injury, basically, the IQ usually drops around 20 points due to the type of damage with a traumatic brain injury or your IQ was one hundred before the accident. one hundred and twenty 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 I've been working alongside, I've been working with loads of other patients even the same when these students applied their mind their brain was changing the 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 ways through the information how to write that and capturing that information how to make sure that they can go back and compare what they had written and look at the original work and understand and it makes sense that it was and then being able to reteach that and explain it, I was explaining to these students that we would spend hours working on these techniques and applying them in this school and I saw changes everywhere, so I thought, well, this is great, this is wonderful.

Seeing these incredible changes and up here on the stage what you will see are two plants and this green plant here represents a healthy thought and the little black tree there represents an unhealthy thought, so we are a toxic thought of either of the two negative ones. . emotion or a bad learning pattern and what I think, if you look, if you look, if you study the brain, you can actually see that thoughts, as your thoughts form in the brain, they form in your neurons and they look like trees, so I really At that time I believed that as long as you used your mind you could change your brain now in the '90s with the advent of brain imaging technology.

This was proven, so in the 80's changing your brain with your mind was crazy, but in the mid 90's and now it is totally normal to hear people talk about neuroplasticity all the time neuroplasticity means that your brain can change your neuro means that the brain plastic needs to change so your brain is designed to change but it has to be stimulated to change you also get something that we Now I understand it's called neurogenesis, neuro, which means brain, Genesis, which means new verse, so We constantly, day by day, grow new brain cells, so if we have a malleable brain and we constantly grow brain cells, the more you direct your mind. the more your brain will grow, so the more you think, the deeper you will think, the more questions, answers and discussions through information, the more your brain grows, the smarter you become, logical deduction, not in the 80s, it was ridiculous in that so, but as I said it is now collectively accepted around the world, now researchers are showing 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 through deep intellectual thinking, you can change . your brain with your mind, so I decided that I am working individually with patients.

Let me see if this can be applied in a broader context and in larger communities, very quickly. I just want to show you a couple more slides. of the traumatic brain injury patient and who they are. I'm going to go through them real quick this is her this was in South Africa these are her results in English the interesting thing here is the dark and continuous line that was what she was achieving and who of her academic results where I intervened was if you look in the middle and see the dotted lines that start to rise there more or less in the middle, which shows where the therapy started, in other words, what this tells us is that she was an average student, that was her trend line, that was what what he was achieving academically and if I predicted his performance based on his previous performance, that's what I would have continued doing, but it was the intervention of teaching him how to use his mind to change his brain.

In some cases there was a dramatic increase of up to 220 percent in her academic grades. Now I not only work on the cognitive through academics, but I also worked on it directly, but we also found indirect results: her language skills improved and her emotional skills improved. she improved, so there was an overall effect, so we saw the same thing happening in her social studies, we saw the same thing happening in her other subjects as well, so I decided to formalize my theories and start and start doing. and create creates to formalize my research. I created a theory, don't worry I'm not going to spend hours on this and this is just to show you what you think a theory looks like.

In this, the top part shows that you are talking about your mind and at the bottom where you see the clouds is your brain, so what I am basically saying there is that the way you think is actually going to change the way you think. your brain works, so it is formalized in a sea, so when it was formalized I turned it into a theory. I decided to work with a group of students with learning disabilities in a school, so instead of one on one, I trained teachers and many went to work in a school, I trained a bunch of teachers and then in these systems and then they trained to 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've been working one on one. I'm glad I can tell you that. We had the same kind of results if we brought this back. Well, we had and we also had incredible results. Let me get back to that, as soon as the first two small blocks there is the trend of academic change of the school, the moment the teacher began to apply the techniques, we significantly altered the Train. What I mean here is that I was not working directly with the student.

I was working with the teacher. Since then I have changed thousands and thousands of teachers. I've been working in this field for 30 years, working with teachers, corporate students, people with brain damage, people without brain damage, and I've constantly seen this constant change in the moment you direct your mind, in the moment you discipline yourself and work daily to unlearn which is a memory building process you will change your brain there is no doubt about it now you can think negatively and you will also change your brain negatively if you think positively you change your brain positively and that called plastic paradox, so this incredibly malleable brain is subordinate to what you do with your mind, so if you think you're not going to make it well, you're not going to make it, but if you think you're going to make it. you're going to get the way you think to drive your brain, your brain responds to how your mind is actually working, so if you look at the next slide, you're coming from working with audiences in this public school in a learning disability environment.

The government approached me and the government I come from South Africa, if you haven't guessed already, and at that stage I was working in it was very much the pre-apartheid area and the government approached me to I worked with agroup of schools in Soweto. I'm sure you've all heard of Soweto, where Nelson Mandela is out there this time. These conditions were terrible for ten years. I literally worked in the trenches. I went to these schools that were underperforming. schools where the conditions were incredible I see this incredible school that we are in today those schools that there would be a hundred children crammed into a tiny little classroom we would share a textbook there would be a blackboard and an old blackboard board with little pieces of chalk and the blackboard would not even It didn't even work properly, being there these children would have means but they were all dying of hunger each one of them had a story that if you heard their story you would cry most of them had no parents their parents had died of AIDS most of them had to some kind of trauma in their lives horrible conditions that most of them hadn't had they hadn't eaten a decent meal for a few days and yet they sat there listening completely absorbed.

I would go to these schools and work for five hours on a Do you know they wouldn't move for five hours? What's very interesting here is that, in parallel with working in these schools, I had my internship and I also worked in very privileged schools, so I was seeing both ends of the spectrum. I found that the children in Soweto had a much deeper concentration and desire. They saw that they saw the opportunity to learn such a privilege. They would sit there for hours. They didn't want me to leave in one day. There was a young man like He was teaching this group of students and quickly to backtrack, they redid this big project over a period of time.

We worked with thousands and thousands of children and teachers and now we used to drive to Soweto, which was very, very, very dangerous. In those days I was a white woman driving in Soweto. They never touched me. These people were so eager to learn. So desperate to learn how to learn. They protected me. Anyway, they couldn't get enough information. One day, a young man. A man found out that this course was taught at the school I was doing and he was about 24 years old and hadn't finished school, he was a drug dealer, he was everything you don't want and when he entered that school, everyone I met him at school, just the kids just separated, it was like the Red Sea parting and he walked to the back of the classroom and stared at me.

He could feel his eyes boring into me and I could think while he talked and explained. how you learn how your brain works and your intelligence works and that's how we do this biology and we go through the reading process how we process and read information and we ask and we answer and we argue and these kids are interacting with me during this whole thing and he's looking at me and looking at me and looking at me and what went through my head I have to confess was boy, when I get out of here I better watch my back because this young man is not happy that I am here today at the end. of those five hours and they didn't move for five hours.

I emphasize again that the young man takes the pen from him when the teacher said, the teacher said who would like to thank dr. If that young man ran forward with tears streaming down his eyes, I will never forget that scene where he raised his pen and said dr. Now I know what to do with my pen. He went back to school. He finished school. He became an agent of change within his community and that is one of the thousands and thousands of stories that I have had the privilege of being a part of. One of my oldest patients was a 78 year old pilot who just couldn't fly anymore, so he went and studied his second profession at 78, which was to be a certified public accountant, and he graduated at 84.

I mean, how cool is that? asked me to give him he had just renewed a certificate to plan his work, so he had done this in this course, so my children, my lab rats, I call my children and my husband, my lab rats, they are sitting in the front chair, they are very friendly, they don't bite, so you can say hello to them if you want they grew up with the things I have used those things my whole life what is what is the thing is that your mind is so incredibly powerful you have a powerful mind you have a sound mind you have a mind that is capable of achieving your dreams you are as smart as you want to be I am here saying this with conviction because I have seen this over and over again in so many different circumstances when I came to the United States.

Here's another slide that I worked on, so I did a lot of my initial research, as you heard in South Africa, on one on one, traumatic brain injury, learning disability, public schools, special needs schools and government. schools and I also in this country worked in Dallas for three years in charter schools and we found that the same thing was happening. We said I worked a little bit individually with some of the students, but I did most of the work. What we did in the Dallas schools for three years was we had teachers show them how to learn when you direct your attention, when you apply disciplined, directed, deep, focused thinking, when you sit with whatever it is you're learning, whether it's in a university level school level business level whatever you are looking at whatever you are studying whatever knowledge you are trying to master when you sit with your mind and direct your attention that repeated effort when you direct your attention repeatedly because learning has place learning is a process of constructing thoughts inside your brain you are a thinking being you think all day you are always thinking during the day you are thinking you are choosing and you are constructing thoughts thoughts about memories and thoughts are real things, memories are real things , so while you're sitting in your school because you're doing whatever you're doing in life, when you sit there daily, it's a daily rigorous discipline process and you read and you ask yourself, what am I reading? your answer yourself and discuss it with yourself as you do this disciplined mental work that you are pushing your malleable brain to grow branches, you are literally growing branches on these neurons inside your brain, you have unlimited capacity inside your brain, Scientists have tried to estimate that there is a limit to what we can do, what fits inside our human brain.

Well, some researchers have said that you would have to be three million years old to fill the human brain. You have an infinite capacity to build memory inside your brain. So when you direct your attention, change happens, change happens, and anyway, it's your mind that changes your brain. You see that you are not a victim of your biology. Many of those patients I work with might have said, Well, I'm a victim. I had a traumatic brain injury. I was diagnosed with learning disabilities. I had a heart attack. I had a stroke. I had this brain. That's all kinds of brain damage.

Those kids in Soweto might have said, “Look.” my circumstances look at my surroundings they could have taken all that but they didn't we can overcome any circumstance because the truth of the matter is you can't control the circumstances of your life but you can control your reactions to those events in circumstances and that applies to an academic level that is applied on a daily level as you think, choose and construct thoughts, you see that each and every one of us is not a victim of our biology, we are a victor over our biology. we control our brain, our brain doesn't control that and research over the years, as I've said, has shown that, and collectively around the world, people are demonstrating the same thing, so here's the answer to my question: yes, your brain, your mind, can change your brain and everyone should have the opportunity to learn how to learn.

The key is that people must be taught how to learn. Thank you.