Dr. Caroline Leaf

Thank you, Hilah.

It's so lovely to be with you.

Absolutely.

Well, I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa and we've been in the States now for the last 13 years and we travel globally.

I used to practice, I practiced 24, 25 years as a clinician and I'm a brain, a mind-brain researcher, neuroscientist.

I've been doing that for 38 years.

So I've been in the field for many, many years and my fascination with the mind and the brain began as a young girl.

I was very fast, I was going to become a neurosurgeon.

I even got into that field and

decided that I actually wanted to know more about understanding of the mind as opposed to just the physical brain.

I was trained in the era when they didn't believe that the brain could change, but they did understand that the brain was separate from the mind.

Then over the last 40 years, as we've learned more about the brain,

the mind has been kind of separated and kind of ignored or seen as a byproduct of the brain.

So we've kind of transitioned in a negative sense.

A lot of the science has transitioned in a negative sense that we've advanced with brain science, but gone backwards with mind understanding.

and so I decided to dedicate my career to understanding mind, what it is, what are thoughts, what are memories, what's the difference between the mind and the brain, what happens when they interact, why do they need to interact, how can you manage this process, do you have any control over the process, and I started out my work trying to understand, I was just fascinated as a child with the brain and the mind, and started out my initial research with people with very severe issues like traumatic brain injuries and

severe war trauma and learning disabilities, dementias, autism, and then carried on in that field, but then adapted my work to helping everyone because you've all got a mind, you've all got a brain, and we all need to manage it.

So it's just been a developmental process.

And my most recent book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, I put my most recent clinical trials in there in a summarized, simple version, just to show people the reality of mind-brain and the mind-brain connection.

Well, it was one of my neuroscience lectures that, and neuroscience was in its infancy in the 80s.