Manage Your Mind Or Let It Control You: No Other Option | Dr. Caroline Leaf
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, my name is Lewis Howes, and welcome to The Daily Motivation Show.
How did Dr. Caroline Leaf challenge 1980s beliefs about coma and brain damage?
Once someone's had a traumatic brain injury, and I mean your dad went through one, that's pretty much that's written off. And we were trained, as I said, to compensate. So I said, okay, well, there's hardly any research in the 80s on brain injury and on how to treat it. And so I thought, okay, well, I'm going to start there. And so I worked with people that had been in comas for like longer than two weeks. And at that stage, if you're in a coma for longer than eight hours – The brain damage was considered irreversible. Now, in this day and age, we know that's not the case. But in the 80s, that was the going philosophy. So I was completely swimming upstream when it came to this concept.
What case study showed the brain's ability to rebuild through directed mind management?
Anyway, I showed with my subjects that with using your mind, and not in any weird way, just a very systematic, deliberate, intentional mind management in different ways, and different brain building and dealing with emotions and just different ways, same sort of process that you can actually change this. And so some of my first, my very first case study was a girl who was 16 at the time of the accident and she had lost a whole year of school written off as a vegetable. I mean, that's what the doctors used to say in those days, which is a terrible thing to say to someone. Anyway, long story short, after eight months, not only did she manage to – she came around. I started working with her when she was conscious and functioning sort of at a second grade level.
And she wanted to – her goal was to get – her goal of greatness was to get back to finish 12th grade and with her peer group. Now, that was an impossible task. All the doctors said, don't even go down that road. Not even worth it. So I said, well, I was a new scientist then, very young, totally into this. I said, well, you – You know, go with me. Let's do this. And within eight months, she caught up to a 12th grade level, finished school with her peers and went on to get a university degree. And one of the coolest things was that she was actually a really average student and not even good at math. After the accident, using her mind to change her brain, she became like a math genius. You know, I mean, this was like, and I can tell you story after story, and that really motivated me to work across the board with now I really have to understand what's going on.
And I happen to be living in South Africa where I grew up at the time. I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa. And in the apartheid era, I mean, this is like, it really ages me, doesn't it?
How did Dr. Leaf apply her methods across different social and global contexts?
Go back into those, I worked through the apartheid era, the transition and the post-apartheid era. So I was seeing all the socioeconomic trauma, the racism trauma, And I worked in that three days a week in those environments with terrible poverty and whatever. And I worked in Waterloo, Rwanda. And I worked with the wealthiest of the wealthy, CEOs of corporations, schools everywhere that my laboratory was the world to try and understand poverty. humans and mind and get away from this scientific concept that consciousness is the hard question and no one is really doing anything we're just talking about it as being as this elusive philosophical thing that we will push aside and one day promissory science will do it one day and I thought I can't do this because
I am mind. You are mind. So if I don't manage it, I mean, you can go three weeks without food, three days without water, three minutes without oxygen, but you don't even go three seconds without using your mind. So my underlying premise was, okay, well, if that's the case, what is it? And how do we manage it? And if I don't manage it, what I did from my research is You can learn to manage it. Mind is malleable. You can direct the neuroplasticity of your brain. I did some of the first neuroplasticity research in my field in the late 80s, early 90s. Before it was accepted by the mid-90s, neuroplasticity was, well, that's it. And I showed that my underlying argument or thesis was right.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:12
2
How did Dr. Caroline Leaf challenge 1980s beliefs about coma and brain damage?
0:12–0:47
3
What case study showed the brain's ability to rebuild through directed mind management?
0:47–2:21
4
How did Dr. Leaf apply her methods across different social and global contexts?
2:21–4:01
5
Why does Dr. Leaf argue we can't go three seconds without using our mind?
4:01–4:48
6
How can you learn to direct neuroplasticity and manage your mind?
4:48–6:14
7
What does 'greatness' mean according to managing your mind vs external success?
6:14–6:46
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Motivation
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