Chapter 1: What is the difference between the mind and the brain?
I love that you're in this field of understanding the mind brain connection and how it plays into our thoughts and our emotions, our feelings, our mental health and everything else that's happening in our lives. My first question is, What is the difference between the mind and the brain? And does the brain control the mind or does the mind control the brain?
You've asked one of my favorite questions there. That's a really great place to start. I've got some props. Is that okay? Can I use some props to show you?
Show me. Show me. Explain. I need to understand in a simplified way.
Okay, so here's a brain, not a real one, in a skull. And the terminology for about the last 40 years is that the mind and the brain have been used interchangeably.
Chapter 2: How does the mind control the brain?
So most people think when you talk mind, you're talking brain, and when you're talking brain, you're talking mind. And most of the popular literature, even the scientific literature that the media tends to put out, talks about how the brain produces thoughts or the brain produces the mind. But your brain actually can't do anything on its own.
So if you did, and if I was holding up this, if this was a real brain and I just took it out of someone's head, which I wouldn't do, but if it was bleeding and whatever, and you looked at this brain, we could stare at this all day long, but it would never do anything.
So what is the difference between a dead brain and yours and mine and the listeners and the viewers is that you are actually thinking, feeling and choosing. You're alive and your aliveness is your mind.
And your mind is this ability that of what you're doing right at this moment as you're listening to me, you are processing the auditory sound waves, the electromagnetic light waves through your ability to think and feel and choose, which is mind. So your mind is like processing, unique, brilliant processing field, gravitational field around and through your brain and body.
And you convert what you're hearing and seeing into actual meaning. And that meaning is formed from trees that you actually grow into your brain. So 400 billion actions per second, you're using your mind to translate auditory and visual signals into protein tree-like structures in your brain to make sense of what I'm saying. And then each new thing that I say, you're growing more and more.
And everything I'm saying is in the root section because it's the source of the information. And the tree trunk and the branches are your interpretation of what I'm saying. And you're linking it to other existing, whatever I'm triggering at the moment that you know about whatever in your life related to a subject. And that keeps going. And that's what we do all the time.
Your mind is always with you and your mind works through the brain and the brain then responds. So here's a little model. So your mind is the
gravitational field and this is not woo-woo science this is hardcore nobel prize winning science that this discovery of the gravitational field in fact einstein spoke about it back in the early 20th century how we each human has this gravitational field this electromagnetic field around us And that is basically through us. And when you die, that's not there anymore.
And that's the thing that's kind of keeping you alive. And that's the thinking, feeling, choosing, the psychological version. And the science-y version is this gravitational field. So it's a little bit like a magnet. This is a super easy way to understand it. If you imagine a piece of white paper and you put a whole lot of iron filings on the paper, you may have done this at school.
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Chapter 3: What role do traumatic experiences play in mental health?
Exactly.
Totally. How far does the field extend? Is it two feet in front of us? Is it six feet? Is it a football field? How far can it go?
We don't really know because when you're talking about quantum physics and gravitational fields, there's a lot of interaction that occurs. But what the science seems to show is that it's kind of a, almost how, you know, like around us sort of this.
Like a halo-y field.
Like a halo, yeah. And it's probably more because, but it interacts because everyone's got this field and then we live in gravitational fields. So everything around you is a gravitational field. So everything's interacting. And so that's why, you know, when you come up to someone, an example would be like an electrostatic shock. You know, when you brush past someone, you get that.
And on a more psychological level, you can experience that that field is like maybe you're in a really great mood and then you get into a conversation with some friends and they're so totally depressed and you come away from there thinking, I feel awful. I need to go and have a shower. You feel so…
So their field has interacted with yours and impacted you because that field is coming from your mind, which then uses the brain and converts what you're experiencing into these thoughts. And then these thoughts are generating, you know, there's this whole relationship, the iron filings concept, and there's this back and forth. And this literally is photons.
Einstein showed this, that we're literally generating from our thoughts as we talk from our thoughts, which you can't talk without thoughts. You build thoughts and then your actions and and communication come from the thoughts. So this would generate healthy. It's a nice, healthy green tree. And here's a toxic one.
So this would be a toxic, you know, the depression or whatever, you know, being negative or whatever. That would generate toxic photons. And these are the ones that would make you, you know, you feel it. You feel that negativity. This is a sense of you're not a happy person and you just feel like amazing, you know. So this is very real. This is not some ethereal thing.
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Chapter 4: How can we manage our minds effectively?
So the feeling, the think, feel, choose work together to make sense of the physical impact and what it means and if it's threatening or not threatening and all kinds of decisions are made in your mind and it happens super fast. So it's think, feel, choose, think, feel, choose in cycles, and it's really, really fast.
You know, we talk about 400 billion actions per second, but it's actually 10 to the 27 and faster, which is an inconceivable speed.
So what I've done with my work is to try and understand this, you know, what is a thought and what is memory and what is mind and what is brain and how do they interact and how do they influence and do we have any sense of agency over this process and what does it look like?
Yeah, can you explain it all?
Yeah.
Absolutely. I can certainly try. So I spent 38 years studying this and I started out in the world of working in more clinical. I practiced clinically for 25 years. And I initially started my research in the 80s. And funnily enough, in the 80s, we were taught that the brain couldn't change. So all my lectures were around the brain is fixed.
It's fixed. Fixed mind, fixed brain, fixed mindset.
Yeah, so that's it. You've just got to learn how to work around it and compensate, more of a compensation kind of philosophy. So I remember thinking in one of my neuroscience lectures that this does not work for me because we're changing and growing as humans. So I said, no, I'm going to start researching this. And I was told by my professors, that's a ridiculous question.
And I actually did a TED talk on this, the ridiculous question of neuroplasticity. So in the 80s, I said, okay, well, give me the worst situation. What's the worst situation? They said, okay, it's traumatic brain injury. Once someone's had a traumatic brain injury, and I mean, your dad went through one, that's it pretty much that's written off. And we were trained, as I said, to compensate.
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Chapter 5: What does Dr. Caroline Leaf say about the 21-day myth in mental health?
So there's very little research in the 21-day myth. So I decided to research it. And there's a few studies. There's one from University College London. I put them in my book. There's my one that I've just done recently in 2019 over 2020. We are tracked, and we're tracked in the brain what happens.
So 21 days, you get what we call gamma peaks, which means that you've taken this, you've deconstructed it, and you've reconstructed it into something healthy. So you've changed this thought, but it's XY. So that's in there, but it looks different. It's like if you take an ugly old house... that you're going to renovate.
You take lots of photos of all the mold and all the ugly carpets and you bash it down, you build a beautiful new house. You still remember how it was, but you've reconceptualized it. You're living in that new space. You remember the old. So that's what I'm talking about. That takes 21 days. So you create to break down and build a thought with memories because a thought is a tree made of memories.
Memories are like a tree is made of branches.
Chapter 6: How can we effectively rewire our minds in 63 days?
Thoughts are made of memories. So to make something that's got a level of sustainability takes about 21 days. And in that 21 days after that, if you stop there, it's a tiny little plant in your forest. It doesn't have enough energy to move from the non-conscious mind, N-O-N. The non-conscious mind operates 24-7.
It's where all your experiences are stored in thoughts, all your belief systems, your nurturing, everything about you. And that is influencing your conscious mind. Conscious mind's only awake when you're awake. So right now as I'm talking,
Everything that I'm saying is stimulating thoughts from your non-conscious mind to move into your conscious mind to make sense of what I'm saying and to build all this new stuff into thoughts in your trees. So a non-conscious mind, for a thought to move from the non-conscious to the conscious, to the subconscious, So non-conscious, subconscious is the bridge, conscious is when you're awake.
Non-conscious, 24-7, infinite, huge, massive, and where our wisdom is as well. So the wisdom is through the middle. If you want to imagine a forest, you've got the beautiful dark green strip, which is all your instinctive wisdom, survival stuff, wired for love stuff, optimism, bias. And then everything we experience in life is around the edge. Little trees, big trees, dark trees, green trees.
The smaller the tree, the newer the experience or the newer the memory, the weaker the memory. The big established trees are the ones that influence. So those things are powerful. So if it's a big dark tree and it's influencing, it's going to jump into your conscious mind and influence your view. So backtracking.
To get something that's good that you've rebuilt to actually influence how you view something, it has to have more energy put into it. Energy is never lost.
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Chapter 7: What role does self-regulation play in mental health?
Energy is transferred. Quantum physics talks about energy. These things are proteins with energy vibrating in the little protein structures. So you want that they're weak. So you've got to strengthen it.
You've got to water it. You've got to feed it some fertilizer.
Totally. And all you do is it's so easy. Oh my gosh, it's so easy. From day 22 to 63, you simply do step number five for about a minute a day. That's how simple it is. It's 42 minutes over 42 days. In my NeuroCycle app, I've actually got an active reminder function that you can type it into. It pops up on your phone. And you can remind yourself to do this. And you literally just read it.
And it keeps, just reading it reminds you to do it. And then you're building your strength and you're turning it into behavior change. So to go around, you know, the theme of your podcast, you know, to get to greatness requires behavior change. So real behavior change, if you really want to build a good habit into your life, you're going to have to spend the 63 days doing it.
So not only is that 63 days, I mean, I've shown it scientifically and so on. Not only is it for detoxing the patterns.
the traumas the toxic habits the small t big t as you mentioned the acute stuff the bad habits we've developed but it's also to build new habits so if you if you know you identify this is an area that i want to grow in my life to go to the next level of greatness whatever that is you need 63 days at least and sometimes more sometimes the trauma is so embedded and it's blocking your greatness that you might need multiple cycles of 63
There's no cookie cutter design. But the more you do that and the more you practice it in the moment by moment, the more self-regulated you become, which brings us right back to the beginning of the conversation, which was that mind is always in action. So you may as well control it. So here I've just told you how to do it. It's pretty much the nuts and bolts.
What does the neuroscience say behind positive thinking versus negative or toxic thinking? I don't know what the stat is. It's 60,000 thoughts a day or something like that we have, and 80% or 90% of them are the same recurring thoughts. I'm probably off there, but something like that.
No, no, there's a lot of stuff like that out there, and you're not far off in terms of what the media is saying. In terms of the people, I follow people that are heavy into understanding the numbers from a very neuroscientific perspective, and I've done my own calculations. We build around about 8,000 to 10,000 thoughts a day. So we're building. So that's sort of how many events we experience.
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Chapter 8: How can parents support their children's mental health?
That's what neuroscience shows us, just to give you some kind of tangible thing to hang on to. In any one 10-second moment – You can literally have anything from 1 to 13 thoughts that will move from the non-conscious, and maybe more, and also build a couple of thoughts in that thought with one thought, but with multiple, maybe 100 memories in that. So that's...
That's 120 odd things happening in any 10-second block. Wow. And multiply that by 60 seconds, you know, or times six, so in one minute. So you can really see the numbers as they multiply. So that's where we get anywhere between 8,000 we build and then probably about another 10,000 are coming up. So 18,000 seems to be a more, but whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter. It's a lot.
We have a lot of thoughts. We have a lot of- And a lot of them are more negative, it seems like, right?
Not necessarily. If you look over, the only reason it feels like that is because the negative get more attention, not because you're wired that way, but because they have created complete disruption in your brain.
It's a stronger physical reaction, right?
You've got to get rid of it. It's against your survival. So you're going to pay attention to whatever's threatening your survival. Think of it. If someone's at your front door and they're trying to bash your front door down and you've got your family to protect, you're going to pay attention. You're not going to sit and watch TV. You're going to pay attention to what's a threat to your survival.
So it's not that we have more negative thoughts.
When we're relaxed and calm, we're not thinking, ah, I need to fix this. We're just relaxing and hanging out. But it's when there's a thought that's negative, we put a lot of attention on it. Exactly.
It's the big tree in the forest. Whatever you think about the most will grow. So you may have this huge infinite forest of green. The strip through the middle is the wise mind that can't ever change. The majority is green, small trees, big trees. And you're going to have clusters of the black in between.
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