Midlife Mind vs. Brain: Dr. Caroline Leaf on Toxic Thoughts, Neuroplasticity & Healing After 40

Caroline Leaf (0:00)

You're not controlled by these intrusive thoughts, you're not controlled by the sensations in your body. All of those are simply signals. The control is in your mind. So look at those as signals and data, and then you can do the changing.

Hailey (0:13)

Hi, everyone, my name is Hailey.

Laura (0:15)

And this is Laura.

Hailey (0:16)

And welcome to The Body Pod. Dr. Caroline Leaf, welcome to The Body Pod.

Caroline Leaf (0:25)

Thank you, it's so nice to be with you both.

Hailey (0:27)

And wow, first of all, you're such a powerhouse. We're trying to determine, how many books have you written?

Caroline Leaf (0:32)

19, and actually 20 My 20th one's just gone in now, so it's...

Hailey (0:36)

How old were you when you wrote your first book?

Caroline Leaf (0:41)

Gosh, I'm 63 now. I think it was, I was in my late 30s or early 30s, somewhere around there. Somewhere around there.

Hailey (0:50)

Well, you've got a lot to say then, which is super exciting for us. So if we start with the, you've spent over 40 years researching the mind and brain connection. Now, this was the first time that I have heard, I have lumped mind and brain the same. But are you saying that there is, like, you kind of separate the mind and the brain, or is that just the same in conversation?

Caroline Leaf (1:17)

No, they're totally different. And this has been, this is the mistake of the modern scientific era, is this blending of, that is still infiltrated into the general media and the general public's understanding. So for the last around 50 years, there's been this kind of mix of the two, but they're totally different. And it came from the concept of materialism, or the current modern version of that is physicalism. And physicalism, in simple language, means that everything is physical. So there was a move in science, and it's one movement in science.

It's not even a very good movement in science because it's pretty much been disproved, but it's very dominant in the current media and the scientific language, the way people describe things. And that move was, if you can see it, touch it, feel it, it exists. If it doesn't, then it's not important. So therefore, the biology or the physical became the most important. That's physicalism.

So what they basically say is that the brain is it, and it generates the mind as an epiphenomenon or a mistake.

And that's the message that is brought through to all the media and what most people, the average person thinks. But it's not a scientific theory that was proven.

It's a very assumptive and it's actually been disproved. For thousands of years, from the old mystics, philosophers, et cetera, and a hundred years of neuroscience have been very clearly telling us that we have a mind, we have a brain, and we have a body. And the brain and the body are a host, quite literally. They're a host. And they host what? They host the mind. Now, you probably also see this. What's very popular at the moment is the concept of consciousness, which is also old, but you'll see it popping up with news and it's all over the place. Consciousness scientists have discovered what consciousness is in the brain and that sort of thing. Now, the word consciousness is a big word that is used to represent mind. So mind is who you are. It is your thinking, feeling, choosing, loving, appreciating life. Being able to have this discussion, that's mind. The brain doesn't do any of this, but the mind needs a substrate, a host, that it can work through. And so your brain basically and your body are basically that substrate. So things aren't stored just in the brain, which for years people have thought, oh, well, the brain is the center of everything. I mean, it does a lot, but it's not where everything is stored.

There's a format of our thought life that is stored in the brain, and then there's a format that's stored through every cell of the body. So as your listeners and viewers are listening to us now, every single word that we say becomes an energetic force that the mind processes, and then puts it into the host, it codes fragments of it into the brain in one way and into the body in another way. And it all happens faster than you can imagine, faster than 400 million actions per second. So you literally are wiring this conversation into your brain. You're wiring you with your mind, you're wiring life into the brain and the body. And that connection between the mind, which is this energetic consciousness field, it's fundamental to reality. Mind is fundamental, not atoms and not quarks and all those things. Mind is fundamental to reality. And mind is 99% of who we are, and the mind uses the brain and body as a host. And so when someone dies, for example, as soon as the body starts to disintegrate, within this easy way to understand, within 15 to 20 seconds of the heart stopping the brain flat lines, and every single cell of the body disintegrates. But the mind continues on. Consciousness continues. And there's so much research confirming that. Not spoken about enough in popular science and popular mechanics and all those things, it's not spoken about enough. But there's more science showing that than there is showing the statin works. I mean, it's crazy, but we hear more about statins for blood cholesterol, then we hear about how important the mind is. So for the last 50 years, there has been a sort of thing that the mind and the brain are the same thing. And that's why most people, and it's not even any judgment on you or anyone, but that's what you've been told.