we'll continue to cover this issue, because it is too important to ignore. we ask you to know what's going on in your kids' lives. thank you so much for joining us. [ applause ] >> larry: tonight, does the brain have a mind of its own? >> the mind is an entity that exists outside of the brain. and can exert power. >> larry: making us do and say things we know we shouldn't. >> the brain fools you. >> larry: causing us to eat, drink too much, or stay in abusive relationships. >> it's actually a work on the

heroin, or morphine centers of the brain. >> larry: can we rewire all that, or is the brain more powerful than any drug or therapy? therapy? next on "larry king live." -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com >> larry: great rundown for you next week. jimmy carter will be here monday night. barbara walters on tuesday. jerry seinfeld next thursday. all in new york. bad behavior, is it all in our heads? we'll talk about it with dr. drew pinsky, and how celebrity narcissism is seducing america. and neuroscience researcher, formerly taught at queens college. dr. daniel amund, scientist and brain imaging specialist. he's author of "unchain your brain, ten steps to breaking the addictions that steal your life." and dr. george pratt, noted

clinical psychologist. a body/mind approach to calmer, happier, more successful you. first, what is a neuroscience researcher? >> somebody who studies the brain, really. in all aspects. neuroscience is kind of a broad term. it can be neuroby ol, neuropsychology. i have a mixed background in both. >> larry: do you write or teach or both? >> i have been in the past teaching. and doing research while i was working on my degrees. and education is really the path that i want to take. >> larry: let's get into the overall topic here of the brain. start with you, dr. pinsky. why does the brain not stop us from doing things we know are wrong? >> you know, it would make sense if you had, say, an evolutionary point of view that the brain was a perfect instrument that only increased our sur vvivability. but not just trying to decide why the brain isn't a perfect system, in terms of how it operates, how doefs the brain

create the mind and what's the relationship between the mind and the brain. >> larry: they're different? >> well, i kind of think of the mind and the brain, the best way to communicate to people is, like music is caused by a bow going across the strings of a viol violin. it can be shaped and change the. but it's dependent on the violin and the bow to be created. >> larry: dr. amond, we're going to break this down by segments. we'll talk about overeating. everybody will know it's wrong to overeat and it's bad to be fat. why would you overeat? doesn't the brain tell you that's too much? >> not really. in fact, as your weight goes up, the actual physical size of your brain goes down. so your judgment -- >> larry: you get dumber. >> your reasoning goes down. the studies that we've done, so being healthy is critical to thinking right. but if you've had a brain injury, overeating goes up. if you've been eating badly for a long time, you become addicted

to the bad foods, the fat, sugar and salt. when you put them in certain combinations, they actually work on the heroin, or morphine centers of the brain. >> larry: dr. pratt they say to exercise. can you exercise your brain? >> yes, you can. the first thing to do would be, besides taking good care of yourself physically, and proper supplementation, would be to use it, do various strategies to strengthen certain neuronal connections and reduce trauma, stress, and those elements that are interfering with your quality of life. >> larry: practical exercises you can do? >> actually, there are. there's an exciting new development in energy psychology which is using the body's energy system, actually the ak you pressure, acupuncture system to help create some changes in the feeling state, and then also have an effect on the brain. but the nice thing is some of these little simple techniques

can be learned and practiced in five minutes. >> larry: cara, the more you research, the more imponderable it gets? is the brain a great mystery? >> definitely. definitely. and i think that what dr. drew was speaking about is really important. because a lot of individuals in fields that are kind of related to neuroscience have been struggling with the question of mind and brain for as far back as we can remember. you know, there are a lot of people out there who still believe that the mind is an entity that exists outside of the brain, and can exert power on the brain. and we're starting to see changes in research that are showing that we do have very plastic brains. >> larry: meaning? >> meaning that neuronal connections between different cells can sometimes change, and we can have new pathways that are wired based on experience. so there's an interesting kind

of feedback loop where the brain creates mind, and then the mind can exert power on the brain and physically change the structure of the brain. >> larry: can a poor learning brain have a good mind? >> poor learning brain have a good mind? probably. >> thomas edison did terrible in school. >> yeah. >> got beaten in school. and obviously we would say he had an amazing mind. >> larry: so how do we separate them? let's say on obesity. >> the mind/body duel is probably something that goes way back. how do we deal with something like obesity. where we've been -- listen, millions of millions of years went into our brain development. we developed in such a way to live maybe to the age of 20, and to take advantage of what the environment had in terms of increasing our probability of surviving. so things that were high in calorie, things with fat and sugar, of course, we craved and deeply and were well rewarded in our brain system. i don't want to get too heady. but there's a rational system, reward system, and the fact is,

we're eating the reward system and euphoric system that gets deeply involved in this. for some people that can actually drinkinger an addicted process. >> larry: dr. amen, does the stomach tell you you're hungry or your brain? >> your brain tells you you're hungry. your intestinal track actually produces more neurotransmitters, or chemicals that work on your brain than the brain does itself. so your body is really one system. i think of your brain as the super computer that is running everything. but it's all interconnected. >> larry: so the brain would tell me to overeat? >> sometimes it does. if the people have damage to certain parts of the brain, you can have faulty signals. we were just discussing a case of a woman who was 490 pounds, and then had a lap band and she was 280. she couldn't move lower on the scale with that. so had they experimented with

deep brain stimulation and run wires to certain parts of the brain to help her to feel a lack of craving, feeling satiatation. it showed some promise. but as a clinical psychologist, i think what are the circumstances besides the physiology that are going on that can be affected. >> larry: back to the basics, cara. why does the brain do dumb things? >> wow. >> that's a question. >> that's a difficult question. >> that's a good one. >> i think we have a lot of -- the brain, as dr. drew was saying, is messy. it's evolutionarily messy. being higher order and higher thinking, mammals, the executive function can get in the way of the more unstable brain processes. we have a lot of cognitive biases and fallacies that we have to face every day. and one example would be a fallacy that a lot of people getting back to overeating will

experience, once they can get their eating in check, and they can get their exercise in check, and this is the same with addiction, we oftentimes tend to overcompensate and overthink how well we can put ourselves amidst, you know, stressors in our life. so we'll kind of be around people who are eating rich foods. we'll be around people who are smoking cigarettes in our presence and study after study show that we definitely don't quite have the control that we think we do. >> larry: will power, does it work? find out after the break. [ advisor 1 ] what do you see yourself doing one week,

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you've got staying power. >> larry: i guess one of the definitions of insanity was repeating the same thing and expecting different results. >> yes. >> larry: let's get to overeating. what does the brain expect? >> i want to stop just for a second here at the question you posed before going to the break, which is, does will power work. and what you have to understand is, this is the disease of addiction that i work with, that will power, the usual systems that we deploy to decide and to affect volition actually get usurped by the distorted drive systems of addiction. so you start thinking the wrong things. you start feeling that the wrong

things are the right things. >> larry: fooling your brain? >> your brain fools you. so for instance, my patients, once they get sober, they say, i got it, i'm sober. but i've been thinking about joe. joe, of course, lived right next to my crack dealer. the fact is, that kind of thinking emerges always in addiction. so the systems that we use to rely upon for something we call will, actually become at the service of the deeper brain systems to which we are completely helpless. >> larry: since drug addiction, drugs are illegal, is there a criminal mind to the brain? you know you're doing wrong, not only for the addiction, but you would even steal it? >> one part of the brain we have to talk about. when we talk about addiction or will power is the front part of the brain. so the front third of the brain, prefrontal cortex, are larger in huma

humans than any other animal. when your prefrontal cortex works right, and it's not fully developed until we're about 25 years old, when it's weak, it's like the supervisor in your head is taking a break. then your inner child, who's having tantrums, or who wants the crack cocaine or wants the third piece of cheesecake, if your prefrontal cortex is not right, nothing in your life is going to be right. so head injuries matter, low blood sugar matters. you don't eat breakfast, you're going to make bad decisions about food the rest of the day. if you don't sleep right, lower blood flow to the brain. >> larry: doesn't that defy, dr. pratt, that when you're 4 years old, you know everything about yourself then? >> when we're 4, actually, when we're talking about will power, or want power, we have a conscious and subconscious mind. if we didn't -- it's called

different things. freud called it the unconscious, jenny called it the subconscious. what happens is, it's busy doing things for us all the time that we're not taking conscious awareness of. because if we did, we'd be overloaded with all the things that are on our minds. cellular reactions, movement of my arm as i'm speaking. if you think of when you write a check, and you do -- you write the first letter, the rest of your name is automatic. when you're walking, it's automatic unless you're climbing very special stairs. so this is busy doing this all day long. but sometimes you can't get from the subconscious to the conscious mind. we have cognitive therapy as a psychologist, we're all taught change how you think, change how you feel. well, that goes so far. because you cannot think your way out of some of these things. it is not connected. so you have to use tools to utilize the subconscious, which is very exciting. the number of neurons firing per second at the conscious level,

estimated, 40. at the subconscious neuron firing per second, 40 million. >> larry: is the heart, cara, in conflict with the brain? i know this girl is wrong for me. >> that's a different thing. >> i think this is actually really important, because it speaks to what some of the panelists have been saying about the prefrontal cortex and its connections to some deeper brain structure, such as the limb bik system thought of to be responsible for emotion. even in a healthy brain, we have neuron tracts. we have fibers that connect neurons in certain areas of the brain to neurons in other parts of the brain. there are many tracts connecting to the prefrontal cortex. but there are almost none connecting back to the limpic system. it has total control over our executive function. our sort of conscious being

oftentimes cannot handle, cannot control and tell our emotions what to do. we're victims to them. >> or your drives or -- when you're talking about it, i think you were moving into bad relationships now. >> larry: i'm getting to that. we don't want to be conflicted or controlled by one topic. the topic is the brain. >> the heart is the body. and i come from a sort of they retic framework where we don't pay enough attention to the brain/body connection. >> larry: we'll be right back. what about relationships requiring -- does it require two brains to interact? how does that work. maybe we'll get answers next. let me check. oh fudge, nothing without a big miles upcharge. it's either pay their miles upcharges or connect through mooseneck! [ freezing ] i can't feel my feet. we switched to the venture card from capital one -- so no more games. let's go see those grandkids. [ male announcer ] don't pay miles upcharges. don't play games. get the flight you want

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>> larry: fascinating subject tonight, the brain. i want to pick up where you left off. >> you mentioned about two brains. in fact, in terms of particularly solving these problems, we were talking about, we've left the notion of a single skull system and entered into how brains affect one another. for instance, before the break i was talking about how i see the mind/body connection so important. in that when i say working with an addict, i don't want to hear what they're saying or thinking, because i know it's all distorted. i sit and try to attune my body to theirs, and then see what i

understand about empathizing with where they're at, reflect that to them and magically that creates a kind of connection that creates the possibility of changing the wiring of the kinds of systems we're talking about here. >> larry: how, dr. amen, do people change? in other words, how does the brain change its behavior for the better? >> you know, we see that all the time. at the amen clinics -- >> larry: they do, right? >> when we're in the middle of a big nfl study now, we scanned 105 football players. and 103 of them have brain damage. and on the right program, which is getting them to sleep, getting them to lose weight, optimizing their vitamin d level, for example, using some simple supplements, we improve their brains 80% of the time. and then their thinking is better. and their relationship is better. when your brain works right, that's what i've always said, you work right. when your brain is troubled from a concussion, from an illness,

you're going to have trouble in your life. >> larry: this may sound stupid, dr. pratt, what makes one person smarter than another? >> that's an interesting question. i would say what makes one person smarter than another is their ability to adapt. and to accept and to determine the course to go with. which requires a clear brain, to maximally use iq, you have to be at a certain state where you can perform. we also have something called eq, emotional quotient, which is in some ways more important than iq, because it's your ability to maximize your intelligence to relate to others and get things accomplished. >> larry: my mother had kidney disease, my grandfather had heart trouble, i have heart trouble. can you inherit brain problems, be born stupid? you could be born with deficiencies of the brain? >> you could be born with, you know, with problems with brain

structure, with your neurochemistry that can cause disease states later in life. and there are some things that can be changed, and there are some things that are somewhat fixed in the brain. i mean, we know that behavioral interventions can give great results, because like we were talking before, the ability of the brain to adapt, there are some things that you have to kind of hit in the right developmental period before they get pretty well set. >> larry: can you spot this in a 3-year-old? >> i think we're starting to see that with autism, for example. which used to be diagnosed around age, what, 4 and 5. we can see changes in their brains as early as 1 1/2 years old, because they're starting to realize that autistic boys generally have much larger brains than non-autistic boys and now we can measure for those types of things. i think there are some organic things that can be measured early. but oftentimes the behavior has to come out before somebody can

analyze the problem. >> larry: can you look in a microscope, a brain in a microscope and tell me about that person? >> i can look at a scan and tell you a lot about that person. >> larry: really? >> whether they're going to be impulsive or compulsive. >> larry: just looking at the scan? >> just looking at the scan. it's very important. back to your point. my daughter's pregnant. and how her health is during her pregnancy will have a huge impact on that baby, and for the baby's rest of life. >> larry: and the brain? >> and how smart they are. how adaptable they are. how anxious they are. so taking care of pregnant mothers is just critical. and a lot of people don't know they're pregnant until, you know, week six. and the brain starts to develop at week three. so if they're drinking early and they don't even know they're pregnant, it can potential live have a huge impact. >> larry: you talk about drug addiction. a puzzling problem right after this. i used to see the puddles,

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usually trying to find a solution to a problem, and feel better. if your brain is genetically set up a certain way, it works. that's what you have to acknowledge in drug addicts. they use drugs because they work. they do feel better. a lot better. for an extended period of time many times. and then a second phenomenon kicks in. which is the disease of addiction. whereby, in spite of it no longer working or having serious consequences in their life, the what i like to call it the do it again part of their brain has been altered in such a way to require them to do it again, do it again. >> larry: why, dr. amen, does the addiction, the need for the cocaine do to the brain? because the brain still knows it's damaging. >> it damages it over time. >> larry: the brain is damaged. >> yes. and so the emotional part of the brain, the pleasure center in the brain hijacks it. and it's damaging your prefrontal cortex, so that over time, you have less and less and

less control. and once somebody gets clean, it can take months before they begin to feel clear-headed. which is why i sort of hate 28-day prals because i'm like, they haven't really learned anything because their brains still aren't clear. >> larry: are there drugs for the brain, to help the brain? >> we have natural medicines and we have antidepressants, anti-psychotic medicines. we have anti-seizure medicines which interestingly help a lot of people with anxiety and depression. so medicines -- but i always say food is your best medicine. we know if you eat a bad diet, you have a higher risk of dementia and depression. >> larry: what toes depression do to the brain? or does the brain cause the depression? >> well, depression is the effect of various factors. what's happening both within a person and in their brain obviously, and also usually in

their environment. depression occurs, it has an effect on every aspect of a person's life. we all know the standard phenomena, sleep disruption, appetite disruption, concentration problems, difficulty maintaining relationships. and that creates a huge problem for individuals, and then families. so my job as a clinical psychologist is to help use cognitive and use energy and hypnosis and mdr, tools to go back, find out what the problems are, and if you can get them and go back to grief or trauma, and you can clear those traumas, you can create a huge effect in a system. >> and we see it in the brain. that's the exciting thing. >> larry: you see it? >> if you do a treatment like hypnosis or mdr for people like post-traumatic stress disorder, they said we actually calmed down the emotional structures in the brain. so therapy can help enhance

brain function. >> larry: cara, in an autopsy, do we discover anything about the brains of suicides? >> suicides? >> just last week there was a study, this kid an nfl player or something, that committed suicide and they found a lot of trauma in the surface of the brain. >> chronic encephalopathy. i studied a study a couple of years ago on suicide. the most human thoughtful part of the brain, in people who killed themselves, was really low. in activity. which means they didn't have a supervisor. and i always say, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. >> larry: do you study the brains of drug addicts? >> do i study the brains of drug addicts? >> larry: looked at the brains? >> i've looked at neuropsychological effects of people who use drugs. but generally in my research in the past it was with individuals who had sensory disabilities. blindness, deafness, paralysis,

and then later turned to abusing drugs. this was kind of my field of research when i was younger. and so i would look -- >> larry: you were younger? >> when i was in my undergrad, and i would look at the neuropsychological outcomes. i was doing more behavioral testing, using neuromeasures. i wasn't technically looking at their brains, but we were making inferences about their minds. >> larry: do blind people have different kinds of brains? >> it depends on when the blindness occurred, if they were congenitally blind or blind later. it's a complicated pathway both in your eyes and in your brain. >> larry: when we come back we'll talk about memory. don't go away. [ male announcer ] you are a business pro.

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>> larry: i don't know if this is true, i think i read somewhere that einstein had 14% memory. his brain retained 14%. which made him a genius. is that true? >> einstein's brain was a little bit smaller than the average brain. >> larry: doesn't memory bring genius? the more you remember, the smarter you're going to be. >> not necessarily. what brings genius is being able to look at things, common things, in a different way. and he certainly had that ability. >> larry: do you study memory? >> yeah. it's a big field. memory is important for certain things. really, the higher order functions are like problem

solving. that's more what dr. amen was referring to. >> larry: when you go nuts, dr. pratt, if you have 20% memory? >> when you're overloaded, you would have to be doing a lot of stress management. >> larry: what about a genius, though? >> genius is made up of so many different elements. to be op tim alli functioning, you need to make sure that you are taking proper care of yourself, your mental -- your hard drive is clear. and trauma is so powerful in disrupting memory. most people have a lot of untreated and even unrecognized trauma. >> i think this is a very important point. in my world i noticed increasingly trauma is the problem of our time. it shrinks your hypo campus. >> larry: trauma -- >> trauma not meaning physical trauma. i assume you mean interpersonal trauma.

physical abuse, mental abuse, has dramatic effects on the brain and there's lots of information how the brain disregulates, disassociates, how the right brain manages these things versus the left. that's a massively growing area. >> even at ucla, they have recently determined that if you have one trauma, there's a permanent, unless you take it out, 20% elevation in the inflammation of the sitokins in our body. that leads to illness. if you have untreated trauma, you definitely want to get it treated. >> larry: do you study alzheimer's? >> i have in school. but i've never done alzheimer's personally. >> larry: what happens with the brain of -- >> with alzheimer's? new research is always coming about for a while that we thought it had to do with the plaques and tangles. but i think we're starting to see that, you know, and there is some conflict within the scientific community that maybe not specifically alzheimer's,

but dementia. some people would say this is a normal function of living a very long life. and that this is a pathology. >> we see in brain scans the back half of the brain in people with alzheimer's disease completely deteriorates. the nfl players, though, they don't have alzheimer's disease as a group. it's frontal lobe that's damaged. >> larry: what is dementia? >> dementia is the big category. that's where you lose cognitive function that's abnormal for your age. alzheimer's disease is one of the types. the football dementia that we talked about, that's another one of the types. there's blood vessel dementia, where you have a stroke, aids related dementia. i wrote a book called "preventing alz i'mers." prevent the risk factors. did you know obesity is a rick factor. the more fat on your body, the worse it is. depression is a risk factor.

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>> larry: neurosurgeons with the health science center are on the front lines of an experimental approach for the treatment of obesity. it targets the brain and not the belly. here to talk about it is dr. julian bails, neurosurgeon and

chairman of the department of neurosurgery at west virginia university. what have we discovered? explain what this bbs is, doctor. >> well, this is inserting electrodes deep in the brain in the hypo thalamus, the part that controls our appetite. our neurosurgeons have really spearheaded this fda approved study to see if this would possibly have some benefit for patients with morebid obesity. that their life expectancy will be affected. >> larry: how does it work? >> well, it works by electrodes being placed on both sides of the brain, into the hypothalamus, one into the part that is the center that makes you feel full. the other is the appetite center where your drive to eating is. so these electrodes have contacts on them that go through these areas. and then a pacemaker type generator is inserted under the skin, and from that, we're able

to change the settings, and try to see if we can affect the appetite drive these patients have. >> larry: what have you learned so far? >> well, we've learned in the first few series, the first series we've done, that the procedure can be done safely. we've learned that we don't think we're having side effects. and that we can affect the urge to eat, decrease the urge. we're looking at it being well tolerated. but the real -- the jury's still out, larry, we don't have all the results yet. we're now working on trying to refine the settings to see if we can get the weight loss that we and the patients desire. >> larry: why only very obese people? >> well, this is the way the study was set up. it's patients who have failed all medical diets, patients who have failed gastric or stomach bypass surgery, patients who have undergone psychiatric evaluation. and again, their life expectancy is significantly reduced if they

can't get this morbid obesity under control. >> larry: we're going to do a lot more investigation tonight. can i ask you a couple questions about concussions? >> yes, sir. >> larry: west virginia has a prominent football team. now in the nfl. and what is a concussion, what causes it? >> well, concussion is either the head gets hit or maybe the head gets moved back and forth violently, such that the brain moves inside the skull. our brain floats in this bath of fluid, cerebrospinal fluid, and i think that causes a tearing of fibers, rotation of the brain causes tearing of the fibers. so the brain is injured. most of the time it covers. but in some cases we're finding a genetic predisposition, and it can lead to long-term problems in a minority of players. >> larry: could a problem be in the helmet?

>> well, the helmets have undergone a lot of changes and improvements, and helmet design is important. but in my opinion, helmets aren't the whole answer. i think we need to work to take the head impact, the motion of the brain inside the skull out of the game. >> larry: does it -- in the nfl, they're fearing it may shorten life. can it? >> well, you know, we have autopsied quite a few athletes who have had a shortened life because of this syndrome. again, i support football. i think it's america's greatest sport. we want to make it safer. in certain cases there have been long-term detrimental effects of multiple concussions. >> larry: thank you, doctor. we'll be calling on you again. fascinating study. chairman of the department at west virginia university school of medicine. back with our panel after this.

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>> larry: we're back with our panel, dr. drew pinsky, cara santa maria, dr. amen, brain imaging specialist and psychologist dr. george pratt. what did you make of that study they're doing about that obesity study? >> i think it's very interesting and psychiatrist and neurosurgeons are starting to work together again and planting these electrodes in the brain using imaging for things like resistant depression, obsessive compulsive disorder and morbidly obese. it's exciting and going to be much better than the psycho surgery, in the 1940s and '50s. >> larry: what do you think of it, cara? >> i think it's really interesting. and i think where probably the research is limited is the problem of knowing why certain people eat, or certain people

abuse drugs. we like to put them all under an umbrella of, there's something wrong with their dopamine system. these people specifically, you know, don't get enough neurotransmitter that tells them that they're full, or their stoming is not telling them the right signals. but, you know, everybody's pathology is very different. and until i think that we can accurately diagnose why people have these addictive behaviors, it's going to be difficult because we're going to be working with a one size fits all treatment. >> let me say, as a follow-on to that, i do a lot of people who have lost all the weight and they are not right emotionally after they lose the weight. there's all kinds of reasons the weight was there and those things often have not been dealt with. >> don't they become more addicted? >> probably alcoholism is way up. the way the alcohol gets to the brain is much different. >> there's challenges even with depression, when you lose 100 pounds, and you think, you should really be doing well. >> larry: we have a facebook

question posted on our facebook page. do we know what part of the brain causes obsessive compulsive behavior? >> there's a lot of imaging work with that. what we see in the prefrontal cortex, rather than being low, what we see in impulsive disorders, the prefrontal cortex works way too hor with people with ocd. some of the medicines we use or therapies we use actually calm down the prefrontal cortex, so people don't think about things over and over again. >> larry: we've posted to the "larry king" facebook page asking for questions on the brain. 12 years ago i got into an accident in the snow. i don't drive in the snow anymore. i'm a terrified passenger if it's snowing. i've become paralyzed. i cry. i know it's irrational. what's going on with my brain? cara? >> it sounds like it could be a

post-traumatic stress problem based on that accident. >> larry: what is post-traumatic stress? something happens to you and -- >> and you experience hyper vigilance, heightened levels of stress and you have behaviors in your life that are so difficult, that they make your life difficult to navigate after that. we see it obviously in wartime. after trauma, abuse, rape. and after things like car accidents. >> larry: we didn't hear it until vietnam. >> it was shell shock. it had different names. we still -- >> one thing about this case, ptsd can create all of those symptoms, as well as triggering panic attacks. you have one trial learning when you're in a situation that's highly negative and you imprint on that and then you have a problem driving in snow because you have an association. >> larry: how do you get rid of it? >> the desensitization method. >> but it locks things in. the parts of the brain is walled off from other parts. we have to function flexibility as an entire brain.

but traumas lock off parts from the part of the brain that's conscious. >> even with scans with people with ptsd, you can see the frontal cortex inactive. so we can see the correlation with what they can do to desensitize people. >> larry: we'll be back with our remaining moments. don't go away. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] every day thousands of people are switching from tylenol® to advil. to learn more go to takeadvil.com. the first 500,000 people get a free bottle. take action. take advil®.

>> larry: we only have a few minutes left. i won't get personal on this show, but i'll tell a true quick story. i had heart surgery, i'm in new york, in bed, post-surgery. the famous heart surgeon on the front of "the new york times" magazine. into the room comes a man who says he's a brain surgeon at the hospital. he said i don't mind him, he's a great guy, getting all this attention. but heart surgeons are plumbers. they do plumbing. but i'm a brain surgeon. one movie my hae of my hand coue

your life forever. that story is true. that happened. but the heart does command us, doesn't it? >> the prbrain tells the heart what to do. >> they work together. >> larry: but if there is a malfunctioning -- >> you're right. i know what you're saying. we're all into our terminologies here. the fact is, what you're saying is, when we have a deep drive and a desire to be with somebody, that's what -- >> larry: i can't talk you out of love, can i? >> i love you with all my brain. saying i love you with all my heart doesn't work. >> larry: can you talk someone out of a relationship? >> not using the literal mind. someone suffering from love pain or anguish, these methods work. >> larry: cara, why did you decide to make a career of this? >> it's the only option i feel like i had. when i first started school -- >> larry: it had to be a brain?

>> it had to be. it's the most interesting thing in the world. my mother's an educator, my father's an engineer. i had to. i started in music. and then i went into psychology. and as i was studying psychology and philosophy, i decided i n d decided i needed to know more about the organic. >> anthropology, psychology, philosophy, are all coming under the are you brick of neurosciences. >> how the brain can change, rewire itself. a doctor who i do research with, he had patients with phantom leg pain. he developed a mirror, he would insert one hand, the intact arm, the person would see the other arm as intact, and it rewired the brain within minutes. i love neuroplanty. >> i think the brain is the hardware of the soul. who you really are has to do