Right Brain Consciousness

A blog friend of mine recently told me about a video that I think many here at Docudharma might find interesting. The speaker is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who teaches at the Indiana University School of Medicine. After years of studying the brain and its chemistry, she had a stoke, and learned some amazing things from the experience. She recently gave a speech titled “Stroke of Insight” at a TED conference where it is summarized like this:

This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness — of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

(The speech is about 18 minutes. But its well worth the time)

For those of you who might not be able to watch the whole video, Dr. Taylor had an stroke that shut down most of the functioning of her left brain. Here’s how she describes the functioning of the left and right brain:

Our right hemisphere is all about this present moment. It’s all about right here right now. Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems. And then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like. What this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.

My left hemisphere is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it’s all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment. And start picking details and more details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information. Associates it with everything in the past we’ve ever learned and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It’s that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world…But perhaps most important, it’s that little voice that says to me, “I am. I am.” And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me “I am,” I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you.

As Dr. Taylor was struggling for survival as a result of this stroke and the complete shut-down of her left brain capacity, she experienced a consciousness of herself disappearing into the whole of the universe. Here’s how she described it:

When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life, and my mind is now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Harmonic. I remember thinking there’s no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But I realized “But I’m still alive! I’m still alive and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I’m still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana.” I picture a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

Ever since I read the book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image I have been interested in the balance (or lack thereof) in the functioning or our left and right brains. It is clear to me that in this white Northern European culture that we experience today, the left brain has been prized and holds the throne. But at what cost?

In the book linked above, Shlain hypothesizes that ancient cultures depended more on right brain functioning prior to the advent of written language. I’m not sure I agree with everything he writes, but it does seem plausible to me that an emphasis on the written word would exercise the use of the left brain and lead to its development.

In thinking about all this, I remembered an article written by Barbara Ehrenreich titled How we learned to stop having fun. She demonstrates that beginning in the 1600’s, the European world has been plagued by depression.

Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Lionel Trilling wrote in 1972, “that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, something like a mutation in human nature took place.” This change has been called the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the inner self and since it can be assumed that all people, in all historical periods, have some sense of selfhood and capacity for subjective reflection, we are really talking about an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous “I”, separate from, and largely distrustful of, “them”.

…

So highly is the “inner self” honoured within our own culture that its acquisition seems to be an unquestionable mark of progress – a requirement, as Trilling called it, for “the emergence of modern European and American man”. It was, no doubt, this sense of individuality and personal autonomy, “of an untrammeled freedom to ask questions and explore”, as the historian Yi-Fu Tuan put it, that allowed men such as Martin Luther and Galileo to risk their lives by defying Catholic doctrine. Which is preferable: a courageous, or even merely grasping and competitive, individualism, versus a medieval (or, in the case of non-European cultures, “primitive”) personality so deeply mired in community and ritual that it can barely distinguish a “self”? From the perspective of our own time, the choice, so stated, is obvious. We have known nothing else.

Whatever the cause (perhaps the invention of the printing press in 1439 and the availability of the written word to a more broad audience?), it does seem that our sense of individuality has been granted ascendancy over our sense of connectedness. Perhaps, as the Native People of the Americas have been predicting for years in the coming together of the Eagle (representing the rational and material – or left brain) and the Condor (representing the intuitive and mystical – or right brain), our next evolutionary development will be the balancing of these forces.