The Battle of the Brains

Posted on January 14, 2012 by Rob

16 December: Please read the follow-up post, Were the Pyramids Built by Aliens, after you read this post. You may be surprised by the answer!

I received a much appreciated article length reply to a recent post from Neil Slade, so drop everything, go to A Fresh Look at the Split Brain and the Frontal Lobes, scroll down to the comments and read what he has to say.This post is only randomly connected to his comment, so don’t consider it a summary or a critique – just vaguely connected thoughts.

He starts off with a title, RIGHT BRAIN versus LEFT BRAIN, hence the title of today’s post. However, the battle I’m referring to is the battle that goes on between separate brains – yours and mine – and how to perhaps end it. Neil writes:

As humans figured out how to make better spears, armor, and other technology that allowed small numbers of people to control vastly larger numbers of people and creatures, suddenly, the advantages of left brain mechanics looked mighty tempting.

What I can’t understand and what nobody has adequately explained to me is what motivated people to invent weapons of mass destruction in the first place. What instigated this disastrous shift from right brain to left brain thinking and how did we function before we became so entrenched in our left brains?

In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes speculates fairly convincingly that until about 3000 years ago, individual consciousness in humans didn’t exist. Until then, our right brains ruled and we did things unconsciously. Just as our hearts beat and our blood circulates without our conscious intervention, we ate, slept, built stuff and even created elaborate myths and legends without even thinking about it. He cites early versions of texts like the Iliad that are written very differently than more recent versions or more recent additions to prove his point.

There are holes in his theory and it remains a controversial one, but that may have something to do with his definition of consciousness and perhaps a lack of recognition of a transition period or the possibility that just as a few people today have “paranormal” abilities, a handful of people back then may have been as freakishly self-centred as we are today. At any rate, my cursory reading of Jaynes’ opened up worlds of possibility to me.

Let’s take the pyramids, for example. The rational explanations for how they were designed and built are pathetic at best, especially when you consider the weight of the stones and the consistent geometrical patterns that occur in pyramids throughout the world. It is more rational to believe that they were built under the supervision of aliens than it is to believe that some big honchos got their engineers to design them and then forced tens of thousands of slaves to build them. Think about it. Wouldn’t ten thousand slaves require a hundred thousand soldiers to keep them in line?

aliens in egypt?

Aliens in Egypt?

It’s also more rational to believe that left brain (or left brain style) reptilians who had already messed up their own planet came here and messed with our DNA either just for fun, as an experiment, or because they wanted to dominate us and use us for their own nefarious purposes than it is to believe that the right brain – left brain switch just happened all by itself.

If I remember correctly, Julian Jaynes speculated that a cataclysmic event forced the switch, but I don’t buy that. The right brain is far more equipped to deal with the unexpected than the left brain, which can only operate from one known to the other.

Spider webDoes it sound implausible that the pyramids could have been built without extensive planning and design work or that an epic poem or song could arise spontaneously? All you have to do is watch a spider build a web or listen to a bird sing a song and you’ll see that it’s entirely possible. Is it possible for a bunch of people to work together in harmony without rules and regulations imposed from above? Think about the incredible achievements of an colony of ants or bees and you’ll see they are far more efficient workers than we are. Speaking of bees, did you know that they are suffering from “bee colony collapse disorder” thanks to our wonderful pesticides and other chemical goodies? That’s the most plausible theory, anyway.

At the beginning of this post I promised you a possible way to end the battle of the (individual) brains. Well, here it is. I try to make it a point to insert “in my opinion” in all my, well, opinions, no matter how dear to my heart they are. For example, it hurts when I stub my toe and I form a firm opinion that the stone is a more solid object than my toe and is therefore able to hurt me. However, as Einstein pointed out, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.” On a molecular level, there isn’t much substance to either my toe or a stone.

A big termite mound

A BIG termite mound

When you read that I found it more plausible that aliens helped make the pyramids above, did you heartily agree with me, laugh and cancel your subscription to my newsletter or something in between? Had it been something in between, we could have started a dialogue. It wouldn’t be as good a solution as simply knowing, like mound building termites know exactly what to do even when they’re not within shouting distance of each other, but it would be a start in the right direction.

When we realise that our opinions and those of others are just opinions and nothing more, we become humble and open minded. This automatically puts us in a cooperative frame of mind and perhaps, if we practice it enough, we can shift back into having a symbiotic relationship with one another instead of fighting all the time.

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Beyond the Split Brain

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Rob

I received some very interesting correspondence from Neil Slade after last week’s post. For one thing, he reminded me about the Curious Case of Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who had the “great good fortune” of being able to observe her own stroke in progress. I’ve tacked on her TED talk about it below, noticing that over one million seven hundred thousand people have viewed it. Obviously, the split brain is a subject of interest and her story is so extraordinary, it’s worth saving and listening to from time to time. In a nutshell, her stroke virtually destroyed her entire left brain and she came to the realisation that:

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. And right here, right now, all we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect. We are whole. And we are beautiful.

This wasn’t my first introduction to Jill Bolte Taylor and I mentioned her in my Sea of Joy chapter, The Split Brain, which, thanks to Iain McGilchrist, now needs further revision. One thing JBT taught me was that my attempts to get a nice balanced view of the brain were doomed to failure. Worse, as McGilchrist points out, the brain is not symmetrical. I love symmetry, so that is an unsettling revelation.

Anyway, as I wrote in The Split Brain:

The contradictory characteristics of brain behaviour have been a source of great embarrassment to some researchers, who have clung tenaciously to the idea that the brain is a compartmentalised construction and nothing more.

My concluding words were, “It is here that we have to leave the lump of grey matter behind and start surfing the Holographic Brain“. If a holographic brain sounds like a bizarre concept to you, please read the entry, because you’ll need to be able to accept it as a possibility before you move on to Thomas Campbell and his Big TOE. Campbell’s TOE (Theory of Everything) is that we live in a digital world or rather, all our perceived realities are digital realities. The more I listen to him, the more compelling his arguments become. For an introduction to Tom Campbell and his Big TOE, read my blog entry, Thomas Campbell,  William Blake and John Lennon: A Strange Symbiosis and watch the video attached to it.

And that brings me to the point of this entry. Note how I wrote “the more  compelling his arguments become” above. To “argue” is a distinctly left brain activity because it’s verbal in nature. There’s a huge problem with any verbal “argument” (whether benign or hostile): arguments are not grounded in reality or, as Iaian McGilchrist pointed out about the left brain, yield “a world that is ultimately lifeless.” Campbell presents his arguments in order to help us begin the process of disentangling ourselves from the narrow scope of our left brain, intellectual thinking processes and imagine alternate realities. That process of imagination is a right brain activity and hence is more holistic, balanced and ultimately realistic.

Personally, I think amygdala tickling and other visualisation techniques work simply because they are imaginative techniques. Whether or not the science is precisely correct is beside the point. The science helps, because we are so trapped in our illusory Newtonian, mechanistic world, we need an escape route and a compelling argument provides that route. Jill Taylor Bolte was lucky because she was a true believer in the world of matter and her stroke was a “stroke of insight” into the infinitely larger world of the “right brain” (in quotes because that is an illusory concept itself).  Most of the rest of us have to take a slower route, since our “left brain” is like a magnet pulling us back to earth.

Tom Campbell is interesting because he has explored many worlds, but doesn’t view any of them as particularly important. What he stresses again and again is the importance of LOVE as the ultimate reality that animates all temporary realities. As Walt Whitman wrote and is echoed by both Campbell and in JTB’s words quoted above:

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love

(more than) Enough said. Enjoy the video:

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A Fresh Look at the Split Brain and the Frontal Lobes

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Rob


An old friend indirectly led me to the video I’ve embedded at the bottom of the page. It’s a very easy to follow cartoon version of a lecture by Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. When I listened to it for the third time a few minutes ago to get quotes for this article, I found myself transcribing the whole text: it was that good. Mercifully, I’ll refrain from making you read the whole thing, since watching it is much more entertaining and, I think, enlightening, since the cartoons engage both hemispheres of the brain.

We need to use both sides of the brain

Both hemispheres are important

McGilchrist jumps right in and addresses the issue of the “debunking” of the split brain theory, saying that “the division of the brain is something neuroscientists don’t like to talk about any more”; the reason being that it simply isn’t true that one side of the brain is solely associated with reason and the other strictly limited to emotion. After that fact was established, “in a fit of despair” people gave up talking about it. Nonetheless, he argues, “the brain is profoundly divided” and, more worryingly, continues to become more lopsided, until today we live in a left-brain dominated world.

What’s wrong with that? Well, as McGilchrist points out, the right hemisphere “has a disposition for the living rather than the mechanical”, can see things in context, understands metaphor and can grasp implicit meaning. The left hemisphere, on the other hand, “yields a world that is ultimately lifeless.”

After re-introducing us to the split brain, Dr. McGilchrist starts talking about the frontal lobes. This was where his talk got really interesting for me, because I’ve had a frontal lobes dilemma lately. Based on my experience with “amygdala tickling”, I had come to the conclusion that frontal lobe activation automatically made one more compassionate and loving. However, neuroscientists refer to it as the “executive center” and see it as being impartial or amoral. McGilchrist seems to agree, saying that “the purpose of the frontal lobes is to inhibit the rest of the brain.” It stands “back in time and space from the immediacy of the experience.” This results in a decision maker who is able to do either of two things:

  1. It can “outwit the other party” (he calls this the Machiavellian mind).
  2. It can empathise (he refers to this as the Erasmian mind).

This came as a revelation to me and pieces of so many puzzles started falling into place – so many puzzles, in fact, I don’t even want to go into them all here or you’ll die of boredom. However, I do want to mention this (from another article I’m working on):

I learned amygdala tickling from Neil Slade‘s website. He emphasises stimulating both hemispheres by visualising tickling both the right and left amygdala. Most meditation techniques emphasise detaching yourself from your habitual “mind chatter” (a left brain activity) which is always good advice and probably helps bridge the gap between hemispheres, but personally, I think we need to make more active efforts to redress the imbalance. As Dr. McGilchrist says, the left hemisphere is “entirely self consistent largely because it’s made itself so” and “it’s very vocal on its own behalf” while “the right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice.”

Why is this so important? Please watch this video to the end and you’ll see why. Don’t panic – it’s only about 10 minutes long and is very entertaining:

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Merry Christmas from Sihanoukville Cambodia

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Posted on December 24, 2011 by Rob | Leave a comment

The Amazing and Amusing Amygdala

Posted on December 17, 2011 by Rob

Forgive my title: I couldn’t resist the amazing and amusing amygdala alliteration opportunity

The only thing I don’t like about Neil Slade’s voluminous Amazing Brain website is the sheer size of it. There are so many gems hidden in there, but without taking the time to wade through all the stuff he’s collected over the years, many of the best of them remain as dormant as the average brain. Fortunately, now and then Neil plucks one or two diamonds out of the mine and offers them to his newsletter readers.

Such was the case last week when Neil provided links to two articles by Marie-Louise Oosthuysen de Gutierrez. In the first article, she writes about Wisdom and Amygdala Clicking. She begins by defining wisdom as “good judgement, empathetic understanding, psychological insight, emotional regulation and discerning and shrewd advice.” She took this definition from the “Berlin Wisdom Paradigm”, something I had never heard of before. I looked it up and found a “Wisdom Quiz” which I took and scored a relatively high 4.3 on. I may have cheated a little, though, since it was pretty easy to detect the answers they were looking for. She then goes on to convincingly explain in neurological terms how amygdala clicking can aid in the attaining of wisdom.

The other article, Frontal Lobe Stimulation, starts with a detailed explanation of Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, which was the basis of TDA Lingo’s theories. In it, she makes the connection between wisdom and stimulation of the frontal lobes via amygdala clicking, saying that in “the absence of an emergency, the prefrontal cortex has the capacity to modify the response of the amygdalae.” What I found most interesting about this sentence was that, intentionally or unintentionally, de Gutierrez was saying that the prefrontal cortex, not the “I” who imagines it is the boss is the one who does the modifying.

Somewhere in the mish-mash of neural activity in our brains is the capacity to make conscious choices. That’s why, after reading Neil Slade’s and TDA Lingo’s “far fetched” theories, I was able to make a decision to try amygdala clicking. What is amusing to me is that, as far as I can tell, the response that follows a successful “foward click” into frontal lobes nirvana, is no more conscious than the reaction that follows a backwards click. Let’s say I didn’t cheat and my 4.3 score indicates that “I” am a relatively wise person. Am I really? Why, for instance, do I feel empathetic when I do? Empathy is not an emotion you can fake and it is often contrary to the much vaunted survival instinct. It just happens, just as an outburst of anger just happens.

Good judgement, too, does not come as a result of some complex intellectual exercise, it seems to come from elsewhere. It just happens. In my case, at least, it often happens in spite of myself. Sometimes, when I’m really “switched on,” I do things that are contrary to what my intellectual perception of “good judgement” is and they turn out to be “my” wisest decisions. On other occasions, I’ve seen “miracles” occur that definitely fall outside the realm of neurology.

We live in interesting times. Between the successfully manufactured fear that fuels the War on Terror, the fear of global warming and the fear of economic collapse, the American collective amygdalae in particular are really working overtime. Some, like yours truly, believe all of these fears are manufactured ones. Who orchestrates them I can’t say for sure, but one thing I strongly believe is that the solution is individually and collectively simple. See the amygdalae for what they are and discover how easy it is to make the simple decision to flip the switch from fear to freedom. That is the only decision you have to make. After that, just let the “still, small voice” of wisdom whisper in your ear.

How to Activate Your Frontal Lobes

I hope I’m not being presumptuous here by offering a brief “How to” manual and I cringe at the thought of sounding preachy, but for what they’re worth, here are some ideas for frontal lobe activation:

Remember the title above, Frontal Lobe Stimulation? That’s a little different from amygdala tickling and may be closer to the mark. Tickling the amygdala with a feather worked brilliantly for me, but since my conversation with Neil, I’ve been rethinking things, as, I believe, he has. Instead of imaginatively switching the negative energy of a “clicked back” amygdala forward, I’ve just been either turning off the switch or, when its voice is too loud, turning down the dial. By reducing amygdaloid activity, I can let my frontal lobes (or perhaps the non-neurological intelligence that runs their show) take over without conscious interference.

However you choose to do it or whatever method you use, the important thing, I think, is to create a space between consciousness and amygdaloid activity. Ramana Maharishi suggested doing this by asking yourself, “Who am I?”  whenever thoughts cropped up. Mantra repetition also seems to “short circuit” amygdaloid activity. Visualisation has the added benefit of being non-verbal.

I believe it’s only when the pesky voices that come from the Dante’s Inferno of the reptilian brain are stilled that we begin to see the Light of wisdom. Do whatever it takes, but “just do it.” You’ll be glad you did – and so will those around you. Who knows? You just might save the world.

 

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