I would like to begin this post by
reiterating that I don’t have a formal education in any of this. I have a formal education that scratches the
surface of Faulkner and Austen and Chaucer but the only Science classes I ever
took in college were Weather and Climate and the equivalent of Geology
101. Even then I got B’s. As a result, when I pretend to speak forth
about brain chemistry, evolution, models of consciousness, and comparative
religion I must concede that none of my information comes from a lecturer and
none of my “credentials” (which I do not possess) are backed up by test scores.
That said,
I don’t think it’s a fatal problem, because in place of lecturers I’m getting
the scoop from actual neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers of science, and
religion scholars as they break it themselves in a bunch of books. The question is whether my interpretations
are in any way credible I suppose, and yeah, I certainly would be more reliable
if I was pursuing a PhD (or even a BA) in something scientific, but for our
purposes I think we should be ok. I can
deal with books, and I can understand theory if it’s presented to me in a
jargon-free (or jargon-light) fashion, and so essentially what I’m trying to
say is that while I think I can hold my head high as a messenger, I would also
highly recommend that anyone who wants to know what’s really going on read the
actual books.
I
eventually want to get into Jill Bolte-Taylor and the awe-inspiring account of
her stroke and rehabilitation in her book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain
Scientist’s Personal Journey, but first let’s talk a little bit (and only
the very littlest bit) about the human brain.
The human brain is incredibly complicated and I could go on at length
about how little I know about it but I’ve undercut myself enough already so let’s
just jump right in. Asymmetry and
specialization of function. In general
you have to be careful about attributing too much specialization to particular
areas of the brain (this part controls love and this part determines whether or
not you think Seinfeld is funny!) because apparently there is a lot of
coordination between the different parts, but there are some areas
neuroscientists are comfortable assigning relatively specific duties. You hear a lot of stuff bantered around about
left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking, and again, while it’s important
not to get too carried away, there does appear to be a mechanical difference in
what’s going on in different sides of your head.
The left
side of the brain is often characterized as being the “rational brain,” whereas
the right side is known as the “emotional” or “feeling” brain. I’m not going to adopt either of those labels
wholesale (and it seems as if you should be wary of anyone who does), but (and
here I pilfer from Wikipedia, Jesus Christ) the left brain does seem to deal
more with logically constructed systems such as grammar, vocabulary and
precise, formula-based arithmetic. In
other words, prepositional phrases and execution of Pythagorean Theorem are
fiefdoms of the left-hemisphere of your brain.
While the
left-brain can be implicated as a detail-seeking, if
A-is-taller-than-B-and-B-is-taller-than-C-then-A-must-be-taller-than-C type of
logic-problem solving linear processing unit, you wouldn’t be terribly wrong in
offering your right-brain a more finger paints and fuzzy-teddy-bear type of
role in your experience of the world. It
seems like the right side of your head takes in sensory input, turns waves of
light into colors and rippling particles into sound, whereas the left side of
your head analyzes those colors and sounds and tags them as yellow or music. Actually don’t quote me on that, but here’s
something: a discussion of music itself might be instructive. Say you’re listening to somebody playing the
guitar. Essentially, striking the
strings agitates particles in the air which agitate surrounding particles with
agitate surrounding particles which eventually strike your eardrum. Those vibrations are somehow translated into
packets of information that shoot up into your brain which you then experience
as whatever you experience a guitar to sound like. The experience of the guitar, the pure,
untouched sound (and to a degree the accompanying emtions) is managed more by
the right side of your brain, whereas the process of labeling a particular
sound as an A-chord or another as an example of post-industrial speed metal
should be credited more to you left brain.
It’s way
freakier than this as we’ll see in a little bit, but in very simple terms, you
can think of the right brain as providing an intuitive, textured map of the
external world, sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, the big sloppy picture, if
you will, while the left brain labors to cut it up into discrete, measurable
pieces, and in a normal person both sides function as a seamless,
interdependent whole to produce the moving picture of reality with which we are
all accustomed to interacting.
What
happens, however, when one side goes offline?
Just such a thing happened to Jill Bolte Taylor, national spokesperson
for the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource center (where she encourages people to
donate their brains to research (when they don’t need them anymore of course)),
and if you want to hear her TED talk then you can click here. I watched the talk and immediately went to
amazon to buy her book, which was about as inspiring as you could want a book
to be but for the purpose of our discussion of Buddhist enlightenment I will
restrain myself to a brief analysis of the things she experienced when her brain
was running only on the right side.
Unfortunately
I will need to consult some notes first so we’ll have to wait until next
time. Hopefully I have notes to consult
somewhere.
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