Science - no fiction

During the past two years or so, I’ve been reading in parallel two kinds of books. One was rather metaphysical (mainly Florian Tathagata’s trilogy, “Being”, “Given” and “Space”) and the other one popular medicine (e.g. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My stroke of insight” and Norman Doidge’s “The brain that changes itself”).

To my bewilderment, I saw that these two kinds of books were entirely complementary. Not only did I find in the second reasons for the statements I encountered in the first, but also in the first exact descriptions of biological facts referred to in the second. This made me realize that the way we perceive the world has broader biological base than we are used to think.

As you probably already know, the brain has two hemispheres, the left and the right. These two communicate through an “information transfer lane”, i.e. a large concentration of nervous tissue that connects them, called the “corpus callosum”.

From the corpus callosum, information received through our senses is transferred to the gyrus cinguli which is part of our paleomammalean or limbic system. Now what this limbic system does is it attaches feelings to the information. That’s its job. And it does so before information is transferred to the external lobes where our higher cognitive abilities are to be found. This in simple English means that each stimulus that enters our brain is by default ascribed a feeling first. In this sense, we are feeling beings that think rather than thinking beings that feel, as is the common perception.

An important feature of the limbic system is that, although it operates throughout our life-time, it does not mature. Its neurons, just like most of the brain’s neurons, contrary to body cells, are not replaced. This biological fact explains why each time that our emotional buttons are pressed, we react as when we were 2 years of age. Luckily, the cells of the external lobes do mature and can recognize new information when they see it. This recognition ignites a process of comparison/contrast with information recalled from our memory, which leads to the evaluation of the situation at hand and (hopefully) the choice of a less emotional reaction to it.

Now the left and the right hemispheres of our brain are not in symmetry. The right hemisphere is designed to perceive things as they are connected to each other. This means that for our right hemisphere there is no time other than the current moment, which it sees as a huge collage of impressions and stimuli. As the borders and lines between things are blurred, everything is perceived as connected to each other, i.e. as a one and only thing. Mirror neurons, which enable us to put ourselves in another’s shoes or make us aware of another’s emotions, are also located here.

The left hemisphere, on the other hand, processes information in an entirely different way. It literally dismantles the general impression of the right hemisphere into details, which then links to details from the moment before. By organizing details in such a linear sequence, it creates the concept of time, dividing it into past, present and future. This hemisphere tells us for example that this must come before that and forecasts what is to come. In fact, our left hemisphere speaks to us incessantly, as it hosts the centers for understanding (Wernicke’s area) and producing language (Broca’s area), reminding us who we are and how we are connected to the world outside. Thus, it is the center of our personality.

Our brain’s left hemisphere also creates loops or mechanisms of automatic responses to stimuli, channeling our behavior towards ever the same reactions, based on projections of what feels safe (in this sense, we are the figments of our left hemisphere's imagination). Moreover, it is the part of our brain that categorizes information in every possible way, even quality-wise, including what we like and dislike. It is thus the seat of judgment and analysis - two functions that make it constantly compare us with everyone and everything we run into, keeping us informed of the parts in which, to its judgment, we excel or are lacking.

And while our left hemisphere is responsible for understanding the structure and the meaning of words, our right one is responsible for understanding non-verbal communication, e.g. the tone of the voice we hear, facial expressions or body language. Our right hemisphere understands the big picture and evaluates the consistency of an action as a whole. Similarly, while our left hemisphere perceives the boundaries of our body, our right one understands the place of our body in the space around it.

The invitation to be as space, located at the top of my blog’s right column, which is inspired by Florian Tathagata’s teachings, is actually an invitation to “step to the right”, so to say, in other words to commit more to the way that our brain’s right hemisphere perceives the world. Since it can’t speak (no language centre there), its way is the way of intuition, of the whole picture, of attention to the totality of everything instead of to individual details. Essentially, then, the invitation is to consciously shift our attention from the narrow focus of our brain’s left hemisphere to the way of the right.