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Dr. Dirt
March 2010

My Left Brain Doesn't Know
What My Right Brain is Doing

Dr. Dirt is confused…..or, well, maybe not…..or then again

I had the good fortune in January to be granted the time to catch up on some reading. The first books on my list were in fairly different subject areas, or so I thought:

• The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle's best-seller on self-awareness and living in the moment;

•My Stroke of Insight by neurophysiologist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, who describes her massive stroke at age 37 and its aftermath, from the standpoint of an expert in brain anatomy and function; and

• How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, which attempts to explain how we make decisions, and includes many engaging examples of extreme decision-making venues, from Tom Brady completing a pass under a blitz, to the mind methods of a champion poker player, to stock market pundits' amazing ability to predict wrong outcomes in spite of mountains of data indicating the opposite.
The threads connecting these wide-ranging topics are commonalities in how we process thought and in brain structure and function. Each book is focused, in its own way, on the distinct workings of the left brain and the right brain, and on the linkages between the two.

So what's up with left and right brains? Aren't the two halves just mirror images, like most of the rest of our symmetrical bodies?  Well, no.  The left hemisphere deals with the more cognitive and rational areas of thought, such as language, math, linear thinking, logic, cause and effect, organizing into sequences and categories, and the boundary between the self and everything else. The left, in short, is rational, analytical and individualizing.

In contrast, the right brain is characterized by emotion, intuition, associative and non-linear thought, creativity, spontaneity, imagery, and a more universal rather than individual view of the world. The right, in short, is touchy-feely and tends toward the universal.

So what do these three authors have to say about the brain? Tolle, examining the more spiritual areas of experience and thought, views reason and rationality as clearly important, helping us satisfy our basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, etc. But beyond basic needs, our rational brains are overrated and in fact are often counterproductive. Ultimately, our reasoning minds divorce us from reality. In our need to explain, remember, plan, etc., we lose track of our big-picture relationships with the world and with life. We get so caught up in events of the past (why did/didn't I do that?) and plans for the future (where do I want to go, how will I get there?) that we are no longer conscious of the present. Even when we manage to slow down our actions, our left-brain flywheel keeps the thought engine spinning. To be living in the moment, we need to stop the flywheel and bring the engine of past-future to rest in the present.

This is precisely what happened to Jill Taylor when she had a massive stroke in the left side of her brain at age 37. As blood from ruptured vessels closed down parts of her left brain, she lost the abilities to verbalize her problem, to punch a sequence of long-memorized numbers into the phone, and to follow the simple steps to make a phone call to a friend. She had a fundamental grasp that something was going very wrong and that the phone would help her. She felt distress and anxiety, and she felt she needed to take action, but the series of actions needed could not be pulled together. She felt very strongly that something needed to be done, but it took her several hours of dogged persistence to find a phone number (one she had called hundreds of times in the past) and to dial it. And when she finally reached her clinic, she could only make random noises. Nor could she understand what the person on the other end was saying. However, on both ends of the phone line, understanding and concern and distress and the need for action were clearly communicated. She was not able to string together the logical steps to fix her distress, nor could she verbalize it or do the math to dial a familiar number, but right-brain intuition, emotion, and imagery were all present, and sufficed.

In short, her logical left-brain activity was severed, but the intuitive right brain kept pushing (though irrationally) toward action and success. And this concept covers a lot of the conclusions in Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide.  The left brain's job is to sift through all the data and arrive at a conclusion, a decision. However, if this occurs in a strictly rational vacuum, the permutations of choice can be almost endless, and a purely analytical decision might take forever.  This won't work well for Tom Brady as three steroid-laden linebackers close in, or for an airline pilot at two thousand feet involved in a unique engine failure. The more intuitive, holistic part of the brain (right hemisphere) grasps the situation as a whole and acts before left-brain reason can reach a conclusion.  Too much thinking would lead to a bruising "sack" or a crashed airliner.

Of course, the scalpel slicing the hemispheres cuts both ways. In the absence of logic, language, sequence, and personal boundaries, the right brain on solo will lurch about without direction - very creatively perhaps, but without guidance from the past or care for the future, and without the boundaries that create individual separateness. In the total absence of left-brain function, the right brain may run amok. Or alternatively a "quiet" left brain may allow a burst of right-brain creativity, inner bliss, and a sense of oneness with the universe. This was exactly Taylor's experience after her stroke wiped out the function of her left brain. She was at peace with herself and with the world. She had no real concept of past and future, but existed totally in the present moment. The universe was permeated with energy fields and life-force. Her descriptions are similar to those of transcendent LSD experiences (or so I have been told). She likened her experience to the state of Nirvana achieved in eastern religions.

Which takes us back to Eckhart Tolle and life in the moment. As Tolle sees it, your past consists only of fragments of your imagination. Consider that nothing in your life actually happened in the past: your entire life happened only in the moment. Your future is even more a mirage, and will never exist as a part of your life. Now "is the only thing. It's all there is. The eternal present is the space within which your whole life unfolds, the one factor that remains constant. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be."

Wow, man. I'm gonna go eat.

-Dr. Dirt will now return to the cave shared with John Hart, Professor of Horticultural Technology, Thompson School of Applied Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham.