At the 2008 TED conference, a neuroscientist named Jill Bolte Taylor gave a remarkable talk about the severe stroke she had suffered, and what she had learned from it. Most strokes don't teach their victims much, except perhaps how near the precipice always is, but Taylor got lucky (as it were) in that hers disabled her left brain hemisphere only, allowing her right hemisphere full play. And when that happened the logical, driven, planful scientist vanished, leaving an addled hippie on a mind trip, but one more pure than any LSD or peyote could deliver.
The right brain is the destination for all sensory input. It does some organizing, but is not really in the judgment business, rather revels in the "blooming, buzzing confusion" coming in. So it's up to the sober grown-up left brain to prune, block, and mute most of right-brain's offerings so that it can Get Something Done.
I had never heard of Dr. Taylor until a week ago when my wife directed me to a youtube copy of the TED talk. (Thanks, Google, for everything...) The talk was fun and inspiring, and also suspenseful. After all, if someone is vigorously prowling the stage and talking a mile-a-minute without notes about her recent disabling stroke, one can't but think...
But TED is nothing if not upbeat, so this talk was not going to end in a tragic pratfall. Reassured by that reflection, I relaxed into it and came away both ways enlightened.
Western, I learned about the division of labor of the brain: left hemisphere, planning, language; right hemisphere, sensory data. (This corresponds roughly to the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy used in popular classifications of logical/intuitive, but I suspect the popular view mixes up functions more than the (current) scientific view.)
Eastern, I saw she achieved the kind of insight that the great sages and mystics allude to, and which has been heretofore so elusive. (But apparently now all you have to do is arrange a properly-placed massive but temporary injury to "your" left brain hemisphere.) While "disabled" she saw that everything is connected: our bodies extend into all the space around them; we interpenetrate each other; individuals are no big deal. (These are my words, but one of her points is that words fail one—or more precisely that the verbal facility is shut off.) The insight, of course, is that egoism is a lie, a giant con played on each and every one of us (yes, I know...) by our busy little left brains.
And since egoism is the source of so much of the world's pain, and of so much suffering in each of us, wouldn't it be wonderful if it could be...well, if not eradicated, at least cooled down a bit by a periodic washing in this vision of Oneness?
But how? It could be that Zen masters and such already have kind of a leaky connection between halves, which just requires enlarging. For most of us, though, absent the lucky hemorrhage, it's drugs and drugs alone that will let us really see the unum in pluribus.
It is true that to one of a philosophic bent the inner whisperings that drive us to feed our needy egos become increasingly unconvincing, so that by middle age such a person must see the self-talk we all engage in as pathetic delusion. And yet, what is such a person—and I count myself as one—to do?
First, this grim insight is just the left brain at bay, rather than the right brain reveling. And, as everyone knows, a negative attitude—even if right—is no basis for a happy life. So, it's drugs then.
But gee, Mr. Natural, they're illegal...
More on this later, but I note with a mixture of amusement and discomfort how my second-to-last post specifically and many of them tacitly celebrate logic, the glory of the left brain...
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