Thread: Meditation class: Summary of & reaction to "Stroke of Insight"

As requested, this is my summary of and reaction to the TED Talk Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight for Waving on Ocean's class on meditation & lucid dreaming.

This was a presentation by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor describing her experiences in going through a stroke on the left hemisphere right around the language centers of her brain. She alternated between neuroanatomical and phenomenological accounts of the episode. In short, her stroke gave her an experience of enlightenment, which she interpreted as being a matter of her left hemisphere shutting down and her right hemisphere taking over.

On one level, this video was very validating for me personally. I've been suspicious for a while of the possibility that what we normally consider to be conscious thought is structured by the same part of our brains that structures the syntax of language. One way I think about this is in terms of Chomsky's universal syntax as described in Keith Devlin's book The Math Gene; in short, Devlin argues that there must be a module in the human brain that is responsible for our complex capacity for grammar since mathematically there's no way to break apart the syntactic structure we use without making a discrete jump to proto-linguistic structures ("Me like banana. Banana good."). It has long struck me that the phenomenology of conscious thought is entrenched with what many people are tempted to describe as "noise", rather implying that it's auditory or at least verbal in nature. But I know that I can and often do think in pictures, and that the words come a moment after the meaning has already been thought about. Many people have reported similar experiences (cf. Jacques Hadamard's account of mathematicians' attempts to solve problems in his book The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field). Yet when I and others meditate, even these visual/spatial thoughts seem to intrude with much the same "volume" as the running commentary. So what structures that "noise"? It seems like there may be an underlying mechanism, like Devlin's brain module, that is responsible for conscious thought in what Taylor refers to as "left-brain" thinking which includes but is not limited to verbal thinking. Otherwise normal conscious thought would not necessarily have been so drastically affected as what Taylor described simply by a stroke around the language center of her brain, as visual/spatial thinking could have continued as per usual.

It also struck me as surprising that virtually all spiritual traditions encourage development of the qualities that Taylor accidentally tripped over, so to speak. My personal favorite "road map" is the Enneagram. It emphasizes the virtue of being in the present moment and allowing consciousness to fully engage in the here-and-now, advocating that we should relax into a full awareness of our bodies, allow our minds to become quiet and receptive rather than loud with the chatter of thinking about the past or the future, and encourage our hearts to open and become filled with compassion and gratitude. These, as authors and researchers Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson point out, are qualities that indicate strong psychological health, and in fact the degree to which these traits are missing is the degree to which we fall into the mechanical neurotic patterns of our egos. I, for instance, am a type Five in this system, which means that my tendency is to collect skills and knowledge in order to make myself more "ready" to engage with activities - instead of just engaging in those activities with the confidence that I can understand the world better if I simply live within it.

What catches me by surprise with this presentation is that psychological health could be tied to which half of the brain is dominant at a given moment. Is the left hemisphere really that intrinsically flawed? Or is it just a matter of balance, such that people who try to operate purely on the left side of the brain (as our culture seems to encourage) try to use the left hemisphere for tasks that the right hemisphere is vastly better suited for?

For that matter, how does Taylor know that the stroke caused her to shift her center of focus entirely over to the right hemisphere? From her description, we have no accounts from anything like an MRI while she was going through one of her supposedly right-hemisphere moments to see if blood flow was really increasing on that side of the brain. If I remember correctly, in their book Why God Won't Go Away, authors Newberg, D'Aquili, & Rause indicate that the portion of the brain responsible for individual identity is actually on both sides of the brain just a bit above the visual cortex. There's been ample research to indicate that the characteristics of willpower, dedication to a plan, and ability to concentrate is actually relegated to the prefrontal cortex (cf. Change Your Brain, Change Your Life by Dr. Daniel Amen for a few of the many references in this area), and the prefrontal cortex covers both lobes of the brain. There has even been some suggestion that the pineal gland at the center of the brain is responsible for the "inner visions" that we often associate with spiritual experiences (cf. DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman).

But if it is the right hemisphere that's responsible for many of the attributes of compassion, selflessness, and so on that we attribute to someone being strongly and sincerely spiritual, then this suggests that we should have examples of people who are dominantly right-brained just as most of society is quick to point out people who are very skilled at being left-brained. Certainly one can get there by training, as people like H.H. the Dalai Lama seem to have. Yet given how crazy Taylor sounded like she must have been when in her "right-brain" mode, I have to wonder if perhaps the people with the deepest natural skill in this area who actually would benefit from left-brain disciplines are those whom we lock up in insane asylums or give drugs for things like schizophrenia.

In any case, one thing that became vividly clear as a result of this presentation was that you really, truly do need both modes in order to function well. Too much left-brain leaves us with a sense of inadequacy in our lives, the "suffering" we all endure as the Buddhists put it. Yet too much right-brain seems to keep us from being able to survive! If everything is okay and you don't have a self who can be harmed and there is just boundless love, what does it matter if you get hit by a car? If we were to train our brains to fail to see the problem with that question, then it seems pretty clear to me that we would be training our brains in a very wrong and dangerous way.

All in all, I thought this was a fantastic presentation. It was fascinating and extremely thought-provoking. My thanks to Waving on Oceans for suggesting it!

~Morphenius