Brain - Left and Right Hemispheres

Tony Crisp

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In a very real sense each of us have two distinct ways of relating to and perceiving the world and the people around us. This is because our brain has two hemispheres, and each hemisphere has different abilities and very different ways of dealing with incoming information .

On a recent radio interview a man and woman were described who created lively musicals. The way they worked and how they were such an amazing team was discussed. The man would lie on a couch and let flow with ‘stream of consciousness’ ideas, and the woman would write down what was said, but pulling it into structure and careful use of appropriate language.

This is almost a direct expression of how the left and right brain lobes can work together if we can easily access their different abilities. In people with a healthy brain integration the two halves of the brain work like two people in a happy and creative partnership. Each of the partners can perform its own special tasks most of the time, but each is able to take on, partly or fully, the skills of the other when necessary. This may be necessary in people who have experienced brain damage.

Although research has not arrived at definite classifications of what the lobes of the brain deal with, in general they are as follows:

Those are the generally accepted functions of the right and left brain hemispheres, but those who have deeply experienced their right brain action, as did the famous neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor, enlarge these description. From such experiences we can see that the left brain experience is largely one of seperation from other people. We feel physically and mentally isolated in terms of intimate contact with others and what they think or feel. Our relationship with the world is largely through our senses and the narrow world they show us. Our thinking is mostly from what we have learned and what we remember in a narrow beam sort of way. From such feelings it seems our reality is that our present life has little or no connection with people in the past. We are 'here today and gone tomorrow'. Life can be very painful and full of struggle.

The right brain experience is totally different. There is no sense of seperation from either the living or the dead. We have a vital awareness of the many things out of which our life has arisen, and our part in the stream of life from ancient times. Our awareness expands in a way unimaginable to the left brain experience. This awareness, as quantum theory states about our fundamental particles, is not local. It is not tied to the place, time and restrictions our senses are. Through this we know those we love in a way beyond anything enabled by our body awareness. We know their innermost being and our links with them. The so called dead are alive for us as part of our wider life. Our creativity is immense because our consciousness leaps beyond what we already know and think. We know ourselves as an integral part of an astounding universe. (Watch the video of Jill describing her experience.)

To return again to more basic statements and generalise, if your approach to life is dominated by your left brain hemisphere, which is largely rational and analytical, your best way of learning would be in looking at facts in a sequential and logical order. If you are largely a right brain person your approach to learning would be to understand details by gaining an overall picture of what you are studying. The details then fit into this concept of the whole and make sense to you. You would also be more open to learning through your feelings and intuitions, and through hands on experience.

In fact this last aspects of the right brain gives us a clue as to what your ‘brain type’ is and how you approach life. The left brain subject will have a sense that their life is not part of a grand scheme of things, but is subject to the agreed and rational rules of the dominant science and social rules of their culture. The right brain subject will know from their inner awareness that their life is part of the way the cosmos works, and has emerged out of a timeless continuum carrying all ages of the past into their present existence.

Connecting this with dreams, our night time drama tends to express these different facets of us in the different characters we meet. The following dream clearly shows a ‘right brain’ character bringing something to the dreamer’s attention that his usual left brain way of looking at life would probably have missed.

Example: I was on a plane or a journey. On my right sat an American, very flabby, with a paunch. I was eating an apple, (I had been on a fruit fast during the day), and my elbow sometimes touched the American’s paunch, it felt lifeless, lacking vitality. I told him he ought to eat only apples for a while, and all the dead flesh would fall off him. Then a young Chinese man came to me and pointed out a line marked on my apple, on the green, less developed side. He said every apple had such a line if one looked, and under the line was a hair, “the hair of discontent.” He said this was poisonous, and best not eaten. I slid my fingernail under the line, and pulled out a long hair. I thought this was wonderful, and that I had been given real wisdom of the East. Ian R.

In fact Ian was far from content with his life at the time, and it led him to look critically at other people. The wisdom from the East – the left brain global view of life – pointed out how poisonous this was.

Here is a dream illustrating a very different stand:

Example: I was walking home at night under a magnificent starry sky. I thought perhaps this was the Milky Way, as I had never seen it before. But there were distinct edges to the massive concentrations of stars forming the shape of people. I felt very enthusiastic and uplifted by this sight and wanted other people to look at it. Then I seemed to be at home, perhaps where I used to live as a child, and my father was there. I told him about the figures and wanted him to look, but he seemed quite uninterested. I also felt somehow that he was locked into an intellectual cynicism that could see no wonder in the stars. To him they were simply random shapes in the sky. To me they expressed something that, perhaps, I would find it difficult to put into words, but nevertheless was very moving at a deep level. TC

Here his his father depicts his more rational way of looking at the world. Nevertheless the dream shows balance as TC himself feels the impact of what he has seen.

As is often the way, the right brain tends to express in symbols, as it does in dreams, but it takes the focussed enquiry of the left brain to work like a detective to unravel the clues and bring the creative impulse into real clarity and fruition, something that wasn’t happening in Heather’s dream. Exploring the dream would provide the creative spark between the intuitive and the rational. See: people for further description of dream characters; brain; left; right.

To explore your own right brain awareness see Using Your Intuition.

Useful questions are:

What is my basic way of relating to the world – do I feel part of the cosmos, or a short lived biological creature?

How do I approach a problem to solve it – do I focus intently on it and look at the facts, or do I unfocuss and listen to the many strands of input that are in me?

Do I learn by taking in information from outside in a rational way, or do I try to arrive at an overall picture to which I add the details?

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