So, to ask a very simple question, why is the brain so clearly and profoundly divided? Why, for that matter, are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Do they really differ in any important sense? If so, in what way? Iain McGilchrist
a short, very earthy, and wise piece about how food connects people, about how they access their memories of taste, and about the power of food can evoke emotions. We all probably associate food with some kind of images, instant memories, smells, or feelings.
She talk about her pleasure of eating sour fruits. This paragraph inspired me to write this post. Our deep connection to the earth, our unique taste of home are related to our memories and memories imprint emotions.
Feeling alive can be as simple as eating a delicious sour plum, and our brains have the ability to travel inward and outward when we miss something, allowing us to imagine both possible and impossible lives and dreams.
This alone makes me feel so connected to our natural world—it's where everything begins, where we feel at home, and where all the lives we've lived return.
”Nanna would devour these super sour plums in the summer sunshine, making the most of the season whilst they lasted. It all made sense, she spent much of her youth in Persia as it was back then. Rather than wince at the sour taste dancing on her tongue, she would simply sit back and smile - greengages were her taste of home.”
As you’ll read in this article, our brain has its own history; it operates in two different ways, but for the same goals: for us to evolve, to survive, to thrive, and to transcend.
Table of Contents:
Brain functions: -How we can use right hemispheric thinking. -The consequences of living in a left–hemisphere society. Intellect/Intelligence. Urbanization effects on the mind. Grounding – The universal anti-inflammatory remedy How to be alive. My life as a student. Down to earth. *Resources.
Brain functions. The consequences of living in a left–hemisphere society
Nature predates the birth of our ancestors, and therefore, it is our most important connection, the primordial one. Our body and mind holds all of nature's wisdom, memories, and parts of other people's stories as they become ours as well.
Our brains contain our life experiences all together; our two hemispheres give us different representations and versions of life and its aspects.
I've compiled a concise interview here, with links to sources. It's based on the 20-year+ research of Iain McGilchrist, who is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and literary scholar, and the author of two enlightening books that I warmly recommend to everyone who wants to dive deeper.
“The short version of what happens is this:
It seems that the fundamental difference – and this exists in all the neural networks we know going back hundreds of millions of years – is that creatures have to solve the problem of how to eat without being eaten.
They have to be able to focus on something that they can grab and get very quickly. For this they need detailed, precise attention to a very small thing that they need to manipulate. But that’s not the only attention they need. They need at the same time to have a broad, open, vigilant attention for the predator who will make them its lunch while they’re getting theirs.
And more than that, it needs to be open to everything: to its mate, to its offspring, to everything that’s going on in the world.
In a soundbite, the left hemisphere has evolved in all of us to serve – well, I say “all of us”, but I mean, in general, throughout the history of the evolution of this arrangement – the left hemisphere has evolved to be the one that helps us manipulate the world.
And the right hemisphere is the one that helps us understand the world, make sense of it.
Because, of these two different kinds of attention, the left hemisphere sustains this very narrow (perhaps three degrees out of the 360), targeted attention to something it already knows it wants: the world is made up of things that are familiar, known, unchanging, unmoving, isolated, decontextualised, non–individual, inanimate.
As for the right hemisphere, it sees a world in which everything is ultimately connected to everything else, nothing is ever finally certain, nor completely fixed, it’s on the move all the time; that often what is important is something that is implicit in the context, and is ruined if you decontextualise it.
It’s in touch with embodied feeling, with emotion, with the physicality of our existence. And this vision also has a place for the unique individual. And it’s an animate world. Just to gloss that, you can in a perfectly painless procedure, now suppress one or other hemisphere for 20 minutes at a time. And when you do this, if you suppress the right hemisphere, people see things that they would normally call living as just mechanical.
Whereas if you suppress the left hemisphere, they see things that we would probably think of as inanimate, like the sun, as a living thing. So it is quite interesting. There’s another couple of things that are very, very important, and one of them sound fascinating, but it’s not as important as the other.
That first one is that the left hemisphere is very full of self–confidence. Because it knows so little, effectively, it thinks it knows everything. And the right hemisphere, on the other hand, is much less certain and has a much more modest opinion of its capacities, whereas the left hemisphere has a grossly inflated optimism about what it is and what it can do.
But the last thing, which is really, really crucial, though it might not grab people’s attention in the same way, is the difference between the presence of something and a representation.
The right hemisphere is able to deal with the presence of something as it comes into being for us, actually just being there with it, and experiencing that presence.
Whereas the left hemisphere takes it and makes it a representation, literally something that is present after it’s no longer present: actually ‘re–presented’.
This is the difference between a two–dimensional depiction of something, and the embodied thing that is there.
So for example, an image is static, it’s fixed, it’s two dimensional; whereas the landscape that is imaged is everything else that is left out. And a quick and dirty way of putting it is that the left hemisphere deals with the map and the right hemisphere with the terrain that is mapped.”*1
The consequences of living in a left–hemisphere society
The left hemisphere is not to be dismissed. It’s very important. It’s a tool, much as it is itself interested in tools.
But it’s got to be as it were, in the service of something beyond that.
So we need it, but it needs always to be under the superintendence of the right hemisphere that sees more.
And in a way it should be acting as a functionary – or something rather like a desktop computer.
I resist the equation of anything to do with the brain with a computer; but in this one respect, it’s slightly like that, in that it’s very good at carrying out procedures rapidly, but it’s not good at understanding what those procedures mean or imply.
So it must take material, do useful preparation, and then give it back to the right hemisphere, which then incorporates it into the overall picture.
But what happens is that the normal passage from right to left stops now at the left hemisphere, and is not taken back into the right hemisphere.
In other words, we think what the left hemisphere shows us, once it’s broken the thing down, is the reality. But having broken it down into bits, it will seem meaningless, it will seem unattractive and senseless. And it lost all its meaning.
If you take a piece of music that is profoundly moving and just turn it into a bunch of notes, and perhaps catalogue all the notes and say, “Well, we have 37 A–flats, and we’ve got…”, you know, this is not going to help you understand the piece of music, because the music’s all in what has been lost in breaking it up into bits.
It’s all in the – what I call the ‘betweenness’; not the space between, but actually the construction of relations. And that’s another thing that I can only just throw out briefly.
I believe, that RELATIONS are the foundation of everything; that things are not primary, and then have to be related, relationships are primary, and the things we call ‘things’ emerge from a network of relations.
Now, if we lose sight of this, what happens is that we start to view a theory, which is extremely thin stuff, as more real than experience.
We start to see the map as more real than the land in which people live that appears on the map in just a few lines. We lose all the subtle stuff, all the stuff that comes, the skills that come, from experience.
It’s the downgrading of experience, the downgrading of one’s intuitions, the downgrading of one’s judgments, as though the only thing that can validate or verify anything, is an argument inevitably based on things that have been isolated, decontextualised, and so forth.
We’re following very black and white positions because the left hemisphere wants decision now. It doesn’t want ambiguity. It doesn’t like uncertainty, because, remember, it’s the one that’s grabbing. And so the left hemisphere is quick and dirty.
VS Ramachandran, a very well–known, distinguished neuroscientist, calls the right hemisphere, ‘the devil’s advocate’, because it’s not the one that jumps to conclusions.
It goes, “yeah, but it might be this”. Whereas the left hemisphere is jumping to conclusions all the time. So it has a quick and dirty way of thinking. It tends to put people into categories and everything into categories.”*1
How we can use right hemispheric thinking
”I think the first thing is to see what’s happening, because I think a lot of people have no context in which to set their unease: I think a lot of people would agree with us that there’s something wrong, but they don’t know what it is.
Because I’ve tried to explain that what we’re doing is seeing only a very, very partial and degraded version of reality; we’ve been trained by the culture that has evolved since the Industrial Revolution particularly, but really also earlier than that, with parts of the Enlightenment – not to ignore that they had value in themselves, but that they helped us to be hubristic, to be arrogant.
And that has made us think that we understand everything, and we know what we’re doing.
The world conjured up by the left hemisphere and the right – if you’re buying into the left hemisphere world of certainties, isolation, nothing unique, categories, abstractions, disembodiment, the inanimate, you’re not going to understand what we’re talking about here. Because it all comes indirectly, it comes through things that don’t speak to us in the literal language of a dishwasher manual, but in fact speak to us through things like poetry, through music, through narrative, through myth, through rituals; if you are able to open yourself to them and experience them, will let you know you are contacting something at a much deeper level.
You will actually experience your body responding to it, even if it’s only the hair on the back of your head standing up when you feel these things.
The way we think now is directly opposed to any way of encompassing the sacred.
One is mindfulness, which is really about stilling the left hemisphere. It’s about trying to get the left hemisphere out of the picture, and enabling the right hemisphere to speak. And people think – because this is the left hemisphere way of thinking – that we make things happen: “let’s do this, and it’ll happen”.
But often, it’s not doing that enables something to happen, because what it is you are doing is itself part of the problem, even if the doing is trying to achieve a more spiritual approach.
What you need to do is stop doing many of the things you’re doing and listen; and in the silence that you create, in the creative space that you bring about, something may come to you.
And I can almost guarantee it will come to you if you have created that open space properly, and not going “but where is it, I need an intuition now”: you can’t do that.
And in brief, my answer is they are not separate, but aspects of one and the same underlying reality.”*1
Intellect/Intelligence
Krishna Murti said a long time ago about the relationship between intellect (left-fragmentary) and intelligence (right-understanding the whole), works for us, which is somewhat related to what studies and science are now supporting. Interconnected and interdependent.
“Thought thinks it can bring about order in itself, but thought being limited, whatever its order, is limited. I'm using simple logic.
Therefore, intelligence refers to the ability to organize thoughts appropriately. In other words, I need knowledge and experience, which will provide me with knowledge, memory, and the ability to think effectively.
That's clear. Therefore, intelligence only manifests when thought recognizes its limitations and realizes it cannot achieve its goals.
Understanding that thought is limited and cannot, under any circumstances, bring about or cultivate intelligence is crucial.
Thought is unrelated to intelligence. Intelligence, we say, is the capacity to see the whole; the whole of the movement of thought. The capacity to see that. The capacity to see thought is limited. To have an insight; that insight is intelligence. I wonder.
Whereas intelligence analysis will always be analyzed with the background of the whole. I wonder if you see all this.”*5
Urbanization effects on mind and body
Urbanization, despite its benefits, has been associated with an increase in mental illness, particularly depression. Evidence supports the connection between reduced exposure to nature and an increase in mental illness.
It's not clear how less time in nature can lead to mental illness, but one possibility is that time spent in nature affects our ability to calm down, enter into contemplative states, keep our nervous system in check, or create hormonal patterns that don't work right, all of which are linked to depression and other mental health disorders.
By taking pauses to breathe, experience the wind, immerse ourselves in the water, sense the fire, or plant our feet on the earth, we reconnect with four essential life elements, which we require for shift of attention that helps us relax and activate different parts of our brains.
“Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” Rachel Carson
When we feel the rush of the intellect coughing up in reaching conclusions or creating models of reality in order to be efficient, pausing, eating a fruit, going for a walk, hugging someone, or looking at the sky is not only for the sake of pausing, but also to shift the energy, attention in the brain and access other parts that can create balance in our overall mood.
Attention refers to how we direct our consciousness towards the world. We have the ability to choose how we focus our attention on the world.
“For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy — no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” Rachel Carson
In my post about Death Archetype, I stated that we have lost our connection to nature, our nurturer, the giver of life and the effects on our psyche are real. We are self-destructing ourselves by not recognizing nature as part of ourselves. It is in our nature to be in Nature.
Never before has such a large percentage of humanity been so far removed from nature (1); more than 50% of people now live in urban areas, and by 2050, this proportion will be 70% (2). What are the potential mental health implications of this demographic shift? Although urbanization has many benefits, it is also associated with increased levels of mental illness, including anxiety disorders and depression (3–5). Causal mechanisms for this increased prevalence of mental illness are likely manifold and are not well understood (6, 7).
This effect traces to living location within the same individuals as they moved closer or further from greenspace. Other correlational studies reveal that window views that include natural elements (compared with window views that do not) are associated with superior memory, attention, and impulse inhibition (10), as well as greater feelings of subjective well-being (11).*3
Nature provides for us all in so many ways. Nature is the source of life; sexuality is the source of our human nature; and the universe is the source of everything. Everything is connected. It may sound like a “spiritual” cliche, but now we have science to back this up at any given time. The reason we are still alive is because of nature's resources, which allow us to heal, breathe, and reach our potential.
It is well known that corporations and large companies consume the majority of resources. However, we as individuals can minimize our impact by monitoring our behavior, needs, and true needs.
When we feel overwhelmed, we can reconnect with the four essential elements of life. The elements are earth, fire, water, and air.
We deserve to take a break whenever we need one. Recharge our batteries and rediscover our sense of self and place in the world.
“Rumination is a prolonged and often maladaptive attentional focus on the causes and consequences of emotions—most often, negative, self-relational emotions (25). This pattern of thought has been shown to predict the onset of depressive episodes (17), as well as other mental disorders (26).
Positive or neutral distraction (vs. maladaptive distractions such as binge drinking of alcohol) has been shown to decrease rumination (27). To be effective in decreasing rumination, these positive or neutral distractions must be engrossing, to maintain the shift of attention onto the distracting stimuli (27).
From this perspective, we aimed to observe whether a 90-min nature experience has the potential to decrease rumination. In addition to gathering self-report measures, we examined brain activity in the sgPFC, an area that has been shown to be particularly active during the type of maladaptive, self-reflective thought and behavioral withdrawal that occurs during rumination (19). This behavioral and neural evidence—when taken together—would provide convincing evidence for a change in rumination resultant from nature experience.”*3
The impact of nature experience on self-reported rumination and blood perfusion to the sgPFC. (A) Change in self-reported rumination (postwalk minus prewalk) for participants randomly assigned to take a 90-min walk either in a natural setting or in an urban setting. (B) A time-by-environment interaction in blood perfusion was evident in the sgPFC. F map of significant interactions at a threshold of P < 0.05, FWE corrected for multiple comparisons. (C) Change in blood perfusion (postwalk minus prewalk) for participants randomly assigned to take a 90-min walk either in a natural setting or in an urban setting. Error bars represent SE within subjects: *P < 0.05, ***P < 0.001.
Grounding – The universal anti-inflammatory remedy
Grounding*6, walking barefoot is a natural anti-inflammatory, that can improve our health. Schumann resonances influence direct contact with the earth's natural electric charge (electrons). Electrons on Earth are affected by these 7.83 Hz resonances.
Grounding foster wound healing, sleep, and inflammation reduction. It also de-stresses the autonomic nervous system, improving heart rate variability, a key indicator of stress and sudden cardiac death.
Grounding reduces blood viscosity, a cardiovascular risk factor, according to research. *6 Grounding also improves head, face, torso, and extremity blood flow.
Normalising cortisol, brain activity, and muscular tension has also been shown to reduce physiological and emotional stress. Grounding also speeds healing and reduces inflammation in sports and professional activities.
Grounding supports mitochondria to boost energy and cell repair.
Modern lifestyles have disconnected humans from the earth's electron supply, causing an undiagnosed electron deficiency.
Grounding restores this supply, reducing inflammation and oxidative stress and strengthening defenses.
Grounding may become a leading preventive and therapeutic treatment for inflammatory diseases like diabetes, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disease, and communicable diseases.
How to be alive. My story.
I was a nearly a full-time geochemist who wanted to pursue a master's degree in paleobotany, but instead life offered me a full-time job as an artist, and I took it. The 5-year academic studies and the wonderful experience in geology and geophysics flooded back into my memory as I thought of my connection to nature.
When I was in nature, learning about life formation and the richness of mother nature, I felt the most alive. I have exposed my body and mind to the four essential elements of life: wind, earth, water, and fire. I then documented these lessons in my notes; lucky enough, I achieved a high grade and used film photography to make art exhibitions on the hallways of the faculty.
As young geologists and lovers of nature, we went on our practices every summer, which included swimming in mountain rivers, sleeping under the stars, wearing muddy shoes, and dancing around a fire. This was my school of life.
20 years later, my outside in nature experiences shaped me in a way that I cannot ever feel disconnected from nature, I see it as part of myself as it should be; I feel only gratitude.
Personal archive. Life.
My take away on this post is that the season of strawberries, cherries, and apricots is upon us, and we have numerous fruitful reasons to celebrate LIFE and care for the earth.
Remember how much you’ve enjoyed picking fruits from trees and eating them fresh?
What is important for humanity's future is our ability to use our imagination, the right hemisphere of our brain, to broaden our vision further and further and establish connections beyond our own existence and immediate needs.
This was my 19th post! Covering the fields of psychology, science, art, and history, I have a deep desire to understand the complexity of the human mind and behavior. My posts are free and educational, but if you consider a paid subscription, I will be more than grateful. While I have based this article mostly on my own research and observations, I have used information from a variety of sources for reference, as you will find below. However, please be kind with gaps or shortcomings. Read it at your own pace and enjoy this moment of solitude and self-reflection.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” C.G.Jung
If you enjoyed my post, *Wink* once. *Wink* twice while subscribing and supporting me in writing more & better. * Wink* trwice if you want to Offer me a good COFFEE :) ☕
Thank you for such an inspiring excursion ~ from Iain McGilchrist’s insights into the human brain ~ via Krishnamurti’s differentiation between intellect and intelligence ~ to the importance of sustaining and reviving the relationship between Mother Nature and human nature!
Thank you especially for a great synopsis of McGilchrist's theory. This focus on the left hemisphere seems to explain very well the evolution of the anthropocentric worldview and resulting destruction of our collective home and sanity. We (collectively) know the map really well, while forgetting that the map is not the landscape! It would be laugh-out-loud hilarious, if the consequences weren't so tragic and horrific!!!
I love how you brought it all together to grounding and summer fruit 🍑🍒🍓 In our garden it's peaches and raspberries at the moment.
I'll be thinking of you and remember to do lots of grounding on our outing to the Atlantic coast next week. 💗🙏
Beautiful! The poetry of strawberries, cherries and apricots is now upon us! I love your journey and your beautiful summary here. I always get caught between the science and the spirit of everything. The brain may just be a big antenna. All I can do is live in to the questions. But a big yes to more art!heArt. Bless you 🙏❤️
Thank you for such an inspiring excursion ~ from Iain McGilchrist’s insights into the human brain ~ via Krishnamurti’s differentiation between intellect and intelligence ~ to the importance of sustaining and reviving the relationship between Mother Nature and human nature!
Thank you especially for a great synopsis of McGilchrist's theory. This focus on the left hemisphere seems to explain very well the evolution of the anthropocentric worldview and resulting destruction of our collective home and sanity. We (collectively) know the map really well, while forgetting that the map is not the landscape! It would be laugh-out-loud hilarious, if the consequences weren't so tragic and horrific!!!
I love how you brought it all together to grounding and summer fruit 🍑🍒🍓 In our garden it's peaches and raspberries at the moment.
I'll be thinking of you and remember to do lots of grounding on our outing to the Atlantic coast next week. 💗🙏
Beautiful! The poetry of strawberries, cherries and apricots is now upon us! I love your journey and your beautiful summary here. I always get caught between the science and the spirit of everything. The brain may just be a big antenna. All I can do is live in to the questions. But a big yes to more art!heArt. Bless you 🙏❤️