[Tom Huntington]

Wow @Jeff Thank you, thank you, for sharing your experience👏 So glad you were so skilled at staying in balance with yourself and living to share your experience. I’m inspired by your story.

Now that you’ve shared the story with your analysis of The Hemisphere Hypothesis with us, I encourage you to keep telling the story with your RH/LH learning . . . maybe even at some Open Mike story telling venues 😁 Even if you live in a place where there are none, there are now many more venues online, thanks to the Covid Pandemic.

Tom

[Don Salmon]

Hi folks,

I love this group – the more we focus on attention and experience, the more real-world applications we’ll find.

The first time I was aware of the intuition/analysis distinction (I prefer the psychological to neurological terms – I’m assuming, of course, folks realize intuition = RH and analysis = LH) was as a teenager.

I had started improvising/composing music when I was 11, but did not start formal study until I was 17. My teacher had me write a fugue. I was pretty good at the technical stuff, but when I tried to put it together into a composition, it sounded dull as dishwater.

If I ignored technique, and just improvised something sort of fugue-sounding, it sounded very pretty but the structure was almost entirely absent.

I remember struggling with this for months, and one day it just happened by itself. The music flowed, the intuition was powerful, AND the structure was precise. I could not replicate this at will, but it has stayed with me lo these many years, and I realize just about in any moment of the day, it’s possible to step back BEYOND BOTH intuition and analysis to that place of quiet Being (God, if you wish) from where intuition and analysis can flow effortlessly.

not that it’s easy, just that it’s possible.

[Peter Barus]

Don, this reminded me of an interview with Phillip Glass that stunned me.

Nadia Boulanger had taught Glass about the relationship of technique and style. It happened when she assigned him an exercise in harmony. He followed all the rules of voicing, and constructed the passage correctly. Still she shook her head. “But Mademoiselle Boulanger, every note is correct,” he protested. “I know,” she replied, “But it is still wrong.”

Ancient Zen masters nod approvingly. Correct, but still wrong!

It was then, Glass said, that he understood what she was teaching him. “Before you can have a style, you have to have technique,” he recalled. “It is the only basis for choice, otherwise you just have a series of accidents.” But it’s more than the sum of its parts: not a question of attaining a voice through technique. “It’s getting rid of the thing,” he explained.

Reading “The Matter With Things,” there’s an astonishing passage about beauty being the supreme measure of any great achievement, whether philosophical, mathematical, scientific, literary, or artistic.

[Peter Barus]

I haven’t met a grizzly, and hope to miss that experience, thank you! But I imagine you would not trade it for anything.

The following is an excerpt from a book I wrote in the context of Japanese martial arts (Matters of Life and Death: Essays in Budo). I’m adding it here as it seems to fit the topic. However, it was written in 2013, long before I knew about Dr. McGilchrist’s amazing work. So it’s in the context of the triune brain and the idea of the fight-or-flight response.

In the hemispheric lateralization context it seems to me that we are unlikely to be able to put words to events seen from the right-brain perspective except as a kind of after-action report. In my present work, a book about–well, the title is “Surviving Extinction at the Dawn of the Attention Age”–I’m finding it very difficult to deal with what is generally called the conclusion. Iain’s work has been most helpful in this regard, in that at least I may suspect it isn’t merely the onset of dementia. At any rate, here’s my example:

I once found a baby raccoon in the snow, half its face bristling with porcupine quills. It would die unless they were removed. I had extracted quills from dogs; what did I have to fear from this cute little ball of fluff? Seeing myself as a compassionate being, I decided to capture the tiny creature. I managed to corner it, and moved in – and it launched itself at me with teeth bared, hissing loudly, every hair standing on end! I lost all sense of proportion. My skin seemed to shrink all at once, and before I knew it I had retreated a good ten feet, heart pounding, gasping for breath. My physical reaction would have been more appropriate had it been a charging bear, although we are advised, here in bear country, to stand our ground when it comes to charging bears. I doubt whether I will have any say in the matter. My endocrine system will probably take over.

On another occasion my mid-brain triggered the “fight” response. I was not expecting a fight; I wasn’t even in a bad neighborhood. I was at work outdoors when a rifle bullet buried itself in a piece of timber near my head. Then I heard shots. When I understood what this was – but not what it meant, apparently – I flew into a rage and ran in the direction of the shooter, shouting something about his ancestry, never thinking about taking cover. I was sure I could see the tracks of the bullets cutting through the tall grasses, inches to the right and left. I had no sense of danger. When the man saw me running toward him, he dropped the weapon and threw his hands up. He had been adjusting the sights on his deer rifle.

This was not bravery, any more than my retreat from a baby animal was cowardice. The lizard-brain reacts instantly. Other parts of the brain explain what happened later, most likely inventing a heroic story. A charging baby raccoon got the flight response and I back-pedaled before I knew it. Flying bullets elicited the opposite response, and I charged just as thoughtlessly.

[Jeff Verge]

That’s really interesting. I expect part of the baby raccoon response was surprise, whereas for the bullet you were reacting to something that had already happened? There’s something primal about a frightened, hissing animal. I was lucky my bear was relaxed with a contented belly, otherwise who knows?

I”m curious if you had any sense of hemisphere shifting, especially when you confronted the gun owner. When it happens to me I’m quite aware of it (and now that Iain has shed some light I understand it better). For example, when I first spotted the bears I was very conscious of sliding from RH mode into LH mode, and narrowing focus as I tried to figure out what I was looking at. Did you have an intense awareness of zooming in hard, and the rest of the world falling away?

[Peter Barus]

It’s well to remember that memory is memory, not the event itself. Hard to say anything definitive. If I understand this, any experience I can remember in language is probably going to be LH, as RH doesn’t speak.

Fun to speculate… Maybe getting startled is RH, and passes (If there’s time) to LH for interpretation and cataloguing.

Now it’s already a memory (Shooting? At me!? Better get me with the next one, #%&?!)

Or, perhaps it passes back to RH and is resolved.

If I had to guess, it seems plausible that in one case, LH decided to go after the shooter, doing a blow-by-blow running commentary; with the raccoon there was no memory of how I moved ten feet back, but it was over, and LH had dropped it at the first feral hiss. The flight response (faster than LH) seems to have worked.

Imagine: a trained martial artist encounters a purse-snatcher. Mildly surprising, but not a new experience, so she doesn’t break stride (LH has gone through the techniques thousands of times and isn’t interested). RH, which stored all that training in “muscle-memory” and has no need for LH to figure anything out, moves her body just the precise inch that leaves the mugger grabbing air.

An untrained person would not see the assault coming (RH), or would react (LH) with typical ineffectiveness. Like I did with the shooter. Or get lucky.

It’s always lucky if you don’t get shot, or bitten by a wounded animal, or eaten alive by a bear.

[Jeff Verge]

Yes about memory of experience and its inherent distortions, and then narrowing things down even more into words. As well, it’s a convincing argument that we have to trust in experience as it presences to us, the view from somewhere.

I thought of a way to explain what I’m thinking of and wondering if others experience too, when I speak of a sense of zooming-in, as RH cedes control in order to zoom in on something. In film it’s called the contra zoom. I had a vague sense it was a Hitchcock innovation so I looked it up and yes it’s also called the Vertigo shot. The lens zooms in while the camera pulls back. I’ve known it other times in different circumstances, but it’s what I experienced most vividly when I first spotted the bears – it was dawning on me that I’d just been where they were not that long ago, and furthermore there were two times earlier I was resting somewhat hidden, and a close-up surprise encounter could have easily happened.

What I remember most is how intensely analog the experience was, stretching a second or two at most into a beginning state, transition, and altered state, like going down a zipline in my mind, as the threat assessment processes ramped up. That it’s a common movie technique makes me think others know exactly how that feels – to zoom in and pull out at the same time.

For your story, it could have begun in the moment between sensing that something happened, and it dawning on you that it’s a bullet that could have killed you? Just thinking out loud. Curious how common an awareness of this transition state is. One possibility is that I had the luxury of time to coolly assess my situation, whereas in both your cases everything is happening immediately.

[Peter Barus]

I can say that I was totally without any cool assessment of my situation in every case. Had I been trained in dealing with charging critters, or flying bullets, my training probably would have taken over. These stories are clearly the LH talking after the fact, and putting a little spin on things. When something happens that we’ve trained for, the stories don’t seem to matter much.

[Jeff Verge]

I’ll end here agreeing with you mostly but not quite about memory and story.

Completely agree that memory is always a distorted reconstruction, but it’s a representation of something real, something at least partially stored in the body. I have to make a conscious effort to remember the totality of my experience, because if I didn’t the story has a way of replacing the memory over time. I’m with you on that and that the level of experience will change how it presences, but where I disagree is thinking it’s the only thing.

One can always reduce – memory isn’t real, stories don’t matter – but that’s the old dead hand of the left hemisphere. If I had been trained for bear encounters I may have had a different experience, perhaps more grizzled and less intense, but I’d still have a story.

[Peter Barus]

I’m finding this conversation quite clarifying, thanks for staying with it. Without this thread we have been sharing, I’m not sure any of this would have occurred to me.

I suspect memory is a synthesis of the narrative and background (L & H), but it is all representation and a memory of a bullet is not the bullet. The moment anything happens, it is gone, and the representation is all we have. And maybe all we ever have. So memory is as real as it ever gets, and certainly does matter if anything does.

I’m intrigued by the notion that the two participate in synthesizing any complicated series of actions, so that even with constant feedback and adjustment to circumstances, familiar functions don’t require a lot of attention. I’m thinking of performance, for example, when technique, once perfected to a degree, is completely discarded, and one becomes a human being (as distinct from a human doing).

I can attest that at such moments performing is as easy and thoughtless as breathing. And afterwards it is nearly impossible to remember.

A friend of mine, a student of Lakota medicine, says that fear, such as may arise in an encounter with a bear, is an opportunity to practice a virtue, such as generosity. Perhaps the bear has many mouths to feed, and needs your body, so you make the offer. This doesn’t require you to get eaten, it’s just acknowledging our relationship to life. Maybe an upbringing in that cultural context would qualify as bear training.

In the heat of the moment, LH might struggle to keep up with events. And certain default reactions are available, such as fight, flight, freeze, flock, etc. Or, the situation being other than life-threatening, but still a cognitive overload, one might break into helpless laughter. In some Japanese martial arts, this is a well-known phenomenon known as the “aiki giggle.” It certainly clears the mind.

[Jeff Verge]

Yes wholeheartedly agree, this is clarifying. I am learning new things about my experience, new connections and so on. You touch on a lot of thoughts, I’ll try to hit a few.

I expect you’re right about synthesis. It’s coming on 5 months since my encounter, and ever since I started telling the story, and especially putting this RH/LH version here, I find I have to work to reacquire my sense memory of it. The told version struggles to replace the memory, and to become the memory, even though the told version leaves out quite a lot. But there was so much more going on, it’s as if I have to access my body’s sense memories rather than my mind’s reconstructions to even glimpse any part of the totality. I have no science to back it up, but I’d suggest that bodily aspects of memory reveal themselves as closer to the original experience than do mental reconstructions of that same experience.

One thing I left out of my story, I was conscious of wanting to remember everything, by being as fully in the moment as I could be. I didn’t want to film it, I wanted it burned-in to my memory. And I was surprised by how much of a body experience it was, which I still use as a check against my more mental representations and pictorial memories. Not sure if that helps, just putting it out there.

I’m a huge admirer of Indigenous ways of knowing, so I thought about how I would put it to your friend of Lakota medicine. I think I had the opportunity to practice respect and communication. I had so much respect for her, as if she was more than just a bear, she was an emissary of the entire forest, which I’d just spent the whole day soaking in. I passed on her first attempt to communicate with sound, but she wasn’t having it and switched to body language, with which I was able to communicate with her. Feeling that connection with her and earning her respect was amazing. I hope I always remember, inasmuch as that’s ever possible.

Something else I left out of the story. When I first got to the place where we’d meet, I thanked the bears out loud for forcing me up the mountain. This was my third and last ever attempt to get to the top, and they made it easier by cutting off my retreat. Then after they passed I thanked her silently for that intimate moment of respectful connection, and a memory with shamanist echoes in deep time to carry on my ascent to a clear night of stargazing. So to round it out I’ll call it all virtues of gratitude, respect and communication.

I think about my sandwiches too, from the bear’s perspective. They could be the most amazing smell she ever knew. They were seriously delicious, and even more so after defending them.