[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.