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Reply To: Inhibitory neurons at play between L+R prefrontal cortex
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Hi Lucy,
I’ll do one better. If you like, you’re welcome to take our courses for free. Write me at info@remembertobe.life.
Our courses on effortless mindfulness and effortless sleep are all based on this understanding of attention (and awareness) – I daresay you might even get some new insights on the doshas and their relationship to the gunas!
Take a look at the 2d video (the lower one) on this page: http://www.RememberToBe.Life where I go into the different modes of the brain, and how this relates to different kinds of attention. I don’t mention hemispheres, but you’re welcome to ask here if you’re interested.
To me, this is by far the most important thing related to Iain’s work. Like Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who has researched flow experience for over 50 years, Iain has touched on the key to the survival of civilization, but he’s not very good at offering practices.
Here’s 3 people who have done so:
1. Loch Kelly. His “glimpse” practices – basically, simplified versions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen practices from Tibetan Buddhism – are excellent. his first book was not written to well, and you can get all you need from his 2nd: “The Way of Effortless Mindfulness.”
2. Culadasa, aka former neuroscience professor John Yates. In his book, “The Illumined Mind,” there’s a section near the beginning where he teaches how to shift attention from “selective attention” to “peripheral awareness.” The book is INCREDIBLY complex and I only mention it to show that others are working with this. I will say – meditators who practiced 20-30 years went to him and within a month or two, were experiencing long stretches of complete mental silence (NO verbal thoughts). I can attest – as this was happening to me more and more when I discovered Culadasa in 2016 – his practice works. But you can do the same with Loch’s practices or the next guy, Les Fehmi:
3. Dr. Les Fehmi. He was (deceased in 2019) a psychophysiologist who since the early 1970s, studied hemispheric relations, but unlike Iain, his interest was almost entirely practical.
He noted 4 basic types of attention
Detached narrow, and detached wide attention (tending to be associated with the LH
Immersed narrow and immersed wide (RH). Both of these are related to the flow experience.
But most of all, and this relates to what I said about how, in experience, you can’t really isolate one thing as “LH” and the other as “RH – Fehmi taught Open Focus, which is a state of deep integration of the entire brain (subcortical as well as the cortical hemispheres).
You can learn to shift into Open Focus (which is what we mean in the video on the Remember To Be site by “experiential mode”) and from there, you can make a choice as to how to attend. You don’t really choose in a LH fashion, by analyzing. You learn to surf the world of experience.
IN any moment, I’d be hard pressed to say “I’m in a LH mode or RH mode.”
But you get a feel for an emphasis – you’re more focused, or your attention is wide. You’re more immersed or detached, and it changes from moment to moment.
Fascinating stuff. Be sure to write at info@remembertobe.life if you’d like to take the courses for free.