[Don Salmon]

Hi Maureen:

(Fellow therapist here) I’m SO glad you asked this. I mainly joined this channel for experiential/practical exploration, and a large percentage of comments and questions are related to neuroscience, theories about psychology and philosophy.

Hard to know where to start – there’s just a ton of good stuff out there.

1. Video on effortless mindfulness: on our home page, http://www.RememberToBe.Life, if you scroll down to the 2nd video, you’ll see what is, in essence, a method for shifting from LH to RH (I have written a lot in these groups on the McGilchrist channel, that making the dividing line between “LH” and “RH” is not something I think is very helpful – and in fact, I don’t see Iain doing it as much as his students and followers seem to do – be happy to take about that if you like

2. The work of Les Fehmi. Dr. Fehmi (a physiological psychologist) spent over 50 years training people to shift from narrow, linear, logical, controlling, detached attention to wide, non linear, intuitive, spontaneous, immersed attention. He was able to help people reduce or eliminate medication for the most severe kinds of chronic pain (intense migraines, back pain, pain of all kinds), depression, anxiety, trauma, and more. He trained Olympic athletes, helped people in their relationships, and much more. His book “Open Focus” is probably the best introduction, but you really need to practice to get a sense.

With one patient, he taught her simply to notice space. That was it. In 3 weeks, decades of severe migraines and stomach cramps along with severe anxiety were completely gone. She said in 3 months of practicing this, every single area of her life showed significant improvement.

3. Culadasa aka Dr. John Yates. Culadasa’s work, I find, is much more powerful than that of Fehmi. I’ve known of Fehmi’s work for years, but just came across Culadasa’s “The Illumined Mind” in 2016. Culadasa distinguishes “selective attention” (roughly related to LH, thought not as rigidly as Iain sometimes makes it out to be) and “peripheral awareness” (which Culadasa considers to involve both hemispheres, not just the right). I should mention that as Dr. Yates, he was a neuroscience professor, so he knows this stuff from the inside.

he had meditation students with 20, 30 or more years of experience, who came to him, stuck in their practice. Just teaching them how to watch the breath with this awareness of different modes of attention enabled to them to reach an almost entirely silent mind within months.

I had the same experience reading Culadasa. Over the decades, I’ve had spontaneous moments – sometimes hours – of almost total mental silence. But I never understood how it was possible to simply shift attention and watch thoughts vaporize. he teaches how to do it!

I’m assuming you know all the conventional means, music, art, improvisational acting, breathing, imagery, etc etc etc. They’re all immensely helpful, but if your LH patients are highly resistant, having VERY scientific, well researched practices that don’t have any “woo” feeling or “New Age” quality to them can be immensely helpful.

I find that not just with LH folks, but just about everyone in this tech age, being able to talk about the effects of these practices on the prefrontal cortex, on the brain stem, etc is immensely helpful – especially because it’s equally effective with atheists and religious fundamentalists – it’s a no-brainer!”

Speaking of which (I got the no-brainer joke from this guy) I find Dan Siegel’s writing almost impenetrable, full of jargon and unnecessary complexity, and he’s not great at teaching practical methods, but some people love his stuff. I will say, I used to recommend – and sometimes buy extra copies to hand out – one of his books; “The Whole Brain Child” – and the techniques and practices in the book are applicable to teens and adults as well as toddlers, for whom the book was intended. It was co-authored with a child psychologist, which may be why it is so good!

So that’s a start. I love this topic and I look forward to hearing more from you about it. I’m especially intrigued by your observation of how those seeking therapy nowadays have become MORE LH. My experience is generally the opposite, but perhaps it has something to do with where you practice? I’ve been living in the Southeastern US the last 20 years (originally from NY City).

Thanks!!!

[Don Salmon]

That’s an interesting take on the default network.

In most of the studies I’ve seen as well as large-scale summaries, the default network is characterized by negative mind-wandering, often seen as triggered by survival-related fears.

In more recent writings, I’ve seen more references to the so-called “positive” states you reference, creative day-dreaming etc.

I might speculate on how one might involve one hemisphere more than the other, but actually, I was wondering if parapsychological research as well as various brain injuries might shed some light on the relationship of the hemispheres.

On the one hand, we know from over a century of psi research that it is perfectly possible to perceive objects without the use of the brain.

On the other, McGilchrist himself makes reference to the case of several individuals who were born with or had injuries resulting in the complete absence of one functioning hemisphere, who yet had all the psychological characteristics (narrow detached attention vs wide, open immersed attention) of those with two hemispheres.

I think the problem we get into is that McGilchrist himself, as he also has acknowledged numerous times, alternates, often without acknowledging it in the moment, between discussion of the hemispheres as metaphorical and discussion of them as literal. I find in many of the discussions on this channel, LH and RH are referred to as if they are discrete entities, and on the verge of assuming they control consciousness rather than are vehicles for it, or perhaps more accurate, simply reflect – as does all matter – activities of consciousness.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Jake,

Thanks much. Neil is an important figure in the transition from materialist to Nondual science.

he goes even farther than that video in this quite excellent essay: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4951167/

[Don Salmon]

Thanks Jennifer. Looks fascinating – just signed up to subscribe!

[Don Salmon]

Here’s another way of looking at how to relate to the idea of LH and RH.

1. Different “selves” in us (different organizations of personality, often associated with quite different states of consciousness). Yogis, contemplatives around the world have always had profound knowledge of this (it’s implicit in Ayurveda and even more in Vedic astrology). But in the modern world, Pierre Janet was probably the first who brought this out (many look at that era, the late 1800s, and think it truly a shame that Freud came into prominence, rather than Janet, whose work has been far more strikingly confirmed by modern psychology and neuroscience than Freud’s – much of Milton Erickson’s work can be traced by to Janet – and another even lesser known figure of that era, Frederick H Myers, who’s writing inspired Irreducible Mind, Beyond Physicalism and Consciousness Unbound, the work of Ed Kelly and his extraordinary group of neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, etc)

2. The heart brain (40,000 neurons surrounding the heart) and enteric nervous system or “gut brain” (100 million neurons), as well as the intelligence of EVERY cell in the body, all trillions of them (now that evolutionary neuroscientists realize that one celled organisms have astonishing levels of intelligence, even possibly the ability to consciously mutate, change their basic genetic material, in order to meet various challenges

3. The upper and lower brain

now, put that all together, with the fact that at every moment of our lives, BOTH hemispheres are ALWAYS functioning.

Let’s say we’re in our work self. Some combination of the working of trillions of cells, the gut brain, heart brain, LH, RH, subcortical head brain, comes together to form one particular personality.

Then we’re in our on-the-way-home-planning-to-watch-a-documentary-on-the-medieval French-Renaissance self.

Then we get home and we’re in our -chuck-that-I’m-getting-some-beer-and-chips-and-watching-basketball self.

If you want the neurophysiology of these selves, check out Dan Siegel’s Developing Mind.

Dan has put together;

LH/RH integration

integration of our various selves

memory integration

upper/lower brain integration (and more recently integration of head, heart and gut brain, as well as the rest of the body)

interpersonal integration

transpirational integration (integration of mind, heart, body, interpersonal relationships and the whole universe

and ALL of that is in relationship to pure Awareness, which is not situated in any area of the brain or body, but rather, brain, body, universe are all manifestations of that Awareness.

And Dan’s a mainstream psychiatrist!

And then we have the yogic understanding of vast subtle universes beyond the physical universe, and the transcendent reality beyond all universes, and that Divine Reality which includes and transcends all of that (God immanent and transcendent, the panentheistic view which Iain only vaguely hints at in the final chapters of his book)

So take all of that, and compare that to the tool of simply talking about LH and RH. It’s a VERY useful tool, but if we make everything about that, it’s incredibly limited.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Lucy:

What a wonderful response. I was just starting to do my morning exercise routine, and mulling over all your points and thinking, “How in the world am I going to focus in on the most interesting, helpful way of responding” – and this came to me.

I’m going to try to address your question regarding my caution about making LH and RH too discrete, making the correlations of experience and brain activity too discrete (this applies to your question about depression and the RH, as well as Whit’s comments about mind wandering and the LH and RH.

Les Fehmi was a physiological psychologist who probably led at least 1000 or more sessions per year over 50 years – my guess is he saw over 100,000 people in that time. His “Open Focus” method is a means of bringing about a state of coherence, integration, in the brain. And he gave a VERY rough template for understanding how to apply different kinds of attention to our experience:

He suggested 4 dimensions:

1. Narrow

2. Wide

3. Detached

4. Immersed

Now, generally, he said narrow, detached is the mode of the LH, wide immersed is the mode of attention of the RH.

But let’s look at it in practice.

I’m guessing most people here have practiced breath awareness? I’ve observed dozens, maybe hundreds?? of teachers and students teaching and practicing this. I would say a significant majority teach and practice it in a rather rigid way, struggling with their minds, forcing their attention, tensely focusing and getting lost in mind wandering.

I noticed quite early on, that Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh taught breath awareness in an unusual way – he would always emphasize “FEELING the breath IN the breath.’

Now, let’s put that together with Fehmi’s categories:

1. I’m sitting here, aware of my breath, my mind constantly pulled this way and that. I try to narrow my focus to ignore everything else, and I’m observing the breath as an object.

Sounds like LH, narrow detached attention, right?

But we look at a brain scan, and it seems that my RH is more active, and if we zoom in more closely, various regions in the right hemisphere associated with flow, immersed, wide attention, are active.

Confusing, eh? Let’s try again:

2. I’m sitting, completely relaxed, feeling the breath flowing, not so much as an object separate from me but as part of a field of energy, almost like an ocean undulating, with the “breath” not so much separate but simply one movement in this unified field of energy-awareness.

Sounds like RH, wide immersed attention, right?

So you know what I’m going to say – the brain scan says the opposite.

How can this be?

I think Iain’s biggest mistake is not COMMITTING to the hemisphere hypothesis as a metaphor. I”m sorry, I’ve been studying the brain since the early 70s, I’m quite familiar with Max Velman’s work (I met him at a conference in India some years ago and he was kind of enough to write a blurb for our book) – I mention him because Whit referenced his work in a paper).

And I will say, we just don’t know enough about consciousness, about mind (mind and consciousness are not the same), about feelings, sensations, about what matter and energy are and how they relate to mind and consciousness – to make the kind of definitive statements about mind and brain that our LH is so desperate to make (sorry, I just through in “LH” for fun – I think saying things that way is almost meaningless)

It’s a metaphor. IN any case, I’ll conclude with practice. Lucy, I’m sure you know, whatever your knowledge of Ayurveda or hypnosis or any form of therapy is, when you sit down with a client or patient, all that goes out the window (at least, all explicit reference to it does) and you’re just THERE with them in ways no science of psychology or neuroscience can touch.

And if that doesn’t make sense, try breath awareness and watch the nearly infinite ways your attention plays with experience, and then you see that these distinctions of narrow, wide, immersed, detached, LH, RH, are USEFUL, but only to a very very very limited extent.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Lucy and Nic:

I thought Nic captured the quality of despair beautifully in this line:

“I notice a lack of meaning, a lack of conceptualising the whole, an aversion to stay with uncertainty and the not knowing. More dysregulation, and trauma symptoms.”

Yes, I see the same thing – but!

LH/RH relate to very limited aspects of human consciousness – they’re different functions of the intellect. But we have a very ordinary physical or sensory mind, and an emotional mind.

And we have the prana (sorry, there’s no English equivalent – it’s not exactly “energy” – in the Yoga tradition it’s the Life consciousness, “Prana-shakti”, that underlies all that we moderns ignorantly refer to as “matter”. And in therapy, about 90% of our patients’ problems have much less to do with EITHER the LH or RH but with distorted functioning of prana, related to disconnection, trauma, the meaningless of modern life, etc.

Furthermore, all human societies prior to the actually quite recent period of ancient Greece (in other words, for over 100,00 years prior to a mere 2500 years ago), lived with a vivid, visceral awareness of vast realms of consciousness far beyond our ordinary waking state. Everything was alive, connected (and not merely in the RH way Iain describes). The world was magical, miraculous, alive, meaningful simply in its Presence.

Now, at the same time I see see poor and working people get caught up in literalist superficial conspiracy theories or fundamentalist religion, I see many who are far more open to these vast, subliminal realms than most educated people are, whether LH dominant or RH dominant.

And if we let go of rigid categories of LH and RH, and look closely from moment to moment at ANY of our patients, we may see that there is an utterly indefinable mixture of “all of the above” in them, in ourselves and in our interaction with them.

So my own way has been to use these categories to help me be more mindful of various notes, various flavors that may arise, but then just as quickly let go of them and dive even more fully into experience, which is far beyond any of our neurological, psychological, scientific, philosophic categories.

[Don Salmon]

Hey Nic – I’m going to answer you and Lucy together, below….

[Don Salmon]

Hey Nic,

Can you say a bit more about that? Do you think it’s something to do with UK culture, social media around the world, or something else?

Is it possible both of you serve the same population?

I could imagine among professionals the LH emphasis might have increased, but I’d be surprised to hear it’s also increased among the poor and working class….

[Don Salmon]

Maybe some practice would help?

Try this.

Notice the shapes of the letters here on screen

s

h

a

p

e

s

now, notice the white space between the letters

s

h

a

p

e

s

Now, notice thoughts arising in awareness.

Listen to the thoughts as if they were nonsensical sounds – just as with the letters, you’re letting go fo the meaning and just noticing shapes, let go of the meaning of the thoughts and hear them as pure sound.

Now, notice, IN BETWEEN thoughts – there’s space, silence, stillness.

Notice BOTH:

Thoughts…… (space)……Thoughts…..(space)……Thoughts…..(space)

now, finally, switch figure and ground. At first the focus is mainly on thoughts, as the Figure: and the background is space.

Let Space be the main focus

SPACE……(thoughts)…….SPACE…..(thoughts)…….SPACE…..(thoughts)

notice the SPACE IS PRESENT even when thoughts occur.

Les Fehmi had a patient, Paula, who was an emergency room nurse. For years, she had severe migraines, crippling pain, horrible stomach aches, ongoing severe anxiety and frequent panic attacks.

He simply said to her, “notice space. Notice space between things in the environment, and notice space between your thoughts. notice the space within which the energy of the sensations of your body moves.”

In 3 weeks, ALL of her symptoms were gone.

She said after 3 months, virtually EVERY area of her life had improved.

Our ordinary fixated, analytic attention has nothing to grab on to when we shift to noticing space.

Try it. Be sure to do it multiple times a day for several weeks, for at least a minute or so at a time, and let us know what happens. It is a VERY VERY radical shift, and will change everything in your life if you commit to it.

Here’s a nice little animation showing you how to do the internal shift from thoughts to space:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkP1-lin590

[Don Salmon]

I’m not sure what “cognitively penetrable” means, but from the context, I’m guessing you mean, is it possible to intentionally shift from effortful, tense, detached, analytic, narrow attention to effortless, relaxed, immersed, intuitive, global attention.

yes. There’s over 50 years of research verifying it:

1. Dr. Les Fehmi, a physiological psychologist. He spent 50 years teaching people to shift from what he referred to as narrow, detached attention to wide, immersed attention. There’s a very rough correlation with the hemispheres, and the various modes you refer to. Theoretically that may be interesting, but since the whole brain is active all the time in real life, outside the lab, for the practical purposes you’re referring to, the actual experience of shifting attention is far more important than what’s going on in the brain (which we only know through experience, indirectly or directly, anyway. This is true for all of the results of science, however much – through narrow, abstracted attention – we constantly forget about it)

2. Dr. John Yates, a neuroscientist and longtime Buddhist teacher, uses the terms ‘selective attention” and “peripheral awareness” to describe these varying forms of attention. He had students with 20 or 30 years of experience meditating who had not been successful in shifting to states of unity consciousness succeed in a matter of months by training them in shifting attention.

There are many other examples (Loch Kelly has been a subject in numerous labs, teaching similar shifts of attention)

As far as the idea of depression and the right hemisphere, it’s not that cut and dried. Similarly, perhaps you missed my comment that the association of the default mode with any particular state of mind is incorrect. Scientists say the default mode may be associated with negative, tense dysphoric thinking and it may be associated with positive creative mind wandering. It’s not one-to-one, neither are moods one to one corresponding with particular hemisphere.

It’s a shame that Iain so often goes back and forth from describing his “hemisphere hypothesis” as metaphorical vs literal. Since we know ALL the functions of the right hemisphere can, in the case of brain damage, be taken over COMPLETELY by the left hemisphere, and vice versa, the idea of relying on particular brain regions as definitive just doesn’t work.

Further more, parapsychological research shows cognition is perfectly possible without use of the brain at all, so it really helps us a LOT, I think, to take all info about the brain as metaphoric.

[Don Salmon]

Hi Lucy:

I’m an outlier here – I love Iain’s work but I don’t think it applies literally in a kind of one to one way. There are many ways of “self-ing” and I suspect they involve the whole body as well as vast realms of non-physical realities that neurologists know nothing of. I suppose if one must, you might way the verbal self is related to the LH, but there is definitely a different kind of ego-self in the RH (if you examine Jill Bolte’s writings, you’ll see a sense of separate self VERY much present even in her silent mind. Spirituality is not so simple as we like to make it these days)

As far as the Self in Buddhism, I fear that words get in our way as well. In fact, there are numerous of the most ancient Pali writings in which the Atman is described using exactly the same terms as the Upanishads, and is considered a core Reality.

Besides that, there is simply no question in Tibetan Buddhism that all 4 major schools, Nyingma and the others whose spelling I don’t recall) accept continuity of consciousness from life to life.

There’s also no question that nobody in any contemplative tradition – Christian, Jewish, Taoist, etc – accepts the reality of an inherently existing separate “self.”

I think really, most of the problems modern people have talking about individuality in spiritual contexts is that we have an underlying physicalist view which prevents us from seeing clearly. I remember quite vivid details from other lives, but those lives were not “Don.” I’m not Don either in that sense.

Sri Aurobindo, in his chapter in the Life Divine, on the Eternal and the Individual, describes this better than I’ve ever seen anywhere. When we hear the word “individual” our ordinary minds almost always make this into a thing, something separate. But it is THE DIVINE only, the only existent.

Now, people who only vaguely know Asian philosophy as “illusionist” or “world denying’ think that somehow denies multiplicity. But it is the Divine radiantly, playfully, ecstatically appearing in an individualized form, never separate from the cosmic nor from the transcendent. I don’t know if Rodney is here, but I’m sure he’ll recognize this as the Trinity.

The same Trinitarian view is in Tibetan Buddhism in discussion of the Dharmakaya.

You see how impossible words are! This is why except here on the McGilchrist channel, I’m practicing writing for teenagers. Let’s see if I can close this with simpler words.

The birds are chirping, and the trees outside my window are very very subtly shifting in the wind. I hear Jan in the other room doing Qigong, and I also hear the sound of my Time Machine backup humming.

There is hearing, seeing, thinking, feeling. There is a radiant, joyful Presence and awareness of all this. As the mind gets quieter and the heart starts to open, it feels directly like Presence/Awareness hearing-seeing-thinking-feeling-itself, but an itSelf which is boundless, infinite, timeless, yet dynamically alive.

Still too complicated! I’ll keep trying:>))

[Don Salmon]

You’re very sweet. Thank you SO much for watching, and I appreciate the comments.

I LOVE Shah’s Sufi stories. I’ll share with you one of my favorites:

Mulla Nasruddin made yearly trips across the border. As he pushed his wheelbarrow full of straw across the border, the guard would stop him and search thoroughly, convinced he was smuggling something.

Over the years, the guard was convinced that the Mulla was up to no good, but could never figure out what he was smuggling.

Finally, one day after the guard retired, the Mulla happened to meet him at a cafe. They sat down as friends to share coffee and the guard said, “Ok, now please, can you tell me, what was it you were smuggling?”

The Mulla replied, “I was smuggling straw.”

[Don Salmon]

Hi Rodney – gee this thread is getting long!:>))

Apart from the Tantric traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism, I’ve always related most closely to the mystical Christian tradition, particular with regard to the incarnation and the importance of matter. I think we’re “one” in this:>))

[Don Salmon]

Hi,

Perhaps you can do me a favor? Over at our website, http://www.RememberToBe.Life, we’re inviting people to shift attention with rather little reference to conventional practices (we do some simple things like breath watching or what we call “breathing with words,” but for the most part we’re inviting people simply to look more closely at their everyday experience).

I took some recent neurological findings about different modes or states of the brain and tried to put it in VERY simple everyday language. It’s the 2nd video on the home page, if you scroll down a bit, the one on effortlessness.

In Iain’s language, it’s contrasting LH and RH attention – but as I’ve said a lot in these forums, my experience, in practical terms, is that you can’t really separate out LH and RH this way; in our actual experience, it’s always mixed. It’s very helpful, I think, to make these distinctions, but after you’ve made the distinctions I think it’s good to forget about them.

I think the distinction of effortful/tense attention vs flow or effortless attention is much more helpful. LH and RH, to some extent, depend on conceptual understanding, whereas you can feel very powerfully right in the moment the extent to which you’re exerting stressful, effortful, tense energy or allowing (and again, you’ll find in experience that there’s always a lended mix of effort and effortlessness).

If you have the time – I think the video is about 8 or 9 minutes – I’d love to hear your reflections.