The Right Brain and Us

Watching Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk “My stroke of insight” made me think of Radio Lab’s episode “Who am I?“

This episode included an interview with Julian Keenan, a neurologist that studies self recognition.

Keenan discussed a study involving morph software and a drug that anaesthetises the brain.

He’d photograph his subjects and combine their images with images of famous people using the morph software. Then he’d inject the drug, sodium amatol, into their brain hemispheres and have them look at the images with half their brains turned off.

In Keenan’s own words:

The results were quite interesting: when the right hemisphere was driving the brain and the left hemisphere was anaesthetised, the patients saw their own face out of this morph, and that’s how normals react to these morphs. You generally see your own face in the morphs.

However without the right hemisphere, the patients didn’t seem to recognise their own face in the morph, and they identified, they thought the face that we presented them was a famous person’s face.

That the right brain is so crucial in visual recognition and self awareness raises some fundamental questions about how we know who we are, and how informed our sense of self may be.

I wonder whether we can reach an imbalance in brain hemisphere activity not by injecting a chemical but by not actively using the right brain hemisphere on a consistent basis – by living in a society that is driven by left-brained activities.

Thinking about Western Society, America specifically, I could see how the trappings of our culture and economy cultivate extremely overactive left brains…and could lend to more dormant, under-utilized right brains.

All of this makes me wonder whether if we might house under-stimulated, atrophied right brains and/or overstimulated, hyper-developed left brains. And if we did, would leave us imbalanced – and give us a truncated sense of who we are as individuals and possibly even as a society?

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Below is a video from the folks at Science Central that dovetails nicely with the science behind visual recognition and Keenan’s research mentioned above.

I feel as though these studies could point to a deeper level of machinery animating how we frame the other and the amorphous nature of the self.

It sounds like right brain might hold some of the answers to these questions…

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