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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ Category

The Divided Brain

Posted in from the reading room, neuroscience, psychology, science on August 20, 2012| 18 Comments »

Iain McGilchrist has released a short Kindle book entitled The Divided Brain and The Search for Meaning [ASIN:B008JE7I2M]. In it he presents an excellent precis of the ideas and findings he presents so brilliantly in his somewhat massive The Emperor and His Emissary.

The key to his thesis is that it is odd that our brains are divided into two asymmetric halves. Why is that? Why didn’t we just develop a single, unified cortex? There’s probably some big advantage in having two brains, but only if the two halves let us do different things. This is NOT an argument that the left does this and the right does that. It is NOT a claim that left-brained people deal with facts, and right-brained people are artistic. He dismisses such ideas as simplistic and erroneous. As he puts it –

Instead of asking, as of a machine, what it does – does it ‘do’ reason, emotion, language, imagery? – we should have asked – as of a person – what’s he or she like?

In other words, what are the different ways each hemisphere approaches the world?

He says that the right hemisphere primarily lets us be aware of the world, and looks for the connections, or the “between-ness” everywhere, whereas the left allows us to grasp, and, hence, manipulate the world.

The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation…….One way of looking at the difference would be to say that while the left hemisphere’s raison d’être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility.

These differences are profound and we need them both. the one helps us to pin things down, and the other opens us up to seeing change and possibilities.

Another way of thinking of the difference between the hemispheres is to see the left hemisphere’s world as tending towards fixity, whereas that of the right tends towards flow.

In his thesis, he claims that the left hemisphere way of engaging with the world has become unhealthily dominant and we’ve become stuck on its way of representing reality to us.

the purpose of the left hemisphere is to allow us to manipulate the world, not to understand it.

I highly recommend you get this book. You can easily read it through at a single sitting, then you’ll want to go right back to the start and read it again. If you haven’t read The Master and His Emissary, The Divided Brain will whet your appetite but it will also let you easily understand the basic premise.

The right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind.

The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises, where the right hemisphere’s world remains truer to each embodied instance, and appreciates the unique.

Just stop and think for a moment what that means, and why we should want to re-balance our society by shifting the balance to the right hemispheric way of approaching the world…..

 

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Love from the beginning

Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, neuroscience, psychology on December 19, 2011| 3 Comments »

Last year I studies Interpersonal Neurobiology with Dan Siegel, whose book, Mindsight, I highly recommend. He teaches around the essential triad of brain, mind and relationships and understanding the links between these three turns out to be tremendously illuminating. On the relationship front, Dan draws on his training in attachment theory and demonstrates the links between early nurturing and personality later in life – particularly in connection with how we form relationships.

Sir Harry Burns, the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland, highlighted in a brilliant presentation earlier this year the key importance of early years in determining future health and health behaviours.

On top of this comes this research from the University of Minnesota demonstrating –

“Your interpersonal experiences with your mother during the first 12 to 18 months of life predict your behavior in romantic relationships 20 years later,” says psychologist Jeffry A. Simpson, the author, with University of Minnesota colleagues W. Andrew Collins and Jessica E. Salvatore. “Before you can remember, before you have language to describe it, and in ways you aren’t aware of, implicit attitudes get encoded into the mind,” about how you’ll be treated or how worthy you are of love and affection.

Wow! during the first 12 to 18 months! How important is love? You can’t over emphasise it.

You might be thinking yikes, if it’s set in the first 18 months, what hope is there? Well, it turns out we can have lots –

The good news: “If you can figure out what those old models are and verbalize them,” and if you get involved with a committed, trustworthy partner, says Simpson, “you may be able to revise your models and calibrate your behavior differently.” Old patterns can be overcome. A betrayed baby can become loyal. An unloved infant can learn to love.

 

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Hug more – it’s good for you!

Posted in from the consulting room, health, neuroscience, video on November 25, 2011| 1 Comment »

Nice little article on the School of Life site about the relationship between compassion and circulating levels of oxytocin.

It references Paul Zak’s talk on TED.COM.

It appears that there’s a relationship between our oxytocin levels and how much compassion we experience. Of course, as with so much neuroscience, this can’t be described as simply cause and effect but the correlation is still an interesting one.
I particularly like the concluding recommendation about how to increase your oxytocin levels –

To make a decision to raise the level of oxytocin in our bodies – Zak’s prescription is “eight hugs a day” – and reduce, say, levels of the stress hormone cortisol, seems as conscious a moral choice as giving to charity or embracing a religious creed. And if the outcome is the same, then let’s get hugging now

 

Never mind your 5 a day veggie and fruit portions – have you had your 8 hugs today yet??

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Out of Our Heads

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy, science on July 24, 2011| 1 Comment »

Alva Noë’s “Out of Our Heads” [ISBN 978-0-8090-1648-8] makes a strong case for understanding consciousness as a phenomenon, not produced by the brain (in the way that the stomach produces gastric juices, as he says), but rather….well, this is how he puts it –

Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context.

He rejects completely a reductionist view that you are your brain –

The subject of experience is not a bit of your body. You are not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are.

and, further,

Brains don’t have minds; people (and other animals) do.

This way of thinking is entirely consistent with what Dan Seigel teaches from a perspective of “Interpersonal neurobiology” – we can find neural correlates of mental phenomena, but we have no way of proving either causation or direct linkage between the two. This is also consistent with those who argue for both and “embodied” and, in particular, an “extended” mind (see Andy Clark’s work). I particularly liked the phrase Alva quotes in his book (attributed to his colleague Susan Hurley) –

…the skull is not a magical membrane; why not take seriously the possibility that the causal processes that matter for consciousness are themselves boundary crossing and, therefore, world involving?

I love that. We are all deeply and intimately connected as open systems with our environments – our physical, social and semantic environments. The flows of energy and life flow into us, through us, out of us. They create us in interaction with our own bodies and minds. As Alva paraphrases Merleau-Ponty –

…our body is ours – the place where we feel and the means by which we act – insofar as the current of activity that flows toward the world passes through it.

There is so much to stimulate your thinking in this book – about consciousness, about a sense of self, about habits, language, how we create the world in constant interaction with that changing world. I’ll just highlight two other parts of the book for you. Firstly what he says about science and biology –

Science takes up the detached attitude to things. But from the detached standpoint, it turns out, it is not possible even to bring the mind of another into focus. From the detached standpoint, there is only behaviour and physiology: there is no mind.

..you can’t do biology from within physics. To do biology, we need the resources to take up a nonmechanistic attitude to the organism as an environmentally embedded unity. When we do that – and now we come to my critical claim – we also secure the (at least) primitive mentality of the organisms. The problem of mind is that of the problem of life. What biology brings into focus is the living being, but where we discern life, we have everything we need to discern mind.

…once you see the organism as a unity, as more than just a process, you are, in effect, recognising its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and point of view.

I feel this is crucial if we are to achieve a better understanding of these big issues of life, mind and consciousness. We have to see people as whole organisms in constant exchange with their environment. There’s something inherently inhuman about the attempts to reduce biology to physics, or the attempts to reduce human beings to physiology and behaviour.

Finally, I could pick many, many paragraphs to make this point, but let me end with this one –

We are partly constituted by a flow of activity with the world around us. We are partly constituted by the world around us. Which is just to say that, in an important sense, we are not separate from the world, we are of it, part of it. Susan Hurley said that persons are dynamic singularities. We are places where something is happening. We are wide.

 

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The space within

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on July 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 

Once in a while, I get shocked into upper wakefulness, I turn a corner, see the ocean, and my heart tips over with happiness – it feels so free! Then I have the idea that, as well as beholding, I can also be beheld from yonder and am not a discrete object but incorporated with the rest, with universal sapphire, purplish blue. For what is this sea, this atmosphere, doing within the eight-inch diameter of your skull? (I say nothing of the sun and the galaxy which are also there.) At the center of the beholder there must be a space for the whole, and this nothing-space is not an empty nothing-space but a nothing reserved for everything.

This quote from Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift is used as an epigraph for the last chapter of Alva Noe’s excellent “Out of Our Heads”. As he concludes –

I hope I have convinced you that there is something perverse about the very idea that we are our brains, that the world we experience is within us. We don’t need to have the world within us: we have access to the world around us; we are open to it. I take this to be the import of Bellow’s language in this chapter’s epigraph.

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The Empathic Brain

Posted in from the consulting room, health, neuroscience, tagged on July 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I am he as you as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

We’re still in the midst of a highly atomistic society, as Mary Midgley describes so clearly in books like “Science and Poetry” and “The Myths We Live By”. The thrust of human thought has been to separate, divide and reduce. Consequently there’s a popular conception that we are all separate – that there is a “me” inside my head. We have a sense that each of us are as separate as billiard balls. We might bump into each other, impact on each other, but we don’t spill over into each other.

But it’s all changing. There’s a new paradigm, a new way of thinking on the block, and it’s gaining ground fast.

That new paradigm is the irreducibility of reality, the importance of understanding connections, interactions, complexity. There’s a shift in focus from separate entities to between-ness.

“The Empathic Brain” by Christian Keysers [1932594515] gives an interesting insight into how the discovery of mirror neurons has shown us just how wrong the idea of completely separate, skull-bound minds is. Keysers is one of the pioneer researchers working on the discovery and understanding of mirror neurons.

Here are just two points from his book which might change the way you think about the mind, the self and your relationships.

Firstly, Keysers and others have shown that mirror neurons are involved in producing a phenomenon where the pre-motor strip in our brain becomes active in specific ways. When we see someone carrying out an action, our brain prepares to make our bodies carry out the same action. This might even follow through into the action itself. Have you ever noticed how two people well connected in conversation often mirror each others postures or body movements? Little things like touching one ear, or scratching their nose, where one person does it, and the other immediately mimics the same action. If you ask the people concerned about it, it’s likely they’re not even aware that it’s happening. It’s not that the one thinks “Oh she’s scratching the tip of her nose, I think I’ll scratch mine”!

Secondly, an area of the brain known as the “insula” becomes activated when we empathically respond to another’s emotion. This explains why some people can become quite overwhelmed by another’s emotion. In fact we’re not all the same in this regard. The insula of the most highly empathic people becomes much more active than that of the less  empathic. Again this isn’t something we consciously, rationally choose. The activation of the insula by others’ emotions doesn’t seem to be under our control.

Here are a couple of passages from “The Empathic Brain” –

Imagining actions also increases brain activity in the premotor regions involved in executing similar actions……Thus, during both observation and imagination, our brain uses the premotor cortex to mentally re-enact an action without actually moving the body.

 

If we interpret the actions of other individuals through our own motor programs, our own motor programs will have a very strong impact on our perception of other individuals.

 

Empathic people activate their insula very strongly and may be overwhelmed by the vicarious emotions that movies trigger in them. Other people activate their insula only weakly, needing much stronger stimuli to trigger their own feelings.

 

Through shared circuits, the people around us, their actions and their emotions, permeate into many areas of our brain that were formerly the safe harbours of our identity: our motor system and our feelings. The border between individuals becomes permeable, and the social world and the private world intermix. Emotions and actions are contagious. Invisible strings of shared circuits tie our minds together, creating the fabric of an organic system that goes beyond the individual.

The concepts of the mind as embodied and extended  seem very helpful to me. This work on mirror neurons, interestingly, touches on both of these.

 

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Reducing pain with your own brain – meditation

Posted in from the consulting room, health, neuroscience, psychology, tagged on April 6, 2011| 2 Comments »

Here’s another study showing how pain can be reduced without using drugs.

In this particular study, the researchers had the subjects do one 20 minute focused attention meditation session daily for 4 days. The subjects rated the painful stimulus applied as “57 percent less unpleasant and 40 percent less intense”.

This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it’s another study showing the potential benefit of simple meditation techniques which anyone can learn and integrate into their daily lives. Secondly, as the article points out, it shows how quickly a benefit might be obtained.

If you do suffer from some painful condition, do you practice daily meditation? If not, why not? What’s to lose?

 

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Reducing pain with your own brain – love

Posted in from the reading room, health, neuroscience on April 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

Here’s an interesting piece of research. Viewing pictures of a romantic partner can stimulate the “reward” parts of your brain and reduce your experience of pain.

In this trial the researchers compared three interventions – viewing a photo of your romantic partner, viewing a photo of another attractive person and a standard distraction test. The first and the third of these reduced the pain experienced most, and the parts of the brain “activated” by viewing the romantic partner were not the same as those areas “activated” in the distraction test.

I should just add that in this particular trial the subjects were in the first nine months of a romantic relationship……but, still, it’s interesting to see the demonstration of the impact of love (and desire?) on the pain reducing mechanisms of the brain.

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An Integral framework of psychological development

Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, personal growth, psychology on March 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

In Ken Wilber’s integral map of development, he describes an evolution from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to worldcentric. By this he means an initial focus on “me”, to an identification with others like us (“we”), to an identification with all living things.

He demonstrates how this relates to stages of moral development, from preconventional, where a child is self-absorbed, to conventional, where they learn the rules and norms of culture, and identify with their tribe or group, then onto postconventional, where their sense of identity expands out to include all humanity.

Interestingly he suggests there may be another map which lays nicely onto these – body (a focus on my physical body), mind (expanding to shared relationships and values) and spirit (all sentient beings).

Or even, from a neurological basis, from the reptilian brain stem (centred on me), to the mammalian limbic system (centred on we – the seat of attachment), to the neocortex (able to perceive and identify with the world).

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Partitive and aspective

Posted in books, from the living room, from the reading room, life, neuroscience, philosophy on March 10, 2011| 2 Comments »

Here’s a quote from a book entitled “Neuroethics“. This is from an essay by Nancey Murphy.

While Greek thought tended to regard the human being as made up of distinct parts, Hebraic thought saw the human being more as a whole person existing on different dimensions. As we might say, it was more characteristically Greek to conceive of the human person “partitively,” whereas it was more characteristically Hebrew to conceive of the human person “aspectively.” That is to say, we speak of a school having a gym (the gym is part of the school); but we say I am a Scot (my Scottishness is an aspect of my whole being.)

Until I read this, I’d never come across these particular terms. Nor did I know there was this difference between Greek and Hebrew thought. But what completely struck me was how congruent this idea is with what Ian McGilchrist says about the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In his “Master and His Emissary“, he makes the case for each hemisphere engaging with the world in its own unique way – the left engaging in a “representation” way, breaking reality down into parts to “grasp” it by mapping it against what’s already known, and the right engaging in a more holistic way, (what McGilchrist describes as a focus on the between-ness, rather on the things). Ken Wilber’s description focuses on the “interpretative” nature of this other way.

So this is interesting. This idea of a “partitive” world view is very much our dominant paradigm. We break experience into parts and we use the left hemisphere strongly to do that. It strikes me we are on the edge of a wave of change here though, and that this worldview is running out of steam. It’s failing to satisfy what it is to be fully human. If that’s true, then we should be seeking to develop our right hemispheric powers, creating a more “aspective” worldview.

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