In an experiment by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Roger Sperry and his team, Joe is flashed pictures to both sides of the brain simultaneously. His left-brain sees a picture of a hammer and the right brain a picture of a handsaw. The experimenter asks him what he saw, and Joe says, “Hammer.” He is then asked to close his eyes and let his left hand (connected to his right brain) draw what he saw and he draws the handsaw! When Joe looks at the picture, he recognizes that its’ a drawing of a saw, but when he’s asked why he drew it, he has no idea. You can watch videos of Dr. Sperry's experiment on YouTube. They are stunning to watch.
Through many elegant experiments, Sperry’s team found that “Joe” actually lived in his left brain, and that the named self that we all identify with is inextricably tied to our ability to talk and name things.
When our hemispheres are surgically separated, our right brains demonstrate themselves to be highly intelligent and even better than our left brains at certain tasks, such as understanding emotional body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. Their speech ability is quite limited though, and if their thoughts and feelings are going to be put into words, the information needs to be sent across the corpus callosum to the left-brain speech centers. Once there, it may be directly expressed, but it can also be altered, edited, suppressed, or even ignored.
Our ability to think rationally and to use speech and numbers has allowed us to build on our imaginative abilities and emerge as the most dominant creatures on earth. Perhaps because of this evolutionarily new and astounding power to alter our environment, the left brain has become a little over-impressed with itself. Because it alone has the ability to name things, it calls itself the dominant, or “major” hemisphere! That’s fair, because it can and does provide an override function in relation to the more emotional right brain, but it makes a serious mistake when it thinks that it is the only hemisphere that counts. While logical thinking is necessary for building skyscrapers and flying to the moon, it is nearly useless when it comes to creating and maintaining an emotionally intimate relationship, or responding to fast-developing threats.
The split-brain research showed us that we have another type of intelligence that coexists with our usual way of thinking about and describing our world. This intelligence has its own perspective, priorities, form of information processing, and motivations. It influences our daily lives much more than we know.
This intelligent “unconscious” mind undoubtedly lives in not only the right brain, but in other areas of both brain hemispheres and parts of the limbic brain that lack direct access to speech. It has eons of evolutionary experience that can guide us or help us solve problems. It tends to think in terms of how things are connected, rather than how they are different, and it excels in recognizing both spatial and social relationships. Bringing this emotional/intuitive intelligence into our problem-solving and emotional coping efforts greatly expands our ability to worry well; it lets us use all of our brain capacity to resolve rather than create worry and stress.
The terms “right brain” and “left brain” have almost become clichés over the past 40 years. While it is an oversimplification to assign all logical thought to the left brain and all intuitive symbolic thought to the right, the distinction is another useful metaphor. There are indeed significant differences in the way that different brain regions process information. Research on patients who have had the two sides of their brain separated (“split-brain” subjects) confirms that both hemispheres are highly intelligent, with the right brain more closely integrated with imagery and emotions, and the left side more specialized for speech and logic.
In 1981 Roger Sperry, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology received the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that we actually have two brains–or more accurately that both sides of the cerebral cortex are each individually capable of high-level information processing. Our cerebral cortex is divided in half, looking quite a bit like an oversized walnut, with the two halves (hemispheres) wired together by large bundles of nerve pathways.
Dr. Joseph Bogen, a neurosurgeon colleague of Sperry’s, began researching an operation in an attempt to save the lives of a number of human patients suffering from life-threatening epilepsy. None of the usual medications had worked for these patients and they were in serious danger of dying from prolonged seizures. Bogen’s hope was that by separating the two hemispheres, the seizure activity could at least be limited to one side of the brain and body, which would allow the patients to breathe and survive their seizures.
Fortunately, the operation was even more successful than anticipated, and after 41 operations, all but one patient was completely free of seizure activity. Even more remarkably, once the patients recovered from the surgery, they seemed unchanged to their families, friends, and examining doctors.
In order to separate the sides of the brain, Bogen had to completely sever the corpus callosum, a huge information highway of nerve fibers that connects the two sides of the brain. The corpus callosum normally transmits 4 to 5 billion nerve impulses every second between the hemispheres–a lot of information flow to interrupt without any apparent change in behavior or personality.
Fortunately for our understanding of brain function, many of these patients volunteered to be tested by Dr. Sperry. In one experiment, the subjects sat at a table and reached under a screen to handle a variety of common objects that they couldn’t see. Sperry had them focus their gaze on a spot directly in front of them and then flashed a word for a tenth of a second at the extreme right or left of their visual field, thus sending the message to only one side of the brain at a time.
Movies of these experiments are stunning. When a subject–let’s call him “Joe”–receives the message “comb” in his left brain, his right hand goes under the screen, picks up a pen, a watch, a book, and then finds the comb and holds it up. The experimenter asks him what happened and Joe answers, “I saw the word ‘comb,’ and I searched through some other stuff until I found the comb and held it up.”
Then the word “pen” is flashed to Joe’s right brain. His left hand immediately goes under the screen and examines the various objects until he finds and holds up the pen. Joe is asked what happened, and replies, “Huh? Nothing. I’m just waiting for the next message.” Joe has no idea that a message was sent or received, and no awareness that his left hand not only moved but also accurately found the object in question and held it up for display. Something intelligent was at work, but Joe wasn’t aware of it.
Doctors are highly responsible problem-solvers who need to keep a sharp eye out for illnesses that need treatment. They are also under great stress emotionally, financially, and always have too much to do. Do doctors worry more than other people? Please check out my blog post on the site of my colleague, Dr. Lee Lipsenthal: "Finding Balance in a Medical Life." While you're there, be sure to look through his site, to find terrific resources for stressed-out docs.
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Your brain can be thought of as having three major divisions – the primitive, instinctual brain that we share with reptiles and amphibians, the more highly developed limbic, or emotional, brain that we share with other mammals, and the “thinking cap” cerebral cortex that sits on top of the other two, and is much more highly developed in humans than in any other creature. The three brain divisions are intricately interconnected, and impulses at each level often affect the other two. Thus, someone or something may attract or repel us at an emotional, or even instinctual level and later we will try to rationalize and explain that feeling.
Advertisers are well aware of this “bottom up” motivational pathway and design ads that are aimed at first engaging the emotional brain. They know that if there is a strong emotional attraction to an ad, the attractive images and the product may be tied together in the brain. When the emotional brain likes what it sees, the logical brain will often find a reason to justify a purchase. That’s why pretty girls dominate beer ads, beautiful women hock cosmetics, and happy-looking people sell products ranging from pharmaceuticals to automobiles.
Your thinking and feeling brain divisions are not always in agreement, and conflicts about purchases are a good everyday example. Have you ever really wanted something like a fabulous pair of shoes, or piece of jewelry, or a sports car, where you just “had to have it” even though you knew it was way too expensive or impractical for you? Did you agonize about the purchase, going back and forth between the reasons that tell you “no” and the craving that tells you “yes?” That was a conversation between your thinking brain and your feeling brain.
The emotional decision takes only 12 milliseconds, while the rational decision takes twice as long. Once the emotional brain has decided it wants something, it takes a lot of rational argument to change its mind. That’s why the advertisers target the emotional brain first.
If our thinking and feeling brains are in agreement, we buy or don’t buy, we go out with the guy or not, we stay in our job or leave it, and life is congruent and relatively simple. When our reason and emotion disagree, however, we find ourselves uncomfortable and conflicted. It turns out that in those situations we aren’t just of “two minds” about the issue, we are probably of “two brains” about it as well.
I know two people who have won sizable amounts of money in lotteries. Jennie reacted with the joy you’d expect – excited about the win, the money, and all the possibilities it opened up for her. Walter got very anxious, saying, “Oh crap. Now I’ll have to pay a ton of taxes and everybody I know is going to be after me for something.” It made me wonder why he bought a ticket. The point is, the same thing happens to two people and they have very different experiences because they run different stories about the event in their minds.
In this case, the sudden life change precipitated by the lottery win triggered excitement in Jennie’s emotional brain, but fear in Walter’s. The emotional signal went up to the cortex and thoughts, images, and memories were woven together in a way that produced predictions. The signals resulting from the stories that were created in each of their thinking brains traveled back down through the emotional and reptile brains where they activated different reactions.
In Walter’s case, his fears created enough stress and anxiety that he needed to take medications for a while. The fear and worry set up a reverberating circuit that continuously reinforced itself. Over time, with support from his family and some cognitive therapy, Walter was able to appreciate his good fortune and interpret his win differently. As his inner narrative changed about this event, his cortex sent different signals down through his emotional and reptilian brains and he was able to calm down and discontinue his anti-anxiety medicines.
We have little control over our initial emotional and instinctive reactions, because they travel on a “fast pathway” designed by nature to immediately get us out of dangerous situations or to pursue fleeting opportunities. But soon after those initial responses, the cortex gets involved, analyzing and creating stories about our experiences. These stories can alter the way we then respond emotionally, and that’s where learning to use our brains more consciously can help us. We can reprogram our brains by reimagining and rewriting some of the stories that live unconsciously in our cortex, and those rewrites can change the way we feel about some of the things that worry us.
