The Placebo Effect

LIFE ISN'T ABOUT WAITING FOR THE STORM TO PASS
IT'S ABOUT LEARNING TO DANCE IN THE RAIN


Stroke of Insight
Interview with Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D., Spirt of Maat
Dr. Jill is a brain researcher who had suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.  A brain scientist at Harvard, she kept track of what was going on in the 4 hour deterioration process which rendered her unable to walk, talk, read, write or recall her old life.  Jill recreates for us what it's like to live primarily in the right brain, based on her 8 year journey of recovery from the stroke.  This is the center for bliss and joy, the ability to live outside the box, intuition, empathy.  Another fascinating aspect, this is when we live consciously without the ego: no individuality or feelings of separateness.


Bleeping Herald:  Since you were able to experience first hand, living in your right brain, is it a lot easier to get there now?

Dr. Jill:  Oh yes, you know, it's not that I'm separate from it.  It's kind of like the story of how the blue sky is always there and so I see the blue sky as the right hemisphere.  It's always there, it's always doing what it does, it is a constant entity.  The left hemisphere is the clouds and the clouds represent brain chatter.  The clouds come in, and the thoughts come in, and they block the view of being able to see the blue sky even though the blue sky is always there.

The brain chatter comes on line and then it's organizing and categorizing and dramatizing all of our lives in the external world.  But you can quiet that when you get rid of the clouds, when you allow the mind to focus away from those thoughts, then you reveal what's always been there - which is the existence of the right hemisphere and that peacefulness and that awareness that everything is one and everything is connected.   That experience of euphoria, if you're willing to let go of the left hemisphere clouds.

BH:  And the more you practise at that, the better you get.

DJ:   Well, you know, I'm coming from the other direction.  So when I had the hemorrhage and I lost the left hemisphere, I lost all the clouds.  I was open to this incredible experience, and then for me to actually be functional in the external world, I had to consciously choose to bring the clouds back so I could function like a normal human being.

My primary place is the state of being in the blue skies, and the clouds I can then just blow away.  It's a tool;  I'm so clear that my brain chatter is a tiny group of cells that perform a magnificent function and I have a say in whether or not that circuitry runs.  So all I have to do is to make the decision that in this moment I'm not going to think those thoughts.  I'm not going to run that particular circuitry, and I'm going to focus my mind on bigger things and block those clouds from being there.

BH:  It seems a lot of people don't have the understanding they are in control of their emotions, or the brain chatter, or what goes on in their brain.  Do you think if people had a little bit more knowledge about the workings of their brain that it would be easier to understand we are in control? 

... I love the part in your book where you discuss that when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 90 second chemical process that happens in the body, and then after that, any emotional response is just that person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.

DJ:  The 90 second rule and then it's gone.  It's predictable circuitry, so by attention to what circuits you are triggering, and what that feels like inside of your body, you can recognize when it has happened.  We all know what it feels like when we suddenly move into fear.  Something happens in the external world and all of a sudden we experience a physiological response by our body that our mind would define as fear.  So in my brain some circuit is saying something isn't safe and I need to go on full alert, those chemicals flush through my body on full alert, and for that to totally flush out of my body takes less than 90 seconds.

So whether it's my fear circuitry or my anger circuitry or even my joy circuitry - it's really hard to hold a good belly laugh for more than 90 seconds naturally.  The 90 second rule is totally empowering.  That means for 90 seconds, I can watch this happen, I can feel this happen and I can watch it go away.  After that, if I continue to feel that fear, or that anger, I need to look at the thoughts I'm thinking that  are re-stimulating that circuitry that is resulting in me having this physiology over and over again.

When you stay stuck in an emotional response, you're choosing it by choosing to continue rethinking the same thoughts that retrigger it.   We have this incredible ability in our minds to replay, but as soon as you replay you're not here, you're not in the present moment.  You're still back in something else and if you continue to replay the exact same line and loop, then you have a predictable result.  You can continue to make yourself mad all day and the more you obsess over whatever it is, the more you run that loop, then the more that loop gets  energy of its own to manifest itself with minimal amounts of thought, so it will start on automatic.  And it keeps reminding you, "Oh yeah, I was mad and I have to rethink that thought."

...BH:  Are people who take the time to cultivate their right hemisphere better at finding peace?

DJ:  A highly dominated left hemisphere extremist generally has a lot of stress in his/her life.  The difference, the advantage of living more in the right is that first of all, there is no measurement of time.  If you are in your space creating and the day goes by and you are not in a state of urgency, you're creating.  You're being, you're evolving something, you're using the essence of what you are to create something new and there is a joy and a satisfaction in that.

That lack of urgency, that's very different from sitting in an office being on the phone, being on the e-mail, text messaging every moment, never really connecting to the essence of what you are.  You're just acting like a machine that's in process.  That doesn't mean that you're not being creative in what you're processing, but you have to have the pause.  During the pause, it's an opportunity for healing, it's kind of like sleeping and waking.  In so many of our jobs that are left hemisphere dominant, there's just output, output, output, there is not pause, there is no refueling, no regeneration.

Overall, if you're going to look at the health of the organism, our traditional society is very unhealthy.  If you look at the mental health of our society, it's very poor and we don't even have a handle on a mental health system that can help us.  Most of us are not really tending to our own mental health, so how can we expect to have good overall mental health of our society?

BH:  You talk a little bit in your book about studies that have been done with Tibetan meditators and Franciscan nuns that show when a meditative climax was reached, certain areas of the left hemisphere had decreased activity.

DJ:  The beauty of this is that there are scientists who are open to recognizing these are realities.  Just because we may not understand them is no reason to say they don't exist or they're not real.  Now we have enough modern technology, and really open minded scientists saying, "Let's explore this."  So it's a very exciting time because the two worlds are facing eachother with curiousity instead of resentment.  And boy, what a difference that is!