Would we feel more content if we "tamed" our left brain?

I don’t think we know enough about brain lateralization to answer this question well.

Hers is an incredible story. She stumbled onto a truth that the meditative traditions have been promulgating for millenia. A Zen teacher I know saw the video of her presentation and said “If anyone ever asks me why I do what I do, I’m just going to show this to them” “Here’s” the video. Worth watching, for sure.

Oops, screwed up the link. Here’s the video.

Maybe that’s what happened to the buddha under the Bodhi tree; he has a stroke.

Thank you very much ljs22 and harp for sharing those. It is not, however, clear to me how one steps out of the left brain easily without having had her stroke.

We cannot deny our left brain at all in the way that having a stroke would accomplish. But I do think we can focus our energy toward right-brained pursuits…in the article, the scientist, after her recovery, chooses to spend more time skiing and pursuing her art.

I think this thread is an interesting follow-up to the earlier discussion about whether the world would be better without emotions. In a sense, I’m asking the opposite. Would be we better off without our analytic side? The short answer, I believe, is humans need and certainly benefit from both. But we can also choose what to focus on in our lives, and perhaps our society would gain something from a sense of right brained connectiveness instead of left-brained categories.

As yet another aside, I remember as a child being extremely right-brained. I was super emotional, artistic, and creative in general. Now as an adult, I’m much MUCH more left-brained…quick to categorize, judge others, and accomplish rational tasks quickly. This switch has made me successful and effective, but not necessarily happy. Have others felt a similar switch?

@ljs22 Yes, I think you are right. Society does tend to knock the right-brainedness right out of us. There is such a focus on and rewarding of left-brained activity in our world that a little more balance would be great.

@marina
In Zen, and most other meditation traditions, there are practices used that are designed to bring that right hemispheric consciousness to the foreground. Some practices use intense concentration on the “here and now”, focusing all of one’s attention on the breath, for instance, and just ignoring the left brain’s activities of discursive thought (as Bolte Taylor says, it’s the right brain that’s attuned to the present). Other practices, such as koan practice, force the mind to see from a right-brain perspective by facing it with challenges that the left-brain simply can’t deal with (try, for instance, to answer this question with your powers of reason: “What is your original face before your parents were born?”)

Whereas Bolte Taylor became aware of how her right-brain sees the world by having her left hemisphere “unplugged”, meditators learn how to see around what their left-brain is doing (which normally masks the right-brain consciousness), and tune into that holistic right-brain view. The goal is never to abandon one for the other, since both are needed for healthy functioning, but without considerable effort and training, most of us will go through life knowing only that left-brain perspective.