right hemisphere

December 21st, 2023

• left hemisphere / right hemisphere
  • MS > but there's true-me stuck in the LH
  • MS > "this isn't rooted in the sociosensual, so stop that"
    • MO > "which isn't very sociosensual"

Books or essays that answer each others' questions

• The Master and his Emissary relates to Spectrum of Ecstasy in that nondual awareness seems to be characteristic of the right hemisphere
  • So you could say that The Master and his Emissary answers these questions one might have reading Spectrum of Ecstasy
    • "In what sense, concretely, is the nondual view "always already there"?"
      • it's your right hemisphere's perspective
      • and it's important to note that just because you (when you're in LH mode) are not consciously aware of how your right hemisphere is perceiving and operating, it's still entirely involved in every moment of operating
    • "What's going on neurologically when someone shifts from a dualistic to non-dualistic view?"
      • this isn't answered very precisely, but it's clearly something about a shift in the relationship between the hemispheres
  • The Way of Effortless Mindfulness by Loch Kelly is also very related to this topic.
    • If, reading The Master and his Emissary, you have the question "what sort of thing might I do that would shift my experience into a more right hemisphere mode?" then The Way of Effortless Mindfulness has dozens of exercises for this.
      • This is all part of Adyashanti's school, btw, which is part of Mahamudra which is a close cousin of Dzogchen. See pages about these on HowToHuman (troubleshooting guide for the human condition)

July 19th, 2023

• left hemisphere/right hemisphere <-> dominance & submission
  • ericyoungstrom.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5455/2013/09/Demar…

March 30th, 2023

• RH right hemisphere

Podcast summaries

• Keywords - brain hemispheres coercion what is coercion? productivity scapegoat Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing Conversation As Medium make shared or different frames explicit shared train of thought do people naturally self-regulate how deep they're willing to go? commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets dream mashups Unlocking the Emotional Brain IFS partswork what might a healthy community look like? doing community well The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere Behavior: The Control of Perception Perceptual Control Theory Hemisphere DharmaChange doesn't just happenHemispheres & Self-improvement left hemispheres aren't made for interfacing with other people Perceptual Control Theory control systems

• Keywords - brain hemispheres McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model Perceptual Control Theory barn-raising Internal Family Systems blindspot blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!) it's only possible to be rational within a frame make shared or different frames explicit Change doesn't just happen Intend productivity Intend Philosophy & Paradigm how to think about goals PCT internal conflict much of human collaboration scales sublinearly but it's possible to scale superlinearly What are the components or dimensions required for collaborative culture? Geoffrey West Questions for teasing apart the concept of commitment commitment/choice is a confused way to relate to stances/mindsets Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing acceptance isn't the same as acceptance safety self-trust right hemisphere left hemisphere self-energizing

• 1:17:54 - 1:35:18 - How do you wake yourself up from dream mashups? How do you interact with people projecting their dream mashups on you? Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation & old emotional meanings everyone is constantly overgeneralizing acceptance isn't the same as acceptance safety self-trust right hemisphere left hemisphere

• 56:30 - 1:10:40 - Why is Ian McGilchrist's work important? Is his work factual or more metaphorical The Master and his Emissary intro left hemisphere right hemisphere

• 1:10:42 - 1:19:58 - Explaining how the hemispheres work using information processing/computation as a metaphor left hemisphere Categories, AI & Left Hemisphere it's the left hemisphere's job to have blindspots right hemisphere complexity systems thinking Donella Meadows resources for systems thinking

McGilchrist's brain hemisphere model

• left hemisphere & right hemisphere (for backlinks)

September 11th, 2021

• polarity management - maybe isomorphic with panarchy loop, and it seems to map onto left hemisphere/right hemisphere dynamics
  • talks about either-or thinking
  • breathing in, breathing out
  • sources:
    • Managing Polarities Of Wholeness
      • Balancing and Leading Head-Heart Tensions in Schools
      • The Power of "And"
    • Polarity Management
      • A Summary Introduction
      • Barry Johnson, September 1998

September 7th, 2021

• default mode network ~= right hemisphere running the show

two directions of abstraction

• right hemisphere is "deeper"

• The other kind of abstraction, right hemisphere abstraction, puts things deeper into context.
  • eg
    • "what's the big picture of this utterance?" is kind of taking the utterance in a more abstract direction, but still situated
      • it's abstract because it's like, moving away from the specific
      • like if you put a single utterance in context
      • of the worldview it came from, the relationship of the people having the conversation, etc
      • those are in some sense more general than the utterance itself
      • but they're also alive and connected, rather than decoupled

There's one world and it's round

• This page is not currently titled very well, but the point is that from the right hemisphere's reality-oriented perspective, everything is all happening as part of one happening, all in contiguous physical space.
  • (This is true about time, too. Everything that has happened and will happen is all part of one timeline)
  • This is obvious, conceptually, but most people don't actually feel the embodied reality of it most of the time.

Empty Logic

• However! It seems to me that a lot of these sorts of explanations are still starting from form and moving towards emptiness. It seems there might be able to be something analogous to formal logic that is fully right hemisphere-based rather than being left hemisphere-based.

thoughts on learning & finite & infinite games

• Tonight at my friend's birthday party, I was a Villager again, and this time I played right hemisphere-oriented trust-building.
  • I still incorporated key more-legible information, but as I said—there wasn't much. To be clear, in the decade I've been avoiding playing Werewolf, I've had a ton of fun with One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which both:
    • is a faster one-round game in which nobody gets eliminated (so it doesn't trigger the fear of having a repeat of the being-kicked-out thing that happened in high school)
    • has game mechanics that add a lot of hard-to-fake data that allows the left hemisphere to feel like it knows what's going on

• What does it mean to play right hemisphere-oriented trust-building?
  • As a Villager in Werewolf, I think it's basically a group coherence exercise, in which you try to figure out who is sincerely oriented towards the shared villager goal of eliminating the vampire team. You are going to try to cohere with everybody around that goal, and expect that some people are actually on your side and therefore gonna be reasoning in the same world as you, and other players are not going to be on your side and are living in a different world where they have to lie.
  • To be clear: I'm assuming a world where dead villagers still win if the villager team wins at the end. I think this should be explicitly stated (maybe it was) at the start of every werewolf game. Otherwise you're not actually on a team with your team, and then there's a totally different reason to distrust everybody.
    • Holy shit, questioning this assumption yielded a bunch of really fascinating ideas. They're [missing block] below.
  • When I got myself attuned in the right way, I found I had really clear hunches about who was a villager and who was a werewolf. I sometimes doubted these hunches, but I felt like I started to learn what part of me I could trust as a gauge on this.
  • And at a certain point—a certain point—I found myself feeling that I knew, without a doubt, that two other people were also on the villager team. I could tell by the way we were thinking together exactly like people would who were trying to win as villagers.
    • Now, do I think I could be deceived by some crafty people under those circumstances? I think it's possible. It just seemed really unlikely, since I could feel the orientation of those players as being towards the same purpose as me.
  • Now, I've only played one round like this, so I really don't know how this works as a given group of players learns more and more about themselves and each other over time and develops counterstrategies etc.
    • My sense is that there are groups of people where using this strategy yourself would be likely to just get you distrusted by everybody, but for basically any specific strategy there probably exists some group that will find it very suspicious.

Hemisphere Dharma

• Relevant right hemisphere capacities:
  • 🎭 improvising
  • 👁 vigilant or sustained awareness
  • ⚛ nonlinear thinking
  • 🌏 big picture thinking
  • ❓ embracing uncertainty
  • 😍 orienting to what's meaningful
  • 👥 seeing people as experiencers & carers (not objects)
  • 🕸 seeing world as flowing complex systems (not static concepts)
  • 😔 reading facial expressions
  • ⛅️ both/and thinking

Questions for Iain McGilchrist

• something about monism as a left hemisphere distillation of right hemisphere non-dual perspective

asymmetric containment

• This then applies directly to the two brain hemispheres. The right hemisphere is based on both/and thinking, and can understand and appreciate the left hemisphere's role in thinking, which is either/or based. The left hemisphere cannot understand how the right hemisphere functions. It can have a model of it, but trusting the right hemisphere appears to require a kind of faith.

Reality is alive: don't carve it

• Something something right hemisphere something something
  • This is related to how the left hemisphere sort of like assembles things from parts, and it's not that the right hemisphere's perspective is a "whole made of parts" but that it starts with the everythingness of everything before even considering how one might talk about dividing it

unconsciousness

• the right hemisphere