'Unity of Contrasts' Chapter 12 from the book 'Behind the Scenes of the Brain Show', by Dr. Zeev Nitzan Part Three
The interrelationships between the hemispheres - unity of contrasts
The continuous duet between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is what creates the song of our lives. Sometimes there is a continuous averaging of the two brain voices, and sometimes one voice prevails over the other. More than once woven into the duet is also a tone of critical dialogue.
The similarity between the two hemispheres of our brain is great, yet the process of processing the different information that takes place in each of them turns the unity of the brain, by virtue of the close cooperation between the two hemispheres, into a unity of opposites. A critical and constant dialogue takes place between the two hemispheres through nerve fibers, which transmit information between the hemispheres, mainly through the bundle of fibers in the brain's core called the corpus callosum, as well as through the "Anterior Commissure" and "Posterior Commissure" pathways.
The duopoly of the right and left hemisphere is in a fluid status quo. The interrelationship between the two hemispheres of the brain exists as a critical dialogue. The brain on the left is the generator of theories and maintains the "Constitution of the Brain", which was enacted based on familiarity with world events. The brain on the right is like a fighting opposition, which sometimes challenges the validity of "fundamental laws" imprinted in the brain.
The right hemisphere performs a constant reality check and challenges the assumptions of the left hemisphere, to the extent that these are not appropriate for its perception of reality.
Some will say that the constant dialectical process, which is at the base of science and which destroys continuous attempts to tattoo the "theory wall" by new hypotheses that seek to be closer to the truth of reality, is a compulsion of the right hemisphere.
The pairing pattern of right and left often has the character of an open marriage. The hemispheres are born in the same brain and there is a close relationship between them, but at the same time each of them flirts with reality shows in their own unique style.
Sometimes there is a conflicting relationship between the two hemispheres, in a pattern reminiscent of the book "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift. It depicts a hybrid mind created from the minds of two people, to resolve a political dispute. One half supporting one party and the other supporting the opposing party.
An idea that shares similarities is the mutual exchange of a single hemisphere between two minds that create two human beings, the skull of each of which houses half of its original being and half of the "alien" being, trying to fit into the mental book in his head. A kind of mental shatanz that creates a chimerical consciousness. And as a thought experiment, what would the products of a brain composed of Einstein's left hemisphere with Van Gogh's right hemisphere look like? And alternatively Marie Curie's left with Helen Keller's right or in an intersex Chetanz: Agatha Christie's left with Salvador Dali's right...
The lobes of the brain in the night edition
It seems that during the night's sleep the power relations between the hemispheres alternately change, and from this it follows that the power relations between their characteristic perceptions of reality also change.
From identifying the "left and right times" of our private mind, an advantage can grow that will allow us to understand the netai built into our perception of reality at that moment.
In the dolphins' brains when they are asleep, the two hemispheres share alternate shifts of wakefulness and sleep. That is, at each stage one of the hemispheres is in a state of wakefulness and its counterpart is in a state of sleep. This is due to the constant need to monitor rising to the surface of the water for breathing.
It seems that during the various stages of the night's sleep, the human brain has an asymmetric pattern of the activity of the hemispheres, and they alternately share the baton of central influence on the brain's activity (this hypothesis is also based on self-observation). There is no complete shutdown and on the other hand complete activation of the different hemispheres like the dolphin's brain, but in each stage of sleep a different pattern of hemispheric dominance emerges. That is, in each stage of sleep there is an information processing pattern that tends more to the right school or the left school - alternately, when one of them is more active than its counterpart. The alternation between the hemispheres with a firmer grip on the information processing rudder takes place in shifts and timings characteristic of the person in question. Some hours are hours of right dominance and other hours are hours of left dominance. From my personal experience, I have found that when I am sleeping or in the intermediate state of sleeping and not sleeping around three o'clock in the morning, my thoughts are painted in a somber tone, which can be defined as a gloomy hyper-realism devoid of comforting light, and the contents of my thoughts are autumnal/winter (an emotional and cognitive climate suitable for the dominance of the right hemisphere and in which it plays a role central to the right amygdala). About two hours later, towards morning awakening, my personal mental space is usually filled with a comforting light and the thoughts carry more positive contents (although often not more "realistic"). The mental spring increases in a pattern corresponding to the dominance of the left hemisphere.
From this I tend to think (in the spirit of induction), that the seasons of the mind take place during all hours of the day, day and night, in cycles whose exact timings probably bear a personal stamp of each and every person, but possibly also a universal human pattern.
The known hypothesis - to the left and the unknown - to the right
An innovative hypothesis explains the differences in the functions of the hemispheres of the brain in that the right hemisphere is more inclined to process new information and the left is more inclined to store the archive of the insights that have been processed and acquired. The right hand is more likely to be the "producer of insights", while the left hand is more likely to be the treasure house of the memories and insights we have collected in our lives. That is, the right hemisphere prefers to process unfamiliar information, while the left hemisphere prefers to process familiar information. This generalization is true for most types of information that our minds process. Support for this emerges from observations made among right-hemisphere patients, in whom a reluctance to the new and a tendency to avoid new experiences was often observed.
The right lobe is the main generator of insights. The left lobe is the main treasury of insights. New reality insights ("memes") tend to be created more in the right hemisphere. It may be due to its ability to model the new information into its material infrastructure as a "knowledge structure" - in the form of a three-dimensional "cloud" pattern of interconnected neurons, more easily. On the other hand, according to this opinion, the left hemisphere is "less fluid", tends to preserve its "knowledge structures" and creates new knowledge structures at a slower rate than the right.
The right hemisphere is like a tireless cartographer, working in a constant pattern on "sketching" of new brain maps, and in contrast, the left hemisphere is the storehouse of maps that were attacked in confrontation with reality and found worthy of navigating the ways of life.
The right numeral and the left numeral can be called the "Magellan numeral" and the "nothing like home" numeral - respectively.
The right hemisphere is the one that processes the new and the unfamiliar. She was looking for the different and the exotic and her horizons aspire beyond the horizon of the present thought. The Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the world, summarizes key elements of her being. On the other hand, the left hemisphere accumulates insights to deal with life situations in which we have gained experience and it usually directs our consciousness to the familiar and routine. A possible motto for her is "there's nothing like home".
A dynamic equilibrium exists between the innovative insights that the right hemisphere tends to create and the conservative insights that tend to be stored in the left hemisphere.
The conservatism of the left is in the name of protecting our knowledge of the world, but sometimes this conservatism harms the updating of this knowledge of the world.
The language and the hemispheres
The terrain of the surface of reality is covered by a fog of uncertainty. Words are a retreat into confessions - conceptualizing terms familiar to us from our experiences in the world.
Words also have the power to create reality: one of the accepted interpretations of the magic commandment "I will create as I say" is "I will create as I say", in ancient Aramaic. The word casts a spell or, alternatively, a spell, and drowns reality in nonsense.
The main, though not the only, promoter of the word show is the left hemisphere, which is the stronghold of the familiar. But the statement of the 19th century French neurologist Paul Broca, that a person speaks through the left hemisphere, is a partial truth.
The assumption regarding the absolute hegemony of the left hemisphere over language has recently been cracked.
New findings contradict the assumption about the verbal blindness of the right hemisphere. It turns out that innovative works of language, such as metaphors, words with multiple meanings, doubling of language, layers of meaning and more, are processed first in the right hemisphere. Also, the right hemisphere plays an important role in understanding the language of poetry, where innovative and linguistically challenging combinations of words are common.
Language acquisition in childhood also seems to obey the rule of new verbal information tending to be processed in the right hemisphere. Since the sounds of the language and its words are new to the child's brain, the main entrance gate of the language to the brain's faculties is on the right. On the other hand, from the moment the language is acquired, the repertoire guided by the familiar is actually a collection of generic patterns that tends to be stored, as familiar knowledge, in the left hemisphere.
The traditional view about the function of the hemispheres that attributed all language functions to the left is at the very least inaccurate, some would play a requiem for it.
Shettons on the left bank of the Shepha river
The incidence of dyslexia (disorder in the development of reading in children) is significantly higher among right-handed people compared to right-handed people. It is possible that this reflects damage to the left hemisphere in the early stages of development, which also caused the choice of the left hand as the dominant hand. The hemisphere that controls hand movement is on the opposite side, because the movement control pathways are crossed.
Also aphasia ("silence" - a defect in the function of the lips) is often caused by damage to the function of the left hemisphere. On the other hand, the rare condition known as hyperphasia, which is characterized by a tendency to talkatively and "mechanically" say long sequences of words, occurs mainly among those suffering from a rare brain syndrome called Williams, and is associated with a larger than normal left hemisphere.
It was found that women have greater brain flexibility in preserving language functions, which is also reflected in a higher compensatory capacity when the main language areas of the brain are damaged. Among women who suffer from damage to the left hemisphere, language functions will be affected in a less significant way than among men who suffer from similar damage.
"Morphing" is a term that describes the merging of two distinct and separate templates into a merged template that preserves the characteristics of both templates. In an experiment in which the use of Morphing was included, findings emerged that could confirm the assumption of hemispheric specialization. During the experiment, a subject's face was gradually merged with the face of Marilyn Monroe over a sequence of "chimeric" portraits on a computer screen, which differed in the degree of contribution of each face to the common portrait mix. After that, a controlled and selective anesthesia of the right hemisphere was performed in the subject's brain by injecting a short-term anesthetic (sodium amytal) into the right carotid artery, and as a result, the processing of visual information was left in the hands of the left hemisphere. When presented with the new cluster, the subject did not recognize her own face in the combined cluster, but recognized Monroe's familiar facial features. On the other hand, when the left hemisphere was anesthetized in a similar way, and the right hemisphere took over the visual information processing baton, the subject recognized both her facial features and Monroe's facial features in the blended face. A possible interpretation that is consistent with the "familiar and unfamiliar" hypothesis is that it seems that the components of Monroe's face are considered familiar information and our face, which is merged and integrated with the cluster components of other faces, is considered a novelty that requires the involvement of the right hemisphere.
To the page for purchasing the book on the book junction website
For the first part - The unity of opposites: two minds and one brain - lines in the image of the hemispheres
for the second part - The areas of joy and sadness - emotions "take sides"
