Brain Integration
Brain Integration
When I took Tom to see Jane Lloyd for the first time one of the simple tests Jane used to establish how Tom was processing information was to get him to focus on a dot in the centre of a piece of white paper whilst wearing a pair of glasses. The glasses had one blue lens and one red lens, similar to those used to view 3D films.
When Tom described a "moving dot with a red background, no a blue background, now its red, now its blue," Jane explained the phenomenon of alternating suppression and how that made reading extremely difficult for Tom. She handed me the glasses and urged me to do the same test so that I could see what Tom should be experiencing.
When I had the same visual experience as Tom there was a huge flash of realisation as a lifetime of compromised reading was condensed into a few seconds. I genuinely wanted to cry as I remembered how hard it had been for me to read, especially under stress. I had hidden this struggle many times, assuming I was a slow reader because I was stupid.
This simple test was a measure of brain integration. Each eye produces an image of the same object from a slightly different perspective and the brain works with both hemispheres to align the two perspectives into one image. This "simple" task requires clear communication between the hemispheres andthe channel for this is the corpus callosum which bridges the left and right brain.
Without good brain integration words literally become a moving target as the brain selects one image, then the other, then the other etc. This is called alternating suppression. If you would like to experience reading with alternating suppression simply close one eye after the other every second or so whilst trying to read.
My personal coping mechanism was to close one eye when reading. I had never been aware of this until that day with Jane and then other things started to make sense. I used to read with my dominant eye, the right eye, and this automatically sent the information to my linear left brain. The stress of reading further impaired my brain integration and so the information got "stuck" in the left brain. I could read economics textbooks and process the information easily but ask me to "feel" a novel and I was lost.
Whenever we lose brain integration we process information differently, we move differently, we perceive the world differently. The most common cause for a lack of brain integration is stress. Any movement into fight/flight or survival changes our physiology and neurology.
We came to see our work as creating the conditions in which brain integration is the predominant state of being. That simple test with the red/blue glasses became somewhat of a gold standard in our work. Brain integration gave access to the expansive, creative world of the right brain whilst connected to the linear, rationalising world of the left brain. It feels like the unifying principle between the Newtonian and Quantum, the male and the female, the Yin and the Yang.
It feels to me like aCREATIVEspace.
We are currently working on a pair of red/blue glasses big enough to cover the world!
I know we have posted it many times but I had to revisit Jill Bolte Taylor's talk as a reminder of why we need both left and right!
Go easy, tread lightly, stay free
Bill