Sorry, I made a typo. Here's the complete web address to the video.

 

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

After my aneurysm I just had a shockingly bad headache for a few weeks.

 

Damn you to hell, [insert_deity_here]! <shakes fist at sky>

 

Today's surprise headline:

Man experiences condition that fucks up human brains.  Now his brain is fucked up.

Somebody call Reuters.

You obviously did not watch the video.

Zymotic was joking. Paisley always answers criticisms with cries of "u didn't watch teh video!!!1"

I'm rather surprised that Paisley hasn't announced that himself in this thread yet.

 

"spiritual enlightenment" merely translates to 'emotional experience'

Her logical, detail oriented, fact oriented, language understanding, time (present and past) aware, mathematical and scientific, comprehending, knowing, acknowledging, order/pattern perception, object naming, reality based, strategic, practical, safety conscious brain was damaged, hence now she is extremely emotional and a visionary.

Where do you get "spiritual"? She explained the mechanism of her physical brain, and how she experienced the functioning of her brain while the left hemisphere was physically damaged.

Hey guys. I found out all you have to do is take some really nifty drugs, or suffer brain damage and you get "spiritual enlightenment".

 

You don't have to sit and try and convince yourself something special is happening.  Just pop some pills and away you go into nirvana!

Oh man. This is why I don't need a television. You can't buy this kind of entertainment.

The whole concept of "spirituality" was just debunked by brain damage, and you're seriously still going? I don't want to be the one to make the brain damage joke.

"Spirituality" is nonsense, Luminon. It doesn't mean anything. If you want to talk about changes you consider positive, just say that. You don't need a word that invokes magical non-entities.

The funny thing is, that even the greatest skeptics can be deeply spiritual, Carl Sagan, for example. And a lot of religional dignitaries are utterly non-spiritual. You see what religion had done, it usurped the concept of spirituality for millenia, it's time to take it back for everyone and into all aspects of life. For example, spirituality in science would mean something like a research useful for humanitary purposes, published freely for everyone, and not stuff like nuclear, chemical or conventional weapons. Spirituality is an universal concept which should give an intuitive meaning.

 

Don't worry, I'm always careful with what and who I invoke

Yeah, you're right, that's the word! She felt it as a real thing, so it would be good to behave according to it. Someone should go explain it in places like North Korea.

The problems with functioning and danger of death were caused by stroke, not by enlightenment. Enlightenment can and does happen in many other ways which are more natural and make people more able, not less. They become a great workers, activists and teachers, or whatever they already were.

 

I was joking, of course. This is why the emoticon was there. (I really, really don't know how many smileys should I make so everyone will understand when I'm joking.) What you mean is denouncing the eastern notion of enlightenment, which basically means sitting under a tree for 30 years or to follow some guru like a tag. This is understandable, we are Western people and we function differently. There are different methods for a Western person to attain enlightenment.

This is an incorrect notion of enlightenment. Have you ever heard of a golden middle path? Having a cake and eating it? I mean, having both left and right hemisphere working and cooperating. This is the key to geniality, by the way. What about living in eternal peace AND understanding the words? And everything what is necessary? The brain is a good servant, but a bad master. There is a lot to improve on an average brain.

I doubt that neurology knows anything about enlightenment. It is a long, gradual process with major waypoints, which are called the enlightenment. It is a gradual expansion of awareness, including the everyday life. It is gaining a control over the physical body, then emotions, mind, and intuitive, creative higher mind. I'm just guessing, but an enlightened person should be in control of primitive emotional reactions like run/fight, which has something to do with amygdala, reptile brain and adrenaline glands. He should be also intelligent above the average. And there might be some strange activity going on in hypophysis, epiphysis, frontal lobe, corpus callosum, and so on.
An enlightened person is compared to a common person, like a modern man compared to a caveman.

Can we truly say, even so, that a meaningful existence for us can not be one dominated by the playful side of the brain? I mean to say, the reasoning here is circular, is it not? Analysis (a left-brain activity) of our condition favours a dominantly analytical approach (left brained) to our condition. Wouldn't our spontaneous brain equally return favourable judgement on a spontaneous approach?

But what deems what is and isn't appropriate access, Will? If we were a right-brained society we'd be considering a similar question regarding the aptness of left-brained resources wouldn't we. Shouldn't we ask first whether spontaneous and playful psychology is viable for humanity and not just assume it isn't?

So you're saying there's no reason at all why it might be apt to differentiate between the world the right brain senses and the one the left thinks it is using the concepts invoked by the word 'spirit'? I might disagree with you on that.

 

PS sorry I can't watch the video, my sound card, she be cactus atm.

But our right brain isn't about judgment, it's about feeling. As a result, it's possible that we'd feel as though there was meaning one day, and none the next. Whether we'd be right or not is something only the left hemisphere could mediate. I don't think it's circular thinking, given a balance. The right part of the brain deals largely in nonsense, and through the fusiform gyrus, the left brain makes sense of at least some of the dream-like massive parallel processing that goes on in the right hemisphere.

I think you misunderstand my position. By saying "appropriate", I'm not suggesting a repression (or suppression or depression) of the right hemisphere by the left (the purported path to civility) I'm suggesting that without the full functioning of the playful side, the serious side will lack energy to perform. Western society, however, clearly favours the left hemisphere, despite claiming to favour the right ("It's all about having fun and enjoying yourself", etc).

We'd be arguing about synonyms, so it might get dull. If someone says they're in "high spirits", or that someone is "spirited", I don't jump down their throats because spirits have never been shown to exist. I say "Oh my god" all the time -- it's just an expression. If, however, someone asserts that the spiritual part of the mind is located in the right side of the brain, then I might have to call them on mislabeling ignorance.

Yeah, I get your drift. The loss of either hemisphere would be a heavy dysfunction. You may have read too much into the word "superior" when applied to the left hemisphere. I was identifying the same bias that you were.

The thing is, the bias is understandable. It's all well and good to say we'd be happy as "natural" children of the earth, but we would most likely live no longer than 40, and suffer diseases we couldn't identify. So for the parts of our lives where we weren't being miserable and set upon, we'd be very peaceful. Not that we'd be able to tell one moment from the next, of course ...

It's speculation, but I'm not sure we'd be able to tell. If we were sad, it would probably approximate "wrong".

Well ... except we'd be as sad as the other animals when they got sick and didn't know why or how to deal with it. Not that we knew how to deal with being sick until the 19th century, really, but that was part of developing the bias towards the left hemisphere.

If we can't plan or discern, we would definitely find ourselves being sad, or at the very least, uncomfortable. Try feeling one with the universe while being mauled by a tiger. From a distance, the right side of the brain just wants to cuddle the tiger, but probably fears the tiger as well. One problem: without the left side, we have no way of dealing with those feelings in a productive way. "Productive", here, meaning recalling tiger behaviour and planning away out of getting mauled.

Obviously the physical right hemisphere is real, but that hemisphere wouldn't lead us to reality in any specific way. Functioning without the left hemisphere would leave us without language and calculation. Not an enviable position.

From my limited understanding, and in broad strokes, the left hemisphere provides discrimination between self and other, and between objects. One could argue that neither a broken up universe nor one perceived as a whole is the real universe. I see that, if that's what you mean.

In fact, I'd say it's often helpful to weaken the influence of either side: when confronted with idiocy, one might feel the emotions of affront rising, but the left hemisphere can step in and "cooler heads may prevail". On the other hand, an over-use of left-brain functioning can rob us of insight and creativity, linking things together that the left hemisphere would find ridiculous.

So yes, I think get what you're saying.