An Exercise to Balance Your Brain's Two Hemispheres

In this clip Dr McGilchrist talks about the importance of attention, and why your brain's hemispheres differ in the way they attend to the world.

Watch more from this series on The Master and His Emissary here:

[julieritchie]

Misleading title as I thought it was going to have DrMcGilchrist explain how to do an exercise. Love his talks, such clarity.

[nancyhope]

When I am driving, I have to focus on car and road, but at the same time I cast my attention widely on the environment, without words. Belly breathing is good too. It is refreshing at the least.

[carolyng.]

Here’s a brain balancing exercise a friend with a head injury taught me: March in place and touch your right knee with your left hand and your left knee with your right hand alternating as you march. While marching and cross touching the knees, count backwards from 100 silently to yourself and hum at the same time. Have fun!

[cellom.]

Why the study of the arts is so important for younger people.

[dinofrangiamore]

I'm reading your book for the second (third?) time. I don't think it's exaggeration to say it's the most important work of the early 21st century, providing the basic diagnosis and challenge of our times, as well as directions and hints for treatment. Getting our two minds, each with their own special attention and function, working together in a continual (however unconscious) state of perspective and information exchange, operating in this sort of organic dialectic...that's the essential aim, right?
I work at fostering such communication/cooperation between my two minds in a few different ways. I create journals with a collage format, a balanced mix of words and images, both linear and formal and focused according to the left, along with more free-form and open/associative, whole-perspective according to the right. During meditation I sometimes picture the two hemispheres playing catch with a ball or disk, or I imagine them playing ping-pong or tennis. There's also a dialogue approach a clinician (Schiffer) has used.
Also, personal experience tells me that cannabis, if used intentionally, may also help activate more right brain-type thinking/awareness, perhaps having a disinhibition effect on the corpus callosum (i.e. Huxley's "reducing valve" is opened). I've never seen formal research/literature to support/deny this but haven't looked too deeply into it.
I've been interested in dual-brain psychology since I first learned about it in an undergrad psych class back in the 1980s. It really resonated with me. When your book came along, wow, what a tome, you're speaking straight to the troubles and needs of our times, your historical look back at hemispheric shifts, a sort of cultural dialectic working over the centuries...that's some pretty powerful and fundamental stuff!

I often cite your book in my work, indeed, it's among my top five guidebooks for our times. To put is mildly sir, thank you!

[crystaldragonwoman]

Sounds like combining the one pointed concentration with mindfulness 💫

[jasonwhyttes]

In the Buddhist belief, the most recent teacher, Siddhartha Gautama, had a very strong connection to the forest. He was born, lived, and died in the wild, and often wandered in the wild. The monks I spent time with explained that this is to help stimulate part of your brain that is more aware of the environment. We are more active in our right hemisphere it would seem when we are in nature, especially living in it id imagine.

Other things like a strong emphasis on community is pretty ingrained in their belief, which has the same purpose of connecting to the world with that side of our brain.

I am beginning to think Buddhism has a profound knowledge to the way the mind works in the way it describes life like a dream/delusion/attachment. It seems I found some 'meaning' around religion in a sense.

[AksilRebis]

I balance my brain hemispheres by bringing my attention to where my vagus nerve attaches to my diaphragm. In a couple of minutes, effortlessly, my breathing becomes more rhythmical and my heart slows. From there, my awareness of the space within my body and around it permits me to harmonize all my senses simultaneously, including space and time. That's when I become aware of an 8th dimension... Which I call variously "Mind, Meaning and Collective Unconscious". I learned this doorway while listening to Les Fehmi's Open Focus biofeedback tapes.

[MP-dbsw]

Castaneda talks about "the right way of walking" where you walk at a bit slower of a pace with either your fingers curled or some kinds of small objects (pebbles or if you want to go full new age, crystals) between some of your fingers (this is to draw some of your attention to your hands) while directing your gaze "loosely" at the upper portion of the horizon. With the eyes you take in the entire field of vision, including peripheral vision, all at once, equally, while shutting off the internal dialogue. Once this can be achieved, simultaneously "open your ears" to ALL of the perceivable sounds of your environment. Finally, become aware of the sensations of your body, like the wind against your skin and the feeling of your legs supporting your weight and your feet making contact with the ground, etc. I can tell you that the further you go with this exercise, the more intense the sensory experience becomes. Which is the point, you're literally overloading your senses while remaining calm and in a state of inner silence.

[mikeward]

Not only attention, but perception: interpreting the inputs to best suit your sensibilites. Uncousious perception is the purview of the LHS. Abstract interpretation that captures an aspect of the signal (sight, sound, taste, feeling) most important or interesting or just different is the purview of the RHS and makes all the difference.

[jayjaychadoy]

What was an absolutely beneficial help for me was my psychologist practiced a therapy for me that really worked!
It was an amazing help, after trying other methods, and it fixed me.
I’m not sure what words to use to describe my inner experience, because of course it was about me, and my concerns. I was always amazed when I left the therapy appointment how different I felt, and then how I would be able to adjust throughout the time between appointments. It totally included left brain, right brain integration.
I had waited many years to find the solution for me. I’d tried so many other helps and was quite discouraged.
I am in British Columbia, and the therapist was Dr Richard Bradshaw, but not the famous one. Famous to me though.
He did a TED talk. His students have learned this technique as well.
It truly was remarkable for me.

[Prunesquallor]

One common meditative exercise is to focus on the breath as is goes in and out of the nose while at the same time being aware of the space around you. It's amazing how much better you can feel afterwards.

[lisafred]

Try a Feldenkrais class to balance the brain. In NYC they have a class free or donation once a week.

[KwendaloInstitute]

Or instead of an elaborate Eastern exercise you could balance the brain by simply tracking and trailing an animal in a wild environment where there are inherent dangers. One must necessarily engage intermittent attention between narrow and broad focus.

[rossmccabe]

Having spent 6 plus years in 3 times a week Psychoanalysis 40 years ago I have come to understand that what I learned and began to experience through this process was being able to differentiate between thought-expression of left brain ideation and association-expression of right brain experience. Over the years I have grown more aware that experience via association-right brain expression of experience felt true- learning to trust the differentiation between defensive ideation and true ideation. to recognize what was "true" has added to an internal experience of legitimacy and authenticity of my self. The Master and Emissary has added to the authenticity of this experience of discovering myself.

[mantykarhu]

With the LH I’m agnostic. With my RH, I pray fervently.

[scorpionsting]

In dzogchen awareness one can exercise attention without intention or object resting in the nature of mind itself. Or so they say! Of course one has to develop the intention to rest the mind that way which takes training and time. In traditional Buddhist doctrine there are said to be 'two wings of enlightenment' which are shamatha/mindfulness and vipasshana/awareness. Mindfulness involves placing attention on a specific and learning to rest there and awareness is about become aware of the space-atmosphere-mind around mindfulness until the 'object' of attention becomes the nature of mind itself. So it seems that in this tradition too there is a two-brain approach assumed.

I have been thinking about this as I slowly go through your videos and the Matter with Things (on the desk but not yet read except for the last chapter!) and it seems to me that the reason we have this two-brain approach involves an existential prerogative for creatures coming out of the realm of Idea or Mind, as it were, and into Embodied Form as living creatures who in turn create fields in which other seemingly solid phenomena like planets and rocks etc. also coalesce. In our dimension we have place/location which means there is a particular here and everywhere else around. This is the spatial equivalent of the One (everywhere) and Many (particularities). So once we have a realm with particulars you have Two zones, the place where the particular is and everywhere else. So in your approach analyzing brain function, you have left brain (particularity) and right brain (context-space) etc.

No doubt the left brain can be trained to pay attention to particulars versus leaching off into habitual false 'monkey mind' pistes. Forming concept is a type of particularity. It is extremely helpful but can also be problematic. The notion of a tree is very helpful, for example, but it is not the tree itself of course; over time we think that our concept of tree is the tree and rarely even see actual trees any more moreover we usually think of them in combination with other similar abstractions in complex thought constructions. Once cataloged they get ignored somehow, they are no longer living processes but fixed corpses, if you will. So the abstraction is the killer aspect of this left brain way of creating particularities in the way we think (as in the example of the concept of 'tree.') There can be valid and helpful left brain attention though and that would be the old-school (Anapanasati sutra style) mindfulness (which exists in other traditions of course). Once the mind's attention is placed (left brain) then the right brain spacious awareness can flourish. Something like that. A teaching called 'the nine ways of resting the mind in shamatha' goes through nine levels of doing this.

In any case, from your work I intend to study the brain research once but then work on ways to encourage two-brain meditation - or attention as you helpfully put it - and, no less importantly, intention by considering different styles of attention. You are right to put so much emphasis on attention. The brain work you have done is all left brain approach in some way, or abstract theory even if grounded in scientific observation. The attention subject is practical, experiential application. I think what you have offered the world via your considerable work is truly terrific and powerfully virtuous for both yourself and your fellow mankind making you in Buddhist parlance a very noble Bodhisattva. (Hopefully King Charles III will recognize this and give you a stunning Honor!) Some of the best work by a Western thinker in many a generation. Thank you very much.

[Nothingman]

A technique I came up with is as follows (this can be done with the imagination or with eyes open looking at something): Stare at a dot in the center of your attention. Now expand (diverge) your vision, and use your peripheral to see the outline of a circle. Play with going between the dot and the large circle. Now stare at the dot and the circle with the same level of intensity. You are now looking at the smallest point and the largest circle simultaneously. You can take it one step further. That step is to see the dot, the circle, and the whole thing as one, simultaneously. The holy Trinity, if you will.

[gunfighterdrummer]

This is more important then what people may think.

[ravichanana]

I use music to balance the right side with the left.