From International Viewpoints (IVy) Issue 3 - November 1991
 
The Duality of the Brain Functioning: The Two hemispheres
By Gregory Mitchell, England

(Gregg has had training as an Hubbard Professional Auditor, has at 
least twice been in personal conversation with Ron, but has for most 
of his career run his own parallel research track to Scn. He runs 
Mental Development which includes evening courses for 'ordinary 
people' which produces after two years a stable state where one is 
'51% shareholder in his own mind' (somewhat comparable to the rather 
unclear state of clear). Ed IVy.)

Mass and Significance

(Edited transcript of a short recorded talk in June 1991.) Now I am 
going to talk about the two sides of the brain which are perplexing 
people somewhat. Here we are not denying that there is a mind that 
does the thinking, and that there is a spirit that controls the mind. 
However we have to interact with the body, control it, and Hubbard 
describes this in terms of his genetic control centres (Advanced 
Procedures and Axioms, see also PAB 5), in that some people are 
genetically right handed, some are genetically left, and may well be 
running on the wrong control centre.

So the two sides of the body are to a certain degree specialised. For 
example we will look at what the two hands do, and let us consider a 
right handed person, and make such neccessary adjustments to what I am 
saying, in terms of left handed people.

The right hand of a person controls fine detailed movement, such as 
writing, and adjusting mechanisms or controlling tools, or doing 
anything which requires sequential action as such. Whereas the left 
hand establishes an anchor point or reference point. It may hold on to 
something that we are working on, so there is a relative motion 
between the left hand and the right. So there are two modes of 
perceiving. The one which is educated most in this culture goes with 
the right hand, the left hand having been called the kack hand or the 
sinister hand (sinister/dexter is left/right in Latin). So two modes 
of knowing, two modes of perceiving the world, to deal with the 
material of this world exist. One is potential, the other one 
manifest, which is the right hand side or the left brain side in most 
people. You might say that the left brain is chalk and the right side 
the blackboard.

Functional Differences

Now if we could contrast these two sides, the left side is linear, it 
can only deal with one thing at a time. It forgets rather rapidly, and 
a person who is learning in that mode will be called a stringer - he 
will have to learn one thing very carefully, and then the next and 
then the next. A person almost totaly unable to take an overview. 
Luria, the great Russian neurologist describes this in his book "Man 
with a Shattered World". He talks of a soldier who received a bullet 
wound through the head, and it damaged severely the right side of the 
brain, yet the man survived, but with very strange experiences. Such 
as while eating soup, when he concentrated on the soup the spoon 
disappeared, when he concentrated on the spoon, the soup disappeared, 
when he concentrated on the flavour the whole room disappeared. So the 
organization of the left hand sphere is such as to deal with one 
detail at a time, whereas the other side deals with many details. This 
is necessary too, otherwise music would not be possible.

And again this is reflected in that the left hemisphere would deal 
with one note at a time, whereas the right hemisphere would be looking 
at the overall context, of that which has gone before, and the 
immediate history of that piece of music and the anticipatory scale of 
what will happen. Now a person without a right hemisphere could tune a 
guitar against a pitch pipe. He may be able to play the odd note if it 
is written down on a bit of paper, and in a very artificial way play 
some very simple tunes, but this would be done at a robotic level. 
Whereas on the other side a person may easily translate intention into 
action, at that nonverbal level. Both types of consciousness are 
neccessary.

In the child and in primitive people, the degree of differentiation 
between the two sides of the brain is slight. So both sides are doing 
something like the same work, the difference is a matter of degree. 
And according to the philosopher Ernst Cassierer many primitive people 
are unable to tell a lie because this means standing outside yourself 
to have feelings about your thoughts or thoughts about your feelings. 
Whereas a person with specialised hemispheres that are quite 
specialised can do so easily.

You may say, well why tell a lie. When we write a story or invent 
something initially we are telling a lie. We are postulating an "as-
if" universe. The classic form of a postulate would be, for example, 
"were I to do so-and-so, if that, then that". So we have one side that 
is capable of mocking up, where the other side is trying to recreate 
reality. Both sides draw on much more primitive structures which 
produce the imagery, much in the way of a tape recorder, but in 
different ways. The left side can isolate out a detail, which is 
useful to be able to do, so long as it does not become compulsive, 
whereas the right side is unable to deal with details and looks at the 
general plan.

And a person who is right side dominant has a totally different 
learning style with a subject: they will read every book in the 
library about it, and read everything else, talk to everybody, and 
then only gradually will a picture of what they are learning emerge 
out of the mist. You may say that one side is concerned with plan and 
the other with putting it into action, so no single side is right. 
Full conscieousness would arise from an integration of the two sets of 
processes, which involves a cooperative or colaborative aspects of the 
two sides.

Experiential Differences

According to depth psychologists such as Janov and Bianco, we may 
retreat into left brain modes of proceeding and acting, where our 
emotions are memory rather than what is directly experienced, because 
the traumatic material is being stored in the right and we are doing 
so in a way which is inaccesible. So we may have a verbal description 
of events, but are unable to experience the pain and emotion thereof.

Another person who is in the right brain may well have pain and 
emotion and effort visible, however he is unable to access the 
postulates and conclusions and other verbally and conceptually stored 
material in the left, as this is below the boundaries of 
consciousness, e.g. when a person is in an extreme emotion such as 
love or rage or grief the words to express this do not come easily or 
they may not come at all.

Perceptual Differences

There are differences in the visual imagery, in as much as the left 
brain imagery tends to be small, inside the head, and moves with you, 
whereas imagery of a right brain nature due to some peculiar 
arrangement of the balance is such that if you turn your head the 
imagery will tend to move as though you are seeing something in the 
real world. If you move your head to the left, it will appear to move 
to your right.

For example I can imagine with my eyes closed that chair and as I move 
my head it is still where my finger is. Well the left brain imagery 
will not be related in any way to the outside world and will tend to 
move with me, as I move around. So one sort you can describe as 
grounded, the other is ungrounded.

Again in perceiving things, the right side will be concerned with the 
spaces enclosed. I am looking at those plants and see various spaces 
exist between the leaves which set up another set of shapes beyond the 
conventional. The left side would tend to see the thing itself, the 
figure rather than the ground. Likewise, I did some experiments with 
some playing cards. The hearts and the diamonds were black and the 
clubs and spades were red. People who were left brain dominant 
actually experienced visible misemotion trying to play with these 
cards, because it interfered with what you could call conventional 
perception. The right brained person had no difficulty doing this.

Integration of the two sides

However true higher creative thought comes from an integration of the 
two sides. Einstein said "I will do a flight of fantasy and work on 
some thinking which is not thinking as you would understand it but a 
combination play of some imageries and sensory feelings and only when 
this comes to some resolution I would fumble in the other side of my 
head for words and for algebraic statements which would permit me to 
communicate these insights to others".

The true thinking which stands behind things is non verbal. Now a 
person who is right dominant and when both sides are cooperating, uses 
words as his servants whereas a person who is left dominated 
frequently tends to be governed by words and belief systems and symbol 
systems often to the exclusion of the external reality.

Diagnosis

Some work has been done with a device rather like an E-meter in one of 
the London hospitals recently, as a diagnostic device, finding the 
discrepancies between the left hand TA shall we say, and the right 
hand TA, representing particular clinical types. The manic type having 
a lower TA on the left hand and the schizoid/schizophrenic type having 
a lower TA on the right hand, indicating either functional imbalance 
between the two sides due to early dramatization or actual organic 
damage. Either way you will end up with a problem.

If you have an E-meter with solo cans you can test this for yourself. 
Take your tone arm with solo can first in the left and then the right 
hand. Then compare the TA. More than half a division difference shows 
that you have a problem of integration. Parts of your track may have 
been bypassed in your earlier auditing (Gregg mentioned that although 
we tend to regard the time track as a single track, it could be 
regarded as three parallel lines, for thought, emotion and effort 
(effort is right brain). It might equally be regarded as having -many- 
parallel tracks one, for each perception, and also tracks for other 
things we can recall. Hubbard has at times stressed the importance of 
auditing both the effort or force and the significance but there is 
the vague possibility that some people have not had a complete balance 
in their auditing. Parts of your track may have been missed).