Bicameralism
“Jack Tanner’s most recent books in particular compare the left brain to consciousness, and the right brain to the unconscious, separate and devoid of language. This is why dreams, where the subconscious is in control, often seem so “unfamiliar” and are not linear, logical and contain no coherent written language. A different ‘type of consciousness’ is being expressed, and the normal, day to day ‘left brain’ consciousness is submerged and temporarily inactive. Lucid dreaming and OBEs are all about getting the ‘brainwaves’ in each hemisphere of the brain in the right configuration, and crucially it is all about having *different* brainwaves in each hemisphere, which leads to different types of mental ‘awareness’, some more logical, some less, some more focused, some totally passive, some in the liminal state between waking and sleep, etc.
An extract to consider (and perhaps you will want to study Mike Hockney’s and Jack Tanner’s books in more detail at some point).
GS 15. Mike Hockney. The Mathmos. ( https://www.amazon.com/Mathmos-God-Book-15…/dp/B00IRNC4IS )
“Neuroscientists are frequently those most heavily committed to the empiricist and materialist Meta Paradigm of science. They treat the brain purely in machine terms and have absolutely zero understanding of the human mind and Fourier mathematics. They are locked into seeing mental states as brain states. They have not, of course, been able to establish any link at all between our thoughts and our brain states (i.e. to read off our thoughts by seeing which parts of the brain are active at any instant), but nevertheless they have a quasi-religious faith that they will eventually be able to do so. They have no alternative paradigm for considering any other possibilities. They are like Catholics who believe that no interpretation of the world is possible other than that supplied by Catholic dogma. Rather ironically, neuroscientists don’t think at all. They are supremely lacking in imagination and intuition.
In the 1960s, Roger Sperry and his colleagues carried out “split brain” experiments on sufferers of epilepsy who’d had the corpus callosum (the tissue linking the two hemispheres of their brain) severed to reduce the severity of their attacks. Each hemisphere now operated in isolation, and was discovered to have markedly different properties from its erstwhile partner.
Sperry was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology in 1981 for this groundbreaking work. It therefore beggars belief that a neuroscientist could attempt to say that people are not right-brained or left-brained. Of course they are!
Imagine a dominant husband and submissive wife in a house, and imagine that they communicate all the time. Are the decisions taken by the “household” likely to be those of the husband, wife, or both in exactly equal partnership? The fact that the two partners constantly communicate is wholly irrelevant to what decisions are made. Almost always, the preferences of the dominant partner will be manifested. It’s simply stupid – and unbelievable – for a professor to argue that the mere fact that hemispheres are linked somehow means that the hemispheres are equal partners.
The professor says there’s no evidence for right or left hemispheric dominance. On the contrary, there’s vast evidence for this, and none at all that the hemispheres are equal partners with equal influence. If they’re equal, what’s the evolutionary point of even having two hemispheres in the first place? The very fact that two brain hemispheres exist at all is extremely indicative that they have radically different lateral specialisations. If we didn’t need two hemispheres, we’d simply have a single, undivided brain.
Roger Sperry received his Nobel Prize precisely for his discoveries revealing the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres. The left hemisphere of the brain is associated with analytical and verbal tasks. The right hemisphere is skilled at spatial perception tasks and music. It has only rudimentary language abilities, but contributes emotional context and understanding to language, and allows us to visualise what the world represents.
‘The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you.’ – Roger Sperry
Why do neuroscientists insist on spreading these silly myths that there’s no hemispheric brain specialisation? It’s because they are fanatical materialists, terrified of linking the different hemispheres to radically different mental properties, which would throw the entire materialist paradigm into doubt.
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The simple fact that most people are right handed rather than left handed or ambidextrous is blatant evidence that one hemisphere is superior to the other. If the hemispheres were equal partners, we should all be ambidextrous, or there should be as many left handers as right handers.
All of Jungian personality typing is based on hemispheric imbalance, with thinking and sensing being left brain properties, and feelings and intuition belonging to the right brain. Extraversion is a left brain property and faces out to the world (spacetime, matter and dimensionality), while introversion is a right brain property and faces in towards the interior world (the dimensionless mental Singularity). Neuroscientists don’t have a clue about any of this. Like old-style behaviourists (whom they strongly resemble), they regard the mind as ultimately non-existent or wholly irrelevant, and that only physical processes happening in the brain have any meaning.
The brain is the perfect dialectical instrument. The left brain is the thesis, the right brain the antithesis, and their common operations (reflecting a united brain) the synthesis.
We are nothing but creatures of hemispheric imbalance. Julian Jaynes’s brilliant theory of bicameralism is all about this imbalance. Jungian psychology is equally dominated by hemispheric imbalance. Neuroscience rejects all of this and blindly proceeds along the road to nowhere, to an “explanation” of mind based on mindless atoms! This, they claim, is rational. (…)
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(…)
No wonder there’s no evidence when people such as Blakemore are conducting the research. Her remarks demonstrate everything that’s wrong with science and its inherent prejudice against the mind. Blakemore, we can be 100% certain, is not devising any tests to test whether a child is left or right brained, since she has dismissed the whole concept right from the outset. We can be sure her equally blinkered, groupthink, careerist colleagues have exactly the same biases. You can’t get job in this field unless you agree with materialist dogma, just as you can’t get a job in the Catholic Church if you’re not a Catholic.
No one ever suggested that hemispheric dominance results in “blood flow” ever being cut off to the other hemisphere. For optimal functioning, the other hemisphere has to know what its partner is up to! That doesn’t make it an equal partner with equal executive decision-making importance. The unconscious mind is always aware what the conscious mind is doing, and often signalling to the conscious mind to do x rather than y. All of this is dismissed as nonsense by neuroscience, a bizarre subject that studies the brain while ignoring the mind!”
Thomas Foster – hyperian
