[Music] welcome to the being known podcast with my friend dr kirk thompson and my friend pepper sweeney we are here to discover and explore what it means to be truly known on today's podcast we're going to be talking about the horizontal domain as you know in this season two of the being known podcast we are talking about the nine domains of integration uh we spoke about consciousness the first week we spoke about the vertical domain or actually the first week we talked about integration in general so go back and listen to that one if you haven't because that'll be very helpful then we spoke about consciousness and the vertical domain so those are there for you you all to go back and listen to if you haven't already and today we're talking about the horizontal domain um kurt when i think about sort of this left brain right brain thing you know the first thing that comes to mind is do you remember those mac commercials uh from like the 2000 early 2000s maybe 19 maybe the late 90s where it was two guys in a white room and one guy's like a cool you know hip kind of guy he's standing there the other guy's a complete computer nerd with his pocket right here oh yeah that's right yeah you know the cool guy's like i'm back here other guys yeah on pc right and so i kind of i kind of had this feeling of you know the right brain is this sort of you know mac kind of thing right right right and left brain is more of a pc and then you see the illustrations everywhere where the the right brain has just got colors shooting out in every direction and the left brain is like a piece of concrete it's like just right you know so so let's talk about you know as we start today let's talk about the um the differences between the right and left brain and maybe how they're similar yeah well i think uh pep one one of the things that uh is a is a pretty common misconception is that the right and the left brain are so starkly different and we think that the right brain does only certain things the left brain does only certain things and we'll talk about some of those things that each of those hemispheres of the brain tends to be more active in doing but the reality is that most of the things that we talk about that happen in the right or the left whether it's our nonverbal cues or our language or emotion most of those functions are things that both hemispheres can and do perform for example it is true that most of our language develops in a part of the left brain that is specific for that and we know that when people have strokes that end up you know affecting the left hemisphere of the brain people's language can quickly go but it doesn't mean that that's the only part of the brain that can do that in fact when we hear certain words that are particularly emotionally laden especially ones that are drawing us to connect with each other so if i hear you if you hear your name called and especially if if nell were to call your name especially if now calls your name in you know a time when she's feeling particularly amorous or like you know kind or whatever right like even though it's a word like your name like that would tend to show up in your right hemisphere or when we're using words to express love or care for one another that's language that tends to show up in the right brain despite the fact that having to do with being words and there are other things there there are these amazing stories of neuroplastic change in which certain parts of the brain that used to be taken care of by one half of the brain a person has an injury or a stroke and that part of the brain's job is taken over by another part of the brain so that we see that the capacity of the brain to shift from one side to the other to do certain things is a possibility now the way that we end up living our lives is that like like a lot of things if i become if i get really good at throwing a baseball you know from the time i'm a kid with one hand versus the other right i'm gonna eventually develop a capacity to throw that baseball let's say with my right hand that eventually i won't have the same capacity to throw with my left hand and if we were to look at the brain activity that has to do with like the fingertips and how they hold a baseball when they grip a baseball you would see that the part of my brain that is connected to my right hand which would be my left hemisphere part of that part of the brain you would see that like there's all kinds of neural connections between the part of my left brain and my right hand that wouldn't be the case for my left hand and my right brain and we typically are doing these kinds of things we're developing a lot of these skill sets when we're younger and so it's easy for us to say oh well certain things happen in the right and certain things happen in the left and that can be the case but it's not because they don't potentially have the capacity to do both things equally well but here is one place that is different and that has to do with the general posture that both hemispheres actively engage when it comes to living in the world and what do i mean by the posture that i have in the world you know in order for us to navigate the world we are doing two things at one time always we are at the same time that i am uh like looking out at the world i'm looking out the world and i'm observing the world i'm engaging the world i'm still at some point simultaneously also having to kind of keep an eye on what's going on in the detail of the world yes i want to look at the forest i'm taking in the forest but i also need to make sure that there's not something in one of those trees a predator in one of those trees that might want to come out and get a hold of me especially if i'm a lower mammal or if i'm a bird there are certain ways in which i will pay attention to the world in its large expanse kind of taking it all in right but there's another way that i'm paying attention to the world in which i'm actually looking at details i'm looking at how the world works one way i'm experiencing the world i'm with the world the world is a here and now thing i'm taking in the beauty the sensations the images i'm just kind of swimming in that but there's another way in which i pay attention to the world in which instead of being immersed in it i'm swimming in it the other way that i do that i engage the world is if i'm i keep the world at a distance now the distance may only be at arm's length but i keep it at a distance in order for me to examine it in order for me to study it in order for me to manipulate it in order for me to use it to its best ability so i am i am listening to switchfoot play the blues and i'm driving my car but i'm actually like i'm paying a lot more i'm just with the blues then i am necessarily paying attention to details of signage and so forth and so on because i'm just with that music or you're with a painting you know you're you're with one of van gogh's painting you're just in that space or you as an actor like once you once you are doing your work all your prep work you you come to the stage and you are in that space and like dude like you're in that space but if i need to change my tire i'm like looking at a distance i want to know where the lug nuts are i want to know where the you know where the tire iron is i need to know where those things are in order for me to manipulate it in order for me to change it if i'm trying to figure out a math problem if i'm in you know if i'm like one of the engineers for apollo 13 like i got to figure out how to get these guys home and i am thinking thinking thinking about something out here at a distance and we need both of those things the problem is for us where things get really difficult is if a one side of the brain gets over developed to the extent that the other side is underdeveloped and then we have this challenge of our kind of emotional mental relational lives being kind of hijacked by one side or the other and when we're not aware that that's happening we just think that we have a set of problems but we don't know that it has much to do with the difference between our right and left hemispheres so the one thing that i'm hearing you saying i think is that that i think a lot of people have um been misled to believe or have it's a myth is that you know you are either right brained or left brained that's just not a thing right i mean both are working all the time right but sometimes people can be have one side more dominant than the other side right and so we we it is true that so for instance again back to the baseball metaphor if i'm throwing if i throw the baseball with my right hand it is true that my left brain is going to be more dominant than my right when it comes to throwing a baseball right but we would be in we would be incorrect to say that just because now i know this is going to be stereotypes right but it would be incorrect to say that just because i'm an engineer i'm left brain and because you're an artist you're right brained that would be an unhelpful inaccurate way to describe what it is that's going on it may be there there that those two people utilize certain elements of their hemispheres in certain situations more than their counterpart but it's not because one hemisphere of their mind is more dominant than the other just because one's an artist and one's an engineer it is true though pepper and and we'll i think we'll get into this more that that culturally and this this is the work of ian mcgilchrist in the master in his emissary culturally we also see that our neurological behaviors play out in our culture in such a way that when it comes to knowing things for example this is where when we get to this whole notion what does it mean for us to be known when it comes to knowing things i think that the most important in fact the only way to know things is through the scientific method that's how i know things how do you know that this is true because we've studied it because we've set up a research protocol for it because we've analyzed all the variables we've done the study and therefore this is what we know to be factually true and so this creeps into all kinds of elements of our lives so if i tell you that i love you and you're not feeling it you're like yeah but kurt like i'm really not feeling i said but the fact is right we can do the research we can go back and record it like there's the data my left hemisphere is talking to your left hemisphere and there's the data and like like like what's the problem we live in a world that as it turns out for the last four to five hundred years as mcgilkes points out has become increasingly culturally dominated by a left hemispheric way of being in the world say more about that so one way to talk about this is to first of all kind of go back to the beginning of like brain development this will be this will be kind of helpful i think and you all you can you'll hopefully you'll kind of you'll you'll see this really pretty quickly that when we're born the first hemisphere to develop what it's supposed to do is the right hemisphere so the things that eventually we end up doing mostly out of the right hemisphere our kind of integrated map of the body right our sense of like what our body feels like internally for instance our non-verbal cues that we talked about in our last episode right the body and how we communicate both to each other and to ourselves non-verbally through our bodily instincts our emotion our capacity to sense things immediately in a moment holistically in the room this sense that there are always these different kind of ways in which you know we we have a sense of timelessness like i'm involved in so if i get in my get in my zone i'm just there and i the passing of time it like stops taking place for me so this sense of we right i have a sense of being connected to someone else connected to the world connected to the universe this sense of being we with largely is an experience that emerges out of the right hemisphere attachment for instance right attachment processes crucially emerge beginning with the activity of the right brain interestingly enough you know most people most mothers when they just hold their infants most mothers hold their infants in their left arms now i don't mean that that's not like well you know anybody who's hearing this like well i'll show you i'm just gonna like hold my infant in my right arm from now on you fancy pants shrink-o-matic i'll teach you we hold our infant in our left arm what does that mean that means that as that newborn is being held in my left arm their head tends to tilt in such a way that their right ear is against our chest and their left ear is open to hear our voice and their left ear is connected to their right brain and we give them our voice over and over and over and over again we hear we give them our comfort in that way over and over and over again and so that right hemisphere is taking in a sense of we a sense of connection that i'm connected with somebody and that's its job and we would say that in the process of our being known like i want to be known i want to be known by you by amy by our friends we i want to be deeply known and in order for us to go on and create beauty and to be known is an event that largely emerges in the right hemisphere as does attachment i then want to make sense of all that that i'm sensing and so my left hemisphere then comes in to help me make sense of this it gives me a sense of understanding it helps me figure out problems i can manipulate these things because i can see the tire that's flat that has to be fixed the math problem the this the that the so forth and so on but we've lived in a world in which for the last 400 years has grown in its intensification of turning the world into a problem to be solved we are so linguistically based that as long as i can just explain something to you logically as long as i can just make it clear to you make it plain to you then we should be fine there shouldn't be a problem i should be able to explain my political position to you and argue you into a place of understanding that i'm correct and you're incorrect this shouldn't have anything to do with emotion this or our relationship or my fear or my attachment to my parents this should only have to do with my logical linear processing heck even in the way that we put like nature in our cities right we want our cities to be have trees and so forth but like how do we do it like we plan it out right we we make sure that those trees are planted x number of feet apart we don't just like say hey we're just going to let a bunch of trees grow over here we're going to just like let nature do its thing no so even in our attempts to create beauty we do so by making sure it's still dominated by this constructed linear boxed in way of seeing the world and the challenge about all that pep is that when it comes then to like relational traumas when it comes to the you know you hurt my feelings and then you say well i didn't mean it so you give me the data you didn't mean it and so therefore it shouldn't be a problem that's not going to be very effective for us when our african-american brothers and sisters our hispanic and our asian brothers and sisters are having experiences like they've been having like not just for the last year right for 400 years for as long as we've been around here doing our thing quoting facts is not how we get to a place of healing and wholeness that's not how we do this but we have been primed through a particular way of our brains operating such that the role of the right hemisphere that to be known to do all of its all of its work is then to be kind of shipped out to the left brain so that the left brain can help us make sense of this but it's all in the service of coming back around to the right brain to enable the right brain to then flourish even more i want to be known so that i can understand what that means so that i can take that process of being known to the next level we are always even when we are fixing problems even when we are logically linearly explaining positions at the end of the day we are still wanting to do that in order to develop and deepen our relationships at the end of the day it's because i still want to be with you and cook a great meal and watch a great video and make great music and then tomorrow like paint it together or do whatever it is that we're going to do like we're going to create beauty in the world and so on deepen our relationships and yes i need the capacity to linearly logically think about what those problems are but when i only understand the world in those terms i lose track of what it means for us to be known i lose track of the importance of what it means for me to feel felt i i stop being able to be broad and curious and open about the world instead the world becomes more restricted it just becomes a problem that i'm trying to solve when realistically we're really looking for there to be this rhythmic interaction between the two sides of our brains and my capacity to interact rhythmically between my right and my left brain interestingly enough is heavily dependent upon my rhythmically interacting with you with another person if i don't have my interaction with you my right and left brain are not going to talk to each other very effectively and so we we have to have an active both sides both hemispheres have to be active even as you and i are communicating with each other so that i can understand and feel right right right right one of the most um important questions of course that we ask people is like well what do you feel and you know a common answer is well i think and they they're going to go tell me their their thoughts on on things right they want to tell me what they're thinking because even their experience of emotion is one of analysis like i can talk about what i feel i can't express what i feel necessarily i can give you the definition i think and so forth but i want to talk more about what i think than what i feel first of all because i don't have much practice doing that right second of all you all out there you you may or may not have much experience or practice with language like well i think there are only four feelings like i'm mad or sad or uh mad those are my uh i guess there's only three right maybe only two because we don't have much of a lexicon for this so it's kind of like i got three primary colors and that's the only colors that i have but the reality is that we experience so much more right the kind of color and number of colors so much greater than that but because we've come to see the world as a problem to be solved because we've seen our marriages as a problem to be solved our parenting is a problem to be solved my panic attacks is a problem to be solved i'm not able to be curious about what is it that this is pointing to about which god is trying to draw me in so that we can create beauty and goodness i just see this as a problem to be solved not so much as beauty and goodness that is waiting to be created and so we have here this experience and expression of the left hemisphere and the way we express it in our culture again not like like when we when we it's it's not just about what happens in the privacy of our minds when we think about education for example right you gotta like you gotta test you gotta pass the test and hear the scores the whole notion of discovery the whole notion of curiosity the whole notion of like what do you want to learn today what are you curious about no we're going to dictate what you're going to learn and we're going to tie anxiety to it by the time you're in third grade so that you can start to worry about not passing the test not just so that you can get to fourth grade but so that you can get into yale right right and so now i wanna like make sure that we're like pushing you out of your right hemisphere into your left hemisphere to make sure that i'm analyzing analyzing analyzing in order for me to know that i'm right because if i'm right then not only will i not be wrong but i won't be left i won't be abandoned because so much gets tied in this left hemispheric dominance so much gets tied to shame so much gets tied to the analysis of how if i don't get this done correctly it's not just that oh we'll figure it out again later i'll try it and we'll work it out no it's there will be some kind of catastrophic problem that will ensue because of this you just sent me back to seventh grade in sister juanita's class in my algebra class and just bring it so bring it i can vividly remember you know uh before this conversation i would i would have said you know i've got a real strong right brain my left brain is just really weak because algebra was not my thing right so i'm sitting in class and you know i she's got the problem up on the board and i'm hiding right i do not want to be called on to go up in front of the class because i'm good i know the shame and the humiliation that's coming when i come up and i look at this problem and i have no idea what to do and instead of teaching me she's going to yell at me and she's going to humiliate me in front of the class right so uh and and that's what happened you know you called on you up to the front of the class you don't know how to solve for x and instead of someone saying let me teach you how to do this it's basically you hear someone saying you're stupid right in front of your your your uh peers at a time in your life when you're you know that seems like the biggest thing in the world right so all that shame that's tied into into that yeah right right well and one of the ways then that we we we end up you know kind of even reinforcing that is uh you know i'm just i'm having this fantasy of you know uh your uh you know given given your acting prowess i'm thinking like that you would you'd have had some lines that you could have delivered for what was her name sister sister juanita sister sister juanita yes that you know you could you could have said sister juanita i'm i'm perceiving that you're i'm perceiving you're feeling something about the fact that i don't know the answer to this question could we talk about that can we just have a little conversation because i'm i'm actually feeling a little anxious i'm feeling a little threatened by this i'm not really quite sure where we're going i certainly am not sure where we're going with the math problem but i'm also not sure where we're going with our relationship right in this in this moment right because there is a sense in which one would you would love you would love if our teacher would be able to say okay let's let's find a way to let's let's let's find a way to talk about it let's finally talk about the problem that's on the board exactly just like you said right yeah i think about uh sports right and uh my mind is drawn to and oh my goodness i am at the moment i am blanking on his name it's one of the hazards of turning 58. uh when you turn 58 one of the skill sets that you will lose is the capacity to remember particular high school football coaches names it's a very small subset of memory that people are researching i can remember a lot of things i can remember my name i can remember your name pepper but i can't remember this particular high school football coach's name i think it progresses to all pronouns eventually that's what my dad always said he's like the first thing to go is pronouns i can't think of any pronouns so wherever that sits in the brain remember the problem i guess it's right the first place like i know it's it's it's just it's entered retirement it's like it's like it it's gone it's moved to florida like right yeah my wife and i are taking a trip to florida later this month i'm like yes i'm here to find a certain part of my brain it's the pronoun part i can't remember pronouns yeah so but there he's he's now retired he's not he's a he's a coaching instructor and uh he won a number of state titles uh with his team and their motto was we play football to learn how to love one another this is what we do and of course you know at the time and later he was he was he played for the detroit lions remember he played for the lions uh he was he was a lineman for them i think and then came back and coached high school ball and is a believer and this was his thing like he's like no we're gonna this is what we're here we're here to learn how to love each other that's why that's what we're blown to play football and this would be like like like they'd have to repeat this right every every so often and as such uh you know of course how can you argue when you're winning titles but what does it mean for you to see that like you know you're going to direct all of this kind of energy this pounding aggression you're going to develop it in such a way that you are actually paying attention to a more balanced view you know one of the things that you all might imagine is that i'm saying that the left brain is to be you know not to be trusted by all means no the problem is not that we have a left brain the problem is it has become tyrannical over our right in our culture it's usurped its role as being this mediator of helping us navigate what it really means to be known by one another you know i'd also say that you know one of the other important things too pepper about this is that for far too long we have also in many respects tried to shoehorn our faith into my right hemisphere by using the function of the left thinking that like we believe something to be true when we have read it if i've been given a certain set of facts about the gospel then i just somehow should magically know that that's true but we go back to the phrase just say no to drugs and we know that one of the reasons why that was ineffective was because the part of the brain that hears the words just say no to drugs has nothing to do with the part of the brain that wants to do the drugs oh i've never thought of that before that's great right you know that explains some things for you is that helping you make sense of some things in your life yeah and so the whole thing then is that we do the same thing with faith we say like well read john 3 16 and you should know that god so loved the world and so that's a packaged and wrapped proposition but until i feel it in my chest i don't know that god loves me until i see it in your eyes hear it in your voice which is all running to mostly my right hemisphere i have no idea what loving and being loved is all about about what being known is all about you know one of the things that mcgill chris talks about is a way for us to pay attention to this disparity between the right and left and again remembering that we're not throwing the left out the left is crucial if i don't have the left hemisphere like i can't change the tire um you could love the tire i could love the tire you could look at the tire and just get emotional about the fact that it's round and flat and you know all those things but i could i could i could express my empathy toward it you could express your empathy towards the entire and the tire would feel known by me yes yes and we just remain flat as ever so we need the left right we need the left in order eventually though to like fix the tire so that i can get to the birthday party that i'm having for my friend right i i want these things because relationship is where it all ends in order for us then to go on and create even more beauty for us to create the next version of attire right but we do this not just with faith in general as we say like look preachers are not you know the news is not good for preachers if you can't tell really good stories because the bible is a really good story it's primarily a story and if we're not paying attention to what the brain and the bible pays attention to it'll be really difficult for us to hear and experience what god is trying to say to us it's really challenging for us to do that mcgill chris notes that the the ways that he has seen in his research the ways that he has seen in which we are most able to bring this balance of right and left together back together is a through our encounter with nature so how many of you have made especially in this time of cobit how many of you have made a practice of regularly encountering something in nature even if it's in your neighborhood like something as simple as like you go out i think i don't know if you mentioned this like you go you take your susan socks off and now that's getting warmer and like you take 10 minutes and you walk around and let your feet feel the grass so nature is one thing a second thing i i'll just still never forget your your your walk at the creek pepper yeah the second thing is our encounter with beauty in the world of art and the third thing is our religious experience and by religious experience i don't just mean you know just being a logical linear sermon preparation i mean the worship that we encounter but i also mean how are we imagining the texts that we read are we immersing ourselves in the story of the gospel not just the factual truth or the propositional theology but when i read about jesus and matthew am i able to sit at the table and am i able to feel my chest beat in such a way that i'm actually able to sense the tension when jesus in front of everybody else [Music] is asking this traitor to go to dinner right to pay attention to my right mouth hemisphere means eventually as we'll talk about in a couple of sessions that we need to practice doing that in order for us to be able to talk about our stories more effectively in order for us to be attuned and attentive to how our memory works attune and attentive to the things that we sense an image and feel and with that in mind there are some exercises i think that we could look at enter into you know as we uh come to the end of our time today the first is that just keeping track of any time that we encounter beauty in the course of our day now this would mean we'd have to look for it but anytime we have an encounter with beauty we name that and we write that down so to keep a journal of beauty that we're gonna you know at the end of our day we're gonna keep track of like i had an encounter with this particular sunset that i saw or the tree that i saw or i actually went out in my yard and i just noticed that the frost was the snow was receding it was just a beautiful take like what am i doing to like pay attention to that and write them down but also pay attention to what you sense an image and feel when you encounter it write that down begin now here's one that'll like our you know many many of you all you'll think like i'm not that's not what i do i don't write poetry i want you to practice beginning writing poems jack spratt sat on attack that's a fact jack you're a poet and didn't know it would you know sure as a long fellow and how do you do that i would say go online get yourself a primer on beginning to write poems and i want you to begin to write but i want you all to begin to write poems great the best poets the best poems are written by the poets who write the most poetry because a lot of it isn't that great but because of that because they're practicing they're engaging the interplay between their right and the left hemisphere because we're using language along with metaphor along with rhythm and cadence and so forth practice paying attention to your nonverbal cues we talked about this in our last episode there are seven nonverbal cues we talked about those go back and listen to the podcast but then make a habit of every day saying that today is going to be the day i'm going to pay attention to what it's like for me to look at other people my eye contact i'm going to pay attention to that i'm going to pay attention to my tone of voice i'm going to pay attention to my timing and you know intensity of gestures i'm going to pay attention to those things that is the very act of paying attention is my analytical brain actually connecting with the parts of my right my left brain connecting with my right brain that is demonstrating those nonverbal cues then we have a breathing exercise that we've done that we've given to folks we may have talked about this in last season but it's a simple exercise six breaths per minute uh the average human adult respiratory rate is about 12 to 14 breaths per minute if you lower that to six it means one inhalation every five seconds one exhalation every five seconds and a much deeper breath but to do that requires you to pay attention to your breath because if you're going to watch a video or read a book while you're trying to do this you're not going to do it because you're just going to go back to your automatic you know cadence why is that important because as we do that kind of work we're giving the right hemisphere an opportunity to breathe literally remember we're not trying to get rid of the left hemisphere we're just trying to make sure that it serves the purpose for which it was destined and that is to help us make sense of what we sense because largely what we're trying to do is to create relationships of beauty and goodness in the process of being known so that we can then go on and further create more beauty and goodness in the world hopefully then those will be four things that we can do encountering beauty practicing writing poems paying attention to your nonverbal cues and the six breath per minute breathing exercise that can help bring your right and left hemisphere into a more amiable relationship with each other those are great exercises kurt that'll be i'll i will uh venture out on this this week and uh and try these things really i'm not kidding i i you know i i do some of them but to put them all have a sort of a a list of things that i can do to help in this connection of the right and left brain and um to help being a live a full life and be able to really connect with people and connect with beauty um i appreciate you giving us these exercises and um i will be uh working on those this week encourage all of you people to to do the same thanks kurt thank you and i'm looking forward to your to your to your poem i really i can't wait for your poem well it's a little more like a limerick um and we that may be for a different podcast not even a different episode like there once was a man named kurt all right kurt thank you so much for today all right man thank you great to be with you again all right love you too [Music] this podcast is produced by kurt thompson pepper sweeney and myself amy cella audio production and music is by keaton simons if you'd like to connect with us you can visit us on our website being knownpodcast.com or you can find us on social media at being known pod be well be known