Division of the brain

During this course, we have avoided using the term 'brain', and the past convention that our mind controls our actions. With my first post, I challenge this term, with the following talk that I find extremely interesting. It is about brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor who suffers a stroke, and is able to study the effect of the stroke on her brain, using the gained knowledge from her research.

This talk is focused on the division of the brain in the left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere and tries to make sense about what happens when one of them stops, and to define what is the role of the left-hemisphere, and right-hemisphere respectively.

Another interesting RSA animate talk is given here by psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist in which he denies past concepts that state that emotions, reasons, language, imagination are distributed between the left and right hemisphere.

He also talks about how more and more information is available for us, but we are not able to process it. Referring to the extended mind, we could use the internet resources to build our own book just like Otto's, however, for processing that amount of information we would need a lifetime and be wise to understand it.

He talks about how there is a paradoxical relationship between adversity and fulfillment, between restraint and freedom, between the knowledge of the parts, and the wisdom of the whole.

Finally, the talk ends with a quote that I quite like: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant, but has forgotten the gift."