Neuroscience Research

let's talk SCIENCE

THREE KEY INSIGHTS

Ready for the science? Good, because:

1. Your brain is designed for evolution—and you can SHAPE it.

Your brain is built for neuroplastic change. It stays efficient with speedy default operations, while maintaining incredible capacity to form and integrate new connections.

For efficient day-to-day operations, your brain has autonomous networks. The networks that handle your brain's default priorities and processes shape everything from your self-concept and thoughts to your sense of safety or threat. It's these maps that shape your perspective, beliefs, expectations, and preferences—and drive the behaviors and physiology you experience. They ensure you do not, for example, suddenly forget which people you love or that you dislike tomatoes, and always remember when you enter a restaurant how anxious you feel if your back is to the door.

A consistent experience of your life is made possible by two of your brain's largest networks: your Default Mode Network (DMN) and Salience Network (SN). Both are highly lateralized left (2) to help ensure they stay autonomous, speedy and efficient (2). The thing is, they're SO speedy and efficient, sometimes they're fast to come up with the wrong approach for new situations. Knowing these networks are built from lived experiences is the key to crafting new lived experiences that can evolve them.

Your right brain is always looking for new experiences it wants to integrate. It maintains constant networking focused on experiences emerging in real-time. Given all your brain has learned about past experiences of safety and threat, your right brain responds to new experiences by networking globally, incorporating input from the left brain (whose networks contain the official record as to what is salient). But it also does something else. It sustains attention on newly relevant experiences. Part of this involves facilitating networking in one of the most influential of your brain's major networks—the one charged with conscious awareness and action—the Central Executive Network (CEN)(1). It's your right brain that finds and integrates fresh new insights across all the networks mentioned above (the CEN, SN and DMN). (1)

Your right brain attends readily to new experiences to ensure they are integrated—which is how neuroplasticity speeds their future retrieval in the left brain's autonomous networks. Your right brain is such an effective steward of this superpower—closely tracking your embodied responses in the spaces of any emergence and using that data to encode what is safe or threatening—that your whole brain can get updates exceptionally rapidly in cases where it matters. For example, your right brain integrates the pain of getting your fingers burned by a bowl coming out of the microwave (e.g., microwaved bowls = hot = protect fingers) just as readily as the unexpected care in your neighbor's eyes when you ask for help (e.g., asking neighbor for help = safe = ok to repeat).

Clients: Our sessions prioritize new lived experiences because your right brain uses them to make new maps. You'll learn to use uncertainties to locate experiences of curiosity and calm—harnessing your right brain's openness to a safe present time and a generative future. After all, the same right brain that can map a curious and calm present-time can also help you see and shape better and better outcomes.

2. Your brain prefers seeing—and it can see solutions.

This insight matters a LOT for our work together. To bring about the futures we want, we need the capacity to see in detail what's different about them—especially if what is different is something inside of us—and to experience our learning as memories we can return to for guidance in real time.

For your brain, "seeing is knowing".(11) The brain's visual system is the largest of any system in the brain, so sight recruits a vast array of cognitive, sensory and motor networks to construct the images you imagine, or express as metaphors in your speech (9)(11-13). And those metaphors that you hear making their way into your own and others' speech? The color you hear in the words as they arrive? They're embodied evidence of your right brain's emerging picture (11).

You won't be surprised to learn your right brain does the heavy lifting when it comes to seeing. (3-6, 9-10) Brain activity during imaginative and future thinking shows structures in the right cortex and right hippocampus exhibit substantially stronger networking dynamics than the left (3) (in fact, damage to the right hemisphere is correlated with difficulty generating detailed future simulations (3)). Why is this kind of imagery so lateralized right? Because our right brains can see what our left brains cannot (10) — and are always processing imagery, independent of our intention to think in narrative or consciously visualize a concept. (14)

Clients: Are you beginning to see why a picture is worth a thousand words? The clarity and breakthroughs we see in sessions aren't just pictures or information — they're lived experiences your brain encodes as new connections across its most powerful networks. You leave session with more than understanding. You leave with pathways you didn't have before — and the more we see in the landscape you want to travel, the more your brain can access them when you need them most.

3. When narratives are helpful, your left brain is a powerhouse

For all the myths that abound about left and right brain function, neuroscientists do see two truths in the research. While our right brain excels at processing imagery—whether in our mind's eye or around us (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)—our left hemisphere contributes more to language and speech (2)(7)(8). In groundbreaking new research from 2022, the mechanism for accomplishing this is revealed: the corpus callosum actively inhibits input from the right brain while the left hemisphere is constructing speech (8). That's an incredibly valuable insight into why we can stay stuck the longer we're discussing how stuck we feel—and it supports the recruitment of right brain tools when we need the insights only our right brain can contribute.

Clients: Our sessions harness their narratives everywhere they're helpful, without ever being limited by them. When the best narrative can do is point us to what's missing, we'll use your right brain to see what IT knows that YOU don't yet. We'll use language to form inquiries and allow your right brain to answer from a place of awakening — and we'll find that, as new insights arrive, new words arrive naturally.

Read more from the science below and note: research in cognitive and affective neuroscience accelerates every year, so check back often —we do our best to curate emerging resources.

References:

(1) Causal Interactions between Fronto-Parietal Central Executive and Default Mode Networks in Humans (via PubMed)

(2) Two Distinct Forms of Functional Lateralization in the Human Brain (via ResearchGate)

(3) The Hippocampus and Imagining the Future: Where Do We Stand? (via PubMed)

(4) The Right Hemisphere Maintains Solution-Related Activation for Yet-To-Be-Solved Problems (via PubMed)

(5) Hemispheric Asymmetry in Visual Mental Imagery (via PubMed)

(6) Lateralization of Brain Activation to Imagination... (via JCAT)

(7) An Evaluation of The Left Brain vs Right Brain Hypothesis (via PLOS)

(8) Corpus Callosum Found to Switch off Right Hemisphere During Speech (via Neuroscience News)

(9) Neural Foundations of Imagery (via Nature Reviews Neuroscience)

(10) The Human Imagination: the Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Mental Imagery (via PubMed)

(11) Are Metaphors Embodied? The Neural Evidence (via ORCid)