Neuroscience Research

let's talk SCIENCE

THREE KEY INSIGHTS

Ready for the science? Good, because:

1. Your right brain's ready for neuroplastic change!

Your brain is built for evolution. Sure, it stays efficient with speedy default operations, but it also has incredible capacity to integrate new connections. And it has an elegant design that lets it do both.

For efficient day to day operations, your brain maintains distinct networks that handle its chief priorities and default processes. It relies on these networks to shape everything from your self concept, values and thoughts to your emerging lived experience. These maps ensure you do not, for example, suddenly forget who you love or that you dislike tomatoes. The maps to such a consistent experience of your life are thanks to two of your brain's largest networks: your Default Mode Network (DMN) and Salience Network (SN). Both are highly lateralized left (1)—and your left brain ensures they stay speedy and efficient by prioritizing autonomous networking inside these networks (2).

Of course, there is always new information to consider. Your right brain knows this, above all. It maintains constant awareness of any emergence in present time, along with its relative safety or threat. To attend effectively, your right brain networks in a distinctly global fashion, ensuring it has input from the left brain (whose networks contain the official record as to what is salient). It values global insight so much that its networking dominates the last of your brain's major networks—the one charged with sustaining attention on awareness and decision-making—the Central Executive Network (CEN)(1). And what's more? Its focus on global efficiency helps your right brain integrate fresh insights across all three networks (the CEN, SN and DMN). (1) The more readily your right brain perceives emerging safety and threats, the more quickly it ensures they are neuroplastically integrated—to speed future retrieval in the left brain. And it's an effective steward of this superpower. It closely tracks your embodied responses in the spaces of any emergence—which it encodes as data about what is safe or threatening. (For example, if you experience the pain of getting your fingers burned by a bowl coming out of the microwave, your right brain quickly updates your day-to-day networks: microwaved bowls = hot!)

With all this in mind, consider: If the right brain attends so closely with the embodied experience. . . could deliberately minding safety cues be a way to harness our right brain's capacity to evolve our default experiences of safety?

2. Your brain is built for resourceful simulations and solutions

There's something else that's important to know that matters for our work together. Your right brain's global networking is a vastly underutilized resource for future-focused evolutions.

Obviously, to navigate our futures effectively, we need capacity to imagine and simulate outcomes—as well as the ability to integrate these simulated experiences as memories. Which hemisphere do you suspect might be able to help out?

You won't be surprised to learn your right brain does the heavy lifting when it comes to conceptual mental imagery. (3 - 6, 9-10) Brain activity during imaginative and future thinking shows structures in the right cortex and right hippocampus to have substantially stronger networking dynamics than the left (3)—and damage to the right hemisphere tends to correlate with difficulties in generating detailed future simulations (3). Why is this kind of imagery so lateralized right? Because the knowledge our right brain looks for is highly biased for sight.(10) (Insight. Foresight. Hindsight.) So much so, that our brains keep processing mental imagery regardless of our intention to think in narrative or visualize a concept. (14) A vast array of cognitive, sensory and motor networks are recruited to construct the images you imagine, or express as metaphors in your speech (9)(11-13). That's right—metaphors? They're embodied evidence of your brain's emerging insights (11), and the fundamental truth that, for your brain, seeing = knowing is a deeply rooted map.(11)

Notice: Are you beginning to understand why a picture is worth a thousand words? What if every time you wanted a solution you could just... "look" for one?

3. Your left brain is your powerhouse for narratives

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: input from the right brain is actively inhibited by the corpus callosum while the left hemisphere is constructing speech (8). That's an incredibly valuable insight that validates the use of visualization tools in situations where we need clarity with the benefit of ongoing right-brain input.

Note: Research into right-brain inhibition during speech processing is poised to offer increasingly valuable insight, so we'll stay on top of developments over the years.

References:

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

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

(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 Rght 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)