The One You Feed - Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton on Right Brain Injury vs. Left Brain Injury

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist. In 1996, Jill experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. John Britton is a former anesthesiologist who suffered a right brain injury leaving him with only his left brain to function. After hearing Jill’s previous episode on this show, John contacted Eric and they thought it would be interesting to host a conversation with John and Dr. Bolte Taylor to discuss their respective experiences.In this episode, Jill, John, Ginny, and Eric talk about what it’s like to experience the world through your right brain vs. your left brain and how they come together to make for whole-brain living. But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, John Britton, and I Discuss Right Brain Injury vs Left Brain Injury and…The functions of and interaction between the right and left hemispheres of the brainHow the left brain governs past and future, me the individual, details, boundaries, languageThat the right brain governs the present, the “we” collective, connections, expansive, and opennessThe way the two hemispheres of our brain interact with one another in a healthy brainHow John experienced the world before, during, and after his right brain injuryThe most helpful rehabilitation approach for John post his injuryDr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience of her left hemisphere traumatic brain injury and her recovery storyDr. Jill Bolte Taylor Links:Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s WebsiteTwitterFacebookCalm App: The app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life through meditations and sleep stories. Join the 85 million people around the world who use Calm to get better sleep. Get 40% off a Calm Premium Subscription (a limited time offer!) by going to www.calm.com/wolfTalkspace is the online therapy company that lets you connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere at any time at a fraction of the cost of traditional therapy. It’s therapy on demand. Visit www.talkspace.com or download the app and enter Promo Code: WOLF to get $100 off your first month.If you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Whole Brain Living with Dr. Jill Bolte TaylorThe Divided Yet Connected Brain with Iain McGilchristLessons About the Brain with Lisa Feldman BarrettSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are you stressed by the holidays? Many of us are. I recently hosted a community event where I taught a spiritual habit that will help you feel more at peace this time of year. You can access the free video at oneufeed.net slash holiday. Expectations during the holidays can cause us so much stress. Things like obligations to be with difficult family members, pressure to make everyone happy, loneliness because of little or no family to be with, or overspending on buying gifts. If any of that sounds familiar, go to OneYouFeed.net slash holiday to get this free video teaching on how to experience more peace this holiday season. Welcome to The One You Feed.

Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. It's your pal, Chris. Where's the opening quote, you might ask?

Well, instead, you're getting me because I wanted to tell you about this episode. First of all, the guests are Jill Bolte-Taylor, who you may remember from episode 419 not terribly long ago, who is the Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist who in 1996 had a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain, and she lost the ability to walk, talk, read, write, etc. Well, also another guest on this episode, in addition to Jill, is John Britton, who heard that episode and contacted Eric, and he is on because he was a former medical doctor who had a right brain injury. So this is a discussion between the two with Eric and Ginny as a special episode. The other thing I wanted to qualify is that there were some recording problems during this episode, so you may notice that everybody sounds very different

compared to our normal episodes, but the content is great. So enjoy this episode with Jill Bolte Taylor and John Britton, and extra special Fancy Pants interviewer, Ginny Gay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special episode of The One You Feed. I am joined here with Ginny, who you know if you've listened to some of the recent episodes, Jill Bolte-Taylor, who has been a guest on the show before, and John Britton, who is a former anesthesiologist who has had a brain injury at one point in his past and why that's relevant will become clear in a moment. After we had Jill on the show, she talked about how she suffered an injury to her left brain, leaving her primarily functioning in her right brain.

And after we aired that episode, John reached out to me and said, Hey, interestingly enough, I had an injury to my right brain. And it was sort of the opposite of the one that Jill had. And that got me thinking, wouldn't it be interesting to bring the two of them together to talk about right brain, left brain, whole brain living with two different perspectives on injuries to each side of the brain? So that's what we are here to do. And to kick us off, I'm going to allow John to answer the parable of the wolf question since Jill has already had a shot at it. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are

two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather. He says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So John, I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in your work. You know, I've listened to the One You Feed podcast enough to have heard probably 200 responses to that parable. So I kind of asked myself, how would I respond to that parable? I think it's pretty easy for me right now.

The bad wolf to me is my left brain, where, you know, it's a source of negative thoughts, where it's a source of negative thoughts, it judges. The negative thoughts are anxiety and anger and sadness. To take a caring newcomer song title, it can't sit without knowing. It's a defender of its space at all costs. In my experience, it's reluctant to allow the right brain to experience mindfulness and presence. It's a defender of its place. It doesn't allow feelings to be had. It defends itself.

The right brain, which is my good wolf, which was very hard to get to in recovering from my brain injury. It's, for me, the place of awareness, compassion, empathy. It's a place of spontaneity. And it's a place of wisdom and love, which to me means equanimity. And that's a very special place that's really hard, I think, to get to. Thanks, John. That's really, really insightful. And I think you set up some of where we want to go.

Yeah, I thought perhaps before we dive into each of your stories and your experiences of your traumatic brain injuries and recovery, which I'm fascinated by and can't wait to hear you share, Jill, would it be possible for you to share with us just a bit about maybe what the right brain represents, its function, and what the left brain represents and its function? I would also refer listeners back to episode 419, which is Eric's interview with Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, and she goes into great detail on this topic and in her book, Whole Brain Living. So that is a wonderful precursor to the conversation we're about to have.

But for the purposes of this episode, Jill, I wonder if you could maybe give us a brief overview. So I think John just kind of said it all because in, and his answer was very similar to mine, who's the good wolf to me? It's the right brain. Because the right brain is right here right now. It's in the present moment experience. And the biggest difference to me between the two hemispheres is the timing. The left brain has a past and a future.

It has linearity of thinking and it focuses on me, the individual. The right hemisphere, it's right here, right now. And it's, it doesn't have me, the individual as the focus. The focus becomes the we, the collective whole. So how do I exist in the present moment and experience all the same things that the left brain is going to experience, but it does it differently. For example, the right brain is going to hear language, but it's not going to focus on the words and the details and the linearity of that thinking. It's going to focus on the

intonation of voice, the emotional content of the voice, the facial language. Does it match the body language? Does the big picture of how the person's communicating, does that fit together? And with that, because there's no true separation between me and others, I come forward with compassion and openness and expansiveness. And because I don't have the definition of right, wrong, good, bad, which is part of what the left brain does, then I'm open to creativity. I'm innovative and I'm communal. I connect with others.

So the right here, right now, the experience of the whole is the right brain. The left brain is details, details, more details about those details. Take that big picture of the present moment and divide it up so that we can actually communicate about it. And we humans do that we can actually communicate about it. And we humans do that through this huge loop of language. And so we look at the big picture and we say, we're going to now define a boundary between what I'm going to consider pink and what I'm going to consider as red. And that way, then two of us who are separate from one another, because we each now have an individuation and identity, then the filter of the world goes to the individual.

And there's a group of cells in that left hemisphere that actually defines the boundaries of where we begin and end so that we perceive ourselves to not be a part of the whole, but separate from one another. So these two hemispheres are completely filtering the left as it relates to me, the whole, but separate from one another. So these two hemispheres are completely filtering the left as it relates to me, the individual, and I have linearity of time, a past and a future, and all those details, right, wrong, good, bad. And then the right hemisphere is open and expansive and more connected to the present moment and the experience of we as a community. And so those two hemispheres, they function very differently, but in a normal healthy brain, they're connected and they communicate, right?

They typically do have a bit of a synergistic effect, would you say? Yes. You have 300 million axonal fibers going between the two hemispheres. So a group of cells in the right brain is communicating with the comparable set of cells in the left brain, and someone, which group of cells is inhibiting the other cells. So there's always a group of cells in any ability that's going to be dominant. And that's how we gain focus. We have to be able to focus our brain on certain details. Now, if I'm having a thousand things going on in any moment, then I might have half of that going

on in the right brain and half of that going on in the left brain. Or I may have my perception completely skewed to the left where I'm 90% in my left brain and I can't really access the experiences of the right brain or vice versa. So the brain cells in both hemispheres are always functioning at the same time. So at any moment, I'm using both, but each ability is focused by a specific group of cells and over 70% of those fibers in that corpus callosum is inhibiting the cells in the opposite hemisphere in a normal brain. Yeah. I did an interview with Ian McGilchrist, which may or may not be out by the time we release

this, but he has a way of describing these two ways of the brain working that I thought was really, really helpful. And he said, imagine a bird sitting on the ground, pecking it, you know, trying to get seed out of some gravel. The left brain is very focused in on, all right, that's gravel. That's a seed. Let me do this. Let me do that.

But at the same time, the right brain is perceiving the whole of its environment so that it's watching. It's aware. Okay, I can't just be only focused on this pebble because I might get eaten, right? So when they're working together, you see that sort of synergy there of I'm finding the food, I'm focusing on details, I'm keeping the whole in place. And I think be curious to see if you guys both agree with this and Jenny too. I think that sometimes these conversations come across as saying the left brain is better than the right brain. Oh, I'm sorry, that the right brain is better than the left brain.

And I think that that's not the message I've taken or take. I think the message I would take is we have become increasingly left brain oriented as a society. Yes. That's where most of the focus is. oriented as a society. That's where most of the focus is. So in the same way that you need to correct for a deficiency, we need to overcorrect towards the right brain so that we do get more of what, Jill, you call whole brain living. I agree completely. I think that the ultimate goal is we have these two magnificent machines inside of our head and we need them both desperately. The human experiment is the evolution of human has been these emotional systems in both hemispheres and then added on

tissue of thinking in both hemispheres. And so ultimately the goal is to use your whole brain. And you know, it's so funny because so often the conversation then goes to, oh, well, I'm more right brain, but my husband, he's a left brain. So between the two of us, we make a whole brain and it's like, well, you know, opposites attract in the beginning until they don't. And, you know, when you look at the level of divorce, a lot of that is because that difference that attracted us in the beginning is now these are the points of contention. And so really developing the whole brain inside of your head and a whole brain inside of your partner's head ends up with now really conscious people having a conscious relationship using their

whole brains. For me, I never allowed my right brain to be used. I use the example when I was in college going by the studio art department and saying, who would ever do that? I mean, you can't make any money doing that. And they're a bunch of hippies and they don't really like listening to this stuff I like to talk about. So honestly, even before my brain injury, I never allowed my right brain to be used very much. It wasn't really until after that that I had to explore what my right brain was all about. Well, and I think that's a great growth edge because you're right. You're an MD. And MDs focus on left brain.

I mean, even by definition of science and the scientific method, it's a left brain process. It's a method that needs to be done and repeatable and get the same results. And, you know, I teach at medical school and I teach anatomy and gross anatomy and neuroanatomy and histology. I mean, that's the details of the body. And you have to become a master of those details and do your job and do your calculations in anesthesia, anesthesiology. So, so you have, have you, you know, you picked a profession for you. And then how lovely that after having lost what skillset you did have in that brain, it has now inspired you to explore, okay, well, what is over there? And what's it like now without that, even for an extreme left brainer? And then what is the value of reengaging with those abilities? So I think you're a great story.

So speaking of that story, John, I'd love to turn it over to you and for you to tell us and listeners a little bit about yourself. Maybe let's start before your brain injury. Tell us a little about your life, the way you operated in the world, your profession. Just let us get to know you a little bit. Well, I grew up in a small town in Vermont and my father was an alcoholic. He was a slob. No other way to put it.

And so how I interfaced with the external world was really important to me. And so I crossed over into my left brain really early. I wanted a different life. I wanted a profession that people would respect me for. And so the right brain had no room. I couldn't give it space. So anyway, it continued on for years that way. So the right brain had no room. I couldn't give it space. So anyway, it continued on for years that way.

And then finally, when I became an anesthesiologist, I did mainly pediatrics, mainly for a lot of sick babies. And so you have to develop really detailed, linear thinking, because I had a progression of things I had to do. I had to use anxiety as a tool. Actually, the tool of anxiety got me through a lot of stuff because I couldn't back away. And anxiety kept me there. The problem was when I got sick, the anxiety became a weapon against me. But anyway, left brain became a weapon against me.

But anyway, left brain was it all the way. And so then tell us a bit, as much as you're comfortable sharing, tell us about what happened to your right brain. Well, I got a herpes simplex type 1 infection from a patient. So it's actually pretty interesting medically, I think. When I was a resident 35 years ago, I got a little infection in my finger. And back then, universal precautions didn't exist, really. I wasn't wearing gloves. I didn't have eye protection. I wasn't wearing a mask. So I put a breathing tube in a young boy who was badly burned. And a couple of days later, I had an infection in my finger that was a herpetic infection and went away with oral antiviral medicines. And the interesting thing

about herpes simplex is it lives forever in your trigeminal nerve, your fifth cranial nerve, which is a part of a bunch of nerves at the base of your brain that basically allows your head to function. I'm trying to make it really simple here. But it lives there forever. I think most people know about the chickenpox virus that causes shingles, because the chickenpox virus lives in your nervous system in a different place than my virus. But anyway, 30 years later, it came back, and it manifested itself as a bad brain infection or encephalitis. And because my original infection was in my right finger, it just affected my right brain because that's where it hung out for 30 years. And my neurologist at Johns Hopkins said that there's a one in a thousand chance it'll come back because it doesn't go away really.

And, you know, about a year ago, it did come back for a period of time and it went away with oral medicines. But anyway, that's how it happened. So, John, as this infection set in on your right brain, do you have a memory of the loss of function? What was that like for you? No, actually, I don't. I was visiting my mom who was undergoing cancer treatments in Vermont, and I was going to take her to a bunch of doctor's appointments. And along the way, I was arrested for driving under the influence to get to my mom. So I had an arrest record. I gave the small town cop $20 and he let me go. Took my car away

and brought me to a bus depot. And I took the bus to the middle of nowhere and got a cab. You know, in the middle of rural New England, I got a cab and took me to my mom's house. And then after that, I don't really remember much. I remember going to her doctor's appointment and just feeling really weird. And that night, I started behaving really abnormally. So my mom called her best friend, who was a retired English professor from the University of Vermont, who came over and just observed. And she wrote copious notes like an English professor, called her husband and said, this is what John's doing. And he called an ambulance. He's really sick. And so they took me to this little hospital in Vermont. And luckily they had an IV medicine called acyclovir, which saved my life and actually

probably saved a lot of my brain because otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. And so I was in a coma for close to a week and stepped down intensive care again. And then I went through a long brain rehabilitation process. But it's interesting during the brain rehabilitation process, my fellow brain rehabbies couldn't understand why I was there because I could talk. I had memories. When you have a right brain injury, it's different. People look at you and say, well, you seem like the same old person. You know, I don't really, I don't really get where your problem is. And that was a little interesting. And I must say to say the least, because I wanted to say like I'm a duck on water I'm paddling like

man underneath but you don't realize what's happening to me and that's that's really difficult for people to understand a left versus a right brain injury because I could be really articulate I could use language to describe things really well. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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So what was the difference to you? What did you feel was different post your injury? Well, there's some subtle things like my spatial visual things were off. I couldn't figure out where I was. And even though I'd been in places before, I would take the wrong turn walking. I couldn't drive for a long time. And my short-term memory was a little off. And I think cognitively, my kind of academic cognitive therapist, Emily Gibson, would say your executive function was a little off. My ability to make decisions about how I was going to run the day was a little off. I don't know enough to know whether that's entirely right for me or not.

But mainly it was my left brain hijacking things and just saying, you know, you got things to do. And I really didn't have anything to do. But my left brain said, you know, you've always had something to do during the morning. And why aren't you doing something? My right brain couldn't modulate that. And that was different. A completely unmodulated left brain. No ability to the right brain to help me out that way.

to the right brain to help me out that way. That's interesting in that, you know, what Jill said earlier is that many of the neurons that connect the right and left brain are inhibitory. They are the right brain slowing down the left brain saying, hold on. And you suddenly didn't have that. So what you had was sort of that left brain in overdrive. I'm wondering, Jill, if you have any questions from your perspective that you'd like to ask John about his experience. I'm wondering, Jill, if you have any questions from your perspective that you'd like to ask John about his experience. I think he's giving us a lot of information. He's saying, for example, there's a group of cells in the left brain that define the definition of where I begin and where I end. And so I know the mass that is me because of my left brain. But then there's a group of comparable cells in the right brain that says,

now that I can define me, the individual, how do I move me in space appropriately? And so he's, you know, in his description of not being able to have the spatial orientation. That's one of the skill sets of the right brain. Left brain says, this is me. Right brain says, now this is how I move me in the bigger picture in order to get me where I want to go. And then the other thing is that his left brain is saying, I'm busy. I've got things to do. Where's my to-do list? But there's nothing on the to-do list, but my left brain's got to do, do, do, right? And that's what it does. It's in a hurry and it's busy and it's, but it doesn't,

you have to have the bigger picture of your life in order to know, okay, well, if I'm not working from a very specific list of to do, because my whole brain has sat down and figured out, okay, I'm going to do this and then I'm going to do that and I'm going to do this and that needs to be done. And so I'm actually doing things as opposed to just the sense of urgency, which that left brain has. There's a level of acceleration of, I got to get it done. I got to go to the office. I got 50 things I got to get done.

I start, I move into that level of speed and I do, do, do, do, do. But you have to be able to have the big picture in order to actually know how do I place myself in relationship to all those things to actually accomplish anything. So as he speaks, my brain just thinks, well, yeah, that's a factor of the left brain and the right brain. And I think another point that John made that was really important is that anybody with a brain trauma, mine was in my left brain. It influenced my whole brain in the beginning. His was in the left brain. It influenced my whole brain in the beginning. His was in the right brain. It influenced the whole brain from the beginning because the brain is still this one mass. And so whether you have a hemorrhagic trauma and you've got more fluid

going in and swelling, or you have some type of viral infection and you have a lymphatics going in to clean up the mess and to try to stabilize. When you experience a brain trauma, the whole brain is involved and it's like there's no clarity. It's like you're inside of this big cotton ball that extends out a few feet from you and you kind of can sense things, but there's no clarity. There's this lack of clarity. And unfortunately, but there's no clarity. There's this lack of clarity. And unfortunately, more often than not, as with John, he looks the same. He looks like John. I looked like Jill. Okay, well, Jill, once I get a little bit of language back, which John didn't lose too much of his language because of that left brain, people are looking at him saying, well, you seem okay. What are you doing

in here? And that's really hard because if you've got a broken arm, people are sympathetic and compassionate and they assist you because they can visualize the physical problem. But people who experience brain trauma, we look the same on the outside. And so people don't get, no, you have no idea how hard I'm working simply to keep up with my life in this moment. And this is a common complaint of people with brain trauma because we look normal. We look the same and we are so not. And things overwhelm us. Just the light can overwhelm us.

Walk into a grocery store, it can be overwhelming sensory stimulation, but I look normal. So there is this very unique way in which we feel isolated because people cannot visualize and see and understand the problem. One thing I would add in terms of my experience is my left brain would not let me deal with feeling. In your book, Jill, you talk about we feel before we think. My left brain defended its space and wouldn't let my right brain experience feeling. And I think that's one therapy that was really important for me in rebuilding my right brain is doing something called focusing or body-centered

inquiry with a guy named Jonathan Faust, who lives in the woods in Northern Virginia with his wife, Tara Brock, who is internationally famous. But Jonathan invited me to do body-centered inquiry, and it was all about experiencing what am I feeling, where am I feeling it, what's associated with it visually, shape-wise, spatially. And afterwards, there was an intense quietness. So I felt like, and you mentioned this in your book too, Jill, that my left brain was quiet. It wasn't so much that my right brain had been to the gym and had a good workout and was feeling good. It was that my left brain was quiet and my right brain was being allowed to exist, basically,

and have an experience of showing off the visual and the spatial that I was experiencing during the inquiry. Interesting. Because our perception of ourselves in relationship to ourselves, I mean, everybody thinks, well, this is me. This is me. You know, because our perception of ourselves in relationship to ourselves, I mean, everybody thinks, well, this is me, this is me, you know, right? This is me, I know me. And it's like, well, the only reason we know what me is, is because we're getting messaging inside of the brain. And in order for me to be defined as a space, there are cells that are performing that function. In order for me to have some kind of experiential awareness of my body and what's going on, that intuitive knowing of the relationship

inside of my own body, what's my gut saying, what am I feeling, what is the experience to be me, what does it just feel like to be me? These are things that we all take for granted because we don't have to think about them because, of course, I know what it feels like to be me until those cells go offline and now you're not getting fed that information. And yes, Tara Brach, of course, and the ability to shift out of that left brain and quiet it enough so that you can actually sit in the experience of what is this mass that we define as me and what is my relationship now with that and how do I communicate with it or how does it communicate with me at a level that can be meaningful? Because intuition of the right brain and medical intuition into our own bodies is essentially

this relationship that the right hemisphere in the present moment has with all these cells making up our body. And so all of that, we have to quiet that left brain and allow that gift of the right brain to come online. So that would be a tough one. I think the world, not just me who had a right brain injury, I think the world has problems with that. It's basically, what am I feeling? Where is it? For me, anxiety lies between my eyes. You know, people otherwise experience it maybe in their heart or their abdomen. But anyway, there's a felt sense that people don't tap into that I think is really important. And I think Jonathan really helped me with that. And I'd like to really point out the difference between feeling and emotion. Because emotions, we're going to have emotions. You can have sadness, probably.

You can still have anger. Can you get angry in your left brain there, John? Can you do that? Pretty easily. Yeah. So the emotions, we have an emotion in both an emotional system, but feeling to truly feel, what does it feel like? What does it feel like? The relationship between your skin and the clothing on your body. What does it feel like? What's the temperature of the air? What's the pressure of the air on your body? The feeling, the experience of bringing in sensory information as defined as feeling. So I just wanted to point that out because your examples, you use the word feeling, So I just wanted to point that out because your examples, you use the word feeling, and I just want to clarify that it's the feeling, the experience of you as that mask.

No, we're not just talking about emotional feelings. Yes, yes. Yeah. So I'd love to contrast John's experience and his story of his trauma in his right brain with Jill. We've explored this in a previous episode, but just for the sake of this episode, would you take us through a little bit about what happened to you and what your experience was? Yes. So I had a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain. And over the course of four hours, I had a blood clot grow to the size of a fist. And by doing so, it shut down my language, my definition of me as an individual. And I essentially became an infant in a woman's body because I didn't have me, the individual. I didn't have any of my academics. I had no relationship, all my relationships in the external world,

they were wiped out. My relationship with my academics and my verbal language training, well, in medicine, it's like, you know, it's one thing to know a stomach, but you need to know the different parts of the stomach. You need to know the name of the different kinds of cells and the different organs. I mean, so much of my academics had been left brain terminology. So I lost all that. And I lost the concept of mother. I didn't even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was. So I essentially became an infant in a woman's body, but I had the experiential. I became this massive ball of energy. I didn't have the division of me, the individual as self. So I became connected. I became atoms and molecules in cellular organic life form. And it was like, oh my gosh, I didn't die that day, right? I didn't die. I was all but dead, but I was alive.

And so I was just like a picture, a big old microbe that had an awareness of the difference simply between being alive, which is like this miracle that nobody can explain, and capable of receiving stimulation and having experiential around me. I became all experiential. So all the experiential that John lost, that's all I became. So I lost all the details and all the to-do and all the individuation and any of that. The external world was no longer important to me. I just became this massive energy ball. And then it took eight years for me to rebuild my left brain skill sets using my right brain abilities in order to kind of backtrack. Well, I used to be able to

speak and now everybody speaks and I don't speak and I don't want to speak because, boy, does that take a lot of energy and effort? And what's point you know when i can exist in bliss so so i had to pull myself out of this blissful euphoria of the experience of the present moment and painstakingly rebuild the road back to these natural left brain abilities I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

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It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So did your left brain come back online or is your right brain compensating for this loss? No, I rebuilt skill sets. And so this is when I really became aware of the emotional group of cells, the limbic cells, and for my emotional in linearity of time. And that part of me, that motherboard was wiped clean.

And then the left thinking is that rational brain that can have linearity of time. And eventually it was two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage. And I had an absolutely silent mind, nothing going on, no static, no language, no nothing, just blissful euphoria of the experience of the present moment. It was really wonderful. And then the surgeons went in and they removed that blood clot. And then for two and a half more weeks, I sat in absolute silence. And then after the recovery of these cells got a little better, then it was like static,

literally a static tuning into a radio frequency. And it's like, and then a word would start popping into the frequency. And then it was like, I had to relearn language and reading was gone. I had to learn how to read again. Numbers, it took four years before I even knew what one was, much less, you know, how do you put one with another one? So all of those abstract ideas, because an A is a symbol. It's not an A, right? So that eventually came back online. And then I could remember, okay, yeah, eventually I could learn.

I had been an academic. I had a doctorate degree. And I thought, are they going to take away my degree? You know, I don't remember any anatomy, you know, I mean, it was like, wow. So that all just, it was a big miss in my new way of being. And then eventually, I could remember, yes, I could remember my graduation, I could picture that, but I didn't have any of the emotion attached to the past. So I could rebuild my past using school. I mean, what do we teach children in school? We teach left brain skill set. So I had the advantage that I could essentially go back to

school and relearn because we have all these tools to retrain those circuits. And I had to start math from the beginning and reading from the beginning, spelling, what a concept, you know, that there's a right and a wrong and a good and a bad. I had to learn all that, but I could learn it because that's what we teach our children. It's much harder if you've had a right brain problem to rebuild the skill sets of the right brain because they're the subtle innuendos of the essence of what we are. So, you know, someone like John now may have had more trouble

understanding the intonation of my voice. So somebody might say to be really angry and say something to him in a really angry tone and he might not realize they're angry because that's a skill set of the right brain. But we don't teach children that in school. So for me, I had the advantage of losing the left brain and then essentially going back to detail school. John had the disadvantage of that because he could navigate the detail of the left brain. But how on earth do we train somebody to go bigger picture?

That's a really good point because my left brain wouldn't allow me to do mindfulness. It started getting very defensive. You know, it's hard to talk about the hemispheres of my brain. I'm going to have to sort of sit back in an armchair and just sort of watch. Anyway, so doing things like mindfulness were very difficult. I mean, meditation, my experience, it was very difficult at times because my left brain said, no, I need to take up that space with worries about tomorrow, bad memories about yesterday, things that I've got to get done. You can't really take up that space. And I'm not going to allow you to rehabilitate your right brain, which I'm going to be a hog. And so I've been around a lot of people beginning my meditation

and their mind goes crazy. And it's because the left brain, in my opinion, doesn't allow the meditation to stay in the right brain. It just doesn't. And for me, meditation, you know, was not really getting anywhere. So that's how I traveled to do focusing with Jonathan Biles. It's just I needed to get jump-started, focusing with Jonathan Faust. It's just, I needed to get jump-started and I needed a way to get my left brain quiet so that my right brain finally was allowed to be at peace. Another thing that you did, John, was you started exploring art as a way of rehabilitating your

right brain. You want to share a little bit about that? Yeah, it was recommended by actually Emily Gibson, my cognitive therapist. It is a problem-solving way. It was also a way actually to experience some mindfulness because I had to concentrate on something very deeply. And the problem was your right brain, when you have visual-spatial issues, even just drawing is a real workout. I felt exhausted just beginning drawing.

Then my left brain started judging. You know, it said, I'm not used to the experience of watching an incompetent thing. You know, I've always thought that being competent and not doing anything unless you're really competent at it, because you haven't been incompetent at something for a really long time. And so, you know, I had to, again, you know, I had to build up my right brain to say, you know, I think this is cool stuff. It's a lot of good energy, good vibes, you know, and what's wrong with doing this stuff? So yeah, art was really, I think, a beneficial therapy, but I had to really

duel with my left brain at times. Did your right brain come back online, so to speak, John? Or again, is this your left brain in some way compensating for the loss of function in your right brain? Do you know? You know, that's a really good question. I mean, I don't know, Jill. When do you know when your hemisphere is back the way you want it? You know, I'm really envious of somebody that had the right hemisphere to themselves. You know, people always say when there's a stroke or something, you know, was it a left brain or a right brain? And they say, well, can they speak? And it's like, yeah, they can speak. And they say, oh, good. That means the trauma was in the right brain. And boy, if I had to choose, I would so choose the trauma in the

left brain because the right brain is this beautiful experience of bigger picture. Again, we're trained, there's school to go to for left brain skillset. So I do feel for you, darling. their school to go to for left brain skill set. So I do feel for you, darling. And at the same time, I love what you said, though, because mindfulness, the left brain saying, no, this doesn't feel good to me. I don't want to do that. And I think we all have that experience when we try to sit in meditation and everybody says, I can't get my left brain to be quiet. But yours is truly fighting for its identity. And the left brain thinks that it's the only one in the head that matters and everything else is a waste of time. And because that left brain is so give me the to-do list and I've got to be busy and I've got to be competent

and I've got to excel. And I thought it was really interesting because you had said earlier, you know, you would go by the art building and think, oh, you know, what are they doing in there? They're wasting their lives, right? They're wasting their time. And so now here you are saying to your own left brain, hey, I want to do a little drawing. And it's going, what? I haven't changed my opinion. It's still a waste of time and I don't want to do it. You're going, no, no, I think this is important. We're going to do it. So now you're trying to do it and the left brain's going, but we're no good at this. And so this conversation now that you're having between the two halves, I mean, that's beautiful to me because now at least your right brain can show up and defend itself, right?

Yes, yes. Yeah, you've learned the hard, the value of the right brain. And that's part of what I think is interesting is you described John being extremely left-brained before the injury, right? Then you have an injury that makes you even more so. And yet as part of the rehabilitation process, you start moving into right brain things and you start finding a nuance and a beauty and a depth to life that you had not had before. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. I hearken to Jill's book and her characters. Character one, you know, is the thinking part of your left brain. Character

two is the emotional part. I think at times, you know, you talk to a little bit soft character one and it's not as edgy as the hard character one. Anyway, there was a conversation that happened, especially before I went to see Jonathan Faust. You know, and this may be related to the art part, too. You know, look, character two, you know, you're driving me crazy. You always come up with an anxious thing or an angry thing, and I'm running out of solutions. I can't handle it anymore. You're just driving me crazy. So what if you're scared about going to see Jonathan Faust? So what if you may run into Tara Brock? She's a nice person, probably. You

don't have to worry about what you're going to have to say, you know, and hearkening to the art part, you know, look, this is another thing that may be beneficial. This is character one thing, you know, so try it. You know, I'm running out of solutions here and I don't want to go crazy. And you notice that as you're having that conversation with your character one, it's about the future. You know, a lot of us, I've got to make this phone call. What am I going to say? Should I script it out?

I repeat it in my mind, you know, and it's like, just make the phone call and trust. You trust your right brain to show up in a positive, intelligent way because it is. It is intelligent. It is a new level of intelligence for us. And I love, though, because you're that great edge between I was a left brain hemisphere dominant human being before and I didn't have a value for the right brain. And it's kind of like, OK, the universe is going to say to you, John, we're going to show you why you should value the right brain by taking it away.

And then we're going to make you extreme left brain and make you work your way back to your own level of sanity because it is that whole balance. They are very different from their skill sets from one another and figuring out how to listen and how to manage. And I love that you were talking about really your character too. This is the part that is anxious. It's the part that worries. It's the part that says these negative things about me or, but I don't want that because that's, I have to lay me down and let me rest in order for that part of me to open up.

And as children in particular, who are listening to all these different parts and trying to figure out, well, what do I do? Do I grow up to be this thing? And then someone says, well, what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, I want to be a doctor. Okay. Well then you got to be a real character one, or I want to be a doctor. Okay, well, then you got to be a real character one. Or I want to be a sculptor. Okay, well, then you got to be a real right brain.

And it's like, no, we want to develop all of it. And we want to create healthy relationships between these different skill sets. I have to say that just for a moment, I want to reflect a few things. The first is, I think, you know, both of you in your mirror image experiences of one another and what you've shared today, you've given us all a real gift. In your extreme experience, we can sort of, those of us that have not had a traumatic brain injury, and we still have functioning two parts of our brain, you know, we really can take some gifts from this. And the first is, I think, that if we have full function of our brains, you know, we can really cultivate some balance and some interconnectedness that can really benefit us in a way of how we move

through the world and how we experience the world. I mean, I recently was at a retreat where we were cultivating a real embodied presence. So a real connectedness, feeling into our bodies, having an awareness of and in our bodies in the present moment. And in that experience, I had a real experiential aha of thinking of this framework. I'm thinking it was a right brain awakening, which was I had this in the moment sort of knowing. I just had this access to sort of whatever internal wisdom people would refer to or your internal knowing or your just sort of deep-seated in-the-moment presence. And it was through putting my awareness in my body.

And I think about what John was saying about the work he did with Jonathan Faust. And it sounds like a lot of that was very somatic. A lot of that was very connected to the body. And so I think about that experience I had, and I'm like, wow, you know, these are real practical things that we can all do to look at where might we have some imbalance, and then how can we kind of correct for that to bring us back into balance? Jill, I'll just end on this note here. As you said in the previous episode with Eric, something that I think sums up the other inspiring aspect of this, which is you said, you know, the brain is just cells and circuitry. And the beauty of cells and circuitry is that the more you run a circuit, the more powerful that circuit becomes. And it begins to run on automatic and it gets stronger. So it becomes a habit. And

this is why mindfulness works. Mindfulness is choosing purposefully to run certain mindsets to strengthen them so they become our automatic response. I love the growth opportunity that's there for all of us. That's a great quote. I sounded pretty smart there. You sure did. That's absolutely true. I mean, here you have two brains that are made up of beautiful cells. And we grew up to have pattern responses and for our own reasons. And then we both had something that happened that threw that out of, out of normal balance. And then we had to choose, what do we do with this? Do we stay where we are in our lack of ability or do we use what we have,

what cells we have in order to build a more healthy brain as a whole brain? So, yeah, thank you for sharing that quote. That was good. This is all really fascinating. You know, I told Eric, I thought this would be really interesting to talk about my experience versus Jill's sometime. And it kind of took off to being recorded and having this session. So I think it's really cool.

I think all those people who say, oh, those differences between the right brain and left brain from the 70s, that's all old science. I'm going to say you might want to listen to this podcast. Indeed. Well, thank you both, John, Jill and Jenny. I guess that's thank you all three of you for helping make this a wonderful conversation. And I'm so happy we could get us all together. Thank you.

That was great. It was absolutely delightful. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more,

make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.