The One You Feed - Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor on Whole Brain Living

Episode Date: August 6, 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. Her memoir, My Stroke of Insight documents her experience with her stroke and her 8-year recovery and it spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Her new book is Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters that Drive Our Life.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!In This Interview, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and I Discuss Whole Brain Living and …Her book, Whole Brain Living: The Anatomy of Choice and the Four Characters That Drive Our LifeThe wolf parable as it relates to the right and left hemispheres of the brainThe differences between the right and left brain and how they work togetherLosing her left brain function as a result of a stroke and being left with just the present momentThe division between the science of the left brain and the spirituality of the right brainThe function of the amygdala in the left and right hemispheresFour different “characters” of the brainHow we can change the habitual patterning of our circuitry Mindfulness is choosing purposefully to train our automatic responsesA “brain huddle” is bringing the four characters together as a teamB.R.A.I.N. huddle:  breath, recognize, appreciate, inquire, navigateOur lives are a collaboration of our whole brainDr. Jill Bolte Taylor Links:Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s WebsiteTwitterFacebookPeloton: Of course the bike is an incredible workout, but did you know that on the Peloton app, you can also take yoga, strength training, stretching classes, and so much more? Learn all about it at www.onepeloton.comIf you enjoyed this conversation with Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Neuropsychology and the Thinking Mind with Dr. Chris NiebauerLessons About the Brain with Lisa Feldman BarrettSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Breath is the first thing we do when we're born and the last thing we do when we pass. And in the meantime, it's a train running on our track constantly throughout our entire life. 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 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? Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, 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. Her memoir, My Stroke of Insight, documents her experience with the stroke and her eight-year recovery and spent 63 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Today, Jill and Eric discuss her new book, Whole Brain Living, the anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life. Hi, Jill. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Eric. I'm so happy to be with you today. I am really excited to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book, which is called Whole Brain Living, the anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandmother who's talking with her grandson. She 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. He thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. grandmother. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. 100% the parable represents the right hemisphere, which is in the present moment. It is open, kind. It is nurturing and supportive. Its primary purpose is love. While the left hemisphere has a past, has a future, it's me, the individual, my identity,

and my relationship with the external world. So to me, it is exactly that. Which one do you feed? Do you feed energy into the value structure of that right hemisphere, which does care about the we in the collective whole? Or do you feed the energy into me and mine, the ego, and the accumulation and the greed and all of those things that happen to me, the individual? So for me, that's a really easy question, the right hemisphere versus the left hemisphere. So I want to get to your stroke and

your story here in a second. But since we've gone right into the right hemisphere and left hemisphere, I thought I would jump in here. And my question for you is, you know, we've had a number of different neuroscientists on the show over time. And I've heard varying opinions about this right brain, left brain thing. And you know, that our modern understanding is more that the brain functions as a whole, more than we thought, maybe more than we thought with the right brain, left brain. So I'd just be kind of curious to hear you say a little bit more about when you talk about right brain, left brain, are you speaking really strictly scientifically? Are you oversimplifying

to make it easier to understand? Say a little bit more about that. If you go back and you look at the split brain studies in the 70s, when Dr. Roger Sperry cut the corpus callosum, which is a highway of information transfer of some 300 million axonal fibers. So it's easy to say today, yes, the whole brain is always functioning. And it is. These cells are in circuit and the circuits are just lighting up all over the brain. However, what actually happens if you separate those two hemispheres by cutting that corpus callosum? And so all of the studies of what we learned between what's going on in the right brain and what's going on in the left brain was the byproduct of that collection in that series

of experimentation. So if we cut that corpus callosum, we do have two very different brains with very different character personalities inside of ourselves. The left hemisphere is going to have language and it's going to relate to me, the individual and the external world, while the right hemisphere is more of an experiential, big picture, contextual consciousness. So it's all true. They're both true. But as soon as you take those two hemispheres that process information in completely opposite ways, the right hemisphere takes the data from fewer to more to more, giving it that open expansive, so that the right hemisphere

is connected to the bigger picture contextual, while the left brain has a group of cells that actually defines the boundaries of where I begin and end as an individual separate from the context of the atoms and molecules outside of me. So my left brain defines the boundaries of me, gives me an individuality, gives me an ego center, and filters all the information coming in about me going smaller, smaller, detail, detail, detail. So we know scientifically the two hemispheres complement one another in the way that they process the same information, but in completely opposite ways.

So somewhere along the line, maybe there was too much hype about the right brain, left brain. Well, in a human and a normal person where you have that corpus callosum, everything, it's a shared context and we are bouncing in and out of the different parts of our brain. In the last five minutes, we've been in I don't know how many of those different characters, because our brains are connected together. But if you go in and you cut that corpus callosum, that data was beautiful in displaying how each of those different groups of cells is wired when they're

separate. So I think that's where a lot of the controversy comes in is, yeah, I may have two of them inside of me, but I have the experience that I'm only one because there's 300 million fibers communicating, and I'm actually bouncing around all over the place. That's a great explanation. Thank you. And I think what you're saying is when the brain is functioning normally, of course, all portions of the brain are all contributing to our experience. But the split brain studies really allowed us to see if you were to separate these two, what they would look like. And now we're going to lead into your version of your unfortunate personal split brain experiment. I think this is a good place to kind of go into from what we know scientifically to what happened to

you. I had a brother who was 18 months older than I was. So we were constantly together as siblings. And I noticed that my brother was very different from me when we would walk away and talk about what a situation was like and I thought how can he perceive things so differently than I do and eventually my brother would be diagnosed with a brain disorder schizophrenia. So because of my ongoing relationship with him I became fascinated with what is this brain? How is his brain different from me? And biologically speaking, my brother's the closest thing to me that exists in the universe. So it had to be something at the cellular level. So I grew up to be a neuro anatomist, a brain scientist at the cellular level. So I was teaching and performing research at Harvard

Medical School, looking at how does our brain create our perception of reality? What is the difference between the cellular circuitry of a brain that would be diagnosed as normal control and compared that with human tissue, postmortem tissue from individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, with human tissue, post-mortem tissue from individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, OCD, panic anxiety. So that's what I was doing. And then I woke up one day and I was experiencing a major hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of my brain. And over the course of four hours, I watched the circuitry in my left brain go offline

circuit by circuit by circuit. And to me, because of the way I think, and I was teaching at the medical school level, head and neck anatomy, and how all of these different things come in and where they go and how they get processed and which cells communicate with which cells, et cetera, et cetera, I could visualize, because that's a function of my right hemisphere, this breakdown at a neuroanatomical level. And then four hours later, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life. I had become a breathing body in the bed, and I had no left hemisphere anymore.

So I existed in the present moment experience of right here, right now. And then it would take eight years for me to recover the functions circuit by circuit by circuit of that left hemisphere so that I could then speak again. I could relate and have all the skill sets of what that left hemisphere does that you have to have a left hemisphere group of cells to do. So you had a stroke that in essence took your left hemisphere offline. Yes. For a significant amount of time. Yeah. Then I had to use what I still had, which was a bigger picture contextual understanding of life in order to rebuild those circuits in order to regain those functions. And it took eight years.

And this has been well documented in your first book called My Stroke of Insight, as well as one of the most probably widely watched TED Talks ever, where you describe this process. But what's stunning about it, in addition to the fact that you were able to sort of observe what's happening, is what you noticed about your experience as that left hemisphere was offline. And what you describe, and I'll let you use your own words to go into it more, but you describe that sense of you as an individual, as an entity was gone. Yes. Yes. Jill Bolte-Taylor died that day. Her likes, her dislikes, her academic knowledge, book knowledge, her relationships, her history, her remembrance of her past,

any dreams of any future, any of that preconceived notion of whom I had been as the neuroscientist was gone. And all I had was probably very similar to being born as a baby, new into the world with no information, no roadmap to where you're going to go and just the experience of the present moment. And you don't know where your hands are. You don't know where your feet are. You don't have the boundaries, the identification of self that it takes that left hemisphere in order to create over a period of time as an infant lays in its crib and starts flailing about and eventually figures out that, oh, that hand

thing, that thing up there, that's a part of me. Oh, I can do things with it. And then, you know, it builds this perception of self in relationship to just the consciousness of energy that it's a part of. So what was the experience of that like? Because it could sound terrifying from the egoic perspective. If that was online, it would have been absolutely terrifying. But that was gone. I didn't have that. So there was no competition for the microphone in my head. I didn't have the fear. I didn't have

the, oh my God, I'm falling off the Harvard ladder. Oh my gosh, I'm less than. Oh my gosh, I'm wounded. Oh my gosh, I'm paralyzed on half my body. Oh my gosh, I have no language. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, that was all gone. That was part of the left hemisphere evaluation of me in relationship to self. So without the self present, I was still conscious. I was still aware of the present moment, but that's all I had was the present moment. So I could be speaking eventually to someone and then turn around and they were gone. They didn't exist for me anymore. All I had now was my new present moment. So reality is built on moment by moment by moment. And then we have this beautiful left hemisphere that can string those moments together so that we can become a conscious bridge over time so that we can have a past, we can have a future, and we can exist in relationship with ourselves and others with a memory of what and who we are. And I just lost all of that.

And it was fantastic. As terrifying as it sounds. And to my left brain, it was. But to my right brain, it was absolutely blissful euphoria because the present moment's a perfect moment. Yeah. What I find personally interesting about this is someone who has studied Buddhism and spiritual awakening for a long time, which posits this idea that this self that we're so convinced of is not a self in the way we think it is. It's not as real as we think it is, right? What you're describing is very much what sounds like that experience of no self, which is that the left brain, which strings all this together, creates the narrative, creates the memory stream, the stories. If that goes away,

our experience is one of unity with everything else. Right. Because I, the individual, me, the ego, I don't exist anymore. And in the absence of me, the information is no longer streaming in and being filtered through that filter of me, the individual. And in the absence of that, what is there? What is out there that is regardless of whether I am or not? And that's a collective whole. Right. And I think that what's interesting is we talk about enlightenment or awakening, it sounds on one level like it's just the pure right brain state. But the tradition I'm most interested in, which is Zen, really says, yes, there's that experience. But there's also the very real experience of being a human that exists in the world.

And it's where all those come together into a unified whole. and it's where all those come together into a unified whole, that's what we're after. And that kind of leads us into your book called The Four Characters. Because what you're basically saying is, hey, we've got these four parts of our brains, the right brain, left brain, and then emotional and thinking centers. We've got these four, and really knowing how to work with all of them is what leads to a good, fulfilled whole life. Is that how you'd put it? I do put it that way. The title of the book, Those Whole Brain Living. And what you described is exactly that. You're saying it's one thing to be able to identify and find that place where we are

in this collective whole. But the fact of the matter is I'm a human being. I'm not designed to spend my eternity as a human being being completely non-functional zoned out in the zen of my right brain. It's a fantastic place to come from, but I am an organic entity. And so how do I make the best of the life that I am? And for me, the evolution of humanity is exactly what you described. It's gaining these four characters, our two emotional brains, one in each hemisphere, and our two thinking brains. These are modules of cells that have very specific subsets of skill sets.

And they end up having a personality because I'm very different when I go to work and I'm being functional and I'm being orderly versus when I'm out in curiosity and innovation and exploration. Or when I'm very unhappy and I'm sad or I'm feeling angry or I'm blaming others or I'm just in that discontent, no, no, no, I'm going to push whatever it is away, versus when I'm just existing in the blissful euphoria. So these are four very different groups of cells in that side of our brain. And that was, I think, probably the greatest gift in my life to having had this stroke experience. I got to wipe out my pain from the past and the emotion from the past.

I got disconnected completely from my external reality. As horrible as that sounds, well, it was what it was. And I wasn't worried about it because it was gone. It upset other people, of course, but not me so much because it was gone. And so here I am in the present moment having this awareness that I'm still alive. And if I'm still alive and I can have this experience of peaceful euphoria, then everybody can. And then it was a matter of, okay, well, I'm out blissed out in my right brain having a

blissful time thinking, well, how much of this do I have to give up in order to get back enough there to be able to communicate to everybody that it's just right there in our right hemisphere if we'd quiet that left hemisphere down enough and find our way into that bliss. So that's how I figured out that was the moding factor for me to bring myself back into all that circuitry of the left brain. I had to have language to communicate. I had to have my left thinking, rational, logical, methodical thinking brain in order

to be able to communicate in story form, in order to communicate. And, you know, I had to let enough of that come back online, but I vowed to myself I would never let that become the value structure from which I was going to live my life. I was going to use that left brain as a tool. And there's actually a fantastic book by Dr. Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His emissary. And this is about them using the right brain value structure and the gift of that character profile. And then his emissary is the skills of the left brain in order to live a truly meaningful and purposeful life. Yeah, I think that's a great way of looking at it. And I think people who are focused on personal growth and spiritual, narration, memories, all of that.

And so it feels to me like we overemphasize this other side of it because we're so far out of balance. Yeah, well, and the left brain has defined what is a good life? You know, if it's going to be about me and the world filters through me, then where am I on that hierarchy? Where am I on how much money do I make? How big is my house? My values become about comparing myself to the external reality and complying to the social norms because that's that left brain character.

And we are so skewed to that value structure. But then there are those of us who are less left brain character. And we are so skewed to that value structure. But then there are those of us who are less left brain dominant. And that character one, I call that a type personality is quieter. And the people who exist more in the present moment who are not all about their ego, they're not all about how much can I get, I don't base my personal value based on my bank account or how big my house is. And then it's a matter of, okay, well, I'm finding peace. And what does peace look like? And so now we have this division, which feels to me like a real artificial division between the science of the left brain and the spirituality of the right brain. Well, I think spirituality is language.

I think that it is a form within which we have defined what is that experience. So that's the language. And a lot of very skewed to the left people don't feel comfortable with what they describe as the woo-woo or, you know, that's just whatever that is. It looks like this. It's flowy clothing. It's people speak slowly and everything gets relaxed. And there's these things open.

And they're not comfortable. The left brain is not comfortable putting down its ego long enough to go shift into what it sees negatively as woo-woo. And so for me, the gift is that looking at how our brain is anatomically structured, we have two emotional systems, one in each hemisphere, one in the present moment related to the big picture context, and then the experience of being able to have a thinking brain, call that the infinite being or the cosmic consciousness or God or Allah or whatever your left brain belief system is comfortable feeling. And then you have the left hemisphere characters that are all focused on the

me. Well, I'm a whole human being here and I have a whole brain. So how do I capitalize on the best of all that I am? And I'm a true believer that the evolution of humanity is, you know, right now we exist in a society and a culture where even if we look at Jung's four archetypes, only one of them is conscious. The conscious left thinking brain that is me, the individual in relationship to the external world. But my emotional systems are both part of the unconscious. And then my character of the right thinking brain is a part of the unconscious. And it's like, well, what if it weren't? What if we were not existing, being three quarters unconscious,

What if we were not existing, being three quarters unconscious, and we actually had a relationship with those parts of our brain? We knew who they were. We know what they like. We know what they do. We know when we're being that character and behaving in that way so that at any moment in time, we can just call on any and we have the power to choose moment by moment who and how we want to be and all of a sudden we take a leap in our own consciousness because wow there are light bulbs in all four parts of my brain and I know how to get from one to the other I can brighten a certain part I can dim a certain part at will to me that's the beauty of where we are going through really truly understanding whole brain living the anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life 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. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk

about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, Really? And you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You've got a line that I think is really important. You say, from a purely biological perspective, we humans are feeling creatures who think rather than thinking creatures who feel. Explain why that is neuroanatomically and what the implication of that is. Perfect. So when you think about the

reptilian brain, it's got our spinal cord and it's got a brain stem. And then the way evolution happens in the establishment of new species and new creatures is new tissue gets added on top. And then we have new species and then we go through eons of time of working the kinks out between what's going on in the new added on tissue and the tissue below. So we have reptiles and they have this beautiful brainstem. And then we add new tissue onto that. And that's the emotional or limbic tissue.

And that's the difference between a reptile and a mammal. And what that means is we have emotional systems in both hemispheres. And then for the human, we add on new tissue, which is our higher thinking cortex. And so we humans are working out the kinks between our thinking and emotional tissue on the left, the thinking and emotional tissue on the right, the emotion to emotional tissue between the two hemispheres, as well as the thinking tissue between those two right and left hemispheres. So the ultimate evolution of us is to get all those kinks worked out between those four different modules of cells. So when you think about your quote that you just gave, information streams in through our sensory systems.

It goes into that brainstem region and heads directly to the cells then of the emotional tissue. And in the emotional tissue is different groups of cells. And one group of cells in each hemisphere is the amygdala. So we have two amygdala, one in each hemisphere, and the cells of the amygdala bring all that information from the external world. The right amygdala looks at the present moment and says, am I safe? Well, if I've got a bus coming at me, I need to be in the present moment and get out of the way of the bus because I know that that's a danger. The left hemisphere is going to bring information in about the present moment and immediately step out of the consciousness of the present moment. And it's going to go back in time and it's going to say, have I ever had an experience like this that makes me think that this present moment is a danger or a threat? So let's say, for example, when I was five years old, I was riding

my bike along and a dog was chasing me, barking at me, nipping at my feet. And I thought I was in danger. And I thought, oh, my God, this dog's gonna bite me. So I just, you know, in my frantic nature, I just paddle until I get away from it. Now, 55, 60 years later, I see a dog like that and I still have that automatic reactivity because I remember that dog, a dog like that, it wasn't safe, so that dog's not safe, so I'm gonna push that dog away. Well, this dog is 55 years later in time.

It's not the same dog and this one's probably okay. But I'm programmed to remember all those threats from my past. So this is where my trauma and my traumatic memories are going to be hooked into, no, that's a danger. I got to push it away. So information is coming in and going into our emotional feeling system. And then if I'm alarm, alarm, alert, alert, then I'm going to have an automatic reactivity to that, whether it's a past fear or whether it's a present danger. And then eventually, if everything's calm, then I have these two amygdala, one in each hemisphere.

And then they can turn on if everything's calm and good about the present moment. And then that's the machine through which I could learn and memorize new information going into my thinking tissue. So information streams in, it goes into the emotional tissue first. I am a feeling creature who thinks, not a thinking creature who feels. So we end up with the character profile of each of those emotional groups of cells and the character profiles in those two very separate and very different information processing thinking systems. Yeah, it's interesting because this also corresponds with Buddhist psychology that says the first thing that

happens, they call it Vedana. It's basically pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. After the actual sensation, the next thing is an immediate pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And then after that comes the thinking about that experience, the being able to put it into its category. I mean, all this happens in a split second. But the ancient Buddhist psychology slowed it down and they said, hey, first is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And this goes along with what you're saying. Safe or unsafe. Pleasant, I'm attracted toward. Unpleasant, I repel away. Right. And I think what's interesting about this idea that we are emotional creatures who think, or we're feeling creatures who think rather than thinking creatures

who feel, speaks to why something like cognitive behavioral therapy, while having lots of really powerful uses, there are situations that it doesn't because what's going on is happening before thought can get to it. And so what you would say is that in a fully functioning, whole brain living type situation, these various things are informing each other, our thoughts are informing our feelings, our feelings are informing our thoughts. It's this very bi directional thing. And that's certainly been my experience of the way things work. If I only go at things from cognitively, or I only go at things from emotionally, it doesn't work, I really need strategies that come at it from both angles. And you would argue even further that not just thinking and feeling,

but right and left brain also. And so that takes us now back to the four characters. So why don't we just do a quick run through of what these four characters are and where they correspond to in our brain? Perfect. So left hemisphere has a past and a future. Character one is that thinking tissue, that rational mind that we all know, we're alert, we're aware. It's our A-type personality. It likes to create order in the world. It likes to control people, places, and things. It's the part of us that got us here on time because it knows how to be punctual. It's busy. It's got a to-do list and its value structures define what is right, what is wrong behaviorally, what is good, what is bad, what do I want more of, what do I want less of? And that's the portion of, it's kind of, it's the boss. So that's character one. And it's its

own identity. If I'm in that mode, where am I? I'm in my office, I'm on the phone. If a friend calls me and they want to, you know, just chit chat and I'm busy, they actually, I encourage people to name all four of your characters because they are different identities inside of yourself and you want to be able to call on them moment by moment. My friends will actually say, hi, Helen. Helen, hell on wheels. She gets it done. That's the name of my character one. They recognize it's Helen. And it's like, I'm glad they recognize it's Helen because Helen's busy. And unless she wants a break, she wants to go back to work. What can I do for you? Right? Frame of mind. So that's character

one, left thinking. Character two is left emotion. So left emotion, me, the individual, it's all about me. It's my emotional processing from my entire past and my projection into the future. So this is going to be a part of me that has a preconceived notion of how I want it to feel, how I want things to look, how I want you to behave, what I need, and anything that looks like a threat, I'm going to push away and I'm going to say, no, I don't want that in my life. So this is a part of ourselves that can like a threat, I'm going to push away and I'm going to say, no, I don't want that in my life. So this is a part of ourselves that can be very happy, but happy is based on external circumstances.

Otherwise, if the external circumstances aren't what I like, then I'm going to be unhappy. This is our deep sadness. There's even tissue in there that is our insular cortex of that left hemisphere that is our craving tissue. So this is where we crave. And this is where if I'm feeling bad about myself, I'm being negative about myself. I'm not enough. I'm not worthy enough. I'm not worthy of love. I'm bad. I'm angry. And I'm going to blame you for everything. This is going to be my narcissism. This is going to be my addiction. This is going to be my narcissism. This is going to be my addiction. This is going to be my trauma because it's all about me.

So that's little character two. Little character three is the emotion in the present moment. Well, the emotion in the present moment is the present moment's a fantastic moment. And it's like, wow, you know, unless there's some kind of an avalanche happen down right here, I'm good to go, you know? And if it is an avalanche, then it's like, wow, I'm curious. I'm going to go look at it. And this is, it thinks out of the box or it feels out of the box.

It's experiential. It feels the humidity in the air. It feels the texture of my clothing. So if you're going to meditate and use the experience of the present moment, you're consciously choosing to focus on the things that that little character three likes to do or feel. So it's creative because the left brain is what defines what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. The right hemisphere thinks it's all great and more collective. It's not just about me and mine. So it's like, Eric, let's go play.

Let's go explore this. Let's jump in the lake. Let's feel the cool water on our face and the pressure of that water. And, and it's an adrenaline junkie and it wants to like go jump out of an airplane and hope that parachute happens. Wee! And if it doesn't, wee! You know, I mean, it's like in the present excitement. And then the thinking character four is the part of us that is the all-knowing, all-aware, present moment. I'm aware of me, the individual, yes, but I don't overly evaluate my value as the individual. I'm connected to the bigger picture of the universe. I'm atoms and molecules in this magnificent organic form of some

50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. I have eyes that can see and ears that can hear and a voice and language in this magnificent brain. And oh my gosh, I have a body and I have hands so I can manipulate the space around me. And I have legs so I can take myself and choose where I want to be. Wow, the gratitude that I have simply because I'm alive. Wow. And we're all connected. And that to me, that character four is that consciousness that when we meditate, we quiet our left brain in order to open ourselves into that connected euphoria.

When we pray, we pray in the present moment. When we meditate, we meditate in the present moment. When we follow a mantra or a prayer bead, we're in the present moment using our physical body to help us quiet that left hemisphere so we can just find our way into being the energy that's wagging that leaf at me like it's waving and saying, hello, hello. You ask a question in the book, you say that if we were to ask a philosopher or certain spiritual teachers, which is the authentic self, they might point to that character four, that one that has the cosmic consciousness unity, but you say, actually, they're all our authentic selves. And one of them isn't more us than others.

Right. They're just different facets. They're different parts of who we are. Now, I do believe that when we're born, if you take us back into conception, that single cell that was half the DNA from mom and half the DNA from dad, that little cell, that zygote cell, would multiply itself at a rate of 250,000 cells per second, not per minute, per second in order to evolve itself into the fetal body that we would be born into the world as. So the energy of that consciousness of the cosmos is the energy that is evolving this infantile baby. And then ultimately it's in every cell of our being. And so that's like the blue sky the blue sky is always there but then as time comes on and we're in the world then and the brain starts making more connections and those circuits begin to run and become more who we are because they're

becoming more and more developed then the clouds start to come in and the thunder and the dark clouds or whatever is there. And it's all a part of the weather. You're not going to say the only weather is blue skies. All of me, my little character too, when she's unhappy, I can guarantee you she's real and she's who I am. And she's who I am when I'm angry. And she's who I am when I'm angry and she's who I am when I'm protecting myself

and she's who I am when I'm standing up for my own healthy boundaries of what I will and won't. 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. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm not tolerating myself, and I'm going to be loud, and I'm going to throw a temper tantrum like a two-year-old, because neither of those little characters, two or three, ever mature. They are automatic reactivity. Now, as you mentioned

earlier, you said, okay, so that automatic reactivity where we feel and then we think, that is true. However, we can change the habitual patterning of our circuitry by choice. And we can do that cognitively. So if I spend a whole lot of time in my character three and my character four, and then something happens in my environment, which used to, I used to be hyper-triggerable in my character two and come out angry or come out embarrassed or come out sad or come out mad or whatever, that is now my secondary response because now I have trained myself to have a different primary response of curiosity and humor as opposed to embarrassment and anger. Interesting. So you

would say that you've retrained your primary response, not your secondary response, because my experience almost, well, actually, I was gonna say, I'm thinking about my own response to say addiction, right? I was a heroin addict at one point. And I try and think about that process. And I think what first happened was my secondary response got retrained, which was the primary response would happen, something would happen. I would react. I would say, I want drugs. Then my secondary response would come in and say, hey, you know what? We're not really doing that anymore. And you can handle these feelings. And here's a different way of looking at it. But I agree that over time, even that primary response got completely redefined and rewired. Right. A simple example that just happened to me recently was somebody

was asking me for an interview and I said, yes. And I said, thanks, Dave, whatever, blah, blah, blah. And so he wrote me back and he said, great. And he signed it Robert. And in parentheses, he put not yet Dave. And I laughed. I literally laughed out loud was my automatic response. Well, before it would have been, oh, my gosh, how embarrassing. I called laughed out loud was my automatic response. Well, before it would have been, oh my gosh, how embarrassing. I called this dude the wrong name and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's going to think all this. And then I start making up that story. And it was like, no, my automatic response became one of open, joyful, humorous. And I wrote him back and I said, I love this. This is a great example. And I said,

this is what my character one said, what my character two said, what my character three said, what my character four said. And thank God, I'm more of a character three now than I am a character two. So you have, that's what you have done. You have trained, you know, it's 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 begins to run on automatic. And then it gets stronger so that it becomes a habit. And so this is why mindfulness works. What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is choosing purposely to run certain mindsets, to hook into certain circuitry to run that to strengthen that circuitry so that that can become our automatic habitual response, taking the power out of the negative

reactivity that we want to shift ourselves away from. Exactly. So let's turn now to something you call the brain huddle, which is your way of, you know, bringing these four characters together. So tell me sort of first what a brain huddle is, and then maybe walk us through the steps in it. So to me, the brain has these four characters. And so my brain's team are these four characters. And the power that I have is the ability to choose moment by moment, which of those four characters do I want to have be my go forward into the world. So in order to get there, I take the brain team and I say, well, what do teams do? They huddle.

And so it's like, okay, so I encourage people to do this 20 or 30 times a day to get that automatic reactivity again, especially in the event that you end up in your low character two, that for some reason is feeling fear, feeling pain, feeling anger, feeling not worthy, feeling what we know it feels like when we're there. And it's very powerful and it's reactive and things come out of our mouths that we would rather, you know, didn't come out, et cetera. So it's important to be able to call a huddle. And first of all, any of the four characters can call a huddle at any moment in time.

So right now I'm in my character one. I'm talking with you. I'm sharing with you this information. Character one can call a huddle. I could be out paddle boarding and fall in the lake and say, whee, let's call a huddle, you know, out paddle boarding and fall in the lake and say, let's call a huddle, you know, in the excitement and joy of my character three, or I could be walking in nature and just feel so grateful that we're all here and that I've got all of us. And little character two can call a huddle when it needs to be supported by the other parts of our brain. So it's called a brain huddle. B-R-A-I-N is the acronym.

Of course it is. And B stands for breath. And breath is the first thing we do when we're born and the last thing we do when we pass. And in the meantime, it's a train running on our track constantly throughout our entire life. And we inhale and we exhale and we can inhale and we can exhale and we can change the frequency. We can change the amplitude. We can bring our mind to the present moment and manipulate our breath. Okay. And I visualize that. I see that track and I'm watching as I do it. So that brings my mind to the present moment. Okay, so now I'm in the present moment. B, breath. R, recognize which of the four characters called the brain huddle. If my character one called the huddle, well, she's just kind of doing a check-in to see how are we, where are we, is everybody on time, what are we doing, how much time do we have. Character three can call it,

character four can call it, or I can just call it because, oh my gosh, something happened and I'm unhappy and I need everybody on. So recognize which character called the huddle. B-R-A. Appreciate the fact that we have all four of them. It doesn't matter who called the huddle. We appreciate one. Oh yeah. Hi, Helen. I love you. Character four, character three, character two, we're all here. So now we're in the present moment. As soon as we're in the present moment with our breath and we're reaching purposefully to appreciate the four characters, they're all here, A, I, inquire. Okay, well now the team's on board. We're a democracy inside of my head.

Let's inquire in the next moment which of of us would like to navigate the next step, the next moment of our life. And so I can walk into a situation, a scenario. Let's say I walk into a room and there's a couple in there and they're fighting. And I walk in and all four of me are here. And it's like my characters three and four are clearly aware that we just interrupted an argument my character two is feeling a bit of embarrassment because oh my gosh what do i do now and character one is on trying to figure out okay huddle in perfect time

for a huddle right so character one can say to this couple just checking to make sure you're okay um character one's a fix-it machine. Is there anything I can do for you? Do you need anything? Would you like some water? Can I make a phone call? How do I help you? Character one's going, oh my god, oh my god. Character three is thinking, well, you know, I can make a joke and say, oh, it looks like I came in at a bad time and flit out, you know, escape that. Or character four can come in and be very supportive and very loving and just say, I thought I heard voices and I just want you to know I'm here and I'm supporting you. And if there's anything I can do, great. And I just want you to know I'm glad you're here and

I'm with you. And if you need me, call me. Those are the four options, right? Boom, boom, boom, boom. And maybe Helen pops in, that's why I call my number one, pops in and says, can I fix anything? And then character three comes in and says, well, maybe it's better to make a joke. But they're all having that conversation, navigating moment by moment by moment. And in that way, the brain huddle becomes my power. It's my power in any moment to be a completely conscious human being, utilizing each of my choices. And to me, whole brain living, the anatomy of choice, and the four characters that drive our life.

That is exactly what this material is. It's the anatomy of choice. And it's not like I'm just going to have one automatic response, and then I'm going to leave and stick my foot in my mouth and think, oh, well, that was a bad idea. It's like, no, call a brain huddle. Get them all on there. Know all of who you are. Integrate the different parts of your brain. Know them, love them, honor them, so that ultimately, when I'm alone in my own pain, I have the ability to call on my own four characters to self-soothe me. My character one can come in and say, okay, in this moment, what do I need to do in order for me to feel safe again? My character four

can come into my unhappy little self and say, we got you. We love you. We are okay. We're going to be okay. We're all online. everything. We're taking care of everything and managing everything we possibly can. And then that character little three can come on and kind of nudge that little unhappy character two and say, come on, let's go do something, whatever it is. But we're together. We're not alone. And that power to self-soothe your own unhappy self, wow, that's the gift we give to ourselves. Yeah, I love the way you phrase that, the anatomy of choice, right? That really does give us the ability to choose from the best parts of what our brain has to offer. You know,

realizing that each of these characters has its strengths, each of them has its limitations, and now we get to choose which one seems like the best. I'm going to take us out on what I think may be a difficult question. So I'm setting us up for a difficult question on the way out. Who's choosing? Because now we're saying that there's a choice happening from somewhere. I think that they all choose. happening from somewhere? I think that they all choose. I have the power to choose a negative response. I can choose that. I can let my character two choose. She can rule. She's got the microphone. She's the one speaking. Character one can come on and say, okay, how much time are we going to spend? I think it's a we. I think that it's a collaboration. I think our life is a collaboration of our whole brain. Why else would we have these cells?

And I'm not supposed to be just a character one all about myself and my ego and I want more of everything. I'm not always supposed to be in my worry and in my upset. That's a part of me. It's not all of me. I'm not supposed to always be a happy-go-lucky, playful, adrenaline junkie. And I'm not always supposed to be my own God because, wow, I'm all of me. And I think that we have these tools are so different from one another that they really, as a collective whole, I think the collective whole is always making the decision.

But I think whole brain living allows us to make it consciously. Wonderful. Well, I think that is a excellent place for us to wrap up. Jill, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk with us about whole brain living, the anatomy of choice. I've really enjoyed this time with you. So thank you. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate the way you explore, the way you think, the way you shape ideas, and the way you share with our you. So thank you. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate the way you explore, the way you think, the way you shape ideas, and the way you share with our community. So it's a privilege. Thank you. Thank you so much. Take care. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast.

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