Brain Hemispheres and the Consciousness Experience

Prior to reading this post, please click on the title link and watch the (~20 min) video there. Everything else below will be horribly out of context otherwise.

A friend of mine sent across this video link, and I thought it warranted more than a two line comment.

1. The most revealing part was when she brought out a real brain to show how the hemispheres look. Wow! The hemispheres are really not physically connected, and as we have studied before, they perform distinctly separate functions. The "real" brain, also cleared up a long lasting confusion in my head - which side was the right hemisphere and which side was the left (right hand / left hand - same logic)
   
2. Most people, thanks to eductational upbringing, work primarily through the left hemisphere (logic, reasoning, analysis)
3. Creators (especially the master creators) can get to the right side almost at will. The right almost seems to be hard wired to the brain of God!
4. When we have an intuitive hunch we travel for a split second to the right and come back with a treasure trove of details. We do not know how it happened but we just remember the stark contrast later - we were hunting for water in a desert, and an eye-blink later, we are in front of an Oasis. Yanni mentioned about how his compositions happen - once he closes his eyes and goes deep down, he sees all his compositions existing there in a pre-composed fashion! Truly a master-creator!
5. When what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor happens to most of us, we would probably go unconscious. She was incredibly lucky (if I can use that word) to have been aware when the experience was happenning. Being a neuro-anatomist, she was able to instantly correlate this to the workings of the brain hemispheres.
6. The English movie, "The Phenomenon", explores this exact same aspect! The character has a tumor in his brain and brings him to that experience. Movie makers, especially in Hollywood, blow me away! The character actually dies as an enlightened person, I think (conscious exit from the body).
7. Where I feel she may be missing her mark is when she actually had that experience (of cosmic oneness), she actually transcended both hemispheres (as opposed to being on the right). That is a trivial aspect, for what is truly significant is that her blood clot allowed her to experience a perspective that is so so far out of reach for the common human. It is a perspective that will cause a paradigm shift in the way we experience and relate to the rest of Life - forever.
8. The other thing - it may be possible that both hemispheres actually interact. This is not a theoretical observation. For around a year in my life, I was using a technology called Holosync which synchronizes both hemispheres of the brain through sound technology. As the process happens, I could feel the synchronization in my head, so it is sort of proof that the hemispheres interact. This is not an ad for Holosync - I will actually recommend you to stay away from it. I wrote about that here. Writing about Holosync and why to stay away from it will be deviating from the topic, but in summary, it creates a technological dependancy (a costly one at that) which we can do very well without.
9. You are better off taking up a Yoga practice that provides the same benefits. Shambhavi Maha Mudra has been proven to provide the sync up between hemispheres.
   
10. Jill Bolte Taylor's experience is not unique to her. This happened to Michael Hutchison - an experience that left him paralyzed - and enlightened! To sum up his entire experience, in his own words - "So, to sum it up: I'm a quadriplegic. I live in poverty. I'm the happiest man on earth.". Read the article here.
    
11. The creator of Holosync, Bill Harris, wrote a book called "Thresholds of the Mind". In some ways, it is an ad for Holosync, but I recommend that you read this book. It provides really vital insights about how brain changes bring about experiential changes. Also, his discussion on "thresholds", things you will understand to be intuitively true ("Aha") after it has been explained to you.
    

All in all, what is the summary or gist: If you already know at an intuitive level that we are much more deeply interconnected with the rest of life that what seems on the surface, all of these will just be intellectual curiosity, which you can bypass. It will make little experiential change.

But if you are the scientific kind and will not take a step unless you "see proof", these evidences will be vital. What the Buddha said two millenniums ago, science is scratching the surface now. People like Jill Bolte Taylor or Michael Hutchison (or even the movie Phenomenon!) will be vital pointers in the years to come.

As Science will later tell, and humbly retreat knowing where objectivity ends and subjectivity begins, "We appear to be one"! For it can never say "We are one" without knowing - and Science can never know from the outside! "We appear to be one" will be the most important observations Science will ever make in it's entire history. And that will be the time for humanity to let go of Science's hand and take Patanjali's!