Hello, thanks for listening to this Darma podcast. I hope you consider that in accordance

with the Buddhist tradition all of my work is a teacher is offered without charge and supported

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Darmapunks NYC.com.

So hopefully tonight's talk will be of some benefit,

and why not jump right in. I'm going to be talking a little bit

about the bilateral brain one of the many ways to make sense of tonight's topic.

Bilateral brain, we're talking about left and right

hemispheres and the different ways

they attend to experience and make, seek security,

orient us towards survival-based behaviors. The left hem, as we know from the work stemming all the way back from

Sperry and Gazaniga through Ramachandran and McGillchrist and so many others is the representative functions of bilateral brain.

It represents life and concepts. It interprets experience into narratives, which create a sense of control because without the inner narrator,

it would be a little bit akin to as I like to use the analogy of watching a nature documentary with the volume off so you can't hear

the voice over explaining what the images are. I don't know if you've ever watched a TV image

perhaps when you're at a different locale

and you see images on a screen

but you can't hear what the narrator is saying and so the images aren't

connected by an obvious thread and it can be of course disorienting.

And that's the way life would be if we didn't have our left hemispheres,

interpreting everything in reducing the complexity of experience

into concepts like good, bad, useful, useless, positive, negative, and so forth.

...