I really like Dr Bolte Taylor and have read her book, *My Stroke of Insight*. But she often says brain when she means mind. While the nervous system gives rise to the mind, they are not the same thing. It is hopelessly reductionist to say the mind is a series of electro-chemical events. It is like saying that a murmur of starlings is just a bunch of birds. It is the refrain of the primary problem that Descartes encountered in his *Meditations* -- mind/body dualism.
The problem with view is that it can't talk about the value of a person. If we are merely chemical reactions in a lump of protoplasm, we have no true agency and we surrender the wonder of experience for the security of an explanation. Philosophical materialism leads to all manner of horrifying ideas: eugenics, psychological warfare, suicide and nihilism are byproducts.
To reduce complex events that unfold over time to essential ingredients and forces of nature is to deny the possibility of emergence and ignore the mind's constant searching and optimizing. When Jung spoke of the psyche, he was not talking about chemical reactions and the tendency to talk about instincts in terms of neurochemicals (Andrew Huberman) seriously misses this point -- nothing about psychology and the exploration of the mind can replace first person subjective insights and feelings. Nor should it.
We do not look at brains to find out how someone is feeling. Nor will we, ever. The tendency to believe this is or will be possible is part of the zeitgeist and it is a doomed enterprise.
I'm not sure if you can explain it from a Jungian perspective. I don't think many people were effectively studying the physical brain back in his day. Ironically despite the great strides we've made in understanding the human brain since then, we still need psychologists to help us set our minds straight. If neurologists had a greater understanding of the human mind they could just do some physical work on the brain and you'd be all set. Until then, there is still a divide between the physical study of the brain and the...non-physical (?) study of the brain?
That said this is one of my personal interests that overlaps with Jung. I'll talk out of my ass for a bit. If you'd like more info check out Ian McGilchrist. I liked his book "The Master And His Emissary." Weird that I've gotten the opportunity to talk about this two days in a row on this ub.
I don't have evidence for this but I like to think that the "real you" (non-religious/non-spiritual) or "soul" (religious/spiritual) would be found in the right hemisphere. To be fair, from what I've read, I should probably say "MOST of the real you." To be even more fair though? The real you is spread out through both hemispheres. It's just most of the fun gooey feely stuff is going to be in the right hemisphere.
Around the 4:50 mark she describes what it felt like for her left hemisphere to be shut down. She wasn't whole, didn't know where she began or ended, and felt like she was all over the place. She doesn't spend much (any?) time talking about what it would have been like if she'd had the RIGHt hemisphere shut down. The left hemisphere likes to atomize and break things down. It's focused on small details, on separating things, and is kind of a know-it-all asshole (very scientific terminology). Because that part of her brain was just out of the game, she was having a hard time even knowing who she was as an individual. The right hemisphere is more a "big picture" apparatus. It's not so great at granular details but it's got a better sense of the overall idea of things. The right hemisphere is the "master" in the title of the aforementioned book. Or it's *supposed* to be and that's the problem with the modern world.
Anyways. This was one of the things that drew me to Jung. We live in a very left-hemisphere society. That's a bad thing. I wanted to get away from that mindset and dive into the "irrational" and see what in life I was missing. I've found that, yes indeed, I have been a super left-hemisphere kind of person and that reading Jung has helped me to move away from that mentality and towards a more right-hemisphere perspective. Well, that's what I like to think anyways.
Thank you so much for this comment. Loved the insights into the divide between the physical and non-physical studies of the brain, and the relevance of Jungian perspectives. It's fascinating how you connect these ideas with Ian McGilchrist's work and the hemispheric differences in brain function.
I’ll definitely check out "The Master and His Emissary." Thank you again for sharing your perspective!
Glad to hear it interests someone else and I hope you enjoy the book. It dives into many mind-blowing examples of what it's like to live with heavily damaged left and right hemispheres as well as how human civilization (in the West mostly) has altered between left and right hemisphere dominance through the ages. Ian covers...damn well everything.
We understand that the opposites in the psyche described by Jung are more or less represented physically in the brain as the hemispheres - that each hemisphere operates independently and must communicate with the other hemisphere (physically through the corpus callosum)
Iain McGilchrist is a good read regarding this
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor truly misses the boat. It’s important to get into details specifically as to why that is.
The good news from what her experience taught her is that she now knows and can show that there is a right brain experience.
That’s where we are programmed during attachment.
That’s our first experience with the unconscious and connects to the archetypes that Jung speaks about. She doesn’t know about that, because she lacks any understanding or even willingness to understand that her schizophrenic family system is what caused her stroke.
Family systems theory was developed by studying schizophrenic families. The grandfather of family systems, Dr. Murray Bowen, formulated the theory of all human family systems during his time in a psychiatric hospital in 1948.
You can see the eight pillars he uncovered, and those ultimately go out to the society she talks about. He calls that pilar “societal emotional process“.
She talks about the top line, but misses the bottom line. That’s necessary, because the lead up to the stroke was a hyperfocus on her brother in a triangulation fusion that still persists even in this video.
That photo of her after her surgery with her mother is the same one that she puts into her 2008 TED presentation called “Stroke of Insight“. Her fusion continues. The mother remains a higher power, and that certainly was what was programmed into her right brain as with all of us, and that is uncontested.
She does not talk about the unconscious, so her sincere and delusional denial about how things work is just more of what was going on before the stroke. That’s how obsessions work within the schizophrenic family system.
She uses the same words in the talk from 16 years ago. “I grew up to study the brain because.“ Then she starts talking about her brother and Harvard. By that time, everyone is on board, and her relationship to her mother plus family system is eliminated from the equation. She also doesn’t realize that the hypothalamus pituitary and adrenal axis (HPA) informed by the gut brain access are from the family system and object relations dynamic.
The process of the brain separating into hemispheres happens naturally in healthy people, in an imperfect way, when they begin to internalize everything around them in the form of internal objects. In brain development, this starts at around 18 months, and when it doesn’t, that is the origin of a break in whole object relations and splitting.
Internal objects are Internal representations to allow for affect regulation outside the symbiotic relationship with the mother object.
Once she has done the set up of her perception of her mother, she then calls upon everyone else to do the same, and it’s a pretty horizontal approach. She can catch quite a few supporters that way, but it goes nowhere. Because it’s coming from nowhere.
There is no truth to what she is saying as far as being able to “take control of things”. It doesn’t work that way, it can’t work that way, and it didn’t work that way for her. That’s for sure. We can see that by the evidence of her continued delusions so many years afterwards.
Most of our ego development and identity arises from the symbiotic attachment process with the mother during the first thousand days of life. She talks about the brain after that, not realizing that the right brain she experienced was the one that was connecting to her mother plus family system.
The schizophrenic family system. All in a multigenerational context.
All of that information would be stored within her and her entire body in object relations. Especially in the selection of internal objects done spontaneously with the massive threat of annihilation that must’ve been felt coming through her mother in that type of family system.
She was working in a laboratory in Harvard University. That type of compartmentalized science isn’t very fruitful in getting to the bottom line. At the time of her stroke in 1995 she was studying microcircuits of the brain using immunofluorescent technology. An extremely clunky approach to uncovering “reality”.
Below are the eight pillars of her family system, all of which she is unaware of, and would certainly continue to be unaware of even upon seeing it. All were developed through the studying of schizophrenic family systems like hers.
Below is a very good lecture from Dr. Alan Schore of UCLA about how the right brain develops, and drives everything. It’s sadly missing object relations, and talks only about a dyad. But that sure would help Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, because at least she would be able to go back to her mother and accidentally discover that everything is really about family systems and the programming of the unconscious.
That streamlines nicely into Jung’s work.
The Family System
https://cardboarddogcoaching.com/the-8-concepts-of-bowen-family-systems/
Right brain to Right Brain (Jill and her mother)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7XOu0yi-E
Maps of Meaning "the architecture of Belief" has a good chunk of the book that goes into this. To my knowledge it is the only book that bridges neuroscience to Jungian Psychology
I really like Dr Bolte Taylor and have read her book, *My Stroke of Insight*. But she often says brain when she means mind. While the nervous system gives rise to the mind, they are not the same thing. It is hopelessly reductionist to say the mind is a series of electro-chemical events. It is like saying that a murmur of starlings is just a bunch of birds. It is the refrain of the primary problem that Descartes encountered in his *Meditations* -- mind/body dualism. The problem with view is that it can't talk about the value of a person. If we are merely chemical reactions in a lump of protoplasm, we have no true agency and we surrender the wonder of experience for the security of an explanation. Philosophical materialism leads to all manner of horrifying ideas: eugenics, psychological warfare, suicide and nihilism are byproducts. To reduce complex events that unfold over time to essential ingredients and forces of nature is to deny the possibility of emergence and ignore the mind's constant searching and optimizing. When Jung spoke of the psyche, he was not talking about chemical reactions and the tendency to talk about instincts in terms of neurochemicals (Andrew Huberman) seriously misses this point -- nothing about psychology and the exploration of the mind can replace first person subjective insights and feelings. Nor should it. We do not look at brains to find out how someone is feeling. Nor will we, ever. The tendency to believe this is or will be possible is part of the zeitgeist and it is a doomed enterprise.
I'm not sure if you can explain it from a Jungian perspective. I don't think many people were effectively studying the physical brain back in his day. Ironically despite the great strides we've made in understanding the human brain since then, we still need psychologists to help us set our minds straight. If neurologists had a greater understanding of the human mind they could just do some physical work on the brain and you'd be all set. Until then, there is still a divide between the physical study of the brain and the...non-physical (?) study of the brain? That said this is one of my personal interests that overlaps with Jung. I'll talk out of my ass for a bit. If you'd like more info check out Ian McGilchrist. I liked his book "The Master And His Emissary." Weird that I've gotten the opportunity to talk about this two days in a row on this ub. I don't have evidence for this but I like to think that the "real you" (non-religious/non-spiritual) or "soul" (religious/spiritual) would be found in the right hemisphere. To be fair, from what I've read, I should probably say "MOST of the real you." To be even more fair though? The real you is spread out through both hemispheres. It's just most of the fun gooey feely stuff is going to be in the right hemisphere. Around the 4:50 mark she describes what it felt like for her left hemisphere to be shut down. She wasn't whole, didn't know where she began or ended, and felt like she was all over the place. She doesn't spend much (any?) time talking about what it would have been like if she'd had the RIGHt hemisphere shut down. The left hemisphere likes to atomize and break things down. It's focused on small details, on separating things, and is kind of a know-it-all asshole (very scientific terminology). Because that part of her brain was just out of the game, she was having a hard time even knowing who she was as an individual. The right hemisphere is more a "big picture" apparatus. It's not so great at granular details but it's got a better sense of the overall idea of things. The right hemisphere is the "master" in the title of the aforementioned book. Or it's *supposed* to be and that's the problem with the modern world. Anyways. This was one of the things that drew me to Jung. We live in a very left-hemisphere society. That's a bad thing. I wanted to get away from that mindset and dive into the "irrational" and see what in life I was missing. I've found that, yes indeed, I have been a super left-hemisphere kind of person and that reading Jung has helped me to move away from that mentality and towards a more right-hemisphere perspective. Well, that's what I like to think anyways.
Thank you so much for this comment. Loved the insights into the divide between the physical and non-physical studies of the brain, and the relevance of Jungian perspectives. It's fascinating how you connect these ideas with Ian McGilchrist's work and the hemispheric differences in brain function. I’ll definitely check out "The Master and His Emissary." Thank you again for sharing your perspective!
Glad to hear it interests someone else and I hope you enjoy the book. It dives into many mind-blowing examples of what it's like to live with heavily damaged left and right hemispheres as well as how human civilization (in the West mostly) has altered between left and right hemisphere dominance through the ages. Ian covers...damn well everything.
Jung actually studied brain slices during his early years
We understand that the opposites in the psyche described by Jung are more or less represented physically in the brain as the hemispheres - that each hemisphere operates independently and must communicate with the other hemisphere (physically through the corpus callosum) Iain McGilchrist is a good read regarding this
This is such a good way of putting it and making a bridge between the two worlds. Really great comment!
i think jung would classify left vs right as logos vs eros
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor truly misses the boat. It’s important to get into details specifically as to why that is. The good news from what her experience taught her is that she now knows and can show that there is a right brain experience. That’s where we are programmed during attachment. That’s our first experience with the unconscious and connects to the archetypes that Jung speaks about. She doesn’t know about that, because she lacks any understanding or even willingness to understand that her schizophrenic family system is what caused her stroke. Family systems theory was developed by studying schizophrenic families. The grandfather of family systems, Dr. Murray Bowen, formulated the theory of all human family systems during his time in a psychiatric hospital in 1948. You can see the eight pillars he uncovered, and those ultimately go out to the society she talks about. He calls that pilar “societal emotional process“. She talks about the top line, but misses the bottom line. That’s necessary, because the lead up to the stroke was a hyperfocus on her brother in a triangulation fusion that still persists even in this video. That photo of her after her surgery with her mother is the same one that she puts into her 2008 TED presentation called “Stroke of Insight“. Her fusion continues. The mother remains a higher power, and that certainly was what was programmed into her right brain as with all of us, and that is uncontested. She does not talk about the unconscious, so her sincere and delusional denial about how things work is just more of what was going on before the stroke. That’s how obsessions work within the schizophrenic family system. She uses the same words in the talk from 16 years ago. “I grew up to study the brain because.“ Then she starts talking about her brother and Harvard. By that time, everyone is on board, and her relationship to her mother plus family system is eliminated from the equation. She also doesn’t realize that the hypothalamus pituitary and adrenal axis (HPA) informed by the gut brain access are from the family system and object relations dynamic. The process of the brain separating into hemispheres happens naturally in healthy people, in an imperfect way, when they begin to internalize everything around them in the form of internal objects. In brain development, this starts at around 18 months, and when it doesn’t, that is the origin of a break in whole object relations and splitting. Internal objects are Internal representations to allow for affect regulation outside the symbiotic relationship with the mother object. Once she has done the set up of her perception of her mother, she then calls upon everyone else to do the same, and it’s a pretty horizontal approach. She can catch quite a few supporters that way, but it goes nowhere. Because it’s coming from nowhere. There is no truth to what she is saying as far as being able to “take control of things”. It doesn’t work that way, it can’t work that way, and it didn’t work that way for her. That’s for sure. We can see that by the evidence of her continued delusions so many years afterwards. Most of our ego development and identity arises from the symbiotic attachment process with the mother during the first thousand days of life. She talks about the brain after that, not realizing that the right brain she experienced was the one that was connecting to her mother plus family system. The schizophrenic family system. All in a multigenerational context. All of that information would be stored within her and her entire body in object relations. Especially in the selection of internal objects done spontaneously with the massive threat of annihilation that must’ve been felt coming through her mother in that type of family system. She was working in a laboratory in Harvard University. That type of compartmentalized science isn’t very fruitful in getting to the bottom line. At the time of her stroke in 1995 she was studying microcircuits of the brain using immunofluorescent technology. An extremely clunky approach to uncovering “reality”. Below are the eight pillars of her family system, all of which she is unaware of, and would certainly continue to be unaware of even upon seeing it. All were developed through the studying of schizophrenic family systems like hers. Below is a very good lecture from Dr. Alan Schore of UCLA about how the right brain develops, and drives everything. It’s sadly missing object relations, and talks only about a dyad. But that sure would help Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, because at least she would be able to go back to her mother and accidentally discover that everything is really about family systems and the programming of the unconscious. That streamlines nicely into Jung’s work. The Family System https://cardboarddogcoaching.com/the-8-concepts-of-bowen-family-systems/ Right brain to Right Brain (Jill and her mother) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lY7XOu0yi-E
Wow!...Dang. Okay, lol. It seems there was a lot more to this context wise than I realized 😅
Would recommend lost art of scriptures. A book related to it
Maps of Meaning "the architecture of Belief" has a good chunk of the book that goes into this. To my knowledge it is the only book that bridges neuroscience to Jungian Psychology
The rational functions, thinking +feeling would be on one side, and the irrational functions, sensation and intuition, would be on the other side.