New Science Finds Thinking and Feeling in Both Sides of Your Brain – Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor – #828

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is one that I've wanted to do for several years, and it is with a relatively famous neuroscientist who wrote a book called My Stroke of Insight. Her name is Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, and she had a stroke, and it taught her a lot about her brain and how thinking happens. She's a Harvard trained and published neuroscientist and neuroanatomist who looked at the depths of her own mind. And you're going to learn a lot more about that in the show. And we're going to talk about these four distinct modes of brain cells or modules of brain cells as four characters that make up who you are. There's tons of learning in here that go from anatomy to neuroscience to really what makes you you. Dr. Jill, with no further introduction, welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you on.

Thank you, Dave. I've really been looking forward to chatting with you because I just know, you know, we're both biohackers in our own weird ways. You did it on purpose. I did it by accident, but, boy, have we both learned a lot about the biology of the brain and the body. So this is gonna be special.

It is indeed, Jill. It turns out mine was maybe less intentional and more accidental than you might think because I didn't have a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of my brain, and I didn't lose the ability to walk and talk and read and write or recall my life the way you did. But I did have big holes in my brain. On Dr. Daniel Amen's brain scans, he said I had chemical damage from toxins from toxic mold, and I had severe cognitive dysfunction that was so worrisome that I bought disability insurance in my mid-20s. So I'm like, I'm digging myself out of a hole, but I don't even know what the hole is. And once I got out of the hole, I'm like, maybe I could keep going. Which was the impetus for biohacking. And that's why your book in 1996, which is back when I was struggling with this, when, well, I guess your book wasn't in 96, but your. Your stroke was in 1996. Talk with me about what happened. Share with the audience what happened to your brain?

So I was teaching and performing research at Harvard, and I had a major arterial venous malformation in my left hemisphere that I did not know was There. And what that is, is that is an artery which is high pressure connected to a vein, which is low pressure, directly connected without a capillary network in between. And so at the age of 37, my brain, the vein could no longer take the pressure of that artery, and it popped off, and I had a major hemorrhage in the left half of my brain. And I was a neuroscientist. I was my. All of my life, everything was all about how does our brain create our perception of reality? And so I guess the universe decided, well, if you really want to know something, we. We're going to take away half your head, half your brain, and show you what's going on inside of that right hemisphere when it's untethered from the dominant left hemisphere. And it was a phenomenal experience through the eyes of a scientist. Of course, I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of my life after that experience. But I lived. I survived, clearly. And it took eight years then for me to completely recover.

Did you think you'd recover?

I thought that I would recover some circuits. And I kept asking people, you know, people would say, have you recovered? And I would say, recovered what? Because every ability that we have is dependent on cells that perform that function. And so I would recover, perhaps language. That's circuitry. I would recover function of the right side of my body. Again, that's circuitry. I would regain eventually a boundaries of where I begin and where I end. Perception. That's circuitry. So did I. I thought that I would progress, and I thought I would get well, but did I ever think I would be 100%? That was never my goal. My goal was to continue to observe and to try and to try to regain certain functions or abilities without losing my newly gained perception of what I had gained in the absence of that left hemisphere. So I never thought I would be described as normal again because I would never let my left hemisphere become dominant again. But I needed my commitment to myself was I would recover enough to appear normal, enough to be able to communicate with other people what I had gained and what I had learned.

Now that. I mean, it's been a while since this happened. What percent recovered do you think you are?

I think I'm. I'm about 120. I think I'm better than I was before. I do. I think I'm better than I was before because I had the stroke at 37. It took eight years for me to recover, and my goal was to recover 237 or younger. And so I think that I actually became better in the long run.

That is so profound. And I think it spreads a lot of hope for people who are dealing with something's not working right, that it is possible. And I'm the same way. I'm better now than I was before. I dealt with all the biological crap I dealt with. Your goal was never to get there, but you did get there. Did you change your goal at some point along the way? Wow, I really like this. I'm going to go deeper. Did you ever go. I just don't want to progress. I. I want to become something more or it just happened organically.

Well, from my perspective, I became more when I experienced the stroke because what I gained was the awareness that I was as big as the universe. And I gained my relationship to the atoms and molecules around me. I expanded and became open. And then I became aware that if I'm going to be a functional human being in the world, I needed to gain some of those skill sets back from that left hemisphere. But it was never my goal to let the left hemisphere become the dominant personality again who wanted to be boss. So for me, I think that's why I feel like I'm 120% is. I have so much awareness now of who and what I really am as a living being. And I have such a better understanding about brains at a cellular level. What did I lose? What did I gain? And then the recovery of what I had lost made me more.

What? What did you lose? The left half of the brain is known as the logical hemisphere, which is a gross oversimplification. But walk me through the perception there. And then I want to transition from what you learned there because your first book. 63 weeks on the New York Times bestselling list. By comparison, all of my books together, I think, have been on for 10 weeks. So this is like a runaway success of a book. And now you've got Whole Brain Living, which is your new book, like, what you've learned since then. But I really think it'd be useful for me and for everyone listening to get an understanding of when your left brain turns off all that logical. That thinking what's left?

Yes. So there's a group of cells in the parietal region of the left hemisphere. And the job of that group of cells is to define the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. So I know that my face. I can touch my face and know that that is my face. And I can touch my glasses and know that the glasses are not me. So there's a small group of cells in the left brain that defines the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. And I have to have that perception in order to perceive myself as an individual. So once I'm an individual, another part group of cells in there is for language. So I have the ability to create a sound. Dog, dog is a sound. And then another group of cells that places meaning on that sound. So now I have language, I have my individuality, and I have language that I can then use to verbally communicate in the external world. And so what that means is that I have an ego. And my ego then defines what's my name, where do I live, what's my phone number, all the details of my life. And the machinery of the cells in the left brain are designed to take more information, drill it down, drill it down, drill it for details, details, and more details about those details. So it is a biological machine designed to give me an identity, give me an individuality. And through that, all the information coming in through my sensory systems now gets filtered through me, the individual. And that's what that machine is doing. On top of that, Dave, the other thing is that it brings information in about the present moment, and it immediately compares any information coming in about that present moment to any experience that I have ever had. So it gives me a linearity of life. It gives me a past, a present and a future. So the emotional cells in that left brain are wrapped around any pain from my past and any fears of my future. And the thinking tissue in that hemisphere are me, the individual, manipulating and trying to create order in information processing. So this is my alpha type personality, my A type personality. For some people it's a plus plus type personality and it's details, details and creating control of people, places and things in the external world. The right brain doesn't have that individuality. It doesn't have the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. To the consciousness of my right hemisphere, I am open and expansive and as big as the universe. And I'm just completely good with whatever is, because whatever is, is. And it is that left brain that comes in and says no. I have a preconceived notion of what I wanted this moment to be in comparison to what the moment actually is. Were just this phenomenal machine, essentially, with these two very opposite ways of perceiving. And when I lost the individuality, I, I, I blended back into the expansive and openness and I was as big as the universe. And it was peaceful and blissful. Because the present moment is peaceful and blissful.

There's something called the sense of proprioception, which is how our body knows where it is in space and your elbow knows where it is. It's why you don't walk into walls when you're not looking at them. And you know this clearly because you're a neuroscientist. But some listeners might not know what a proprioception is, so you lost that. But what you're talking about sounds a lot like ego dissolution. Is that something that you would agree with or not?

Can you define that for me?

Sure. I look at the ego as the part of the meat operating system that keeps your meat alive when you're not in there. And it drives things like fight or flight, fear, and it drives selfish behavior, and it drives things like hunger and things like sexual desire, but also, to a certain point, your interaction with your community and things like that. But the things that all animals have and do that keep them alive. Most of the things we describe as the negative aspects of ego are more animal. You know, survival operating system versus expansive universe. I'm connected. I'm part of. Of a greater sense of self. There's various definitions for ego out there, but the connectedness to the universe without, you know, being melted into the universe is a classical description of samadhi or some of the other spiritual experiences. Have you kind of mapped out your experience against any of the spiritual ego dissolution states?

I have not, but everyone else has. So this is what I can say about that. First of all, when you think so when you think about the evolution of the mammalian nervous system. So look at the sophistication of the reptile. And they essentially have our brain stem region. It's mostly on, off switches. I'm hungry, I eat. I'm not hungry. I want to mate. I mate. I don't need to mate. Now these kinds of things, I need to run, I run, I hide. I'm okay. So what you describe at that level is essentially the reptilian portion of our brain. Then over eons of time, all the kinks get worked out between all those cells inside of that reptilian system, and that it works very well. We have very effective life death in the reptile. And then new tissue gets added on top of that reptilian brain. And that's going to be the cells of our limbic, our emotional systems. And the emotional system tissue is the tissue that distinguishes a mammal from a reptile. So all kinds of mammals have that limbic emotional system half and half in each hemisphere. So half's going to be in the left half's going to be in the right. And so we have that limbic tissue in each of those hemispheres. So in the left hemisphere, our emotions that relate to our past experience, information comes in through the present moment. And then the left, the right brain says, I'm going to process the right here, right now, in the right here, right now. So I have emotional and experiential in the present moment. And so it's more experiential. What does it feel like to have my clothes on my body? What does it say feel like to have headsets against me? How much humidity is there in the air? What does it feel like to jump into the lake? What does it feel like to jump off a cliff? It's alarm, alarm, alert, alert system. It's an adrenaline junkie. It wants to go be excited in the present moment. But the left hemisphere, emotional tissue, it comes in from the present moment and immediately compares it to any experience we've had in the past. Alarm, alarm, alert, alert. So we have these two alarm, alarm alert alert systems emotionally divided between the two hemispheres. One in the present moment having an experience, and one in the left hemisphere comparing this moment of threat to any potential threat from the past. So immediately that left hemisphere steps out of the consciousness of, of the present moment. So it's processing in order to save our life. And that's the part that pushes away and says, no, I don't like that. It's looking for differences because it feels safe with that which is familiar. So if your skin is my color skin, I feel safe with you. If it's different, then I may push away someone else because of their skin color, because of what language they speak, because of what foods they eat, A million different reasons to spot difference and push it away. And so. And it does it by screaming and yelling. Because the emotional system is developed when we're born and it never matures. And that's really important. The alarm, alarm, alert, alert system inside of our brain, Be it the experiential part of me that wants to go jump off out of an airplane or the emotion of, of. I don't like that. I don't want that. You're no good. Da da da da da da da. That never matures. But with the human, then we add new tissue on top of the emotion, our thinking tissue in each hemisphere. And that tissue is designed to refine and define the functions of the emotion. And so we end up with two emotional groups of cells and two thinking groups of cells that, that are independent of one another and yet completely interactive because, as you know, the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, everything is always happening. But there are actually these conversations going on inside of our head and who are those voices and what do they value? And can we put them into communication with one another so that we actually have much more control over what's going on inside of our head? And. And yes, we do.

What a beautiful description. And that's a lot of the neuroscience work that I've done at my 40 years as end company is around. Where's that voice in my head coming from? And just gaining a little bit of awareness. But your experience is really profound because turning off half of it would just shine a light on it in a way that no one on earth could have handled better because you already knew what was going on versus just really terror and mystery. You're going, oh, look at this. I totally know this. So that's why your. Your first book has been fascinating and your new book, Whole Brain Living, is only. You've only done two books with a lot of time to learn and share a lot of wisdom. So I'm really excited about it. And you talk about four characters in the brain, and I think you just touched on some of that when you're talking about these systems talking to each other. Can you define the four characters from your new book?

Yes. So the way I do it is I take a brain and I open it up, say, cut the corpus callosum, and then I go left brain thinking will be character one. Left brain emotion will be character two. Right brain emotion will be character three, and right brain thinking will be character four. Now, I personally name my four characters, and I think everybody should. I haven't named your four characters for you because I want you to pick names that are just ring true for who you are. Because when we get lost in the emotion and pain, we need to be able to call on the rest of our characters to help us rescue ourselves from our own emotional reactivity. So I will share the names with mine and the characteristics. So character number one is left thinking tissue. And this is the tissue that defines the boundaries of where I begin and where I end. So I have an individuality and I have an ego that goes with that character. And that character is my rational thinking brain that relates all of me to the external world. It is my language so I can communicate with the external world. And all the information coming in through the filters goes into me, the individual. But I'm thinking I'm a rational mind and I have linearity across time. So linearity across time means A happens, then B happens, then C happens. For example. I know because I have that group of cells that I have to put my socks on before I put my shoes on, before I tie my shoes. So that ability to create order in the external world is my character one. So I call my character one. This is the A type personality. It defines what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad. So it's going to be my moral code based on conforming to a societal norm. I call mine Helen. That's short for Hell on Wheels. She gets it done. She's busy. She goes to the office. She gets me places on time. She's punctual and she's. She's, you know, she's my. My. My. Right, wrong, good, bad, and. But she's thinking tissue. So what do you think, Dave? Got a name for me? Got a name for that part of yourself?

I haven't even thought of a name for that part of myself. I think I'm gonna have to ponder on that one.

What's the part of you that gets you.

I can tell you the part of myself.

Okay, I will. I'm warned.

The part of myself with time. My brain is weird. I don't have a lot of time awareness because I'm very much present and future focused, but my. My memory of time is very mushy. I can't tell you whether it was two weeks ago or a month ago or if maybe I still have some lesions in that part of my brain. I don't. I've looked, but it just like. I don't know. I. I resonate with most of that and. But to put a name on it, I'd have to think about that. I don't know.

Well, somebody. Somebody got you here on time today, and it. It would be that part of your brain. Now maybe you make us over there. You know, you set an alarm on your phone. Whatever it takes. You know, it might be something. Siri, I get it. So. But. But there's a group of cells in the left hemisphere that gives us this relationship with time. You wipe that out and there is no time. There is simply the present. Moment experience. And a Moment might be 2 seconds or it might be 3 minutes, but moments are very different. And living in moments as they unfold is very different than being on the clock and watching it tick and being on seconds and minutes, hours.

I hear you there. So if we now have our left brain. Thinking, moral compass. Right. Wrong. Aware of time. Get shit Done. Part of our brain that's one of the four characters in the brain. So what's the other part of the left brain then? This is the feeling part of the left brain, right?

This is going to be the emotions, and these are going to be the emotions where information comes in and emotions. And it's the limbic system of the left hemisphere. And those cells are designed to save our life. Alarm, alarm, alert, alert. Am I safe? And I determine if I'm safe by that group of cells. If everything about the present moment coming in feels familiar, but as soon as something happens that doesn't feel famil, then I move into that. Alarm, alarm, alert, alert. And this is the character where our trauma from our past is going to be residing and wipe out those cells. There's no past, so there's no experience of a past trauma. The other interesting thing about this specific group of cells is that there's a group of cells deep inside called the insular cortex. And the insular cortex is where craving happens. So if we have an addiction to anything that we crave, it is that tissue of that little character, too. So the little character two is the part of ourselves that probably lands us in most hot water with our partners and our friends and our family and our parents and our everybody. And it's also the part of our brain that gets us into therapy because we need to do some work on this little character to help it heal.

So much of the work that I've talked about with PTSD and things like that are in that part of the brain. What I'm not really clear on in your model, though, is there's some stuff in the right brain that's also emotional. And when you're dealing with past trauma, whether they're big traumas or little traumas, they set pattern matching for threats. And it's really interesting to look at the left and right brain the way you do as a neuroscientist and as someone who's lived. It's what sort of threat detection happens in the right brain on the emotional side. Oh, and what's your name for character number two? I got to get your name because.

Oh, my character. Yes. My name for character number two is Abby. And Abby is short for abandoned. And I believe that the moment I was born, I began in this magnificent, symbiotic, beautiful, wet, relationship fluid environment of my mother's womb for all these months of development from a single cell to, you know, how many trillions of cells are in the body. And the moment I come out, I Am now I'm gasping for air. Air comes into my lungs. I get. I'm. I'm in air. I'm. I'm being poked. I'm being prodded. I'm being man, I'm being handled. The lights are no longer muted. The sounds are no longer muted. To me, this is the initial moment of my abandonment circuitry. So everything else then builds up on top of that pain. So that's my introduction to pain in the external world. And then I'm looking at all kinds of things, trying to protect myself from more of that pain. And I want to push it away and say, no, no, no. And I can scream very loud and I can run from it. I can play dead from it. I could get big and ugly and mean and whatever. So. So that's the alarm. Alarm, alert. Alert from that character. Character three is going to be the emotion of the present moment. It's the experience of the present moment. So right here, right now, if I see a bus coming right at me, then I can be aware that that's a threat and I need to get out of the way of it. It's also young. The two emotional systems of Character two and Character three, again, they never mature. So this is going to be a part of me that doesn't have the judgment of the left hemisphere. Right, wrong, good, bad. Which means it's an explorer, it's an experiencer. It's right here, right now. It's alive. And it doesn't have me, the individual. So it doesn't have. I'm worried about my life ending because I'm not defining myself as an individual. And instead, yeah, jumping out of an airplane with my pal Dave. Sounds like a fantastic idea. Let's go do that. Or let's try this or let's try that. So it doesn't have the judgment of that left hemisphere. So it is more creative, it's more open to possibility. It's imaginative. It's intuitive meaning it has a bigger picture perspective of how all the different pieces are linked together, and it likes excitement. That right emotional system is an adrenaline junkie. It wants to have an experience because it's alive and it's so excited that it's alive and it wants to do it with its pals. So my Character three. I call my character three Pig.

And then the fourth one would be the right brain logical.

The right. The right brain is right brain thinking, not logical logic. Oh, thinking logic assumes a relationship. Thinking, not logical, logical is going to be that left character too, but right brain thinking. So think about it when we're in the womb. When we're in the womb, we began as a single cell, and that single cell got half its DNA from mom and half of its DNA, and it becomes the zygote cell. And then that zygote cell makes it into the womb, and it multiplies its DNA and then repackages the DNA into two cells. And so the cells multiply and divide, multiply and divide, multiply and divide, ultimately at a rate of 250,000 new divisions every second. Every second. Okay, so what do we have? We have DNA. We have the atoms and the molecules of the DNA directing the structure inside, the redevelopment of new cell structure. But the consciousness, if you believe cells have consciousness, which I absolutely do, the consciousness is going to be the cell shared consciousness of the energy of the environment that fuels that, which is going to be. If there is a cosmic consciousness, if there is an infinite being, call that God, Call. Call that whatever you want to call that, based on your left brain, systematic religious structure. But it's going to be an energy that fuels that consciousness. So that consciousness is inside of us. Every ability we have, we have because we have the ability to perform that function. It's dependent on cells. So if I can have mindfulness and I can bring myself into meditation and I can find, through prayer or through meditation or through even enhanced drugs, psilocybin, I have the ability to hook into a circuitry that already exists inside of my brain. Anything that has an impact on me biologically is working a system that I already have biologically. So I believe that that consciousness of that character four, which is completely as big as the universe, opened all possibility, which was all I had left after that hemorrhage was that character four consciousness. And it was essentially a consciousness that felt like love. Pure, unconditional, blissful love. And we know that we have the ability to pray to that space, we have the ability to meditate to that space, and we know we have the ability to use other substances that allow us to get to that space. So that's character four.

And what's its name for you?

For me, my character 4 is called Queen Toad. Queen because she's as big as the universe, and Toad because I'm a tad bit, you know, goofy, and I live on a lily pad half the year called Brain waves on the water. So, you know, for me, I'm Queen Toad. Oh, I didn't tell you my character three name. Can I share that with you? Yeah, yeah. So my character three, I call Pigpen. Do you remember the Charles Schulz cartoon where there's Lucy and Charlie Brown and Peanuts the dog? Well, there's a character in there called Pigpen, and Pigpen is walking around in a dust storm. And character three is all about the dust storm. It's all about the chaos. It's not about the order. It's about the experience of being in the present moment. It's it. It is what it is, and it's enthusiastically whatever it is. So I call that one Pig Pen. So I name these characters so that when throughout the day, I can create communication by choice, so that each of my characters have relationships with one another. I gave a talk once about what is the relationship like between the characters of your left brain. This was before I realized there were four of them. But the character of your left brain with the character of your right brain. Because if the left brain looks at the right brain character in judgment, negative judgment, then what kind of a life are you going to have? If that character one just wants to dictate who and how you're going to be in the world?

If you have that inner. That inner critic going on, and this is a rampant problem in society right now, is it usually one of those four characters talking to another one of the four, which is the one doing the inner judgment? Shaming and which one is it? Shaming and judging?

Well, character one has the definition of right and wrong and good and bad. But if I'm able to experience the emotions of shame or guilt or embarrassment, because all of these are resentment, these are emotions based on something that I did in the past, if I have the capacity to have those emotions, I receive it as my character two. And it might be the character two who then turns that negative energy internally. And I don't feel worthy. I don't feel worthy of love. I'm. I'm not good enough. I'm not enough, period. Whereby the character one can. Or if it's directing it into the external, I'm going to blame you for why things are not good. I'm going to insult you. I'm going to criticize you. I'm going to be mean to you. I'm going to try to control you. I'm going to have an emotion. So in answering that question, I will say if it is a thinking directive, that is saying A, B, C, D, you don't light up, I'm going to say that your character one making that criticism. But. But if it is me being belligerent and emotionally attacking, then that would be character two. But the Right hemisphere doesn't look at the world that way because it doesn't look at you as an individual or me as an individual. So post traumatic, anything that's going to experience the trauma has to have the trauma from the past. I have to have the circuitry of the left brain in order to be able to have any perception of that at all.

It makes so much sense. And you said something in there that almost slid under the radar. You said you firmly believe that cells individually have their own consciousness. I fully share that perspective, but it is not the majority perspective. In fact, I think a lot of our behavior is emergent behavior from cells running old programming and enough of them in a network make complex things. How do you know or why do you believe that cells have their own consciousness? And what does that mean for neuroscience?

Well, I think that if you begin with, first of all, there's no explaining life, right? I mean, we can try to explain what is life, but life is this three dimensional thing where thousands of things are happening all at the same time, even inside a single individual cell. So all a cell is, is it is a semi permeable membrane, which means some things can go inside and out of that membrane. And it has a DNA programming that says, I need this, I need that. I'm going to then create waste and I'm going to interact with the external world with little tiny receptors so that I can detect what is outside of me. It doesn't make any sense to me that we're going to take an inorganic thing, something that does not have life, and expect it to have a consciousness. Now of course, AI is trying to do that and is looking all kinds of different ways to do that, but we cannot explain life. So what is the meaning of life at the cellular level? If I'm a microbe, I'm a single celled organism. I'm really not that different than a human being who's made up of 50tr of these beautiful little cells. So for the cell, the meaning of life, I believe, is to detect what is outside and be stimulated by what is outside of me and to then, then stimulate to be, to stimulate and to be stimulated by the cell. And this membrane takes the.