Consciousness at the Quantum Level

In April, I attended my fourth Science of Consciousness Conference (TSC). Sitting near a waterfall behind the conference hotel one day, I asked a woman nearby about the timing of an evening event. She noted my name tag identifying me as an author and asked me what I had written. I told her about my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, and she told me she wanted to write a book. When I mentioned that she might talk to my editor who was attending the conference, she said, “The universe brought us together to convey this information.”

 Now, what is more likely: with so many authors at the conference peddling their books, there was a greater than average chance she would meet someone with this information; or, had the universe conspired to bring us together for that hillside moment?

I’ve been moving in mystical arenas for some time. It started with my oneness experience in San Antonio, TX, where, standing awestruck in the Spanish market, awash in foreign, sights, sounds and smells, I lost my sense of individual identity and felt ultimate bliss. Only one word seemed sufficient to describe it: Nirvana. My next moment brought terror. After a dear friend claimed to be channeling an angel in my backyard, I read a book on dissociative identity disorder late into the night. Finally asleep, I was awakened by a dream image of a patient lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. With eyes rolling, mouth neon-lit, a Darth Vader-like voice shouted out: “Freud only got it half right! Read the two Hyperion poems!

In my book, I describe how this enigmatic message led me to Jung and Keats, along with an exploration of paranormal connections in poets of genius and their great creativity. My book brought me an invitation to a symposium on “Further Reaches of the Imagination” at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Here, assembled scholars told tales of bizarre, unexplainable phenomena in their lives. I recounted my San Antonio experience and how I had returned to the same spot to recapture it and, sadly, NADA happened this time. They all shouted out at once: “You forgot to lick the blue water ice!” Indeed, that final element, that I had theorized in a paper submitted before the conference, had possibly tipped me into a state of synchronized brain hemispheres and supplied the key to unlock cosmic consciousness.

Now at the Science of Consciousness Conference, my former experiences, Esalen, and uncanny science all seemed to meet up. Garry Nolan, a physicist participating at Esalen had claimed that the time-space continuum could speak to us at the cellular level, if we have the proper antenna. He had been working with Dean Radin, who would also be speaking at the Consciousness Conference on remote viewing. Apparently, only one in a thousand can do it. Garry had also mentioned Marjorie Woollacott’s book, Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (Rowman & Littlefield; Oct 15, 2015), which describes her conversion from pure neuroscientist to a believer in so much more by the touch of a guru during a meditation session. Not remembering Garry’s reference to Dr. Woollacott, I was now sitting right in front of her at a morning workshop in Tucson.

                               

But, here’s where it gets really interesting. All signs at the Consciousness Conference were tying anomalous events to hard science. First, let’s consider the claims of spirit mediums. Arnaud Delorme judged mediumship to be an altered state of consciousness. Julia Mossbridge had a model of mind that especially spoke to me: the non-conscious mind is actually the puppet master controlling the more limited conscious mind. Whereas the conscious mind does not normally access future events, precognition and presentiment are “fast-thinking, system one processes” the non-conscious mind uses to prepare us for the future. It is in fact a survival mechanism. I thought back to my precognition as a young college student on a park bench who got the startling precognition that I would marry a guy who happened to be walking by at the time. Indeed, I did marry him. My future had been preordained or in some sense already existed.

I had read medium researcher Julie Beischel's book, Investigating Mediums, before coming to the conference. She was too sick to attend, so her husband stepped in for her. In her book, she cites the possible role of the right hemisphere in mediumship and references its higher level of negative emotions, which I say definitely points to the right hemisphere. One of the mediums she tested noted that her energy shifted and came in on the left. Julie says trauma is always a part of the mediums’ mix, as I do in my research on poets, along with the role of maternal attachment and loss.

In the Unity of Consciousness workshop, Joran Josipovic explained that the right angular gyrus integrates body mapping, so that people with injury to this part of the brain have mystical experiences since they cannot feel their bodies. He also differentiated high entropy versus low entropy states in the brain: the former characterizes psychedelic states, infant consciousness, REM sleep and dreaming, NDE’s, magical thinking and temporal lobe epilepsy, all of which produce divergent thinking and creativity.

Stu Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, professor, and original founder of the Science of Consciousness Conference along with David Chalmers, believes the brain evolved to feel good. Here’s a piece he wrote that explains his thesis in simple terms:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-hameroff/darwin-versus-deepak-whic_b_7481048.html

Deepak Chopra gave an amazing talk on the Conscious Universe. He believes EVERYTHING is conscious. Body/Mind should be seen as a unified wholeness of experience. The true self generates qualia (our perceptions of what’s out there). Consciousness is a formless, primitive, ontological entity existing at the quantum level. He also has a new book out on how we can change our genes.

Rudolph Tanzi, who co-authors books with Deepak, had good news about Alzheimer’s disease. The bad news is that the disease is found in 40-50% of people over 85 and that it starts in your 40’s. Tangles in the neurons produce a neuro-inflammatory response; inflammation, not the tangles, is the real issue. The good news is that they’re working on a way to stop the degenerative process before it starts. He mentioned Cat’s claw extract (Cognitive Clarity TM), which is now available; meditation, exercise, and diet (less red meat), along with 7-8 hours of sleep each night to clear out the brain.

Time and consciousness melded into one big theme at the conference. As I’m running out of time (and space), I’ll be brief. Reality, it seems, is a handshake between waves going forward and backward in time. Quantum entanglement occurs in time. The most important function of the brain is to predict the future. The quantum field is in some sense eternal. We exist in electromagnetic light fields. The brain is an electric organ and a pattern detector.

An aside about mentions of Julian Jaynes, whose theory on the right hemisphere was an early inspiration to me: a graduate student at Columbia began his talk citing Jaynes’s book, without verifying or attesting to his theory, and ended his talk referencing Jaynes. Before coming to the conference I had read Allan Combs’s Consciousness Explained Better (a riposte to Daniel Dennett’s early salvo called Consciousness Explained (1992)). Combs opens his own book with Jaynes's initial paragraph, in all its metaphoric musing and alliterative allusions, from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I sought out Combs at the conference to tell him how much I enjoyed his very readable book. He waxed elegiac on Jaynes, not for his theory so much as for the beauty of the writing, considering it the best of its kind in the 20th century.

Final quips and quotes of note: Mental health issues arise from problems in time and space, problems distinguishing self from other. The grandfather of all the senses is the basic tendency to either approach or avoid. Is this good for me or bad for me? Self-preservation asks us to avoid, while self-development suggests we adapt. The Self is both part and whole and when we have no body to maintain we feel bliss (remember that in a Oneness experience we lose our sense of the body’s limits). Our prefrontal lobes are not totally developed until our 20’s and consciousness narrows as a function of age. As we know more, we see less. Rat studies show that the brain is hyperactive in the dying process as it is trying to save the heart in the absence of oxygen. Serotonin surges. These two findings might account for NDEs. Only 5 % of people survive heart attacks and 20 % of them have NDEs. Light is associated with death, mystical experiences and gurus, like Alain Forget, who gives light energy to open the hearts of his students, claiming he is multi-dimensional when he does it. I felt energy pouring out from my heart in my spontaneous San Antonio experience and saw sparks of light spreading out seemingly infinitely beyond me.

It seems I had come to the right place at the right time to get answers to the mysteries of my own heart and mind in a throng of like-minded folks dedicated to understanding consciousness. We are singular and infinite all at once, both awaiting spontaneous gifts of knowledge and struggling hard to make sense of our and others' experiences. I should add that there was a lot of support for belief in reincarnation amongst the presenters.

“In all chaos there is cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order.” C.G. Jung

 “Heaven lies about in our infancy. Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy.” Wordsworth

“The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands.” Leonardo da Vinci

The Red Book and the Left / Right Emotional Divide

I first bought the large edition of Jung’s long-awaited tome with its magnificent facsimiles of artwork and calligraphy. Both mesmerized and bewildered, I tried to read Sonu Shamdasani's introduction at the back of the book, but it was too large to be functional. Finally, I learned that A Reader's Edition existed. This was manageable and utterly essential to marking passages in the text and taking notes on Shamdasani's invaluable introduction and footnotes. As Shamdasani says, everything Jung ends up saying in future books did indeed come out of this early hallucinatory experience which began during the same time that André Breton and his Surrealist circle were experimenting with their own automatisms and Frederic Myers, Théodore Flournoy and Pierre Janet were studying famous spirit mediums. W.B. Yeats was engaged in séances with his wife, George, as his medium and Jung had a copy of the resulting text: A Vision. The paranormal was in the air and spirit contact was actively pursued.

As I attempted to show in my book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, not everyone has the ability to receive visions, make a planchette move over a Ouija Board, or get answers in a séance. It requires an atypical mind with enhanced right-hemispheric functioning and a partner. Jung fits the mold. First, he had a genetic predisposition to internal division. His mother had two personalities, No. 1 and No. 2; his grandfather, and his cousin, whose séances and splits he studied and encouraged, had the same dissociative tendencies. As a young boy, Jung felt divided between a depressive lonely self and a spirit from an earlier historical period. At the environmental level, Jung suffered from early maternal attachment issues that have been shown to presage a split personality resembling schizophrenia, but more rightly termed dissociation.

On a grander scale, the impending World War threatened his psyche. He had horrific precognitive visions in tandem with his professional break with Freud and an extra-marital relationship with Toni Wolff, who lived in his house as a second wife and shared merged dream states and fantasies with him.* Including his professional interest in troubled minds, we can understand why he felt compelled to write, in painstaking calligraphy, in Latin and German, the words he heard; then illustrated them with brightly colored, tightly controlled, symbolic imagery. As a female voice told him, it was not science, it was art. Further, it was art in service to a suppressed conscious mind.

Jung himself said he felt threatened with madness.** Environmental circumstances reinforced his intention to explore his own psyche through visions and imaginary dialogues. Based on my research into the minds of poetic geniuses, I would say Jung was predisposed to dissociate because of his bilateral brain organization, with neither side dominant, as environmental stressors pushed him over the edge. His use of right-hemispheric poetic writing and highly symbolic, vertically oriented, left-hemispheric painting helped him regain his equilibrium. Both highly verbal and artistic, he retained a helping figure, Philemon, who walked and talked with him, until he was no longer needed. Michael Persinger associates a sense of presence with synchronous activation of both hemispheres.

One of Jung’s early patients provides evidence of a how this type of mind might work. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, written by Aniela Jaffé using Jung’s notes, much of which ended up on the cutting room floor, we learn of a female patient who heard voices. She described a voice in the middle of the thorax as ‘God’s voice.’ Her other voices were distributed on both sides of her body. The ‘divine’ voice commanded that Bible chapters be assigned before each therapeutic session followed by a test. After six years of therapy, the voices ‘had retired to the left half of her body, while the right half was free of them (127).'" Both sides could speak, with more negativity coming from the right hemisphere; but the left hemisphere, focused on reading and reciting, had healed.





Neuropsychologist D. W. Harrison, writing in 2015, confirms that hallucinations experienced on the left side of the body are negative and coming from the right hemisphere; those experienced on the right are coming from the positive left hemisphere (the proverbial demon on one shoulder, the angel on the other). While writing The Red Book, Jung referred to left- versus right-sided visions. For instance, he describes a vision of a winged being sailing across the sky, coming from the right (= LH provenance), a guru with superior insight, as Shamdasani described him. Jung maintained his therapeutic practice and professional and family activities, retiring to his study in the evenings to engage with his voices and visions.

Even as a child, Jung had been a voracious reader. So, it is not surprising that his readings entered into the dramas he evoked through “active imagination.” Shamdasani traces these influences very well, which included the Bible, Swedenborg, Nietzsche and Dante, in his footnotes to The Red Book. Jung admired art as well. William Blake was an influence, although Jung criticized his predecessor's drawings as artistic rather than an “authentic representation of unconscious processes (Letters 2. Pp. 513-14).” Jung also admired Odilon Redon’s symbolist paintings. The Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Ravenna, Italy, had a strong impact on Jung (as it had on poet and occultist James Merrill who spent 20 years in Ouija Board sessions with his partner, David Jackson). The frescos and mosaics there translated into Jung’s own “strong colors, mosaic-like forms, and two dimensional figures without the use of perspective (34)."

Parapsychological events occurred in Jung’s house that affected everyone in it. In Shamdasani’s account, Jung’s son raved in his sleep and couldn’t wake up. Asked for paper and colored pencils, he drew “a man angling for fishes with hook and line in the middle of the picture.” Again the left/right emotional divide is evident: on the left was the Devil saying something to the man, but on the right was an angel. Two of Jung’s daughters “thought they had seen spooks in their rooms.” The next day Jung wrote his “Sermons to the Dead,” claiming in Memories, Dreams, Reflections that the haunting stopped as soon as he picked up the pen.

Parapsychological events often occur when a strong emotion trapped inside needs to come out. Poltergeist phenomena in adolescent children have been described this way. Both St. Augustine and French writer George Sand claimed to have heard the words "Tolle, Lege" [Pick up and read] from an external voice, leading to a change in life course. She also had an ambiguously gendered inner figure named Corambé with whom she communicated as a child. This figure disappeared after she wrote her first book in a dissociative state. In times of great stress, inner voices can save a suffering soul. What they and we are all seeking is meaning and a way forward in difficult times.

Were Jung's Sermons “a curiosity from the workshop of the unconscious,” as he would later say, or was there a deeper meaning? What was the strong need to get those words and images on paper? And who was their author? Shamdasani says Jung’s “I" was the author in the "Black Books" section, but it was Philemon in “Scrutinies.” In some sections of Liber Novus it is was the serpent or the bird. The overall theme was “how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology (Shamdasani 48).” In every poet I have studied who held dissociative discourses with "spirits," the end result included a "new" religion.

In my view, as reason gives way to the irrational, a deeper associative meaning can be uncovered, suggesting, in modern neuroscientific terms, a shutdown of the prefrontal cortex where conscious thought is processed, now expressed through symbols and imagery. The logical left hemisphere is giving way to the mythopoeic right that has similarly informed important religious figures in the past.

Was Jung mad? Richard Hull, Jung’s translator, wrote to William McGuire, who represented Princeton UP papers, saying but for Jung's “hammer[ing] out his experience into a system of therapy that works,” he’d be considered “as mad as a hatter.” Further, “[t]he raw material of his experience is Schreber’s*** world over again; only by his powers of observation and detachment, and his drive to understand, can it be said of him what Coleridge said in his notebooks of a great metaphysician . . . He looked at his own Soul with Telescope / What seemed all irregular, he saw & shewed to be beautiful Constellations & he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds (March 17, 1961, Bollingen archives, Library of Congress). The citation from Coleridge was indeed used as a motto for Memories, Dreams, Reflections (see fn. 257, p. 94 in The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition).”

By Liber Secundus, Jung seems sure of the Power of the Divine Word that others before him had also received. Writing down the Divine Word protects against “the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words (250).”

From my vantage as a reader of Jung’s text, it often does sound mad, with anomalous sense impressions common to psychotic episodes, including his recognizing highly significant messages that nonetheless cannot be understood because they are seen in unusual scripts such as hieroglyphics. The frightening sound of flapping bird wings as well as seeing “shadow forms” are also common. The accent on negativity that Jung hears in his left ear with the word “Misfortune” also shows right-hemispheric provenance. When the God calls to him, the voice is coming from both sides, which Jung interprets as a middle road; but more likely, it is a synchronization of the hemispheres known to occur in oneness experiences, where a sense of self is lost or the self and the divine are felt as coterminous. The very sense that he is working “against will and intention,” manipulated by an external source, is telling.

Underneath all of the imagery and voices, three things shine through to me: his mother complex, from which he needed to be freed; his conflicted relationship to his pastor father's religion; and the legitimization of his extra-marital relationship with Toni Wolff. When Elijah gives Salome to Jung in The Red Book, he says, “For God’s sake, what should I do with Salome. I am already married and we are not among Turks (435).” Yet a dream will convince him to enter into a sexual relationship with her. The fact that “[a] turbaned Mohammad appears the fourth night after Philemon went away, wearing a long coat and a turban, claiming to bring ‘the bliss of paradise, the healing fire, the love of women (539)” is as telling as Jung’s interpretation of “Philemon’s words that I must remain true to love to cancel out the commingling that arises through unlived love. I understood that the commingling is a bondage that takes the place of voluntary devotion. . . . I had to remain true to love, and, devoted to it voluntarily (540).”

In his epilogue to Liber Novus, Jung wrote that he had worked on the book for 16 years, and then yielded to a study of alchemy, which helped him understand what he had written. He admitted, “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness. It would also have developed into one, had I not been able to absorb the overpowering force of the original experiences (555).”

A synthesis of supposedly opposing forces occurs in an appendix to Liber Novus: “Logos [male] and Eros [female] are reunited, as if they had overcome the conflict between spirit and flesh. They appear to know the solution. The movement toward the left, which started from Eros at the beginning of the image, now commences from Logos. He starts moving toward the left [the heart side], to complete with seeing eyes what began in blindness (571).”

A final note on the issue of madness: Dirk Corstens, head of the Hearing Voices Network in the Netherlands, does not believe that schizophrenia exists at all; rather, voices are a feature of dissociation, which originates in trauma. The “madness” comes by way of a fearful reaction to the voices. If one engages with the voices, reasons with them, they can be cajoled, tamed, and reduced to harmless or even helping presences. I believe this is what happened in Jung’s case. Through his calligraphy and art, he tamed his mind, bringing about his own healing as well as a system that could and does work for so many others.



*According to Shamdasani's research, while Toni Wolff was in analysis with Jung, she was having incredible fantasies. Jung wrote that "her phantasies entered exactly into my line of thought. Toni Wolff was experiencing a similar stream of images. I had evidently infected her, or was the déclencheur that stirred up her imagination. My phantasies and hers were in a participation mystique. It was like common stream, and a common task [April 1-2, 2011 seminar, Jung Center of Houston]."

**Michael Cornwall believes psychotic episodes should rather be termed spiritual states of emergency better treated with compassionate listening than pharmaceuticals. Paranormal connections such as precognition and voices with important messages are frequently reported in these states.

***Daniel Paul Schreber was a German lawyer and judge who had experienced severe trauma as a child because of his father's onerous child-rearing practices. His brother, under the same regime, committed suicide. Schreber passed through several phases of severe mental illness, hearing voices and developing strange views in a very God-driven narrative, leading to his institutionalization. He was eventually released because of his book, and lived peacefully with his wife for some time. But, when she fell victim to a stroke, he relapsed and spent the rest of his life in the asylum. Freud blamed Schreber's illness on repressed homosexual attraction to his own father. Jung disagreed, ascribing Schreber's case to an identification with female fecundity, as he and his wife had not been able to have children. Childhood trauma and current stressors were certainly behind his relapses. Cruel treatments by the director of the asylum and his wife's lack of visits only contributed to his gender dysphoria and delusions of grandiosity. Apparently, gender identity confusion is fairly common in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, as well as in dissociative identity disorder. The voices were, in effect, a way to "make sense" of what he was feeling. Similarly to Jung, Schreber described a left ear connection: "inimical souls always aspired towards my head, on which they wanted to inflict some damage, and sat particularly on my left ear in a highly disturbing manner. To his credit, Freud did say that Schreber's delusions were "an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction" (see Rosemary Dinnage's introduction to Schreber's book).

Born That Way

In my last blog, What's Right for You May not be Right for Others, I introduced Iain McGilchrist's notion of the 5% of the worldwide population who have atypical lateralization for language. Whereas his book, The Master and His Emissary, is so inclusive in describing left/right hemispheric differences within the brain and in successive generational proclivities, from my point of view, he left out the best bit about the highly creative minority of right-hemisphere or mixed-dominant individuals. 

In this post, I'm going to discuss handedness and atypical lateralization for language, a predisposing factor for psychosis. The information is based on the newest research articles found in the medical textbook, Language Lateralization and Psychosis (2009), edited by Iris E. C. Sommer and René S. Kahn. The other names that appear below are contributing chapter authors or researchers they cite in this text. 

First of all, left-right asymmetry, whether in the brain (cerebral) or in the body (visceral), happens during the baby's development in the womb. The leftward asymmetry (greater than right size) that produces left-hemispheric dominance for language occurs between weeks 29  and 31 of gestation. The bodily effects are evident later on. Your feet, for instance, are probably different in size, the right is the larger foot in males, and the left in females. My left hand is much longer than my right. Typical left-hemispheric cerebral dominance is not just found in humans: it is in animals too, stretching back phylogenetically several hundred million years. 

Children of two left-handed parents have a 50% chance of becoming left-handed, while for children of right-handed parents it's less than 10%. The language lateralization of the parents also determines to a large extent that of their children. I may be an anomaly with two right-handed parents and the only left-handed child amongst six siblings; but I'd say two of my sisters are right- or mixed-dominant despite their handedness. In furtherance of this scenario, I recently had dinner with a good friend and her teenage son. Both were right-handed. But, when I asked them to fold their arms across their chests, they both put the left hand up, showing some mixed-dominance. My friend is an actress and a singer and her son's father is left-handed; so, this makes sense for both mother and son. In fact, enhanced right-brain dominant folk seem to find each other as a quick tally of my friends attests. 

Great apes are typically right-handed and the parts of the brain used in human language, Broca's and Wernicke's areas, are associated with tool use in chimpanzees. So, grasping with the hand was probably the precursor for "grasping" an idea using language. Even birds use their feet preferentially: the right foot exerts strong force and the left uses fine manipulations. There is evidence that in preindustrial societies right-handedness only became apparent to researchers when analyzing the inhabitants' fine manipulations. Handedness specialist I. C. McManus says that “8% -10% of the population has been left-handed for at least the past 200,000 years or so.” This percentage has remained constant. Again, there are gender differences: men are 25% more likely to be left-handed than women. Compared to the 5% to 6% of right-handers who show RH language dominance, 30% to 35% of left-handers do.

Visuospatial functions are normally assigned to the right hemisphere. Birds too show right-eye (LH) superiority for discriminating visual patterns, left-eye (RH) for spatial tasks. It's well known that men have better visuospatial ability than women and this is because men are generally more left-brain dominant for language than women, whose language functions are more spread out, leaving less room for the visuospatial. But all combinations of language vs. visuospatial functions can occur: L/L, L/R, R/R. In women who are R/R like me,  their language function can practically eclipse their visuospatial ability. I have no map reading ability and am generally lost in environmental space. Forget the old adage that left-handers die sooner than righties. New research shows that “the very oldest respondents have a higher rate of left-handedness than those who are somewhat younger,” according to McManus.

Whereas an intolerance for left-handedness arose with the industrial revolution, as fine work needed to be done and equipment and writing pens were designed for right-handers, a French study by Faurie and Raymond (2004) showed that the rate of left-handedness has not actually changed since the Upper Paleolithic. France has been antipathetic to left-handedness, historically tying the left hand behind the back to force right-handedness. There are no left-handers in China, as it is forbidden. My European friends might be interested in the fact that the highest rates of left-handedness are in Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium, I assume because of more tolerance. Yet, even if forced to write with the right hand, the bearer of the left-handed gene will carry it over to their own children while continuing to use the left for other non-writing functions.

                              

In this History of Left-handers, note that Eve is picking the apple 

    with her left (evil) hand

What about language lateralization and psychosis? 

Quoting Somers, Sommer and Kahn, "non-right-handed subjects, but not strong left-handers, had higher scores on schizotypy questionnaires than right-handed subjects. Mixed-handers showed a trend towards high schizotypy in comparison to left-handers." So, it's safer to be extremely left-handed than mixed, because the major language function is segregated to the right, not just increased language activity in the frontal and temporal areas of the right hemisphere that can account for hemispheric indecision and a predisposition to psychosis of the schizophrenic or bipolar variety. The authors state further that "bilateral language representation facilitates magical and delusional ideas by means of the more diffuse semantic activation to the right hemisphere compared to the left." Bilateral language representation is also associated with autism, dyslexia and ADHD.

In fMRI studies, right-handed thought-disordered patients showed activation in the right-hemisphere homolog of Wernicke’s area during speech production, while controls performing the same task showed left-lateralized activity, supporting Julian Jaynes's view. Diederen and Sommer studied 24 psychotic patients who actually experienced auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in the scanner. All were strongly right-handed and continued to experience AVH frequently despite using antipsychotic medication. The results showed increased activity in the right homolog of Broca's area, which the researchers connected to negative emotion and compared to inappropriate "release" language following damage or surgery to the left hemisphere. 

Overall, the studies indicate that decreased language activation on the left and increased activity on the right are associated with auditory hallucinations, while extreme left-handers are not prone to psychosis. Timothy Crow goes so far as to say that “schizophrenia is the price Homo sapiens pays for language (Crow, 1997a).” It's the lack of complete dominance, the failure to inhibit the non-dominant hemisphere that is problematic. Patients with the most severe hallucinations were the least leftward lateralized.

The final chapter by Clyde Francks lays the genetic blame on dad rather than mom. He claims that the same paternally inherited LRRTM1 gene associated with mixed/left-handedness, which suppresses the maternal gene, was also over-transmitted to schizophrenic patients in a large family study. Interestingly, he found the same father-child enhanced (roughly five times the mother's) genetic transmission in dyslexics.

These studies, of course,  do not paint the whole picture. The genetics are well described, but no mention is made of the traumatic incidents needed to trigger psychotic and/or dissociative episodes in those predisposed. The creative influence of increased right-hemispheric input is touched upon, especially as an argument for sustaining the genetic transfer of sometimes disabling mental illness, but not nearly enough. But then their lack is an opening for the kind of study I am doing on the genetics, early traumas and environmental influences on the minds of great poets, prophets and mediums whose voices have brought great art, guidance and shifting paradigms of consciousness to a general population less endowed for hearing them.  

The Incredible Lightness of Being and Its Dark Antecedents

I've been studying the neurobiology of mystical states for about 15 years, since a dear friend of mine believed she was channeling angels after her mother died. To get the background of all this, see my Web site www.carolebrooksplatt.com. It's been a very long and complicated quest since I had no background in science. I have studied language and literature all my life and have a Ph.D. in French.

Oddly, what seemed to pull it all together for me was the movie, "Amélie," that I saw for about the tenth time last night. The beginning of the movie is a long narration with clever, off-beat imagery about a strange little girl who will grow up to be the equally strange young woman in the movie.

The beginning of the movie shows her troubled childhood, a distant father (a doctor) who only touches her once a month to give her a physical examination. She's so excited by this rare contact that her heart beats furiously and he diagnoses a heart condition. Her mother, an obsessive compulsive, is struck down one day in front of a church by the falling body of a Canadian tourist who decides to end it all in her great leap.

Now we have a sad, angry, motherless child, with a distant father, who is friendless at school. Amélie lives under a dark cloud with sprinkles of fantasy that keep her alive and the most amazing visual imagination that carries through to adulthood.

One day, she takes a blind man by the arm and describes the everyday wonders of the Paris street where they walk and she leaves him off at the métro. As she walks away, she has an incredible sense of lightness, the air she breathes is freer, clearer, the flowers smell much sweeter and everything has a sense of wonder about it. After long suffering, she tips into the nirvana zone with open-hearted compassion and a mission to help others.

This awakening, this incredible lightness of being, this compensation for the trauma of her life up to that point made total sense to me after my years of research into mystical states of consciousness. But it was after sleeping on it and awakening that fresh ideas came to me this morning.

Andrew Newberg has used neuroimaging to see into the brains of Buddhist monks and praying nuns before and during their religious practices. Michael Persinger has used electromagnetic stimulation to the temporal lobes to produce a "God" experience and gave questionnaires to college students to find out what kinds of people are more likely to sense an invisible presence near them. Newberg ends up wondering if certain people are predisposed to have mystical experiences because of their brain circuitry or if their long practice makes it happen. Persinger believes it's an overaroused right hemisphere that does it, especially in people who are interested in creative writing or do it themselves.

I have come to believe that childhood trauma, like Amélie suffered, physically changes the brain, in line with the research of Allan Schore and others. Newberg doesn't take into account the deprivations that monks and nuns suffer as part of their vocation and Persinger doesn't take into account why certain people are more drawn in the first place to poetry and prose. His "God" helmet works best on people with either the circuitry or previously held beliefs that can allow it to happen. I suggest that a genetic predisposition to more right hemispheric dominance along with childhood trauma can lead to brain processing that favors both mysticism and the paranormal, along with novel, creative ideas, more visual imagery and poetic language.

The brain's complex, interconnecting networks, when synchronized, can confer great talents and insights, often feeling or sounding as though they come from someone or somewhere else. We are the authors of our ideas, our feelings, our creativity, but as a consequence of what precedes them, the combined resonances in the books we have read, the movies we've seen, the people we have talked to, all of which can recombine during the dark night, when our senses have shut down, then bursting into consciousness in the morning. The new thread of ideas is tenuous, though, likely to evaporate in the dream mist unless we write it down as quickly as possible.