Two Brains

We've known for decades about the vastly different consciousness found in the verbal, left half of the brain and the non-verbal right half of the brain.  The most famous initial research was done by Roger Sperry.  Sperry studied epileptic patients who had undergone a special operation to control their seizures.  This operation severs the "corpus callosum", a set of nerves that allow the two halves of the brain to talk to each other.  Sperry showed that such patients react totally differently when information is presented to their left eye or ear versus when it is presented to their right eye or ear.  Through this research, he showed that the left brain is logical and verbal, and the right brain is intuitive and visual.  Sperry won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for this work.  Here's a link to a You Tube video showing one of the patients studied by Sperry and his colleague Micheal Gazzaniga:  Video of Split Brain Patient

What is even more amazing about the experience that Jill Bolte Taylor describes in her book My Stroke of Insight is that she didn't just see an image for a few seconds with her right brain and then another image for a few seconds with her left brain.  Her left brain SHUT DOWN for over two weeks due to a near fatal stroke. And because she was a Neuro-anatomist at Harvard University, she was uniquely positioned to describe later exactly what it was like to shift all of her consciousness to the silent, intuitive, perceptive right brain.  And she found that it brought a peace and joy and feeling of oneness with the universe that sounds exactly like the experience of mystics everywhere.