| ONE SUMMER DAY, an old Spanish man walked into the small southwestern town library where I worked. He walked with a cane made of a polished and reinforced cactus skeleton. Stooping under the low, adobe-thickened entry way, the smell of his sunbaked sourness pierced the cool room. With each step toward me, his cane struck the flagstone with a pistol clap. His old penny colored eyes flashed in his corrugated face as he demanded with a soft-spoken, pure Spanish lisp a book on the Mexican War. Can you see this old man in your mind’s eye? Do you feel the cool room and smell his smell? Do you hear the sounds of the cane and his voice? Most of us, when we come across a descriptive passage in a book, do more than read it. We experience it. We crawl into the world created by the author and live in it as we would in our own-all senses operating. We see and hear and smell and touch without any direct input from the external world to our senses, and even though we may not do it well, we can learn to do it better.
But why would we want to do it better? Aside from reading fiction or listening to a storyteller, what’s the point in this conjuring up or imagining? Why image at all?
Imaging is a process that gives us access to a part of our brain that we infrequently use in a conscious way. Through imaging, we can come to know more about this realm of inner space, which has been shut off from us – about its powers and its limits – because imaging is a key that opens a door into what has been called the unconscious mind.
To understand how to gain access to the unconscious mind, it is important to understand something about the wiring of the human brain. Our brains are composed of two hemispheres, each of which is better at a given task. The left hemisphere, for most of us, is the side of the brain that lets us talk. If there is an injury to the left side of the brain, the person injured will lose his or her ability to put thoughts into words (either orally or in writing). The right side of the brain is responsible for different talents. If there is damage to the right hemisphere, the person can no longer draw this object, which is called a Necker cube:
[Please imagine a doodle of a “see-through” box that has dimension.]
Drawing this shape requires what is called “spatial ability”: the ability to recognize and organize three-dimensional form. The person with damage to the right hemisphere will also lose the ability to recognize faces, to perform musically, and to be aware of her own body image (Le., she will not be able to dress herself, though she will be able to speak).
Just as studies with brain-damaged people have shown the different talents of the two hemispheres, studies with people who have had their corpus callosa cut have increased the knowledge of the disparate organization of the two hemispheres.
The corpus callosum is a band of nerve fibers that unite the right and left hemispheres of our brain. It allows for intercommunication between the two hemispheres. In a few cases of a rare form of epilepsy, doctors cut this connection to stop the patient’s life-threatening seizures. Studies with these “split-brain” patients (as they are called) show that when the corpus callosum is cut, each hemisphere operates separately. Roger Sperry, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1981 for his work with split-brain patients, talked of this separation in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Everything we have seen so far indicates that the surgery has left these people with two separate minds, that is two separate spheres of consciousness. What is experienced in the right hemisphere seems to be entirely outside the realm of awareness of the left:”
Sperry demonstrated the presence of “two separate minds” in several different experiments, which he and his students designed. In one, a split-brain patient is looking at a screen where two words are flashed in such a way that one will be perceived only by the right hemisphere and the other only by the left. Let us say the word the left hemisphere sees is “spoon” The patient will be asked to say what he saw, and, since the left hemisphere for most people is the side that allows us to speak, he will say that the word he saw was the word “spoon.” If the word “banana” is flashed so that only the right side of the brain sees it, the patient can not say what word he saw. But, because the left hand is controlled by the right hemisphere and the right hand by the left, he can reach into a box with his left hand and, without looking, select from among many objects the one that corresponds with the word he saw: with his left hand, he will pullout the banana even though he cannot verbally name the word he saw. Though it cannot speak, the right hemisphere of the brain can read and it can understand that the word represents or stands for the real banana. Associating a word with an object is the process of symbolization. But, not only can the right hemisphere symbolize, it can also understand meaning suggested by symbols: “If a picture of a steaming cup of coffee is shown to the right hemisphere, the left hand can point out, amongst an array of cards, the one with the word ‘hot’ written on it.” This ability to symbolize and to find correspondence between the meaning in a picture and the meaning in a word suggests that the right hemisphere operates similarly to the left hemisphere, which also symbolizes and gives meaning to the world it perceives. There is a difference between the right and the left hemispheres, however, that is important. The right hemisphere may be able to find meaning and to make associations, but it cannot speak in the verbal language of the left hemisphere. Because it can’t say “banana.” we tend to assume it has nothing to say. This is obviously not the case. As the hand grabbing the banana shows, the right hemisphere knows things that the conscious or verbal mind is unaware that it knows until the knowing is shown to the conscious side with something other than a verbal symbo1. Reaching for the banana is one way of suggesting its knowing and imaging is another.
Every time we tell a joke, we ask our listeners to image. I want to tell you my favorite joke, but first I must preface it by saying that I met a woman in France who was an American from Texas. She had heard this joke for the first time when she lived in Texas. There, it was told so the people that the joke was on were Aggies: agricultural students from Texas A&M. Then she moved to Chicago, where she again heard the joke, but the people were called Polacks rather than Aggies. Then she moved to Southern France, where she once again heard the joke. There, much to her surprise, the joke was on the Belgians! Jokes can be universal, only the object of ridicule seems to change.
I will tell the joke as an Aggie joke because that is how I first heard it:
A group of Aggies are sitting around talking, trying to figure out when Easter is. One says, “I know. It comes in the summer. That’s when we all get together and shoot off firecrackers and have picnics and wear red, white, and blue. . ?”
“No,” says a second, interrupting him. “That’s not Easter; that’s the Fourth of July. Easter is when that fat man with a beard comes down the chimney and leaves presents under the tree?”
“My God!” says a third. “It’s people like you two who give us Aggies a bad name. Everyone knows that Easter is when Christ was crucified on the cross and when he was dead, they put him in a cave with a stone in front of the door. Well, on Easter he rolls the stone away from the door and comes out and if he sees his shadow, there’s going to be another six weeks of winter.”
Telling the joke, I seldom get to finish the last line. People catch on before that – as soon as I say, “and if he sees his shadow” – and they laugh or groan, depending upon the person.
Were you imaging when you read it? Did you experience your own Christmas or Fourth of July memories-fireworks exploding, childhood expectations of Santa Claus coming down the chimney? Did your memories bring back smells of Christmas goodies? Could you hear the Aggies talking to each other?
Let me give you some examples of how the imaging process of the brain communicates to the conscious mind information the unconscious knows but cannot say in words. In the first example, you will have to participate to experience your right brain working. To do it, you will need a large, brown grocery store bag, a crayon or pencil, two strips of cellophane tape, and a pair of scissors. Cut a circle from the top of the bag like this:
[Please imagine a paper grocery bag with the top cut at
about 2 inches from the edge so that a circle is maintained.]
Now, cut that circle so it becomes a strip of paper with two sides. On each end, but on one side only, make an X. Then, hold the strip out in front of you, one edge in each hand, but with both X’s facing you. With your right hand, turn the X-marked side one turn so it faces away from you. Do not do this with the edge in your left hand. Still holding the ends like this – one X toward you, one away from you – bring your hands together. Place the left hand edge together with the right hand edge so that their ends overlap slightly. The left hand X should be on top, and the right hand X should be on the bottom with no X’s touching in the middle. If this is the case, take your two strips of tape, and put one on each side of the paper so that the edges are completely taped down.
That was the hard part; now comes the fun. With your crayon or pencil, begin drawing a line along the middle of the paper, starting with either side you choose. The best way to do this is to hold your pencil in the middle of the paper and to pull the paper under your pencil. Continue doing this without stopping or lifting your pencil from the paper until something exciting happens.
What did you experience when the end of one line met the beginning of the other? If you’ve never encountered a Mobius strip before, you may have experienced an inner sensation of discovery that we announce with an “Ah Ha!” This discovery is the left hemisphere’s discovery, however, because the right hemisphere deals with spatial problems such as figuring out that a Mobius strip really has only one side. So the right side of your brain may have been well ahead of your pencil- but, unless you are a mathematician, its knowing remained unconscious until the pencil marks met. Some of you might have experienced the I-know-that-I-know-but-I-don’t-know-how-it-is-I-know sensation that also accompanies unconscious, right brain knowings. Some American Indians used to call this unconscious awareness “inner knowing.” and they trained themselves to listen to its voice. Images are frequently the voice of inner knowing, and by learning how to listen to them we can learn more about what the unconscious knows. One way the unconscious uses images to communicate its inner knowing to the conscious mind is illustrated by the experience of a German chemist. Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, who is commonly referred to as, simply, Kekule, had been working for some time on determining the structure of the benzene molecule. He was having little success until he dreamt one night of six snakes forming a circle by each biting the tail of the snake in front of it. Upon awakening, he remembered the dream image, and he recognized that this image might be symbolizing the structure of the benzene molecule. As it turns out, benzene is a hexagonal ring structure with six carbon atoms arranged at the vertexes. Kekule’s non-verbal knowing solved the problem and represented the solution in its own symbol code-that of images.
Two of my personal experiences with images introducing information to my conscious mind may, also, help illustrate the process. The first began with an urge to paint. I haven’t painted much in the last few years. I stopped many years ago because, though I loved to do it, it was much too lonely a life for me. But one day, I wanted to be painting again. I went to sleep that night, thinking about painting. I woke up the next morning, realizing what the urge to paint meant. I was missing the process of painting: my urge to paint was an urge to lose myself in the experience and to become open and aware – like a little child. “Painting” was representing a “letting go” of thoughts and worries and fears and doubts. It symbolized an immersion into the timeless, joy-filled space of the liminal time of the creative process. This was what I was needing in my busy, hectic life; and my unconscious was letting my conscious brain become aware of this fuct through sleep learning.
The second experience came from dreams about a baby. As I wrote in my journal, “The baby could talk and had the most perfectly formed hands. He talked with my voice and he wanted to be named Paul. . . . On waking, I realized that the child is my book and the name is my struggle for the title which represents my focus in the book?” The other night, I had another dream about “my baby?”: “Last night I dreamt that I was high on a ladder with my baby. I was up too high, had climbed too high, and I needed to get down. . . with my baby?” What my dream was telling me was that I had become too “cerebralizing” in my writing. I had experienced a lot of difficulty writing the day before this dream, and the dream was showing me-with images I understood-the reason why. Once I recognized what the image of a baby meant for me, I began to see how my unconscious was using it as a symbol for an underlying reality,
Our brain’s ability to make symbols stand for an underlying reality allows us to create and expand any language. If we look at the creation of the languages of mathematics, we can see how this is a very powerful tool. Because of the languages of mathematics, we have been able to build bridges, to split the atom, to go to the moon. We have created all sorts of technology including calculators, video recorders, and the computer on which I am now typing this book. Without the languages of math, none of these things would have been possible. They are the spin-offs of the creation of languages, which represent and suggest an underlying reality. The languages of math made technology possible.
Because the right hemisphere lacks a language, much of its talents go ignored. Though it speaks, it is like a child whose parents can’t understand her words. No communication is possible. Each of us, however, is capable of creating our own language that would allow our right hemisphere to communicate. In order to do this, first we must understand how the right hemisphere symbolizes its reality.
A word is to the “left hemisphere” as an image is to the “right hemisphere?” They are both symbols because they stand for or represent something. But a word or an image does more than stand for something, and that is why I put quotation marks around “left hemisphere” and “right hemisphere?” Both phrases suggest more than the basic physiological reality of right and left hemispheres of any given brain. They symbolize modes of thinking, where “left hemisphere” represents an analytical, linear, convergent, deductive, logical mode of thought and where “right hemisphere” represents an intuitive, global, divergent, inductive, synthetical mode of thought. The meaning of the words and phrases is more important than the words and phrases themselves; and it is the same with images. If Kekule had taken his snake images literally, he would have missed the point of what his right brain was trying to tell him. Just like words, Kekule’s images were symbols – combinations of code and meaning-pointing him in the direction of understanding. They stood for more than their surfaces suggested; they contained an underlying meaning.
Symbols only work when their meaning is understood. We’ve all heard many anecdotes that underscore the limited role words, themselves, play in communication. My favorite is the supposed Russian translation of the adage, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” When transliterated without regard for meaning, it becomes, “The vodka is strong, but the meat is bad.” A computer has this same problem. It can’t translate from one language to another precisely because it can’t approximate meaning, such as the meaning expressed by a science writer who, when talking about the difficulty of rewriting only a section of his article said, “If you take one paragraph out, it’s like pulling a thread. It’s easier to rewrite the whole thing.” The power of this phrase – pulling a thread – resides outside the collection of letters we call words. It resides in the image evoked by the words, and it’s the image that gives the phrase its meaning.
Words and images work together like this to give a depth of meaning that wouldn’t be possible with one or the other alone. We all know what it means to “drive like a kamikaze” though we wouldn’t have before World War II. Stories of the Japanese fighter pilots on suicidal missions provided us with the image, and we became familiar with the name by which they were called. Through adopting this word, we could express a concept that we couldn’t express so readily before. Suppose we lacked this image-word in our language. How would I express the meaning? I could say, “That man (or woman) drives like he doesn’t care if he lives or dies.” But that doesn’t carry the meaning that “driving like a kamikaze” does. A nuance is missing.
Images supply the meaning to much of our verbal language-a proof that we are, already, using the right hemispheres of our brains. But images can do more than enrich the left hemisphere’s languages; they can open the door to inner knowing when we recognize them as a separate symbol system with their own code and meaning. But just as the left hemisphere uses the right for its languages, in codifying a personal right hemisphere language we must borrow heavily from the left by using words to name our images.
Naming is essential to holding things in our consciousness because the left brain works with words. Naming is different from labelling, however. Labelling is what we would do if we made a one-to-one correspondence between the words “right hemisphere” and the physiological reality of the right side of the brain. Naming, on the other hand, is what we do when we use words to encompass a meaning. For instance, like Kekule’s snakes, my baby image was not to be taken literally. Its meaning went beyond the obvious image, and when I recognized its meaning, I could take the combination of code and meaning and name it. Thus, my image became fused with two words – “my baby” -- and these two words represented this book you are now reading. As the months passed, my right hemisphere reported on my progress by using my image symbol. During a period when I stopped writing, my baby became abandoned. As I went back to writing, he continued to grow, becoming larger, but still lean as he approached adolescence. By naming this image symbol, I could use it to see more of my right hemisphere’s inner knowing. .
Naming not only allows us to encompass meaning, it also allows us to consciously see new things and be aware of things that, though they were there, we never noticed before. For instance, Eskimos gave different names to the subtle differences in snow conditions; mountain climbers also use finer distinctions in naming snow: neve, corn, sublimate, and powder are a few that define the various states. For both, naming the states of snow increased their chance of survival by giving them a greater perceptual awareness. For most of us, survival is not dependent on being aware of subtle distinctions in the states of snow. Therefore, the words “snow” and “sleet” suffice except for the times when we’re sledding and might add an adjective: if it’s “dry snow” it means the run will be a lot faster than if it’s “wet snow?” Without these distinctions, however, our conscious perception of the differences is limited. If we don’t have a name. for it, we probably aren’t consciously aware of it. ,
I was thinking of this one day as I sat looking out my friend’s dining room window. It occurred to me as I looked that there might be many more colors out there in her yard than we consciously saw. We would not be able to see them because we would not have named them. I remember reading in Homer a description of the Mediterranean in which it was referred to as the “wine dark sea?” Could it be, I thought, that the ancient Greeks weren’t aware of the color blue? We do have receptors in our eyes, called cones, for seeing the color blue, but they are only 5% of the cones. Those for seeing red and green total 95%. Maybe it was possible that, though humans had the physical apparatus for seeing blue, they did not know they were seeing it because they had not made the experience conscious by naming it. That got me wondering what it would be like if one person saw the color blue and realized he was seeing something .he hadn’t consciously seen before. In order to remember it, he would have to label it. Otherwise, it seemed to me, he would forget that he had ever seen it until the next time he realized he was seeing it. Then he might think, “Ah ha! I’ve noticed this before?” Finally, if he saw it often enough, he might name the experience, which could allow him to retain it in conscious awareness. He might then want to tell another person about this new thing that he saw. How could he do that, though? I wrote a bit of dialogue around this problem:
- “You talk in riddles.” says the laughing man. “You understand.” says Miriam.
- “Yes, I’m beginning to. ‘Have you ever tried to explain blue to someone who has never seen it?’”
- “You remember that!”
- “I remember well. You point your finger in the direction and say, blue is like gray. . ?”
- “ . . but richer?”
- “Like red. . ?”
- “. . . but cooler?”
- “And not much like yellow because yellow’s. . ?”
- “. . . too bright. But then. . ?”
- “ . . he grabs your finger, and says, ‘Ah! Blue. Yes. Blue is rather long, oh nice! But cool. Here, let’s warm it up; “ he says, blowing on her finger. They are both laughing.
- “I have taught you well.” says Miriam.
This is an age-old joke: many stories have been told about the fool who looks at the pointing finger of the teacher and confuses it for the thing at which the teacher is pointing. It is like the man who went to find Seattle. He came to a sign on which was written the word, “Seattle?” Thinking he had arrived, he settled down under the sign; and there he lived – “in Seattle” – until his dying day.
The ancient Greeks were aware of the color blue, I discovered many years later. Homer might have called the Mediterranean the “wine dark sea” because he, like the inhabitants of Old England, categorized color by its intensity of darkness or brightness rather than by its hue as we tend to do. They would have referred to green, for instance, as wine dark as well. Green could also have been sun bright or moon dim. We tend not to see colors this way. We see shades instead and refer to lime green and hunter green and forest green and avocado green. We perceptually discriminate for shades and hues where the Greeks might have perceptually discriminated for darkness and lightness. Our discriminations, indicated by names we give the colors we see, allow us to see things the ancient Greeks might not have consciously seen. So it is with our right brain images. Naming makes our inner seeing conscious.
How do we know what to name something, though-especially when naming requires us to know the meaning inherent in the image? How do we, for instance, know what seeing cheese in our dream means? This is the toughest part of taking the right brain’s symbol language and building what I call the language of the interconnected brain. It takes time and a lot of practice because most of us are unused to using our inner knowing, our felt senses, or our bodily sensations, which are some of the ways the right hemisphere communicates. Most of us have had an experience with it, though, when we’ve walked into a room and sensed, immediately, that someone was mad. This type of I-know-that-I-know-but-I-don’t-know-how-it-is-I-know or inner knowing is like the left hand reaching for the banana in the split brain studies. The right brain knows something is there, but, being non-verbal, it isn’t able to put its knowing into words.
But why go to this trouble of determining the meaning of our symbols? Why not use one of the many books that purport to tell us what images in our dreams mean? I think that one of the biggest mistakes we can make is to use a dream interpretation book to determine the meaning of our images. It might mean for the author of the book what it says it means, but that does not, necessarily, hold true for each individual. The images “painting” and “baby” are my own. They introduced themselves to me in dreams and writing, and their meaning is specific to my experience-not to a generalizable one. No one else can tell me what these image symbols mean unless I choose to create my image language around the meaning these images have been given by someone else. Doing this can be quite confusing, however, because we are all quite different-we come from different backgrounds, and we have unique likes and dislikes. We are individuals, and no one thing will have the same meaning for two people. I have, for example, a strong connection with trains. My father has worked on the railroad for most of my life, and he likes what he does. We grew up with talk of trains-the jargon and the legends. We also lived by the train tracks, so we could watch the trains go by while we were eating dinner. To this day, the sound of a train whistle makes me feel a sunburst of joy inside my arms and chest. I love the feeling, but I know I don’t share it with people who talk of how lonely the sound of a train whistle is for them. Joy and trains is something that is, possibly, unique to me. Thus, when I dream about trains, they have this meaning. They symbolize good things to me. Freud, on the other hand, saw trains as symbols of death. This is very foreign to me, for it does not fit in with my meaning at all. My symbols grow up out of my life experience, not out of the experience of someone else.
To say that trains in dreams universally mean death is the same as saying that the French word “azure” universally means blue. It does, but only for the culture that chooses to call the reality of blue by the name “azure.” Symbols represent reality: they are not reality itself. Language is created, and the selection of names or labels is arbitrary. So, back to the question of why not use a dream interpretation book: a book cannot reflect your own inner reality unless you wrote the book.
Training ourselves to be aware of the ways images are used by our unconscious and naming those images enable us to begin building a bridge between the right and left hemispheres of our brain so that our unconscious becomes increasing conscious. One of the best ways to map our unexplored inner space is through a process of what I call creative expression. I don’t mean to scare anyone with this term. You don’t need to be an artist to express yourself creatively. Think of what the words mean: “express” means “to make known or indicate, as by words, facial aspect, or symbols” and “creative” means “imaginative.” A creative person has imagination or “the process or power of forming a mental image of something that is not or has not been seen or experienced” (definitions taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language). Any of us who images and makes symbols of those images uses creative expression. And any of us can become better at it, too.
Building this bridge and developing our own personal image-word language of the interconnected brain gives us access to part of the brain that has previously been inaccessible to us. The long-term spin-offs may be just as significant as those gained by the creation of the language of mathematics, but we don’t, yet, know what they might be any more than we could have predicted which doors math would open. The immediate spin-offs are enhanced intelligence, greater self-awareness, and a new sense of meaning in our lives. We can immediately use this language to understand more about ourselves and the world we live in, and, with it, we can come closer than ever before to using all of our brain’s potential.
As I was typing the last word in the sentence above, I repeatedly typed “poetential.” It dawned on me what I was doing. Unconsciously, with that slip, I was supplying my conscious mind with more information. It wasn’t, simply, “potential” I was talking about; it was “poet-tential” or our ability to tap that nebulous part of the brain that poets-with their images-tap. This is the part that, unaware of the brain, the ancient Greek poets called “The Muses” or “The Gods.” and it’s from this part that inspiration, the flash of insight, the “ah ha” of inner knowing comes. This is the part of the brain that Blake’s poets of old in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell used to image up their world. With this slip, my unconscious was supplying me with all these integrated pieces of my memory as well as an additional symbol for my language of the interconnected brain. But how do we go about developing our poetential? I’ll use a right brain method-a teaching story-to answer that question.
Right Brain Method: I knew a man who wanted to collect arrowheads, so he went out into the desert near his home and began looking for them. Though he spent many hours – and many days – searching, he never found any. Finally, in exasperation, he enlisted the aid of a woman renowned for her arrowhead collecting ability, who said it would be pointless if she told him what to look for. Instead, she said, she’d show him. She took him out into the desert with her, where he followed behind while she collected arrowheads.
In the beginning, he could not see what she was seeing. He missed the mounding of earth or the shoots of growth under which an arrowhead lay buried. He didn’t know the signs of the desert floor well enough to see clearly, but he learned. Finally, he could walk behind her and see what she was seeing as she saw it. He learned to recognize the clues that indicated a relic buried in the ground. Then he began finding arrowheads, too, and he amassed a significant collection on his own.
Just like the arrowhead collector, we must first want to find these old, lost tools in the desert of our mind. We can look for them on our own – as most of us end up doing because there are very few arrowhead collectors who can show us how they do it. If we do find someone who has studied the terrain, we may be able to watch while they show us their techniques. From this watching, we may become proficient arrowhead collectors ourselves.
Out of my own experience and that of my students, I have developed techniques for getting on the right side of the brain, for discovering images and their meaning, for learning of ourselves and the world around us, and for developing the language of the interconnected brain which I explain in the other chapters of my book. They work for us, and I hope that they’ll work for you. Ultimately, they are, however, only signposts pointing you in the direction of your own right hemisphere knowing. Don’t make the mistake of the man going to Seattle and think you’ve arrived when you’re done reading this article or my book. They are not meant to be the final statement, but, rather, a springboard into your life-long adventure with becoming aware of all your right brain knows and making it as conscious as your left brain knowledge. To begin this trek, we start with the simple but hard task of getting on the right side of the brain.
© 1985 by Colleen Rae
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