Is Your Left Brain or Your Right Brain Running Your Mind?

Who's Running Your Mind, Your Right Brain or Your Left Brain?

Guest Writer: Lara Patriquin 

We've all heard it: left brain logical, right brain creative. It's cuter than it is true. Both sides think. Both sides feel. The real question is who's in charge.

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist spent twenty years on that question. His book The Master and His Emissary takes its title from a fable: a wise master governs his realm through a gifted emissary. The emissary is brilliant — focused, articulate, efficient. But over time, he forgets he's the emissary. He starts to believe the realm is his.

That, McGilchrist argues, is the story of the modern mind. The right hemisphere is the master — it sees the whole, keeps us connected to what's alive and meaningful. The left hemisphere is the emissary — the narrator, the planner, the one with the words. It's supposed to serve. Instead, it's running the show.

You know what that feels like. It's the ticker tape — the voice that keeps score at 2 a.m. and can't say "I don't know."

Here's the thing: the left brain is a superb employee and a terrible boss.

The calendar, the plan, the sentence — give it a task and it delivers. But we've handed it questions it was never built for: Am I happy? Am I enough? And it just answers. Badly.

The work, then, isn't self-improvement. It's a demotion. Return the left brain to the role it was made for, and let the master back in the room.

Start tomorrow morning. Whoever gets to your mind first runs your day — and left unattended, the emissary clocks in early with a to-do list and a grievance from 2011.

Throw a Morning Party instead:

phone off, long breaths, hydrate, sunshine, journal, meditate, something inspiring. Let the master speak first.

Happiness isn't something the emissary can deliver. It's what's already here when the master is back in the chair.

There's a whole book about this! 

Thrive Mind - An Illustrated Guide to the Subconscious

The bunker is the subject of my book — how we build it, what it quietly costs us, and the glitch in the nervous system that lets it seize the controls: the mechanism that convinces us we’re small and under threat, when our real nature is joyful and brilliant.

It’s in my editor’s hands now, out in the next few months. Here’s an early look at the bunker itself:

What working with me looks like

We go into the bunker together, calmly, and take inventory — questioning the beliefs that keep you defended, and changing your relationship to the emotions you’ve been bracing against. Less a discipline, more like clearing out a room you forgot had a window.

Curious what’s in yours?

Thinking 2.0, 961 S. McClelland, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, United States

Lara Patriquin, MD, Associate Professor of Radiology

School of Medicine, University of Utah, Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0, (505) 269-4097 Book your complimentary call here.

Joanna joannaseibert.com.

Right Brain, Left Brain

Right Brain, Left Brain

Guest Writer: Lara Patriquin

Today, Lara Patriquin is talking about what neuroscience has learned about the left and right sides of the brain — and how closely it maps onto something spiritual teachers have pointed to for centuries. Different vocabulary, same territory. Let's start with the voice that never runs out of things to say.

In the 1970s, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studied patients who'd had the connection between their two brain hemispheres surgically cut, to stop severe seizures. This gave him a strange opportunity: he could show something to one hemisphere while the other had no idea it happened.

The Voice That Can't Say "I Don't Know"

In one experiment, he sent an instruction to the right hemisphere only. The patient's body responded — got up, started walking. Then he asked the patient (whose left brain does the talking) why.

The left brain hadn't seen the instruction. It had no idea.

But it didn't say that. It said, instantly and with total confidence: I was thirsty. I wanted a Coke.

Made up. On the spot. And it believed it.

Researchers call this part of the brain the interpreter. Its job is to explain you to yourself, constantly, and it cannot tolerate saying "I don't know." So it doesn't. Faced with a gap, it fills it, with a story built entirely from what's already on file, because the past is the only material it has.

Lost For Words, On Purpose

Which brings me to "lost for words."

We treat that phrase like a small failure — the thing that happens when you should've had something to say and didn't. But notice what it actually describes: a moment the interpreter, for once, didn't fill the gap. It just stayed quiet.

That's rare. It might be the most honest state you're in all day.

Notice where else this shows up. We say we're "lost for words" watching our kids sleep, or in front of a sunset, or standing in a room with a piece of art that hits us the right way. We reach for the phrase in exactly the moments that move us most. 

The Feeling With a Name

There's a name for that state: awe. Research on it is fairly consistent: lower stress, more connection to other people, whatever we were worried about shrinking down to size. It might be one of the best things available to us — and also one of the things we get the least of. I don't hear people describe these moments the way they used to. Fewer stories that start with I saw something and just stood there.

That's not incidental. Awe is what it feels like to go fully right brain — the seat of our connection to something greater, and it doesn't speak, not in the language we're used to. Which matters beyond just description: if meaning lives somewhere words don't reach, a mind that only trusts what it can say and prove will stay hungry no matter what it accomplishes. Worth sitting with, if you've ever felt strangely empty at the end of a "successful" day.

My Own Version of This

I get a version of this most mornings, when I do my morning party right: music, some time outside, then a few minutes listening to a teacher whose voice is quiet enough to out-quiet mine. Lately that's Rupert Spira — he has a genius for this. Few people can talk you past your own interpreter and into something greater with that kind of ease. Any of his talks will do it. Right brain juice. We're all a little starved for it.

Which is really the point of this whole series: we're hungry for that state, far more than we've been taught to notice. And it's not random when it shows up. A little music, time outside, a voice quiet enough to out-quiet your own — these aren't accidents, they're doors. The more we understand what's actually happening left brain, right brain, the more we can build a life that walks through them on purpose, instead of waiting for a sunset to do it for us.

There's a whole book about this! 

Thrive Mind - A Parable of the Subconscious

The bunker is the subject of my book — how we build it, what it quietly costs us, and the glitch in the nervous system that lets it seize the controls: the mechanism that convinces us we’re small and under threat, when our real nature is joyful and brilliant.

It’s in my editor’s hands now, out in the next few months. Here’s an early look at the bunker itself:

What working with me looks like

We go into the bunker together, calmly, and take inventory, questioning the beliefs that keep you defended, and changing your relationship to the emotions you’ve been bracing against. Less a discipline, more like clearing out a room you forgot had a window.

Curious what’s in yours?

Book a call

Thinking 2.0, 961 S. McClelland, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, United States

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Lara Patriquin, MD

Associate Professor of Radiology

School of Medicine, University of Utah

Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0

(505) 269-4097.        

Recongizing God in Each Other

Recognizing God in each other

Game Well Done

“He who recognizes a king in disguise treats him differently from he who sees before him only the figure of an ordinary man and treats him accordingly. Likewise, souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous, and the most mortifying things that happen to them honor everything equally with delight and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.”—Jean-Pierre de Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment (HarperOne, 1966).

I know people like this who seem to treat everyone equally. No one is more important than another. All are human and divine at once. They seem to see the Holy Spirit, God, and Christ in each person they meet. They do not look merely at a person’s outer appearance, political stature, wealth, or power. Christ indeed modeled this approach for us. 

My experience teaches me that we cannot see Christ in our neighbor because we cannot see Christ in ourselves. Consequently, we project onto others our unchristlike behavior, which we do not realize is within us. 

How do we change? Along the way, someone enters our life and treats us as if we contain a divine spark, the holy within us—that is, they respond to us with love. It is as though a spark has been lit. A lightbulb goes on inside us. We begin to believe we are loved. 

So, our mission as spiritual friends is to seek the light, the Christ, in each other.

I remember talking to a spiritual friend about a family member I struggled with. She helped me by asking me, “Tell me something good about her. Something she does well.”

My experience has also shown me that I cannot see Christ in someone else when I live in fear. I realized this recently while attending a meeting where I felt uncomfortable. I wanted to look good, but I did not know exactly what they expected of me. I was afraid I might make a mistake. As an introvert, I only interacted with people I knew. I was only concerned with what people might think of me. Was I making a good impression? 

At our next meeting, I hope to connect more effectively with others. My plan is to pray for each person who will be there, just before the meeting, asking that we see Christ within each other. I will let you know how it goes.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/