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?
Thinking 2.0, 961 S. McClelland, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, United States
Unsubscribe Manage preferences
Lara Patriquin, MD
Associate Professor of Radiology
School of Medicine, University of Utah
Speaker and Coach at Thinking2.0
(505) 269-4097.
