The Three Amigos – left hemisphere, right hemisphere, senses – give us our sense of “reality”.

Your brain’s cortex is divided into two hemispheres – right and left. According to Orrin Devinsky, MD, professor of Neurology, Psychiatry and Neurosurgery and Director of the NYU Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, the right hemisphere of the brain dominates self recognition, emotional familiarity and ego boundaries. The job of the left hemisphere is to make sense out of sensual input and information from the right hemisphere – it is the story teller.

There is a complicated interaction between right hemisphere, left hemisphere, your senses, and the animal brain within you. Theories abound as to just how that interaction occurs. Recently, Dr. Devinsky conducted a review of many studies of hemispheric interaction in an attempt to better understand this interaction – focusing on right hemisphere lesions and left hemisphere delusions.

“…delusions result from the loss of these [right hemisphere] functions as well as the over activation of the left hemisphere and its language structures, that ‘create a story’, a story which cannot be edited and modified to account for reality. Delusions result from right hemisphere lesions, but it is the left hemisphere that is deluded.” Lesions in the right hemisphere can cause delusions as the left hemisphere goes to work making sense of distorted identity and emotional information it gets from the injured right hemisphere.

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What can you do about it? How can you lift the onus off your back?

“Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories.” (Karl Szpunar, lead author of a recent study on the relationship between memory and future thought and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.)

Suicidally depressed people “don’t remember particularly what happened last month and they can’t really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week.” (Szpunar)

What happens when many of your memories are of traumatic events? Might that mean your future thoughts will also be trauma filled? Or maybe you don’t recall things because of drug-related memory loss. Or perhaps your childhood has become amnesic due to childhood illness or psychological issues.

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A worker who seeks and gets help for psychological problems is more productive, better equipped, and a far more valuable company asset. So why the bias against therapy?

HealthDay/BusinessWeek reported a survey from the American Psychiatric Association that found: “More than 40 percent of the 1,129 respondents said their employer was supportive or extremely supportive of their workers seeking care for health concerns. However, the online survey also found that barriers persist for workers who said their workplace is unsupportive of employees seeking treatment, especially for mental health concerns.” Among those surveyed, 76 percent felt their work status would be damaged if they sought treatment for drug addiction, compared to “73 percent (who felt that way) for alcoholism, and 62 percent for depression, compared with 55 percent who thought seeking care for diabetes would affect their work status and 54 percent for heart disease” (Preidt, 1/31).

The problem, as I see it is a general public bias against those who seek help for mental health issues. I don’t see a quick fix for that.

One “work-around” -
For those providing therapy, I recommend telling clients/patients who come for sessions that they tell their friends and especially co-workers that they are doing “job enhancement” or “personal development” or “performance enhancement” work with a specialist or coach.

This is called a “reframe”. And it’s the truth!

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In an interesting coincidence, the Rapid Eye Technology (RET) eye directing device (called a wand) is moved in a hexagonal 3D pattern just in front of the face – a pattern that due to its spacial character may be very familiar to the aforementioned part of the brain.

University College London researchers have discovered that the brain lays out a grid of cells that represent a map of spacial orientations and locations in space. That in itself may not be any big news to most readers – “so what?” This grid has been known to exist in mice since 2005.

Well, the cool thing is that this 3D grid within the hippocampal formation and associated brain areas, now discovered to exist in humans as well, forms triangles in hexagonal formations – sort of like a honeycomb. Study co-author Dr Caswell Barry said: “It is as if grid cells provide a cognitive map of space. In fact, these cells are very much like the longitude and latitude lines we’re all familiar with on normal maps, but instead of using square grid lines it seems the brain uses triangles.”

In an interesting coincidence, the Rapid Eye Technology (RET) eye directing device (called a wand) is moved in a hexagonal 3D pattern just in front of the face – a pattern that due to its spacial character may be very familiar to the aforementioned part of the brain. Further, the signals flowing through the brain from eyes to visual cortex stop off for an emotional load at the hypothalamus which is attached to the memory-gating hippocampus – the seat of this honeycomb-like spacial mapping grid.

Research team leader, Professor Neil Burgess, commented, “…grid cells may help us to find our way to the right memory as well as finding our way through our environment. These brain areas are also amongst the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease which may explain why getting lost is one of the most common early symptoms of this disease.”

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According to the January issue of Mayo Clinic Health Letter, research shows that guided imagery helps patients use the full range of the body’s healing capacity. Guided imagery is more than listening to relaxing sounds – it’s a learning process to listen to someone’s voice, relax the breathing and consciously direct the ability to imagine. The effect of guided vivid imagery sends a message to the emotional control center of the brain. From there, the message is passed along to the body’s endocrine, immune and autonomic nervous systems. These systems influence a wide range of bodily functions, including heart and breathing rates and blood pressure.

Guided imagery has been shown to benefit patients by:

– Reducing side effects from cancer treatment

– Reducing fear and anxiety prior to surgery. Mayo Clinic studies have shown that surgery patients who participated in two to four guided imagery sessions required less pain medication and left the hospital more quickly than those who hadn’t used imagery.

– Managing stress

– Managing headaches. Studies at the Mayo Clinic have shown that guided imagery may aid in reducing the frequency of migraine headaches as effectively as taking preventive medications.

On the Internet, www.hypnosis-oregon.com and www.rapideyetechnology.com offer information on providers experienced in this technique.

Mayo Clinic
200 First St. SW
Rochester, MN 55902
United States
www.mayoclinic.com