TED
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2010–2024
20:12 · 8.8M views · Mar 13, 2008
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.
Recommended as a vivid first-person view of the right hemisphere in control, often linked to meditation and non-dual experience.
5 comments from Hacker News
Yes, some forms of meditation, in particular "open awareness" is said to give more space to the right hemisphere. I highly recommend this video if you want to hear about what life is when the right hemisphere is in control, especially for people who have been doing non-dual practices (lots of parallel experiences IMO): this video
This is like saying sleeping is a "waste of time, how can I be more productive during my sleep?". "clearing the mind", aka Shamatha without an object, has been compared to deep sleep but also a space where insights happen. You should give it a try, do it for 10 minutes a day for a month, just relax and don't hang onto anything (thought, feeling, noise, anything, just let them happen, relax some more). Some of the theories are that it lets our right brain take over, others that only by stopping trying to be in control can old memories and repressed emotion come up, and some others are about deeper of sleep/reparation. I'm as rational as the next guy, but this type of mediation has affected me more than other forms. Please check this video [2] of a brain researcher describing having a stroke in her left brain, and has a lot of parallel with some descriptions of deep meditative state. [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video
Thank you for mentioning Stephenson. I haven't read him other than Snow Crash, and I don't think I finished it. Googling Anathem brought me to this blog review of it: [LINK] which reminded me of this NIH neuro anatomist who studied her own stroke, including during her multi-year recovery. Her TED talk: [LINK] YouTube of same: this video She sees the right brain hemisphere as being our "consciousness" wetware connecting us to others. Parts of the video are esoteric, but it's fascinating to hear this first-person account from a brain researcher, especially of the morning of her stroke when her left hemishphere was damaged by a spontaneous brain hemorrhage. Edit: couple of typos
I would say that the first-order Cybernetics (as exemplified IMO in Ashby's book) is all about symbolic formalism for "circular loops in causality", and that Second-Order Cybernetics is a species of mysticism (I hasten to add that I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I'm a Mystic myself.) You could imagine a spectrum from logic to cybernetics to philosophy to mysticism. It's all fine, just I believe that it's important to be clear where on the spectrum you're working. If you want to build machines that do things use Cybernetics and feedback/control theory, if you want to grok reality and self eat a mushroom and read "Gödel, Escher, Bach" or Tao Te Ching. In re: "Laws of Form", yeah, he identifies the boundary or distinction between the mystic realm (non-form, non-distinct, non-dual) and symbolic logic, and then builds a lovely binary Boolean logic directly off of that. It's a tour de force . The really interesting thing is that George Spencer-Brown figured out how to deal with circular logical systems by introducing the concept of imaginary Boolean values. It's a formal system for symbolic logic, and you can indeed build a lovely and efficient SAT solver with it using Bricken's Basis. E.g.: [LINK] (For reference, here's the LoF/Bricken formalism) Arithmetic (()) = ()() = () Calculus A((B)) = AB A() = () A(AB) = A(B) (That third rule in the calculus, discovered by Bricken, is the kicker!) cf. "The Markable Mark" George Burnett-Stuart [LINK] GBS (not GSB, they're two differen
Surprised the article doesn't reference the stroke of enlightenment [0]. Makes you wonder how much awakening (as described in linked video) is more accident than act of volition/determination (e.g. dedicated meditation/spiritual practice). Perhaps the latter sets the stage for the ultimate accident to occur. this video