The Voices That You Hear

Julian Jaynes, a Princeton Professor, revealed how untill approximately 3000 years ago the human mind functioned through automatic, non-introspective commands.

This nature given, bicameral mind was highly intelligent, but immersed in the here-and-now. It did not have the ability to be objective, to introspect, or think in terms of the past or future.

The Left and Right Hemisphere

Dr. Wilder Penfield of Montreal, Canada, carried out experiments locating the different areas of the human brain and their functions.

Using electrodes, he would stimulate different areas of the right hemisphere of the brain. When he stimilated a certain area within the right hemisphere, subjects would have visions of past experiences. When stimulating another area of the right brain, subjects would hear auditory commands.

The Voices You Hear

Those auditory commands always sounded like a powerful man's voice. One man said he felt as though it was his father giving him commands. Even women would hear an authoritiative man's voice.

When primitive people were guided by their bicameral mind, they did not recognize those authoritative voices as coming from within their own brains. It sounded like someone else's voice outside of oneself.

The authoritative voice that religious and mystical people hear during their vision is coming from the right hemisphere of their brain.

St. Theresa would hear auditory voices. I have heard them on several occasions; It was Startling. It sounded like a man's voice, very loud. The first experience occurred while I was driving during a 16 hour get-away trip. After hours of communicating with myself, an auditory, masculine and authoritative voice spoke, providing me with the insights I was seeking.

A person does not hear this voice as he would normally hear perple speaking. The voice is inside one's head, but it is so strong, as if someone outside of you has spoken.

Roger Sperry wrote in 1966 concerning his split-brain patients that what they experience in their right hemisphere seems to lie entirely outside the realm of the experience of their left hemisphere.

No One Else Is Present

At one time or another many people experience a voice talking to them even though no one else is present. This voice usually comes across as an authority figure giving a new insight into a personal problem.

This experience of hearing a voice when no one has actually spoken occurs because we have a split hemisphere in our brains-the left and right hemispheres.

As explained in Julian Jaynes book, The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of Tthe Bicameral Mind, the left hemisphere is our logical, reasoning hemisphere.

When we are thinking about an idea or pondering a question, we are normally conscious only of our reasoning, left hemisphere. This is where our logical thinking takes place.

But occasionally our more intuitive right hemisphere will experience a flash of insight, pulling together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to make a sudden insight.

That insight will then pass from our right hemisphere into our left hemisphere. Such a right-brain insight will appear to our left hemisphere, the hemisphere we are normally consious of and thinking in, as coming from outside ourselves.

A person can literally experience an insight as someone else talking to them.

Understanding How Our Right Brain Works

Normally, information comes from our right brain into our left brain to be analyzed. But you can learn to get in direct touch with your right-brain hemisphere by suppressing your left and focusing on your right.

Mystic techniques and devices facilitate in us the suppressing of the focus on our left brain.

Hypnosis is another technique that can be used to suppress the left-brain conscious mind to get in direct touch with the normally subconscious right-brain mind.

A normal person is seldom aware of his right hemisphere, because it is not our rational-thinking side. Processes in your right are more likely to be subconscious ones. But mystics, on the other hand, tend to be much more aware of and in touch with their right hemisphere.

The right is also considered our survival hemishpere. We see, hear, and feel for survival.

Awareness of the past and future are functions of our rational, left brain. In fact, it was not until man developed introspective consciousness and moved away from nature's automatic, animal-like mind that we could think of ourselves in terms of the future while drawing on the past. Our right brain thinks and perceives only in the here and now.

Our right brain is visual and sensual; we pick up percepts in pictures, touch, depth perception and spatial organization. One of the great functions of this process is that it generates a lot of creativity.

Our right brain can see a whole picture at once; a key to originating new, creative insights.

Our left brain is verbal, analytical objective. It sees things in a sequence like the past, present and future. Our left brain is very rational and language oriented.

Linear Thinking Versus Vertical Thinking

In the book New Think by Edward D. De Bono, he talks about linear thinking versus vertical thinking. Our left brain thinks vertically. It takes a fact and through logic builds upon that fact.

But horizontal thinking is much more right brain. Our right sees parallel patterns and associations among seemingly unrelated facts and events.

Our right brain does not build a logical step from one point up to another. It sees in one area a pattern that is parallel to something else in another area. Then, all of a sudden, the right may make a connection between what seemed like an unrelated phenomena resulting in a completely new insight. That is how sudden flashes of creativity come from our right brain.

Most problems can be solved by our left brain because most problems can be solved through stepwise logic. But an uncommon problem, or an exceptionally complicated problem, a problem that eludes solutions even after all the facts have been examined and objective thinking employed, might not be resolved through conventional logic. That is when our right brain can step in and make a totally unexpected insight by seeing a connection between seemingly unrelated facts or events.

Startling Insights

Because the right brain thinks horizontally, it can recognize connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

It is these startling, right-brain insights that cause people to think that some higher authority has given them the answer.

When the right brain sends a breakthrough insight to the left brain, it seems to come out of nowhere. Such insights usually break through a lot of traditional thinking.

These startling, unexpected conclusions can cause an individual to examine their whole life, all their values, everything.

Roger Sperry's work revealed that there are two seperate minds within a single person. The verbal left hemisphere and the silent right hemisphere. This allowed for increased specialization within the human brain.

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