The Fantasy Tales of the Left Brain
“What it comes down to is that
modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.” ―Roger Wolcott
Sperry who won the Nobel Prize for his work on the dual brain.
It is a very common position among
UFO researchers that research should precede with intelligence,
analysis,
knowledge, comprehension, three-dimensional thinking, judgment, reasoning, and
the five senses of reason. All the attributes listed are attributes of the ego
dominated left brain. This research position has rarely if ever been challenged,
despite the fact that it has failed to produce any answers.
On the face of it the notion seems
like a reasonable method to solving the UFO riddle, but left brain research
into new ideas has a serious drawback. The drawback has to do with the left
brain’s ability and tendency to weave together stories to fill in gaps when
there is an unknown or the data does not support the thinkers strongly held
paradigm. In other words the left brain has a built in ability and tendency to
bullshit. Researchers using a strictly left brain approach become victims of
the biology of their left brain.
The work on the different attributes
and drawbacks between the left and right brain are fairly well established by
Dr. Roger Sperry who pioneered the “two brains in the brain” theory and was
awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1981.
The best description of the
differences in the two hemispheres may have been provided by Dr. Jill Bolte
Taylor who was a Harvard trained neuroanatomist, the youngest board member ever
elected to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the driving force behind
the Harvard Brain Bank, and named one of the 100 most influential people in the
world in 2008.
The advantage of Dr. Taylor opinion
of the left right brain issue is that in 1996 she experienced a left brain hemorrhage
that after four hours had completely shut down her left brain and cast her into
the world of the right brain where she remained for five weeks before the left
brain began to come back on line. Taylor is therefore talking about the issue
not as a second hand doctor listening to others or trying to interpret brain
functions based on experiments with rats in a laboratory. Taylor was an
experiencer who carefully documented her experience in a book called “My Stroke
of Insight” after she had recovered.
In speaking of her insights into the
left brain she wrote,
One
of the most prominent characteristics of our left brain is its ability to weave
stories. This story-teller portion of our left mind’s language center is
specifically designed to make sense of the world outside of us, based upon
minimal amounts of information. It functions by taking whatever details it has
to work with, then weaves them together in the form of a story. Most
impressively, our left brain is brilliant in its ability to make stuff up, and
fill in the blanks when there are gaps in its factual data. In addition, during
its process of generating a story line, our left brain is quite the genius in
its ability to manufacture alternate scenarios. And if it is a subject you
really feel passionate about, either good or awful, it’s particularly effective
at hooking into those circuits of emotion and exhausting all the “what if”
possibilities.
As
my left brain language centers recovered and became functional again, I spent a
lot of time observing how my story-teller would draw conclusions based upon
minimal information. For the longest time I found these antics of my
story-teller to be rather comical. At least I realized that my left brain
full-heartedly expected the rest of my brain to believe the stories it was
making up…I need to remember, however, that there are enormous gaps between
what I know and what I think I know. I learned that I have to be very wary of
my story-teller’s potential for stirring up drama and trauma.[1]
This first hand expert testimony is
backed up by other researchers who have done work with split brain patients
where the connection between the left and right brain has been cut to treat
epilepsy. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist and the author of Who's in Charge? has identified the
story teller in the left brain described by Taylor from her firsthand experience.
Gazzaniga called the storyteller 'the Interpreter,' and stated that it is a
very powerful force in the human condition. According to Gazzaniga the
interpreter jumps in to make sense of memories, when it has no direct access to
those memories or the context in which they were made. It does this to create
coherence.
The Taylor also spoke of the right
brain where she had weeks to experience without any input from the left brain,
The
right brain is open to new possibilities and thinks out of the box. It is not
limited by the rules and regulations established by my left brain that created
that box. Consequently, my right brain is highly creative in its willingness to
try something new. It appreciates that chaos is the first step in the creative process.
It is kinesthetic, agile, and loves my body’s ability to move fluidly into the
world…it understands that we are all connected to one another in an integrate
fabric of the cosmos, and it enthusiastically marches to the beat of its own
drum.[2]
The left brain approach to research
has led to an unchanging left brain paradigm of separation and individuality as
opposed to Oneness. The left brain believes in a world where nothing beyond the
random physical world exists. It is a world of the conscious mind as opposed to
the unconscious mind. It is argumentative, needs to be right and is unchanging.
Therefore when faced with a new paradigm such as UFOs, the left brain begins to do what it does very
well; create stories to fill the gaps and maintain the paradigm of a random
physical universe.
·
In the UFO field left brainers at the CIA advanced
theories such as the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes explain the UFOs of the 1950s and
1960s. “They weren’t UFOs: They were us and our spy planes.” This is simply the
left brain story weaving. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea
but the left brain has to fill in the blanks.
·
There have been many reports that were written
off by government officials claiming a UFO sighting was swamp gas, a plane, or
a weather balloon.
·
Look at the stories that surround the great
Roswell UFO crash of 1947. It was identified as a weather balloon with no
evidence to back it up. Then it became a Mogel balloon flight launched in
secret to monitor possible Soviet nuclear tests. It really didn’t matter that
there was no flight on the day the story says it was launched. When President
Clinton challenged the Air Force to
explain the reports of the alien body reports that were circulating by Roswell
witnesses, the Air Force investigators came up with the story that six-foot
wooden dummies dressed in Air Force uniforms in 1953 were the cause for 1947
Roswell witnesses reporting they saw four foot gray aliens.
·
Skeptical investigators in the Rendlesham UFO
case, where numerous UFOs were being sighted in the sky and on the ground, came
up with the explanation that witnesses must have been watching a near-by
lighthouse.
·
In 1952 numerous overflights witnessed by eye
and by radar over the White House were explainable by a weather inversion.
·
Left brained rational skeptics like Carl Sagan,
Donald Menzel, Michael Shermer, Phil Klass, and James Oberg have been very
vocal in providing alternate storylines for UFO sightings, and making the point
that the evidence fails to match up with evidence required by rational thinking
scientists.
These examples are not surprising as
they either involve government officials who are protecting classified material
or don’t want to put the government into a position where they will be forced
to spend billions of dollars on a mystery where others such as the Russians and
Chinese will simply sit back and gather what is learned to add to their
classified investigations into the phenomena, or the explanations were put out
by left brained skeptics who were prepared to fill every gap in their
materialistic view of the world challenged by paranormal reports. As a
scientist and vice-president of Hewlett-Packard commented to Hal Puthoff and
Russell Targ after he saw a paper they had written on remote viewing in the
IEEE, “This is the kind of thing I wouldn’t believe, even if were true!”[3]
What is a mystery is the number of
researchers and UFO groups that approach the UFO mystery in a strictly left
brain approach and end up falling into the trap of the left brain which
operates on what Taylor described as “minimal amounts of information” and “functions
by taking whatever details it has to work with, then weaves them together in
the form of a story. Most impressively, our left brain is brilliant in its
ability to make stuff up.” Consider these examples keeping in mind that the
USAF UFO investigation called Project Blue Book had 22% of all cases it
investigated as unknowns.
·
UFO skeptic Michael Shermer highlighted the problem
in an article on UFOs he did in Scientific America. He stated speaking of the
book put out by UFO researcher Leslie Kean, “According to Kean, ‘roughly 90 to
95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained’ as ‘weather balloons, flares, sky
lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds
reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet
Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball
lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or
lights reflected on a cockpit window,” and more. So the entire extraterrestrial
hypothesis is based on the residue of data after the above list has been
exhausted. What’s left? Not much.”
Like many
researchers, Kean approaches the UFO mystery with a left brain approach to
investigation. She invites researchers to approach the evidence “from the
perspective of an agnostic – objectively, with an open and truly skeptical
mind.”[4] The approach is scientific in hopes that science
will take note and start to take the subject seriously, even though only 4% of
scientists in the National Academy of Sciences believe in any paranormal
phenomena. It is hoped that when hard line left brained scientists admit they
were wrong UFO research will no longer be the Rodney Dangerfield of subjects.
The left brain however uses this desire to fit in, with the left brain world
which garners the respect in the modern world, to its advantage. Needing to be skeptical Kean arrived at a
figure where up to 95% are explained as something other than paranormal. (This
is 4x as skeptical as the official government report). The 95% figure is totally
unsupported by anything more than guessing at what each sighting is. The whole
process becomes the left brain storytelling to fill in the gaps in knowledge,
or as Taylor described it, “to make sense of the world outside of us, based
upon minimal amounts of information; it (left brain) functions by taking
whatever details it has to work with, then weaves them together in the form of
a story.” Kean is not the only researcher that uses this very conservative high
number for sightings that can be explained as prosaic.
·
Another example is UFO reporting segments run on
many of the UFO podcasts. People like to hear about sightings so in many cases
there are a few minutes set up at the beginning of the show to talk about the
latest UFO sightings. Because these hosts want to be accepted by the left brain
skeptical scientists who have no intention of even listening to the evidence,
they portray their approach as using intelligence, analysis, knowledge,
comprehension, three-dimensional
thinking, judgment,
reasoning, and the five senses of reason. By using this approach their left
brain feels that it has to fill in the gaps and makes up stories that do great
damage. Podcasters will say without even doing an investigation “that sounds
like a Chinese lantern to me” or some other off the cuff thought. The witness
is left to feel like an idiot for reporting it.
This attribute of the left brain
leads to some interesting new observations.
·
When it comes to the reports made by UFO
witnesses, people reporting ghost or mystical experiences, psychics,
energy/faith healers the general rule has been that there will be a lot of
deception and that such reports should therefore be viewed with a healthy dose
of skepticism. The evidence seems to point to the fact that the person
investigating the case of sighting is much more likely to “make stuff up, and
fill in the blanks when there are gaps in its factual data.” It is the
investigator and not the witness that must be watched carefully due to this
biological left brain deficiency.
·
When skeptics attach UFO cases explaining them
as some bizarre explanation that makes no sense, we can now observe that this
is part of the process. They are simply the victim of the left brain that has
storytelling as part of the process of rationalization and analysis.
·
In many cases UFO podcasters have become the
death knell of the UFO sighting report. The number one reason people don’t
report UFO sightings is not because they think the government will come after
them, or that the media will not cover it. The reason they don’t report is that
they fear ridicule from people they know are just guessing or being skeptical
and know nothing about what they saw.
·
Roger Sperry pointed out in his Nobel Prize
acceptance speech, the research of the two side of the brain vindicates the
importance of experience in the modern scientific dominated world. “The whole
world of inner experience,” he stated, “long rejected by 20th-century
scientific materialism, thus becomes recognized and included within the domain
of science.”
·
Finally, because the main way the UFO mystery is
studied is through the scientific method, we must remember that science is very
left brained relying on analysis and rational thought. Therefore, it uses a lot
of storytelling to explain reality. When there are gaps in the story it comes
up with things like black holes, parallel universes, dark energy, dark matter
and a whole host of other fictional characters. In addition it creates words
that fill in for gaps in knowledge such as placebo, singularity, hallucination,
nature, genetic memory, and instinct. The biggest of these fictional characters
is the famous “laws of physics” or “laws of science.” Steven Hawking famously
used the phrase when stating that a concept of God was not necessary. “What I
have done,” wrote Hawking, “is to show that it is possible for the way the
universe began to be determined by the laws of science.”
This however raises
the obvious question about this left brain storytelling. Who is this fictional
character called the laws of science? It sounds like a group of super heroes,
or like the millions of Hindu Gods. There is the scientific God of gravity, the
God of electromagnetics, the God of Conservations and Symmetry, the God of
quantum mechanics, the God of Thermodynamics, and on and on.
The storyteller
might be challenged to answer some God questions about the story of the laws?
For example - Who is the law of gravity? Where and when was he born? Where did
he get his power? How does he communicate his law to the Universe? Why does the
Universe have to obey him? How does he enforce his law? If he is eternal does
he ever wonder where he came from? Does he wear a cape?
The answer is that
none of the thousands of laws have a known origin? There is no answer as to why
the law is conveyed or obeyed in all part of the Universe. The laws are just
descriptions of some aspect of reality. They are like describing the story of
Moses dividing the Red Sea – long on description but devoid of an answer as to
how the trick is done.
They are simply
stories that are used to fill the gaps of ignorance told by the guy with the
gift of the gab that shows up at every cocktail party. They do not explain the
mystery and must be kept in perspective
for what they really are – stories.
[1]
Jill Bolte Taylor. “My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal
Journey,” Gale Cengage Learning 2006, p. 229.
[2] Ibid p. 225.
[3]
Russell Targ and Jane Katra, “Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal
Consciousness and Spiritual Healing,” P. 38.
[4] Leslie Kean, “UFOs:Generals, Pilots
and Government Officials Go on the Record,” Crown Publishing, 2010, P.13.
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