Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuro-anatomist who suffered a stroke in 1996. As a scientist, she realized she had "ringside seats to her own stroke" and proceeded to pay close attention to the details of her trauma and recovery process. That attentiveness has led her to some profound insights about the way human thought and experience is organized, and how changes in our thinking could profoundly alter the way humans choose to live.

Here she is presenting her insights at TED:

Dr. Bolte-Taylor suggests that during her stroke she became aware of the different understandings that her left and right brain give her about the world. Her left side is the linear anchor, it creates a history and a future, it seperates her from not her. It enframes her senses in a logic that produces a collective reality, and also herself as differentiated individual with a purpose. The right side tells her about the present, about what the world is like, how it feels, looks, tastes and smells. The two feed each other and work together, but are essentially separate processors. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you watch this video.

Dr. Bolte-Taylor's experience of a stroke, and her subsequent characterization of thinking with the right or the left part of the brain, indirectly references "The Question Concerning Technology" a difficult but important essay by Martin Heidegger that I read last week.

Heidegger's key concern in this essay is to understand how people think about technology. He suggests that our approach to technology, is not just a causal relationship, ie; we do not use technology just to do the stuff that we need to do. We think technologically in order to see the world as a resource waiting to be put to use.

He calls this tendency to see everything as a resource "the standing reserve". So technology, is not just a thing or a practice, - it is a frame of reference, a kind of understanding. When humans use the technological mode to produce stuff, we are 'challenging forth' - daring the world to resist as we create and use and make whatever it is we wish for and think we need.

Heidegger also says there are others ways to create, other ways to think. As opposed to "Challenging forth", there is "Bringing forth", which he suggests is a more nuanced way of creating. Bringing forth does not challenge the earth to produce, it is a collaborative relationship. Think factory farming versus market garden. Think Ikea furniture versus a shaker chair. The fact that humans want to create, and to do, is hardwired, for Heidegger the ways we approach that desire to create can be destructive, or it can be positive. At the moment we are trapped in a fairly destructive pattern of viewing everything as a standing reserve. Then because we have "mastered" nature into a standing reserve, we challenge it forth into doing our will. Maybe think of of the current problem as an addiction to "the will to will".

Heidegger is adamant that this framing of the world as an ever-ready tool or a resource, is damaging to the world and to humans, but that unfortunately in modern technological society we are fairly hard-wired to think in these terms.

However, he suggests that there is an avenue open to people, a "saving power", which is that we have a choice, we can choose to think instrumentally, looking only at the value, or at the means provided by things and events; Or we can choose to engage in something he calls Preparatory thinking.

“Preparatory thinking is primarily a “waiting” upon Being’s “own ruling self-sending forth” (582). As the reversal of the will to mastery, which characterizes modern technology, such thinking cannot be pursued as a means to accomplish a desired end. Rather, preparatory thinking is simply a “receptive openness” that participates in and prepares for the reversal of technology by waiting obediently for “Being’s self-surmounting” (583). Such thinking questions after the concealment and unconcealment of Being but does not reason, calculate, or even plan.” (Weyandt, 66)

Okay I know, that's why many people do not read Heidegger, but stay with me. Here is the mode of thinking of everything as a standing reserve: a forest is not a forest it is a certain gross of lumber, a river is not a river its a source of a certain wattage, a conversation is not a conversation it's building up your network. In opposition to all this, preparatory thinking requires that you calm your instrumental thinking, slow down the pace and focus on other meanings of things. A conversation is a learning experience, an emotional anchor, a fluidity of a voice that isn't your own. The other day I was watching footage of women speaking in Spanish. I don't know Spanish so instead of judging whether or not I agreed or deciding if her words had value for my own knowledge of the world, I got to listen to the timbre of each woman's voice, the way Spanish flows differently then English or French.

When I remember to, I like to practice this kind of thinking when I walk the dog. When I am not crabby or pre-occupied, bean-counting all the parts of my life as I walk, I try to take some time to shut up the "chatter" and start looking around and being quiet.

At first reading, I thought Heidegger was making an ethical argument, thinly masked as an even more thinly masked metaphysical argument. Listening to Dr. Bolte Taylor's presentation, I am not so sure anymore, I am not sure what category I would place these two exhortations to think more openly, to ignore or try to dampen what to all extents sounds like a hard-wired linearity.

Also if you watched the video you'll notice as I did, that at the end Dr. Bolte Taylor tells the audience, (as Heidegger does) that they have a choice; That they can choose not to live in their left halves all the time, that they can stop fixating on where they stop and where the world begins, (and according to Heidegger on how much of the world they can "optimize" while they are alive), and the audience gets scared. As Dr. Bolte-Taylor says (paraphrased):

"That they could purposefully choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres, and find this peace, what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight into how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover....Who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity, and two cognitive minds, and we have the power to choose moment to moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here and right now I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are at one with the 50 million molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you, I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose, and when?"

And the audience awkwardly laughs, no chuckles, at her demand. At this point, it may help to know how exclusive TED is, and how all the people in the audience don't represent an average sampling of the body politic, and probably they worked hard all their lives to be sitting in that audience, and would be reluctant to give up their sense of entitlement. Then again, there may have been a fair number of non-chucklers, I wasn't there I don't know. But still, it's that awkward chuckle, the underhanded undermining of what she says that makes me think Heidegger is right. We are stuck. So this choice, that seems to be a fairly flexible and liberating process to me, may not be merely silly to some people, it could be downright threatening.

Here is how the good Dr. ended her presentation:

"I believe that more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading."

At that she receives a standing ovation.

Irony alert: the commercial that follows the presentation is for "cutting edge technology" designed using Autodesk.