The symbiosis of our Dolby Stereo brains.

Symbiosis is where two animals live together in such a way as their lives depend on one another. Birds and bees are a remote symbiosis but jellyfish are a very close symbiosis. In a jellyfish there are two animals, the animal which can float and digest food and the animal which can sting prey. There really are two animals living as one, biologists will tell you more but I'll have to move on to my next point.

Our brains have been thought to operate different sides of our bodies and have distinct functions. New discoveries now tell us that functions are in truth mixed over the hemispheres but distinctions do still remain. Einstein noted how we are ruled by the lesser good half of our brains, that which splits things into bits and groups and that we really should give more attention to the half of our brain which sees wholeness. Neuroscience is proving his little notion is near true, one side of our mind does work on splitting things into bits while the other does work on the wholeness, but we have a 3rd part. The two functions are very very immediate and reactionary, the 3rd part of our brain at the front operates by sitting back a little from the immediacy of things.

We have then a Dolby Stereo brain, and as we can place a sound in the room by spotting the difference in time it takes the sound to reach each ear so too we have stereoscopic thought.

Now all the brain is for is movement, things which don't move don't have brains. The sea squirt begins life with a brain and it moves about, later in life it finds one place to stay for the rest of its life where it lives more as a plant than an animal. As soon as it find the place to stay it digests its own brain as its first meal. This is really true, please again seek the advice of a biologist on the how's and the why's. Our brain is big and complex because it must move hands, a tongue and it must drive a big floppy gangly body through life. It is very very difficult to make a robot do any one task we can do, years of programming, but we can do many things at once and adjust for variables. Our brain is for movement and, it's pretty damn good at it.

When we look at the world then we use one half of our mind to break things into bits, one half to see the whole event, and the frontal section we use to step back and build possible futures and outcomes. We use another part of the brain (don't ask me which) to take these 3 views on the same event and decide our best move. This is Dolby Stereo thought.

With this new information in mind we can possibly see how different people see the world in different ways. A person who is "Part dominant" will have differing views over a person who is "Whole dominant". The part dominant will insist that things have strict order and can be organized and the whole dominant will be more aware of the symbiosis which the delicate natural balance of our planet depends upon. One with a very decent frontal section will be able to map out possible futures where the part dominant rules the planet or if the whole dominant were able to bring back the Yin Yang balance a little and move us towards the future Einstein and the Eastern Philosophers would have hoped for - a future where we think and operate as the whole and not as competing parts.

You can check out Ta-Wan's other musings here.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao