ENDNOTES RIGHT BRAIN

10-12-06

“The danger of chronically blocking general affective expression is that it may also repeatedly inhibit the access of emotions to an individual’s consciousness.  The Mechanism to block expression is unknown, but perhaps involves a temporary shutting down of the circuits that control affective expression….these appear to be primarily located in the right hemisphere, especially in the orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala.  Individuals with right-hemisphere lesions, for example, may have a reduced ability to perceive others’ emotions, as well as to express and gain conscious access to their own.  Furthermore, imaging studies of depressed individuals (who show reduced facial expression) have revealed a functional blockage in the activation of right-hemisphere facial perception centers.  The implication here is that the expression and perception of facial affect may be neurologically linked processes.  (siegel/tdm/272)”

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10-15-6

“…the right hemisphere appears to be able to make sense of the essential meaning of the input it is able to perceive:  Contextual information is perceived and processed, and the gist of a situation is sized up and understood.  The right hemisphere does not use syllogistic logic to deduce conclusions about cause-  (siegel/tdm/326) effect relationships, but rather represents information about the environment.  Such information includes the relationships of various components of experience, including elements of mental processes and spatial relationships.  Since the right hemisphere is nonverbal, the output of its processing must be expressed in non-word-based ways, such as drawing a picture or pointing to a pictorial set of options to make its output known to the external world.  (siegel/tdm/327)”

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“Numerous studies support the view that the capacity for mindsight is right-hemisphere-mediated.  The registration and regulation of bodily state, the perception and expression of nonverbal signals of affective state, the coordination of social and emotional input with the appraisal centers of the brain, and the retrieval of autobiographical memory all appear to be predominantly mediated by the right hemisphere.  The capacity to represent states of mind within the mind is probably mediated within the right-hemisphere’s domains of processing….reflective function, which permits mentalizing, is likely to be mediated primarily by the right hemisphere.  (siegel/tdm/327)”

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“The right hemisphere processes the overall gist of a scene and creates a context-rich representational “understanding.”  The right hemisphere specializes in the ability to perceive the mental sates of others and to represent others’ minds.  Although it may not use syllogistic reasoning to interpret and deduce cause-effect relationships, it has a reflective understanding of the social world of other minds.  (siegel/tdm/327)”