Don Salmon
2 min readJun 23, 2023

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Thanks - one more little practical thing occurred to me after reading your response. (spoiler alert - I'm probably biased as a clinical psychologist)

So Dr. McGilchrist has been researching LH/RH activity for 3 decades, yet he continually insists he has little if anything to offer in terms of practice (and hints maybe "practice" is a LH error - somehow any changes should then come spontaneously???)

In striking contrast, the late Dr. Les Fehmi, trained as a physiological psychologist, spent 50+ years teaching people to change how they attend - to their bodies, hearts, minds, and to the world. he initially used biofeedback as a supplementary aid, and dabbled with neurofeedback, but with about 90% of his patients, he simply taught different modes of attention.

With barely more than a few references to the brain in his clinical practice, peer reviewed studies he conducted show:

Dramatic reductions if not cures with severe depression, and anxiety.

Dramatic reductions in pain (and pain medication)

Substantial improvement in relationships and perhaps even more amazing, in athletic ability, even among Olympic level athletes.

There are some interesting correlations between narrow detached attention - LH activity, and wide immersed (experiential) attention and RH activity - but as I repeatedly remind my friends at the McGilchrist site

both hemispheres are active every moment

and the subcortical regions are always involved in attention

AND the 40,000+ neurons surrounding the heart (That seems to be borne out by research I've seen though there's considerable dispute) AND the 100 million or so neurons in the enteric nervous system (gut brain).

And you can go on, and speak of the intelligence of the trillions of cells of the body, but that's enough I think, to humble even the most strident neuroscience-advocates to say, "hey wait, maybe I can learn more just be noticing how I pay attention, and settle for some extra clarifying insights from neuroimaging!!"

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Don Salmon
Don Salmon

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