Saturday, February 22, 2025

Saturday, February 22, 2025

    

    Elsa went out the doggy door shortly after she got off the bed. Good girl!  Once dressed and entered the living area, I found a wet spot still warm to the touch. Huh!

     I had an 8:30 appointment with the vet today. Elsa scratched both her ears the other day—just that one time, but that was enough. She rarely scratches, even when she itches. Both ears had infections, and her right ear was considerably worse than her left.

    This coming Wednesday will be the last Grief Recovery class.  Our assignment is to write a reconciliation letter to the person we chose.  I wrote a draft of one this morning. I'll read it or a modified version at our next meeting.  We'll see if it makes a difference.

     As Dean and Nina sat down for our Saturday game of Sorry and conversation, I told them to look around. Did they see a difference? Dean saw it immediately: the four solar panels on my living room floor were gone.

    Today, Dean and Nina changed seats. Dean believed that Nina's seat was lucky. I don't know, but I do know Dean won today. His luck had changed, and his experiment had worked. The change in seating threw me. Who's turn was it next? 

     In the session with Rob the other day, he mentioned McGilchrist's book The Master and his Emissary. Its thesis repelled me: the right brain should be the master. Rob interpreted this as McGilchrist arguing for equality between the brain's two hemispheres. Still, I didn't see it that way.

   I looked for the book in my library and read the introduction. On the last page, McGilchrist writes the story of the master and his emissary. The master is wise and kind. He commissions emissaries to help manage his domain. The emissary gets too big for his britches and assumes power and rights.  He considers the trusting master a fool. He steals from the master and the people he rules over.  That does not sound like a story of equality. I looked for an online summary and found a thorough one on the Shortform site. It supported my theory that McGilchrist advocated for right-brain dominance because it was the loving social side. Oy vey!

    For me, the right brain generally deals with what can be perceived by the senses, the concrete, while the left brain deals with the abstract. The lines aren't drawn in stone, but there are preferences.  The limbic system, which involves emotion, sits below the cortex. While the right brain may be better able to see the big picture and invest in group cohesion, it is also part of our brain that advocates for the love of family, tribe, country, etc., and kills everyone else. Oxytocin flows just as readily when we are joyously murdering the opponent as it does when we embrace our children. Oxytocin flows when we feel connected; it's unnecessary to feel that connection to every living human to get that high.

   Dyslexia is often a problem with learning to use the left brain, which involves a certain distancing from the concrete. We have nothing to hang on to.  In the case of children, it's literal. They can't grasp, literally, the abstract. They can't feel it. How do you learn something you can't feel?  I have to teach them to learn to use their left brain. We're better off developing this skill as a species.  I suspect that as our brains were formed, one or two tribe members developed that skill. They were the wise men and women of the group. They were also deeply grounded in the concrete, not off in an abstract world conjured by their imaginations. 

    The two relevant parts of the brain are the conscious and unconscious parts of our mind, particularly the prefrontal lobe, which is responsible for executive function. It is the last part of our brain to mature. Children learn everything implicitly, bypassing conscious awareness and executive oversight. The parent serves that function in children.

   Kahneman described fast versus slow thinking.  In the Shortform summary of The Master and his Emissary, they refer to Kahneman's fast versus slow thinking thesis.  In the summary, they say Kahneman relates fast thinking to fast thinking coming from the right brain and slow thinking from the left brain. Nay. Kahneman understands that rapid word recognition is a left brain activity. It happens faster than conscious thought. He says we're unable to block processing a simple sentence in our native tongue.   Processing word meaning occurs in the left hemisphere.

   The role of slow thinking is the part of the brain that looks for logical consistency instead of preconceived contradictory notions. 

       I got a call from John.  He is the gentleman who bought four solar panels from me the other day.  His electrician stopped by to do something about the four solar panels he bought. I held my breath. Was he going to tell me the electrician said they couldn't be used with the system he had? No.  He wanted the three other ones I had that were replacements for the dud panels. He would give me another $50 a piece.  Ah!  He told me he was reaching out to folks he knew who lived off the grid to haul away the thirteen questionable ones I had.  Wow!  God does move in mysterious ways. When I told John he had a deal, he called me a lovely lady.  OMG! Mike told me I was beautiful, and that he loved me every day of our forty-five years together. He may have been consciously making up for all the insults my mom hurled at me.  I couldn't believe how it felt to have John say that to me.  Cindy, his wife, must be a lucky lady. My nerves are raw from the lack of Mike's loving attention. Some people believe he belongs in heaven for all he suffered. I believe he belongs in heaven for all the peace and joy he brought into my life.