First Blog

  Your Bicameral Brain by Don Allen Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword? You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused. But maybe you didn’t forget.   Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use. Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of

What is it like to finally understand a new concept which at first seemed like a foreign language to you? Two answers are evident. A. When understanding for the first time, it seems like reaching the peak of a mountain. A triumph. B. After a bit of time, you think of why you did not understand it in the first place. “It is so easy,” you might think. This is the apparent paradox of understanding. It goes from impossible to easy in just one step.