MIND - Manage Your Mind

The MINDRAMP mission is to learn how to live long and live well.

To live LONG, it helps to keep our brains as healthy as possible.  But what do we do to live WELL?  What do we do with our healthy brains?

To live WELL, we need to effectively manage our minds in ways that minimize the negative aspects of our life, (alienation, conflict, confusion), while amplifying positive feelings and behaviors. We need to cultivate contentment, curiosity, compassion, creativity and equanimity.  We need to amplify our  sense of belonging and our ability to collaborate with others in a spirit of love, play and fun.  How do we go about doing it?

I believe that the body of knowledge and scholarship embodied in the "hemisphere hypothesis" provides us the tools we need to develop effective strategies for manage our minds.  This is what we will explore in the MIND OVER MUDDLE series.
 
Iain McGilchrist's "hemisphere hypothesis" is simple to state:  "“The bi-hemispheric structure of the brain makes possible attending to the world simultaneously in two otherwise incompatible ways.”  The implications and ramifications of this revelation are vast and profound.  Problems occur when one hemisphere, the more delusional one, takes over and starts running things by itself. 

McGilcrhist explores the incredibly broad and deep ramifications of the hemisphere hypothesis in his two seminal books on the topic, THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY (2009) and THE MATTER WITH THINGS (2019). In this episode I will give you a brief introduction to his hemisphere hypothesis and offer some hints about how I hope to make use of his ideas.  In subsequent podcasts we will investigate some of the important ramifications of McGilchrist's scholarship  and will also explore their practical applications. How, in practical terms, do we get our two hemispheres to collaborate effectively?