Unlocking Your Right Brain: The Wisdom We've Overlooked

This week, American author Peter Bales put forth a thought-provoking idea: we need to use our right brain more. As many know, the left brain is responsible for logic and precision, while the right brain handles emotion and experience. Bales writes, 'Since the Enlightenment, we've been trained to favor our left brain with its emphasis on rationality, analysis, and efficiency. We're told that artificial intelligence will make our lives more efficient, just as many technologies — from cars to microwaves — promised to make life easier in the past. Yet, as much as we enjoy technology, we're still searching for something deeper, for meaning, beauty, and faith. Science and technology have been hailed as humanity's saviors, but they've also removed crucial human experiences from our lives.' 'Our secular, materialistic worldview can blind us to mystery and deep spiritual experiences found in right-brain activities like art, poetry, music, and literature. The world hasn't become duller or emptier; rather, society has lost the ability to appreciate these wonderful things. Influenced by scientific culture, we see the world in terms of physics and math, as mere tools,' Bales continues. Bales quotes another contemporary writer who says, 'In analyzing everything, we ultimately break our world into atomic pieces, missing the bigger story, the meta-narrative needed to understand the world and cosmos as a whole.' Philosopher Dreher notes that we need to encounter the world as a mystery, something we can never fully comprehend but can still partake in. The words echo what the Chazon Ish wrote over seventy years ago in a distinctly Jewish way: 'Faith is a delicate inclination of a refined soul. If a person is spiritually attentive and at peace, free from the hunger of desires, their eyes will marvel at the heights of the heavens and the depths of the earth. The world appears as an enigmatic, concealed wonder that grips their heart and mind. It's almost as if their very life force is drawn to this mystery.' To keep people from faith, we're inundated with data, equations, physics, and technology — interesting and useful, but not the whole picture. At the end of the day, the world is more enigmatic than understandable. Despite humanity landing on the moon, we still don't fully grasp so many things. In our 'moments of calm,' we recognize the wonder David speaks of: 'When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers.' There's no other way to truly understand reality. Bales mentions that recently there's a growing sense in the Western intellectual world of the narrowness of conventional thinking. He quotes Peter Svoboda, who writes, 'New atheism grew alongside, not coincidently, the rise of the internet — the frenzy of our emerging hyper-rationality, which supposedly can solve every problem, answer every question, and perhaps even cure every disease. People seek something to worship, and it's no surprise they turn to new technology, this quest for information.' Another author, Matthew Crawford, wrote 'The World Beyond Your Head,' describing his life as an intellectual skeptic. He brushed past the world without trying to truly understand it, eventually coming to believe in a Creator and the world's spiritual significance. It's not just the religious who recognize this. Philosophers who don't categorize themselves as religious repeatedly articulate that dismissing spirituality is not the key to freedom and progress. Technology gives us the bearhug, limiting our ability to comprehend the world. Can we reclaim the peaceful lives of the past amid the noise of artificial intelligence and its technological clatter? It can be done, says Peter Bales, by momentarily disconnecting from the chaos and distractions, as the sages of Israel advised long ago.