It’s also active when you are analyzing your role within your particular social context and it helps you generate biographical profiles of yourself. This part of your brain is active when you find your mind wandering to contemplate the past or future. Carthart-Harris mapped the brains of the volunteers who had taken psychilelic drugs, he noticed that a particular part of the brain that handles self referencing processes (default mode network) was greatly diminished. By giving experimental participants magic mushrooms (their active ingredient is psilocybin), recording the participant’s observations while simultaneously doing brain scans (FMRI), they were able to clarify not only the effects of the drugs on perception, but also the parts of the brain that help contribute to these perceptions.

The book is an extensive overview of psychedelic drugs, detailing the impacts they have on brain networks, various mental disorders and the role they play in giving healthy people a sense of transcendence. Their research is highlighted in the New York Times Best Seller, “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence” by Michael Pollan. Recently scientists at Johns Hopkins and the Imperial College of England have been learning about brain function by prescribing psychedelic drugs (LSD and psilocybin).

Studying people who experience brain trauma can teach us a lot about the brain, but scientists can also learn about brain function by the use of drugs. Taylor was so impacted by her stroke experience, that as her left brain came back on line, she deliberately cultivated her thought life so as to limit the judgmental chatter of her left brain. What I find interesting is, her description of shifting to a purely right brain perspective is very similar to the goal of some types of meditation, that is, to simply silence brain chatter. What’s interesting about her account, is that the loss of physical boundaries and brain chatter actually made her feel deeply peaceful! Fortunately her sense of bliss was occasionally interrupted by an alarming thought that she needed to call 911! Dr. She lost her physical sense of self (the left brain maps the physical boundaries of self) and her brain chatter dropped dramatically (left hemisphere controls language). She was conscious as the stroke progressively shut down her left brain functions. She is a neurologist who experienced a dramatic stroke to the left side of her brain (it took 8 years for her to recover). Jill Bolte Taylor’s book “Stroke of Insight”. For example, when scientists first separated the brain hemispheres of epileptics by cutting the corpus callosum (cluster of neurons that connect the two halves), they figured out some of the functional specialties of the different hemispheres. Scientists often learn new things about the brain by studying what happens when some part is damaged and its function is diminished or stopped all together.

With the advent of brain imaging technology, scientists can now see the neural networks that run the ego. Philosophers, scientists and the religious have come up with practices to help control this unruly part of us. This dilemma is as old as recorded history. At other times our ego simmers just under the surface as we experience some perceived injustice. This could be as dramatic as the flight or fight response I showed when I scrambled out the back doors of a Miami University van because I felt claustrophobic (I yelled some excuse as I clawed my way over the back seat). The fact that we have a domineering inner voice which causes us to act in ways that don’t match our ideals is an indication that our brains really do have a mind of their own (pun intended). A fitting name for this voice is the ego. Pink’s lyrics reveal a common human experience, our frustration with the voice in our head and the actions and/or moods that come as a result. In 2001 Pink had a hit called “Don’t Let Me Get Me”.

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