Dr. Allan Schore

With that person, I can bring back the whole context because remember the right brain acts with images, images. So I can bring back that image now and I can remember the closeness that I felt at that point in time, et cetera. These are put into right brain. So we are always putting into our autobiographical memory these heightened affective moments.

So to have those shared affective moments with other people, These are really whereby you're making changes in the right. And these are much more important, I want to suggest, than intellectually. Now, there have been certain fMRI... I'm now going to move into a little bit of a different place here. What I'm suggesting is that these right-brain-to-right-brain communications are always going on.

But... certain people literally can't read them as well as other people can.

Yeah, that's a colossal shift. You can shift from the left into the right about 100 milliseconds. So essentially, you have to be in one hemisphere or the other.

Okay.

Good feet, good feet. Now watch where I go here.

The right hemisphere is dominant for attention. Okay? I mean, this baby and this mother, literally, she's focusing our attention on that baby's face, tone, voice. But there are two different types of attentions. strong neuroscience to show this. The left brain operates by narrow attention, narrowly focused attention.

The best example of narrowly focused attention is you are following my words one after the other. But there's another type of attention which is used by the right brain, which is called wide-ranging attention, which comes right out of Freud. which he also called, maybe you'll remember this, evenly suspended attention.

It's the same thing, which is much wider than that. And that form of attention is the form of attention that the right brain has. Because the attention at that point in time is not only of... what's coming from the outside, but also attention to what's happening in the inside, my own inside, the changes in my own physiology at that point in time also.

So yes, there are these two different forms of attention. And essentially, the only way someone who was just narrow all the time, let's take a personality who just lives in the left hemisphere.

Exactly. Hyperlogical, hyperrational, cannot really see the big picture, but literally that kind of a situation. So essentially, that kind of a person is always looking at the narrow aspects of it and cannot see the broader context. the broader context, because there's a context that's being set up.

Right now, between you and I, there's also a context that's being set up, and that context also has to it a kind of a feeling of safety and trust as we literally just go off wherever our thoughts are with some idea that literally you'll be able to follow that and you'll come back with me at the same time.

So the context, the emotional atmosphere between us changes when you go left into the right like that. The point here is that it used to be thought that the only way you could understand the brain... was by looking more intra-psychically into one brain. If you understood how one brain worked and everything was intra-psychic. But then there's the interpersonal part of it.

And so essentially what we're moving now from a one-person intra-psychic psychology to a two-person interpersonal psychology. You see what I mean by two-person? I got the mother here, got the baby there. I got the patient here, I got the therapist there. And between them literally are going back and forth at all periods of time right brain to right brain communications underneath the conversation.

So neuroimaging, hyperscanning. Neuroimaging, you're familiar with hyperscanning. another paradigm shifting thing that is occurring now in neuroimaging. For the first time, we can now scan two people, NIRS, EEG, whatever you want, while they are in the middle of a basic interpersonal interaction, a numberable interaction between the two of them. These studies have now been done.

And what they did was that they found is that the two brains especially when they are into emotional states and when they are looking at each other face to face and they're concentrating literally on how to empathically be with that person, et cetera, emotions, so to speak, they find that the right brain of one will synchronize with the right brain of the other.

And the part of the right brain that synchronizes with the other is the right temporal parietal junction. A lot of evidence now on the right temporal parietal junction. I said right brain to right brain. So now the eyes are coming. I remember the eyes are, I mean, direct eye connection really is the most powerful form of communication.

Well, you know, the eyes are being controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So you got the – you have an autonomic nervous system with autonomic nervous system synchrony here, so to speak. But – but essentially what's occurring at this point in time, face, voice, gesture. The face is processed in the posterior parts of the right hemisphere, the face processing.

Right hemisphere, face processing. The posterior parts of the right hemisphere, the sensory areas of the right hemisphere process the voice, the melody of the voice, the tone of the voice. That's different than the semantics of the voice.

Right, right. And the posterior parts of the right hemisphere also will process gesture and tactile. Okay? All of that comes together, is integrated together in the right temporal parietal junction. So when two people literally are empathically synchronizing with each other when we are sharing the same emotional state. The third patient says at this point in time, my God, it's rage.