Dr. Baland Jalal
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Baland Jalal’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
If you have the stroke in the left, they will not have this delusion. That's the funny part, right? So it's only in the right. So this tells you there's something going on about self in the rights that's obviously different.
Alteration of self, right? Yeah. Interestingly, if you have a stroke to the prefrontal on the left side, you will develop catastrophic reactions to anything. So you might have a conversation and start crying in the middle of the conversation without any obvious reason. If you get a stroke in the right prefrontal, you will have become delusionally optimistic.
So you'll go out and buy a Rolex if you can't and become manic effectively. So it shows us that the left hemisphere is involved in positive emotion and the right is involved in negative emotion. And in fact, today, when you use things like TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, you might zap the left hemisphere in people with depression and make it more active and you end up with less depression.
I like that. I mean, it makes sense, right? So the right hemisphere is more emotional, big picture oriented, as you say, and it could be that it goes into this infinite loop of possibilities in this big space land where there's no way it can really get fixed. There's no anchoring, right? So that's correct.
Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So I think definitely in terms of using the right hemisphere in dreams, there's got to be something there. So I'm not sure how much this has been explored in terms of the right hemisphere only. But that's definitely because dreams is so much about emotional updating and emotional creating a sense of... making sense of an emotional landscape, right?
So in dreams, for example, it's heavily populated by people, right? Right, right. REM dreams, for example. So each night you cycle through different stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, and then you have deep sleep, and then you have REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, where your eyes go from side to side. During this stage of sleep, you're paralyzed from head to toe.
So you have structures in the brain called the pons and medulla in the lower part of the brain that paralyzes you.
your entire body so you won't act out your dreams and hurt yourself right so this is so i want to lay the foundation before yeah yeah to your point right and that sets up the stage for exploration without risk right so now you can you can engage in this this laboratory uh you know of testing a testing space without any fatal consequences right you can do whatever you want and you don't hurt your sleeping partner partner or yourself so you have that paralysis first of all you're in a physiological straitjacket so to speak right so
Yeah, yeah. So I just want to sort of go through this. So first of all, you're paralyzed in REM sleep, right? From head to toe, you can't move. Your eyelids can move because of a different circuit, by the way. I just want to add that. So this is a different circuit for the eyelids. Now, interestingly, the emotional part of the brain, the limbic centers tucked behind your ears become hyperactive.
So you have that. Your prefrontal lobes and the CEO of the brain becomes less active for some reason. So that part of the brain dials down, right?
Restriction of inhibition. And so everything in the world becomes less focused, right? Less constrained? Less constrained, right? So you don't think in a logical, straightforward ABC-like manner, right? So if I wake somebody up from REM sleep and say, well, and tell him the word sun, he will think of chair instead of moon. So he doesn't think in a logical, serial manner.
He will think in an unrelated manner. In fact, he will be more likely to say sun and share versus when somebody's awake and I ask him, well, what do you think of now when I say sun? They might say moon. So they are more likely to relate unrelated words. So they think in a logical way.
Exploratory process, right? So the prefrontal lobes turn down, right? The emotional part of the brain dial up, right? So you have that, you're paralyzed from head to toe. Now this is a perfect cocktail for strange things. Not only that, but also the chemicals in your brain that have to do with logical and linear thinking, noradrenaline.
You have adrenaline in your body when you're anxious or you're excited. You have adrenaline. You have noradrenaline in the brain, but also in the body. But noradrenaline is a cousin chemical of adrenaline. Now, this chemical... It turns out there's a structure in the brain, in the brainstem called the locus coeruleus. Yes, exactly. Your pronunciation is brilliant.
32,000 cells pitch black in the brainstem. They will stop secreting noradrenaline during REM sleep. So that means your way of thinking about the world is unfocused. It's like spacey, it's creative, right?
Absolutely. Or prior learning. Right. So this is a perfect cocktail now for craziness. The vestibular part of your brain become hyperactive. You know, the central motor region of the brain that has to do with automatic sort of behavior become hyperactive.
Even though you're paralyzed. So that's why dreams, you can sometimes feel like you're running, but you can't control your legs. You feel like some monster is chasing you, but you can't move, or you feel like you're controlled like a puppet on a string. And that's because the parts of the brain, it has to do with automatic movements.
Sporadically, the neurons, they're fire, so you cannot control your movement. So you have all that. And then you have the emotions, and it seems like then it's just perfect for what you're saying then, that the right hemisphere type of thinking of exploration and emotion is just, it's hyperactive.
Absolutely. That's very interesting. Well, to go back to the whole dream thing, right? So one of the things is that it's populated by a lot of people. And that's, again, right hemisphere is actually involved in decoding social, like facial expressions, for example. So that's one thing that obviously autistic people have problems with.
But for some reason, there's a lot of people, a lot of interactions in dreams. So you interact a lot with a lot of people. And usually, actually, these interactions are negative. And this shows us that for some reason, it's advantageous to dream of negative things because you're more likely to train your circuits in your brain to be able to...
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