Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

When you feel a deep “drive” to behave in a certain way, chances are that your brainstem is working closely with the next-higher region, the limbic area, to push you to act.

our impulses long enough to consider various options for response. We work hard to model and to teach this to our children, and we can continue to strengthen this ability throughout the lifespan.

I use the general term brain to encompass all of this wonderful complexity of the body proper as it intimately intertwines with its chemical environment and with the portion of neural tissue in the head.

In chapter 1, I introduced the scientific term representation to convey this notion of information. Our ability to “represent” an emotional reaction to ourselves, to give it a name and a meaning, helps to lift us out of the immediacy of an experience so that we can respond to it effectively.

The brainstem directly controls our states of arousal, determining, for example, if we are hungry or satiated, driven by sexual desire or relaxed with sexual satisfaction, awake or asleep.

The right side develops early and is the realm of imagery, holistic thinking, nonverbal language, autobiographical memory, and a host of other processes. Our left brain develops later in life and is responsible for logic, spoken and written language, linearity, lists, and literal thinking. If the linkage between the sides is blocked, one side may d

the idea that developing the reflective skills of mindsight activates the very circuits that create resilience and well-being and that underlie empathy and compassion as well.

As the singers settle into their seats again, I sum up the point of the exercise: It is the middle way between chaos and rigidity—the flow of independent voices linked together in harmony—that maximizes both complexity and vitality. This is the essence of integration.

Conversely, a stone in itself is not information. The stone has data: We can weigh