Amazing Brains

I started the computer today and put Errol about a foot away from the screen. I opened our digital photographs and scrolled through them. I showed Errol a picture of himself. He brightened. “That’s Errol!” I said, then magnified the image. Errol cracked up. I showed Errol a picture of him on my shoulders. He thought it was the funniest thing ever, and laughed and laughed. Then I showed him pictures of Owen, Cary, and more of himself. The pictures of Owen were his favorites and he doubled over as his little belly shook with laughter. Errol is, hands down, the happiest person I’ve ever met.

I heard an amazing presentation today from a conference called TED. TED is collection of brilliant speakers who help us think more deeply about happiness, creativity, poverty, globalization, and many other topics. None of the many fantastic speeches I’ve heard have been as arresting as a talk I heard today by Jill Bolte Taylor who talked about how wonders of the brain.

Our brain has two hemispheres. The right side of our brain processes all the multitude of sensations we are experience every moment. The taste of an apple, the sound of a car horn, the smell of baking bread. It doesn’t recognize ourselves as separate from sensations. The left hemisphere organizes all the information we take in and puts it into a context. It is aware of the self, which we see as separate from all our sensations. The left hemisphere always has its eye on the past and future. The speaker is a brain researcher who lost the left side of her brain to a stroke. Although the stroke was debilitating, it let her slip into a beautiful world of sensations and connection and rid her of all the stress, guilt, anxiety, and planning of her 37 years. She was awash in all the senses of the moment and couldn’t distinguish between past and present; herself and others. It was, to her, nirvana. Her experience led me to immediately think about my beautiful Errol.

I don’t have a name for Errol’s condition, and I don’t know exactly how it effects his brain, but it’s clear to me that Errol operates almost exclusively out of his right hemisphere, and lives a life that is almost completely in the moment. His life is of a near constant state of bliss. He loves the wind, the sight of his little hands, the pig snorts that I make for him, vanilla yogurt, any music, Owen jumping off his dresser, riding on my shoulders or in the car with the windows down. All kids are a little like that, and the older we get, the more we drift to the left. Errol is a constant pull back to the right and the joy that is always there waiting to be tasted.