Kittenzen: Living in our Right Mind Part 1--mental telepathy

This summer Mark and I read My Stroke of Insight written by neuroscientist (brain scientist) Jill Bolte Taylor who had a stoke in her left brain. But the book is really about the right brain, which was the only functioning part of her brain during the stroke and for many months and years following as she worked to recover the functions of her left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the seat of the creation and understanding of language as well as where we experience time, memory of the past and projection into the future. With only her right hemisphere functioning, Taylor could not create or understand language but she could feel people's emotions and read their body language. Because she had no memory of the past or thought of the future she could only experience the present, the now. When she was only in her "right mind" the busy chatter of what to do next and the voices of criticism and complaint vanished. She only felt peace and a deep sense of gratitude for and connection with all that was in and around her. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to retrieve the functions of her left brain and its harpy voices and busy-ness. She did, of course, decide it was important for her to come back from this place of peace in order to let the rest of us know that we have a choice to be in our "right minds."

Another book we read was Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien, an owl researcher at Caltech who recounts raising a barn owl from the age of 4 days old until he died at 19. Wesley's beak and talons grew too long and were harming him as he aged but he fought her and injured her when she tried to trim them. Because of his advanced age she didn't want to use anesthesia so she tried imaging to Wesley several times a day for 2 or 3 weeks a picture of her gently filing his beak and trimming his talons, after which time he let her do it with no resistance. It makes so much sense to me that mental telepathy, this imaging, can be used to communicate with animals and with people, just as happened for Jill Bolte Taylor when she discovered that using her right hemisphere she could "read" people's body language and actually feel their emotions when they were near her (some people had to leave the room if their emotions were too negative--it hurt her brain to have them nearby). Another friend recently told me that she has noticed for a while that her dog responds to things that she is thinking before she even says them (she thinks "it is time for your bath" and the dog gets up and slowly and reluctantly walks into the bathroom). Apparently, according to O'Brien, research in such "mental telepathy" with animals is showing that it is happening between certain humans and certain animals.

Our attempts to practice mental telepathy with our cats have so far proved unsuccessful (or they just don't care what we think). But they are certainly helping to keep us in our "right minds."