ABSTRACT
The fact that the brain is a highly specialized social organ of adaptation is both good news and bad news. Right-brain functions often appear to parallel Freud’s notion of the unconscious. They develop earlier and are guided by emotional and bodily reactions, and their nonlinear mode of processing allows for multiple overlapping realities. The dominance of the right hemisphere for bodily and emotional functioning and its ability to process this information reflexively and unconsciously have freed the left cortex to attend more to the environment and to engage in abstract reasoning. The general theory rests on a dissociation of the somatic and emotional networks biased toward the right hemisphere from those primarily responsible for organizing self-awareness and language biased toward the left. Just as the left hemisphere can block emotional and visceral input from the right, the right hemisphere can override normal states of consciousness in reaction to threat.
