Neuropsychology of the Cerebral Hemispheres
Keith Happawana
The Psychology of Awakening 2025 DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-06290-1_2 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Keywords | Left hemisphere Right hemisphere Contextual Focused attention Executive attention Sustained attention Neuropsychology |
| Key points | Argues that the left hemisphere's symbolic, goal-oriented processing and the right hemisphere's global, contextualized processing both offer incomplete views of reality, and that training attention, primarily a right-hemisphere function, is key to deeper realizations of reality. |
Abstract
Neuropsychological functions of the left and right hemispheres Right hemispheres are discussed with the purpose of showing that humans have at least two fundamental ways of perceiving reality. The left hemisphere Left hemisphere is argued to be adept at re-presenting reality into symbols, which makes reality easier to manipulate for goal-directed behaviors Behaviors . The trade-off is that mental health Mental health can suffer through adherence to language Language , fixation on narrow ways to attend to information, and the tendency for functions associated with the left hemisphere Left hemisphere to not contextualize information. The right hemisphere Right hemispheres is involved with globalized, novel, and contextualized Contextualized views of reality, which are more focused on nonreductive information analysis. An argument is made that both hemispheric views of reality are inadequate to positively conceptualize the nature of ultimate reality, so maintaining a balance between both sets of functions is most important. Attention, which is primarily associated with functions of the right hemisphere Right hemispheres , is also discussed. Underlying neural mechanisms, types of attention, and a basic working model of attention are all given with the premise that training attention is a primary psychological mechanism that allows for deeper realizations of what reality is (or is not).
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |