Listening to Our Body With the Right Brain

& The Loss of Embodiment With Right Hemisphere Damage

Embodiment & The Right Brain

In the recent newsletter, I mentioned that “Our ability to feel embodied is a job for our brain’s right hemisphere. Our left hemisphere sees our body as a thing or rather a sum of things.” This understanding comes from those who have had damage to the right hemisphere.  

Each hemisphere controls the movement and receives sensations from the opposite side of the body.  If either hemisphere is damaged, the opposite side doesn’t move or feel sensations. In the case of a right hemisphere stroke, the still intact left hemisphere only recognizes the opposite side of the body that it controls.  It is unable to make sense of the body as a whole and thus the left side of the body.  Without the right hemisphere, we are disembodied. 

In Dr. Iain McGilcrist’s book, The Master and His Emissary, there are examples of right hemisphere damage resulting in the person thinking the left arm is not theirs or insisting that it belonged to someone else. While this damage can be due to a right hemisphere stroke, it can also be replicated by anesthetizing the right hemisphere.

With a left hemisphere stroke (and thus an intact right hemisphere), the person still has a sense of their entire body including the part they can’t feel or move. 

This fairly recent study looks further at the results right hemisphere damage:

Bodily self-recognition in patients with pathological embodiment

Listening to Our Body With the Right Hemisphere 

Not surprisingly, another ability of the right hemisphere is listening to our body. The right hemisphere is more closely linked to physiological changes that occur in the body when we experience emotion.  

Our autonomic nervous system, which starts in the brain stem and spinal cord controls automatic functions that happen beyond the brain’s conscious awareness.  

Part of that system - our sympathetic nervous system (which puts us into a fight or flight response) appears to be more closely linked with the right brain.  The parasympathetic (think vagus), which puts us into rest and digest, appears to be more closely linked with the left brain.