Hey Dude, Let's Inherit the Kingdom

If you want to inherit the kingdom, look with the eyes of the little child. Or maybe drink a few cocktails.

Here's the thing about kids: Their prefrontal cortexes aren't developed. Their PFCs don't fully develop until their early twenties.

PFCs control analytical thinking. It is often said that they perform "executive functions" (see below).

So even though the PFC exists in both hemispheres, I'm guessing it leans left, so to speak, with the result that patients with focal strikes in the left prefrontal cortex outperform normal people in creative problem-solving tasks that require breaking away from rule-based thinking. The Matter with Things, 259

If we weaken the PFC, we weaken the left hemisphere's grip. We can weaken the PFC by cultivating the mind of the child. By doing so, we keep ourselves young, which means we keep ourselves flexible and creative.

These are good things.

I can see why Cosmo Landesman admires people who are like that.

From bohemian to bourgeoise

I had a very bohemian druggy adolescence. My parents were old bohemians. For Christmas they regularly gave my brother and me hashish

The Spectator WorldCosmo Landesman

The problem is, he equates it with "drunks and stoners." There's a lot of truth there, but we don't have to be a drunk or stoner to keep our PFC in service to the right hemisphere instead of letting it become a foot soldier in the left hemisphere's efforts to usurp the right hemisphere's rightful reign.

We can cultivate the eyes of the child in all sorts of ways. Christ, after all, wasn't suggesting his followers drop acid in order to inherit the kingdom.

Any efforts to weaken the PFC's left-hemispheric sway over our brains help us cultivate the eyes of the child.

Do nothing.

Do pointless things.

Read a book for pleasure.

Go Zen.

Mindfulness meditation (see McGilchrist video below).

Flourishing - The Daily Eudemon

If you want to flourish, you need to be connected to full reality. If you want to be connected to full reality, you need to be connected to the Tao. If you want to be connected to the Tao, you need your right hemisphere to reclaim its rightful role as the master.

The Daily EudemonTDE

Related

Neuroscientist argues the left side of our brains have taken over our minds | CBC Radio

Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist argues that Western society has become too dominated by the left hemisphere of our brains — obsessed with data and sorting things into categories. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere of our brains which understand relationships and context has been sidelined.

CBC

In their earliest years, children are dominated by the right hemisphere. "As children get older, the left hemisphere matures. It starts showing its talent for spoken and written language, and school curricula move away from areas where the right hemisphere is really in its element. 'There is a kind of westernization, or left hemispherization, of the way we approach the world.' . . . 'The development of a kind of technical, problem-solving attitude to our lives, certainly in education. Almost everybody on the planet now goes to the same kind of school, and your life trajectory is determined by how good you are at that kind of learning. . . . [A left hemispheric imbalance] is institutionalized, it's in the bone marrow, of our eduction.'"