UN Finally Gets Some Brains

By Jason Lim

I admit that the title to this week's column could be sarcastic.

In a way, it's a sort of ``bait and switch'' because this week's column is not about me bashing the supposed ineffectiveness of the leaders of the United Nations.

This column is actually about an interesting conference that I attended last week at the United Nations. It was about the human brain. Literally.

Which leaves me thinking that, on second thoughts, the title is actually not a ``bait and switch" because this column is about the brain. And it is about the brain being talked about at the U.N.

In that light, the title of the column is factually correct because it is the first time that a conference was hosted at the U.N. with the specific purpose of talking about the human brain, as it relates to peacemaking across different societies. Ergo, the U.N. finally gets a brain. A slight play on words but certainly not sarcastic.

The title is only seemingly sarcastic because we ― as human beings ― have a wonderful organ called the brain that allows us to perceive sarcasm, puns, and other plays on languages. This wonderful capacity allows us to communicate on a more figurative level, enriching the social context of our interactions.

However, such interactions are only possible if we have a healthy brain. According to a June 3, 2008 N.Y. Times article by Dan Hurley, degeneration to a section of the right hemisphere of the brain deprived patients of the ability to detect sarcasm because their brains could no longer process and interpret social contexts.

``The left hemisphere deals with language in a narrow sense, the understanding of individual words and sentences," the article quotes Dr. Chatterjee of Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. ``But it's now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal requires the right hemisphere."

The importance of the right brain in processing the appropriate social context ― defined as social cognition ― was the key theme at the U.N. Brain Education conference.

Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist at Harvard who suffered a massive stroke to her left brain at age 37, spoke about how the functional disintegration of her left brain allowed her to experience reality through the inclusive awareness of her right brain. This created an awareness of herself as being a holistic part of everything around her, with a sea of energy seamlessly connecting everything together. Paraphrasing her words, Taylor began to see and experience her reality through the prism of her ``holistic" right brain, allowing her to escape the ego-centered, individual reality of her left ``logical'' brain. ``I felt like a genie liberated from a bottle,'' she recalled the moment of her stroke.

For obvious reasons, Taylor's experience has enormous consequences for the U.N.'s main mission of eradicating the ``scourge of war.'' If everyone's brain could be ``educated'' or ``trained'' to perceive reality through his or her right brain and relate to others through this prism of interconnectedness that she so vividly describes, then the whole ``social context" of our human interactions would become radically different from the ``us vs. them'' social context that usually governs interactions today. Peace would come naturally because the social context that necessitated wars would no longer be the dominant reality governing our awareness.

This is not the same as medicating someone to be artificially calm or brainwashing someone to be passively obedient. This is about letting someone know that reality is a state of social awareness that you actually have an option to choose. You can choose to experience reality through your left or right brain according to the needs of the moment. In a way, this is all about having a choice to define the reality through which you want to experience the world. It's empowering.

At the same time, it's non-practical if everyone had to undergo a debilitating stroke to experience this new awareness. Also, it's not much help to have one person out of every 100 proclaim the wonder of Oneness while the 99 are at each other's throats. A lone, enlightened prophet model will not make the U.N.'s ideals come true. We've been there and tried that.

This was the challenge that Ilchi Lee, President of International Brain Education Association (IBREA), the hosting NGO, addressed through his brain education method. He presented five distinct steps in which a person can retrain his or her brain to increase its innate capacity to process reality in the holistic way that Taylor experienced. In short, his organization is seeking to reproduce what happened to Jill Taylor, but through education. He wants nothing less than to redefine how we experience the world and each other.

All this might sound farfetched, except for the fact that IBREA obtained consultative status with the U.N. last July and that over 500 people from 10 nations, including 80 school teachers in the NYC school system, showed up to hear what these speakers had to say. Perhaps they know something I don't. Which certainly wouldn't be the first time.

Oh, by the way, I am being sarcastic. Or self-deprecating. Or both. I am confused.

Jason Lim is a research fellow at the Harvard Korea Institute, researching Asian leadership models. He can be reached at jasonlim@post.harvard.edu.