For example, lately, at the behest of one of my collaborators (shout-out to Ryan!) as I mentioned a couple of posts back, I’ve been listening to Daniel Siegel’s audiobook, The Neurobiology of We. Siegel’s work as a psychiatrist is mostly centered around healing trauma. In order to do that, he preaches his version of the concept of integration. Using a soft version of the left-brain and right brain understanding of the brain, he differentiates this into discussing how the left neocortex and right neocortex — the big, thinking cap that wraps itself around our limbic/emotional system– operates.
Siegel assigns the primary function of the left-brain neocortex to storing and processing explicitknowledge — in his words, the fragments of events and such that the brain receives from the various sensory organs (sight, sound, etc.) and body parts that receive the stimuli from given events, as well as trauma. He then assigns the primary function of the right-brain neocortex to a holistic, experiential interpretation and integration of those pieces of information on the left. The integrator is the hippocampus — part of the limbic system that sits between the two and serves important roles in short term memory, and has recently been shown to have interesting effects in spatial and temporal regulation.