In the 1980’s, neuroimaging researchers began to notice striking differences between brain-injured people, depending on whether their injury was to the left or the right hemisphere of the brain. People who had left-hemisphere injuries struggled with speech, and certain mechanical tasks. But they could still relate to other human beings, appreciate beautiful music, literature, and nature, and understand subtle emotional context. People who had injured the right hemisphere, on the other hand, struggled less with speech, and could complete more practical tasks. But they had lost the ability to understand nuance. In a way, they started to think more like machines, becoming inclined to lump things into broad categories, as their perspectives became more disembodied, and disconnected from larger contexts. They also became more self-interested, and had trouble relating to humans and other living things in an intersubjective way (in other words, as two conscious minds relate). They started relating to everything outside of themselves more as if it were a lifeless object.
The pop-psychology conception of the left and right brain (the left brain is logical; the right brain creative), has largely been debunked; both hemispheres of the brain are involved in almost all major functions. But researchers found there were unmistakeable differences between the hemispheres, not so much in what they do as in how they do it.
Psychiatrist and neuroimaging researcher Iain McGilchrist has proposed the theory that, throughout most of human evolution, the more holistic, compassionate right hemisphere of the brain was essentially in the lead, while the narrowly focused, mechanical left hemisphere of the brain was there to assist with practical tasks. But at some point in European history, their roles got reversed. The left brain took control, and pushed the right brain to the side. This accelerated during the Industrial Revolution—when machines, a left brain creation, became so powerful and so prevalent.
In a way, this theory meshes cleanly with Pyne’s theory of second and third fire. Second fire exists in an intersubjective relationship with human beings, and feels like the product of a right-hemisphere-dominant way of existing in the world. As Amy Cardinal Christianson, an Indigenous fire expert in Canada, explains: “We coexist with fire, we need fire and fire needs us. It’s a different way of looking at the forest.”
Third fire, on the other hand, and the machines in which it burns, feel to me like the products of the left hemisphere of the brain, and of the amnesiac cultures which, as Pyne explains, lost their “felt” (embodied) sense of how to relate to fire, and came to see it as “a good servant, but bad master.”
![Forest Fire, 1910 - Wallace [1910]](https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines/objects/im-07.jpg)
Experts in trauma are also researching the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how they manifest in traumatized people. When a person is traumatized, particularly if they were traumatized in childhood, whole regions of the brain that are active in others may appear dark if their brains are scanned, while other unexpected regions light up. This goes some way toward answering the question put by Thenon (observer of the ‘lullaby boy’) about why some people remain cool in terrifying situations, while others end up panicked, or singing in the stream. It may have to do with the ways that trauma in childhood, or a lack thereof, shaped their brain.
Psychiatrist and researcher Bessel van der Kolk discusses this in his seminal book, The Body Keeps the Score. When we experience something terrifying, it is immediately stored by the back right brain—the part that stores raw, unfiltered emotion. This part of the brain is so fast that we may never even process an experience consciously, before it is stowed away there, in darkness.
This processing error is a phenomenon that many of us are familiar with—the suppression of traumatic memories. The instinct for suppression, though helpful in the short-term, can often lead to problems with memory, amnesia, and to explosive, erratic, or destructive behavior in the future. In that way, the suppression of trauma feels like a direct analogy, as well as an explanation, for the suppression of fire.
In order to be processed, traumatic memories have to be unlocked from the back of the right brain and processed through the fronts of our right and left hemispheres. This is how we contextualize them, place them in the past, and, ultimately, make sense of them as a part of the ongoing narrative of our lives. Both hemispheres need to work together on this in order for it to be accomplished.
But in traumatized people, the hemispheres have even fewer connections than they do in others. The front of the right hemisphere tends to show up unusually dark on brain scans. With this pathway blocked, the front of the left brain can no longer makes sense of emotions in context. When it feels the fear emanating from the back of the right hemisphere—what we might call a flashback—all it can do is invent a story in order to keep itself safe. A story that may be driven by a mixture of terror and self-interest.
When we try to understand fire with the frightened, disoriented, left hemisphere alone, we see it as the enemy, the object. We lose all conception of a past in which we might have existed in a different relationship to it. We decide that it is encroaching on our communities, our homes, and that we are entitled to control it. The extreme, reactionary, 10 a.m. policy, in response to the Great Fire of 1910, makes some sense in this light.
Unfortunately, when we sever ourselves from the past and opt for total suppression, we also lose any ability we might have had to predict the future. We exist on a free floating island of what feels like an unprecedented present. It may begin to seem like anything could happen. Like everything might burn.
In the end of his account, Thenon explains: “The cook’s condition had improved so much that he had no further need of attention from us. However, he did not get back to a normal state while here, but I was informed some weeks later that he had entirely recovered.”
Of the other, we get only a sentence:
“The ‘lullaby boy’ was taken to an asylum.”