The Polyvagal Theory - Stephen W. Porges

[Jones]

Digging through more info to see if there's a relationship between RH and a ventral vagal state. I understand from previous studies that fear and anger can narrow focus - reduce the available information that can be considered from the perceptive field and fear and anger could most likely be sympathetically driven from the perspective of PVT.

Deb Dana says that her clients report an expansion in their peripheral field of view when she helps them access a ventral vagal state. McGilchrist says that left hemisphere concentrates on particular focal details and right hemisphere has a more wholistic perception. Not sure yet, but that might mean that RH has a relationship to a ventral vagal state. Looked up some peripheral vision exercises as I thought that along the lines of Porges Safe and Sound Protocol that works on the acoustic pathways to vagal toning, there might be some visual pathways given that Dana uses nature films without the sound to similar effect. So, does being in nature prompt more peripheral vision attention? This article suggests that peripheral vision exercises might stimulate the release of acetylcholine (controls the heart rate) - I haven't yet found anything else to confirm that.

Porges states that an emergent property of a ventral vagal state is greater prosody and intonation of voice. McGilchrist says (in this video that's worthwhile watching for a lot of reasons given his fascinating work - How our brains turned fools woke) that in RH damaged people where the LH is predominant, they cannot take into account differences in intonation and adjust contextual perception to take that information into account. He gives the example of saying the word 'yes' in different moods, eg. how a yes sounds if you really don't want to do something, how a resigned yes sounds, how an exuberant yes sounds, how a victorious yes sounds, etc. The RH can take in the additional contextual information, but the LH will only hear the word yes without the additional contextual information.

 

[Arwenn]

Deb Dana says that her clients report an expansion in their peripheral field of view when she helps them access a ventral vagal state.

That’s quite interesting & I’m not sure what the correlation of vagal nerve stimulation is to peripheral vision, purely on a mechanical level (more on this below). The optic nerve is a sensory nerve, relaying information to the visual cortex, so no autonomic nerves are present. However, there are both sympathetic & parasympathetic nerves to other parts of the eye, (which regulate pupil size, lens accommodation, ocular circulation & intraocular pressure), which in turn may have secondary effects to resultant peripheral vision & certainly depth perception.

From what we have read in McGilchrist’s book, it would appear that the R hemisphere (HS) is linked to the sympathetic fright/flight system, with noradrenaline as its neurotransmitter, while the L HS controls the parasympathetic system & uses dopamine. It almost seems like it should be the other way around. However, the left HS likes the known & the familiar which makes it feel safe (parasympathetic nervous system), while the right is in correspondence with the Other/Something-beyond-the-self i.e. the unknown. It kind of makes sense then, that the R HS regulates the sympathetic (fear of the unknown), while the L HS regulates the parasympathetic nervous system. Below is a slide from our workshop discussion on The Master and his Emissary, and a webpage that summarises the differences between the HSs very well (picture is from that site).

Left Brain & Right Brain: 20 Hemisphere Differences Summarized (+ Infographic)

A detailed book summary of the left brain right brain hemisphere differences from The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist (+ Visual Infographic)

www.sloww.co

With regards to purely a mechanical (& very much a L HS congruent) point of view of biology & physiology, I think there is still so much we don’t know about how the brain communicates with itself. There are now biophotons that have been discovered in the brain, suggesting optical communication rather than just neurotransmitters and physical processes. They are also proposing that messages transmitted along nerve fibres are bi/mutildirectional instead of unidirectional, with quantum entanglement & other quantum phenomena occurring at a cellular level. A thread on biophotons here and Pierre’s research into it, which is quite fascinating.

Perhaps the ability to really see (including a widened field of vision) has more to do with which hemisphere one tends to more habitually operate out of. As McGilchrist says, it’s not just a way of seeing, but a way of being in the world (a fundamental disposition to the world), something I personally feel may be tied in with FRV and ones’s Knowledge/Awareness/Being.

 

[Jones]

It almost seems like it should be the other way around.

Yeah it does! And I think there's a clue as to what may be going on. It seems as though that when he is referring to the autonomic nervous system, McGilchrist is speaking from the old paradigm of there just being the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems operating in tension with each other. But the dorsal vagus is part of the parasympathetic system and it is not addressed in the old paradigm.

There's a paper here where Porges talks about what he refers to the vagal paradox where he addresses that. When he talks about how he learned about the vagal paradox, says that he'd written a paper about all these great things about the vagus nerve, and then was contacted by a neonatalist who had read his paper and said that they'd learned that the vagus nerve could kill you. Apparently preterm babies who are prone to bradycardia and apnea are in a state of dorsal vagal shutdown.

Now it makes sense that LH is parasympathetic because there are degrees to a dorsal vagal shut down that begin with dissociation in the mildest sense, and McGilchrists characteristics of LH, while they may be parasympathetic don't seem to fit very well with the characteristics of ventral vagal social engagement.

Still not so sure about RH being sympathetic though. It makes sense that if RH has a more wholistic view, it's more likely to be aware of potential threats in the environment, but there is a difference, I think, of being aware of threats in the environment and operating from a state of fight/flight. The listed characteristics of RH just don't seem to fit with fight/flight. If ventral vagal is social engagement, and dorsal and sympathetic describe various states and degrees of disconnection, then RH characteristics don't seem to align. However, when there is no threat, dorsal, sympathetic and vagal all have positive roles in maintaining homeostasis in the body and it's only when it's recruited during stress or threat that the sympathetic nervous system produces fight/flight so maybe I'm over thinking it.

 

[Yas]

Still not so sure about RH being sympathetic though. It makes sense that if RH has a more wholistic view, it's more likely to be aware of potential threats in the environment, but there is a difference, I think, of being aware of threats in the environment and operating from a state of fight/flight. The listed characteristics of RH just don't seem to fit with fight/flight. If ventral vagal is social engagement, and dorsal and sympathetic describe various states and degrees of disconnection, then RH characteristics don't seem to align. However, when there is no threat, dorsal, sympathetic and vagal all have positive roles in maintaining homeostasis in the body and it's only when it's recruited during stress or threat that the sympathetic nervous system produces fight/flight so maybe I'm over thinking it.

Interesting.

I agree that ventral vagal (which is parasympathetic) must have something of Right Hemisphere as it is a state that is relational, context-aware and emphatic, so it can't be completely of the Left hemisphere, IMO (of course, I just say this without being an expert on the subject).

I thought too about on the right hemisphere in terms of what McGilchrist mentions about how it is the Right Hemisphere that looks for threats/changes/novelty in the surrounding environment with peripheral vision, for example, while the Left hemisphere is more focused on details (this is more in relation to animals like birds, but still) And I thought that that is pretty similar to what some say is a ventral vagal state in which you can be calm but alert at the same time, meaning that you are aware of your environment and surroundings while still being in relaxed state and focused on your 'task' at hand, so to say.

I'm sure there's a lot still to learn and understand about how the brain works and that it may be even more complex. I guess it is important to remember that both hemispheres actually work together, or that the aim is for them to work together, just like with the nervous system states, what is good isn't to always be in just one state but to have flexibility among different states, and to be able to come back to ventral vagal, that's why the heart rate variability is a measure of health in general and nervous system regulation particularly.

Having said that, could it be that what is described as ventral vagal is actually a state in which there's input from both hemispheres in a more balanced way? I really don't know, but it's an interesting idea.

 

[Debra]

@Arwenn wrote:
“Perhaps the ability to really see (including a widened field of vision) has more to do with which hemisphere one tends to more habitually operate out of. As McGilchrist says, it’s not just a way of seeing, but a way of being in the world (a fundamental disposition to the world), something I personally feel may be tied in with FRV and ones’s Knowledge/Awareness/Being.”

From my observations and intensive studies of “Biological programs” which are described as “Biological Laws” by certain “outlier groups, my response is.... this “fundamental disposition to the world” that you mentioned, IS obviously biological laterality, not a “habit”, but a biological lateral wiring, in the brain.

“Laterality” simply means every the sentient being, is either left handed or right handed.
A left spin, or right spin, happens in the first moments of conception, and the hemisphere wiring begins.

From the “Learning GNM site”:
“In the practical application of GNM it is of utmost importance to ascertain a person’s biological handedness, because the handedness determines whether the conflict impacts on the right or left side of the brain and whether a symptom (skin rash, muscle weakness, rheumatic pain, breast cancer) occurs on the right or left side of the body, taking into account the cross-over correlation from the brain to the organ (the brain-organ relation is always unequivocal).”

NOTE: The biological handedness is established at the moment of the first cell division after conception. This is why with identical twins one is biologically right-handed and one is left-handed. Many left-handed people were retrained in early childhood in order to fit into the right-handed world. The real ratio of right-handers and left-handers is approximately 60:40.

The Five Biological Laws - The Foundation of GNM

The Five Biological Laws - The Foundation of German New Medicine (GNM)

learninggnm.com