The first part of the seven part Dominance in Duality series. Full series playlist here:    • Dominance in Duality   Our brains and perspectives are fundamentally dualistic: conscious existence is composed of an endless rhythmic war between our reductionistic and holistic modes of perception, more simply known as ‘logic’ and ‘emotion’. But this duality is inherently imbalanced, which we can see clearly in the structure and function of our brains. In this series which I call “dominance in duality” we will explore how the projection of these neurological imbalances shapes our conscious experience. In my first video on ‘The Paradox Perspective’ I described the two processing ‘streams’ through which information flows within our brains. As a quick review, the ventral stream, which runs down and around, processes information about specific objects or ‘what’ things are. The dorsal stream, which runs up and over, processes information about relationships in time and space, or ‘where’ we are compared with our surroundings. The nature of the dorsal stream is holistic and global, since it deals with relative motion -- we cannot assign a spatiotemporal position to an object if it does not have a relationship with another object. A single, solitary particle does not move, because it has no frame of reference, so there is nothing else to measure its movement against. In the dorsal stream the world is a continuous and intricately connected web. This is a perceptual reality in which everything is related to everything else, no matter how tenuously. On the other hand, the ventral stream operates in a local, reductionist way, since it deals with categorization. One of the ways that the ventral stream, or the ‘what’ pathway, performs this task of disconnection is with language.The right side of the brain is important for linguistic communication, but neuroscientists do not have specific names for the language processing centers of the right hemisphere. And this makes a fascinating sort of sense, because it is our left brain that operates in the domain of specific words, and, in linguistic reality, it is not worth it (or not possible) to apply specific labels to the emotional and non-literal aspects of perception. This is one of many symptoms of the dominance that the left brain exerts over the right. In this series of videos on “dominance in duality,” we will explore how the inequalities between the sides of our brains are reflected in every aspect of our perceptual realities -- from the physical organization of our body, to our abstract conceptual spaces, and even in our culture and society. Despite the inequalities, we need to remember that both sides of this story are required to have a coherent worldview. Communication between the two information streams results in a mental workspace. And to us, this integration literally feels like a space that is filled with a stable sense of self, a representation of our environments, and the meaning that emerges when the two aspects interact. This space and its contents compose our subjective experience -- it is a dynamic map of who we are and how we relate to the things and context around us, including ourselves. The way that we represent ourselves in relation to a representation of ourselves creates an endless hallway effect that makes our internal space feel defined but boundless, recursive but ever-changing, and deterministic but infinitely powerful: a contradictory combination of characteristics that many people call ‘consciousness.’ In the next video we will start to explore this space more deeply so we can build to a thorough explanation and understanding of our conscious existence. Songs: "Ladybird" by Dlay