How the Brain Tells Stories About Itself — and how meditation rewires the storyteller

Confabulation is what the brain does when it lacks information: rather than staying silent, it invents a story to fill the gap.

Davidson and Dahl open with it because it's a vivid demonstration of how all minds work — not just brains with damage. As Davidson puts it, "the human mind and brain is a storyteller." We are constantly constructing narratives about reality and operating from those narratives, not from any "veridical perception" of what's actually there.

When Geschwind returned the next day and asked if the patient knew him, the patient said no. But when Geschwind extended his hand to shake, the patient refused.

Asked why he refused, the patient confabulated — he claimed the doctor's hand looked dirty. The conscious memory of the previous day's painful handshake was completely gone, but some other system in the brain clearly remembered.

A complete dissociation between two memory systems.

Declarative memory — consciously recognizing a person, name, or face — was gone in the patient.

Emotional memory — a more unconscious, bodily record of past experience — was clearly intact, evidenced by the protective refusal to shake hands.

The implication for ordinary life: we routinely operate from interpretations that feel like reality but are constructed by a verbal mind that doesn't have access to everything the rest of the brain knows.

Roughly 85 to 90 percent. In virtually all right-handed people, the left hemisphere is where speech production lives, in a region called Broca's area in the left temporal lobe.

Davidson calls this one of the most clearly lateralized functions in the human brain.

It doesn't — and that's part of what makes the lateralization so striking. Speech production is so strongly tied to the left hemisphere that the right-hemisphere counterpart cannot immediately compensate.

Stroke patients with damage to Broca's area show lasting impairment in producing language, despite the rest of the brain remaining largely intact. The verbal storyteller lives, quite literally, on one side.

A massive fiber bundle of approximately 200 million neurons connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.

It is the largest pathway of connection in the human brain. Every time information moves between corresponding regions on the left and right sides, it travels through the corpus callosum.

For patients whose seizures originated in one hemisphere, electrical discharges would spread through the corpus callosum to the other hemisphere, producing massive whole-brain seizures.

Cutting the connection isolated the seizure to one side and dramatically reduced symptoms — at the cost of leaving the two hemispheres unable to talk to each other. The fibers, in adults, do not grow back.

Sensory information from the left hand projects to the right hemisphere. To verbally name an object, that information has to reach the left hemisphere, which contains the speech centers.

In a split-brain patient, the corpus callosum is cut — so the signal never makes it across. The patient genuinely cannot say what they're holding.

But — and this is the striking part — if you offer them a multiple choice with pictures, they pick the correct object easily. The right hemisphere knows. It just can't speak. And here we're back to Chapter I: when the verbal mind doesn't know, it invents.

Approach and withdrawal.

Schneirla argued that any organism that exhibits behavior at all will approach and withdraw. These are the most basic behavioral decisions an organism can make in relation to its environment, traceable across all of phylogeny — from amoebas to humans.

Davidson placed two facts side by side. First: asymmetry is a fundamental property of nervous systems across species. Second: approach and withdrawal are fundamental psychological dimensions across all of life.

His hypothesis: maybe these are linked. And maybe the existing clinical observations — depression following damage to the left prefrontal cortex, inappropriate joy following damage to the right — were pointing to that same dimension, expressed in the brain's most evolutionarily recent structure.

Tibetan Buddhism — particularly its understanding of the subtle body — has a deeply elaborated framework of left/right asymmetry, with mappings to the movement of energy through different channels.

And rather than "approach and withdrawal," Buddhist psychology uses the language of attachment and aversion. Dahl notes there is "almost a perfect correlation" between the two frameworks — one arrived at through introspection, the other through neurology, both pointing to the same fundamental dimension.

Simon — a Nobel laureate in economics whose dominant metaphor for the human mind was the computer — viewed emotion as the thing that interferes with rationality and is to be banished.

Computers were the best model for "pure rationality" precisely because they don't have feelings. Davidson notes that for someone clearly very smart, this wasn't a particularly wise viewpoint. It reflected a philosophical dogma in which thought and feeling were independent and often at war.

That the prefrontal cortex is not just a cognitive structure — it has a fundamental role in emotion.

Davidson recalls this as the first time he ever read anyone speculating that the prefrontal cortex actually has something to do with emotion, not just with cognitive function. It was a quietly heretical claim at the time, and it gave Davidson the anatomical home for his asymmetry hypothesis.

He gave newborns a small squirt of sugar water, and separately a small squirt of lemon juice, recording both their facial expressions on video and their EEG simultaneously.

The infants were as young as 72 hours old.

Charles Darwin's book The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, in which Darwin claimed — based on relatively casual observation — that facial expressions of pleasure and disgust are innate and present from birth.

Davidson designed the experiment to test that claim with modern tools.

Almost every infant showed clearly different facial responses — pleasure to the sweet, disgust to the sour. The EEG showed asymmetries in the way the hypothesis predicted: more left-prefrontal activation to sweet, more right-prefrontal activation to sour.

And there were already large individual differences in baseline asymmetry from the very beginning of life — the first hint of stable trait-like differences that Davidson would spend much of his career investigating.

Because it was the first randomized controlled trial of mindfulness-based stress reduction ever conducted.

The sample was small. The design had limitations. But it was the first of its kind: 8 weeks of MBSR with stressed tech employees in Madison, Wisconsin, with EEG before and after, and a flu vaccine response measurement at the end.

Brain asymmetry. Meditators showed a measurable shift toward greater left-prefrontal activation over the course of training — the "approach" direction.

Antibody response to a flu vaccine. Meditators showed a more robust antibody response than untreated controls, measured via blood draws before and after the vaccine.

Mind, brain, and immune system, in one study. Novel findings for 2003 — and the reason the paper has been cited so heavily since.

Not extreme left-prefrontal activation.

The simple "left equals positive emotion" framework breaks down at high levels of practice. Davidson suggests there may be an inverted-U pattern, and that prefrontal asymmetry is reflecting something more complex than positive vs. negative emotion alone.

This is one reason he hasn't continued this line of work to any significant degree.

Rather than parsing emotion as positive vs. negative or approach vs. withdrawal, parse it as virtuous vs. unvirtuous:

Emotions that lead toward greater awareness, connection, insight, and purpose — versus emotions that detract from those qualities.

This adds nuance the original framework lacked, and it maps more cleanly onto what advanced practitioners' brains seem to be doing. It's also the framework that animates the four-pillar model at the center of Davidson and Dahl's current work.