What is a healthy brain?

This is a brain/mind that is integrated, one that can balance emotion and logic, intuition and reason. In our graphic novel, Toni and Charlie struggle to achieve this. Both of these characters have become numb and despondent as a result of trauma. We watch as they struggle towards recovery. Our Deck of Cards is designed to help the reader who may have suffered trauma forge a path toward a better present and future for him/herself.

We talk in the novel about the Window of Tolerance, and how we aim to be in the Comfort Zone, that space between being so agitated that you’re anxious and so withdrawn that you’re depressed. Not to say we shouldn’t be challenged. Some days we want to be in the upper edges of the Comfort Zone so we are excited and stimulated but not so much that we are overwhelmed. Similarly, some days we may want to be closer to under-arousal so we can chill and relax.

Toni tends towards the right (brain), the intuitive and artistic, while Lulu tends towards the left, logical and rational. While this is generally true of the hemispheres, according to Ian McGilchrist, author of the encyclopedic The Master and His Emissary, the difference between the two hemispheres is not so much about what they actually do but in the differing perspectives taken. 

The left hemisphere is narrower in focus and relatively inflexible. Specialized for speech, it deals more with individual pieces of information. The intellectual power of the left hemisphere lies in its ability to abstract, which can be viewed as detaching something from its context or looking at it in isolation, together with its capacity to categorize things once they have been abstracted. 

The right hemisphere deals with the total Gestalt, the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Specializing in nonverbal communication, it is broader in focus, such as feeling part of something larger than oneself, and is capable of frameshifts. The right understands metaphor and is concerned with social and emotional functioning and mediating new experience and information. Psychotherapy, for the most part, is right brain to right brain communication. 

Ultimately, one must integrate the workings of the two hemispheres.Our characters are all attempting this, and in the Deck of Cards, we give you tools to do so as well.