Hemispherical Thinker

Is science going soft? At the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in San Francisco in February, 750 scientists, the second biggest crowd of the meeting, turned out to hear Dr. Robert Ornstein, 32, discourse on the "psychology of consciousness." For Ornstein, a researcher at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, crowds are nothing new. Not only scientists but philosophy students and yoga practitioners are drawn to hear him because of his venturesome effort to reunite science and spirit, reason and intuition.

Western man's step-by-step, linear, analytic mode of knowledge has enriched him, Ornstein believes, but has also impoverished him by draining out, or underground, his intuition and more holistic ways of perceiving. What Ornstein is after is "a confluence" of the two streams of knowledge--the techniques of the lab joined to the equally valid but vastly different concerns of mystics like the Sufis, with whose tales he regales his audiences.

Nowhere, Ornstein believes, is that confluence more needed than in psychology, which he contends has been too narrowly confined by the behaviorists and the positivists. He wants to return to the broader preoccupation with consciousness and subconsciousness shared by earlier thinkers, including his idol William James. The road back has led Ornstein to Zen and the I Ching.

Alpha Waves. It has also led him to psychological research on the two hemispheres of the brain, following the work pioneered more than a decade ago by Caltech's Roger Sperry. Researchers have subsequently found that the brain's left hemisphere, which controls the right side of the body, is predominantly involved with analytical thinking. The right, which controls the left side of the body, is primarily responsible for artistic endeavor and intuition.

Ornstein and a colleague have just launched a series of experiments to determine whether individuals can be taught to use one brain hemisphere or the other at will. EEG electrodes applied to both sides of the scalp pick up the subject's alpha waves (brain rhythms of a person awake but relaxed). These are electronically converted into sounds, which are fed into each ear. The effect, says Ornstein, "is to allow the person to hear tones varying with the activity of each hemisphere." The subject can then attempt to concentrate with one hemisphere and test his success by the relative volume of tones he hears. Thus Ornstein is testing one of his theses: that the practices of ancient esoteric traditions, like the development of intuition, can be enhanced by modern technology. We should not, he warns, be limited by what we believe is possible.

Many of Ornstein's ideas are spelled out in a book, The Psychology of Consciousness, published in 1972 and adopted for classroom use by more than 300 colleges and universities in twelve different departments ranging from biology to religion. Says Robert Livingston, professor of neuroscience at the University of California in San Diego: "Ornstein does an outstanding job of communicating ideas and giving a degree of legitimatization in areas which would be considered a little bizarre from the point of view of classical psychology." Says Assistant Professor of Psychology Louise Ludwig of Los Angeles City College: "Ideas about consciousness, creativity, even E.S.P., have been creeping back into psychology over the past five years. I use some of Ornstein's points in class to stimulate students' creativity about themselves."

Born in Brooklyn, Ornstein was a two-time citywide high school math champion and wavered between physics and poetry before compromising on psychology at Queens College. He got his doctorate at Stanford, writing his thesis on the perception of time; later he collaborated with Psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo on a book called On the Psychology of Meditation. Ornstein is currently at work on seven more books. He is also teaching at the U.C. Medical Center in San Francisco, lecturing, traveling and organizing symposia on the nature of consciousness. A bachelor, he tools around in a hot orange Porsche 914 and lives on a Los Altos mini-estate complete with sun deck and swimming pool. He takes no time out for meditation. "I'm not convinced it's good for you, or more personally, that it's good for me," he says. He is far more interested in pursuing his electronic studies of brain activity, the kind of work well suited to the "very linear, left-hemisphere person" he believes himself to be.

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