Brain fusion: When you consciously bring your two brain hemispheres into alignment.

That’s what I was thinking earlier this week when discussing the delights of the brain with a leadership team.

We were exploring brain preferences: Specifically, whether a person’s brain currently preferred to focus on rational data or emotional data.

If your brain prefers rational data, when you walk into a meeting room, you’d recognize there aren’t enough chairs to sit all the people invited – or that the projector isn’t set up.

Your first focus is on facts and logic.

If your brain tends to prefer emotional data, when walking into that same meeting room, you might sense that two people sitting in the corner are quietly fuming at each other.

Your first focus is on emotions and energy in the room.

During the session, I shared a clip from Jill Bolte Taylor’s unforgettable TED Talk, about her stroke of insight.

Her description of losing the ability to use her rational brain – the left hemisphere of her brain – is simultaneously captivating, uplifting and frightening.

With her right hemisphere – her emotional brain – dominating, she sees herself as at one with the world. There is no boundary between her and her surroundings. She feels physically merged with all of humanity.

She is at one with the universe – in joy, peace – and it seems to me – euphoria.

But her rational brain keeps kicking in.

She knows she needs help – because she’s a brain scientist.

She’s caught between enjoying the feeling of beautiful harmony and forcing herself to note every detail of this experience – so she can use it in her research.

She labours over dialling her colleague’s number. When he speaks, his words sound like gobbledygook to her – and when she speaks, so do hers.

Miraculously, she makes it to the hospital – and survives the removal of a golf-ball-sized blood clot. And then she makes it through rehabilitation. Years of it.

The Possibility of Fusion

Eighty years ago, people marveled at the achievement of nuclear fusion.

To me, the insight from Jill Bolte Taylor’s story is that there exists a far more powerful form of fusion. The fusion that occurs when we combine the power of both our brain hemispheres. Our rational and our emotional brains.

That’s when we have the opportunity to create a different type of powerful bond.

And the good news? It doesn’t take years of scientific research to access this fusion.

It’s a moment-by-moment conscious decision to fuse emotional insight and connection, with a rational assessment of what’s important – both now and in the future.

If nuclear fusion powers stars, then brain fusion powers people.

Just as Jill Bolte Taylor did in her Ted talk, when you consciously combine rational clarity with emotional insight, you create energy that can light up any room – and any team.

When might you choose brain fusion – and what impact might you have if you did?