Right brain magic
Neuroscience, faculty X, flow-states, divination, and ESP
This is an essay on the interrelation between brain lateralisation and magical phenomena. I’ll be drawing from Iain McGilchrist’s seminal work The Master and His Emissary (2009), which outlines the differences be the left and right brain hemispheres and then projects these onto history and culture at large.
First a little housekeeping. The human brain is a very enigmatic organ. While the differences between the hemispheres are very real, there are people who break the mold. There exist anomalous people with all kinds of atypical lateralisation. Changes that happen to the brain in infancy can, due to plasticity, contradict the more fixed differences in an adult. There are also people who have grown up with large parts of their brains missing, including entire lobes, who nevertheless function. I won’t be exploring these anomalies or products of infant brain plasticity here, but know for now that they exist. The subject is fascinating in its own right.
Secondly, while I’m relating brains to magic here, I am not a materialist. I am convinced that a mind is something quite different, in concept, to a brain. To my mind this can be shown scientifically, without recourse to belief. For a detailed explanation of this, read my book Pragmatic Magical Thinking, especially the chapter Why You Aren’t Just Your Brain.
For now it is sufficient to admit that brains play a primary role in our ability to think, perceive and remember. They aren’t however the only thing going on, and we don’t fully understand how brains produce thoughts or memories, let alone consciousness. In extreme cases there have been anomalies where comatose patients with very minimal brain activity have still been able to perceive and form memories1. Neuroscience also now understands that there are other cognitive regions compose of neurons in the spinal cord, the gut (enteric nervous system), and in the heart (intracardiac nervous system). These all contribute to our living experience in ways we still don’t really understand, suggesting that cognition is ‘embodied’ and not entirely located ‘in the head’.
Nevertheless, let’s plow on. Even with anomalies and leaving out complicating factors, the left/right brain split is a fantastic heuristic, based on a wealth of evidence. Magic is the study of symbols and symbolically, the implications of the left/right are profound.
Brain Lateralisation
The left brain is a sculptor. Something comes into being through being pared away. It discovers what ‘is’ by investigating ‘what it isn’t’. The human ordered world around us can be considered, to a large extent, a product of left-brain organisation. The left hemisphere is the primary seat of language, details, and of ‘cause and effect’. It relates to the world in a ‘ground up’ fashion, from details to generalities.
The right-brain deals with pattern recognition, relationships, exploration, metaphor, and novelty. It relates to the world in a ‘top down’ fashion. It sees ‘gestalt’ or ‘whole’ concepts first. When you dream, the left side of the brain is (normally) attenuated resulting in a largely right-brained experience of symbols, feeling, ‘drifting time’ and interconnected meaning. When you dream, nothing stays still, as the right side of the brain is not concerned with locking things down.
Dreaming can however occur as attenuation of either hemisphere. Typical dreaming is right-sided, and a good indicator of what it might feel like to have the left side of the brain turned off. These dreams can be flowing, symbolic, and emotional. Perceptions have trouble staying still or consistent and time doesn’t function normally.
Left-sided dreams are comparatively rare. Sleep-talking is left-sided dreaming. Sleep-talkers are prone to coming up with a lot of excuses as to why they aren’t making a lot of sense and why they ‘aren’t asleep’. This is a left-brain tendency. Once the dreamer awakes they will generally not remember the conversation and will then admit they were sleep-talking.
Language, as a mostly left-brained activity. It ‘locks down’ concepts into your reality. This tendency has also been used throughout philosophy and theology in the idea that the world was spoken into existence by a deity. In Christianity, as discussed in my previous article, this is the ‘Logos’, the ordering principle of the universe, which is translated as ‘the word’ in most English Bibles. The idea is at least as old as the Ancient Egyptians, where the god Atum spoke the universe (and himself) into being.
A lot of magic uses this mytheme. The word ‘spell’ comes from Old-English, meaning ‘to announce’ or ‘to speak’. For the purposes of this article we can consider the speaking in rituals as a way to condition the left-brain, and therefore our ‘reality tunnel’.
When the left brain has ‘locked down’ too hard on a thought pattern, or habit, ritual, art, images and music can unblock it. This is backed up by modern psychology, where it is now generally understood that habits are more efficiently broken through changing our behaviour rather than our thoughts or beliefs. This is partly the right-brain helping the left-brain overcome its quagmires.
Magic functions through right-brained ‘synchronicity’ or through linked meaning rather than causality. This is why it is so hard to pin down. When the right brain solves problems of makes decisions, it often feels ‘intuitive’. The right side of the brain, being unable to speak, generally doesn’t explain itself.
Let’s take a look at what the different sides of the brain specialise in. Clearly these lists won’t be exhaustive, but will at least give you an overview
Left hemisphere:
• Most speech and language.
• Mechanical thinking.
• Familiarity. The left side is always comparing things to what it already knows, and it usually prefers what it knows over what is new.
• Categories.
• Grasping (literally or metaphorically).
• Parts and details rather than whole concepts.
• Machines, objects, tools, and artificial things.
• Details, abstractions,
• The left side doesn’t process empathy well.
• The left notices the colour red.
• Prefers horizontal orientation (as in most written languages).
• Narrow-field, and in-focus vision.
• Denial.
• Malice.
• Generation of justifications to fit the ‘facts’ at hand.
• Inductive reasoning: ground up thinking, from specific to general.
• When the left brain reads emotions from faces it does so by looking at the mouth and not the upper part of the face. Anger is one exception amongst emotions, it is a left-sided emotion.
• Mania is overactivity on the left side.
Most importantly for magicians, the left side keeps track of cause and effect. In many cases the left side can also predict, and believe in causes where they weren’t actually present. For instance, asking ‘who moved my car keys?’, just before you find that you shifted them yourself. That these cause and effect stories don’t always reflect reality will become important to us later on.
Right hemisphere:
• Relationships.
• Living things.
• Understanding things as ‘people’ (even if they are animals, plants or inanimate objects).
• Wholes, and ‘gestalt’ conceptions rather than parts.
• Desires novelty and exploration.
• Associative thinking, humour and metaphor.
• Empathy.
• Identification with others and theory of mind2.
• The right perceives a lot more of one’s environment than the left. Most perceptions start on the right side and pieces are then shifted to the left as problems need to be solved.
• ‘Reading people’, and most emotional processing.
• The right brain decreases interest if something is deemed ‘non-living’ or ‘not a person’. This is in contrast to the left side which is prone to treating people like objects, and can be fixated ton objects, for instance, people who collect things.
• Group mediation, and group experiences.
• Most emotions, emotional expression, and the bodily experience of them.
• When reading the emotions the right side prefers the eyes, in contrast to the left which prefers the mouth.
• Facial recognition.
• The ability to cry.
• Prefers the colour green.
• Prefers vertical orientation.
• Narrative rather than separate ‘facts’.
• Deductive reasoning: Top down thinking from general to specific.
• The left is the hemisphere of representation, where signs are substituted for direct experience.
• Wide-field a peripheral vision (low focus).
Only the right parietal lobe has an ‘image’ of the whole body (associated with body dysmorphia). It holds the idea of the body as an identity, it ‘is a body’. The left feels detached from the body, it ‘has a body’.
Both Hemispheres:
• Positive emotions.
• Colour perception right, colour identification left.
• Language is both hemispheres and both relate to different aspects of it. The left side speaks and deals with syntax and vocabulary. The right deals in understanding context, tone, emotional significance, metaphor, humour, and irony.
• Left damaged children are poorer at written language, whereas right damaged children are worse on written language, reading and maths. Language therefore has aspects on both sides, though ‘speaking’ is dependent on left activity.
• In general, mathematical calculations activate more strongly on the right. Addition and subtraction activate the right parietal lobe, whereas multiplication (remembrance of ‘times tables’) is the left hemisphere. Calculating prodigies appear to use more right brain strategies, especially episodic memory3. Maths is therefore a bilateral activity. In Maths, absolute numbers would be more the left brain and numbers signifying relationships would be the right. The left manipulates symbols and the right has the goal in mind.
• Winning is associated with activation of the left amygdala, losing with right amygdala activation.
• Sadness and empathy are highly correlated. Psychopaths who have no sense of guilt, shame or responsibility, have deficits in the right frontal lobe, particularly the right ventromedial and orbitofrontal cortex.
• Depression is more often in the right, with low left brain activity. When depression does occur in the left brain (as right brain hypoactivity), it presents as indifference, apathy, vague lifelessness in contrast to anxiety or disturbed feelings (which are right sided). In both cases these may have more to do with how we process depression than being it’s cause.
• Autism presents as increased brain symmetry. The hemispheres don’t specialise as much as they do in neurotypicals. This causes behaviours that appear left-dominant from the outside, and difficulty with many tasks that are normally right-dominant.
Ironically the ‘political right’ represents values and ideas that are, on average, more left-brained, and the ‘political left’, represents values that are more right-brained.
Magical associations
As a thought experiment, if we were to take the seven classical planets from astrology, and their corresponding gods and qualities, we could say the following. (These are my own formulations, and they could be argued.)
Left side:
• Saturn: That which is old and familiar. That which restricts and recedes. Pessimism. Conservatism. Introversion. Solitary depression and apathy. Bad luck.
• Mars: That which is competitive. Anger. The desire to have more. The will to power. Sexual desire relating to bodies. Pursuit of one’s desires. Conflict and tension.
• Sun: The ego and self. Wakefulness. That which is explicit rather than hidden.
Right side:
• Jupiter: Exploration and expanding one’s horizons and territory. Optimism. Extroversion. Good luck.
• Venus: Love, charm, and attracting people. The desire to be beautiful. Sexual desire relating to relationships. Resolution of conflict, diplomacy and getting along.
• Moon: The emotions. Dreaming. That which is implicit or hidden.
Both sides:
• Mercury: Informations flows, commerce, organisation, language and poetry, tricks and magic.
There are of course many ways one could designate magical symbols to right, left or mixed sides. Some systems such as the Sephiroth from Kabbalah or extended Chakra systems involving the Nadis, explicitly lay things out in left and right orientations. Many of these associations are remarkably close to our current understanding of brain hemispheres, which I find very curious.
Left Brain magic
Many magical systems serve to overload the left brain with puzzles such as gematria, where Hebrew or Greek words are given a number value, via their their letters. In these languages, numerals are represented by letters, and these cultures tend to value numerology highly.
For example, in Hebrew, the word Shalom (שלום) – "Peace", has four letters and a number value of 376.
• Shin (ש) = 300
• Lamed (ל) = 30
• Vav (ו) = 6,
• Mem (ם) = 40
300 + 30 + 6 + 40 = 376
Once this ‘left brain’ puzzle is completed we can then compare the meaning and connotations of Shalom, with other words that also add up to 376, creating a more right-brained set of relations and meanings, that can bring the words to life. For instance, the value 376 also gives us:
מושל Moshel: Ruler / Governor
שוכן Shochen: Dweller / Resident
My right brain can join the three concepts: ‘peace’, ‘ruler’ and ‘dweller’ to form a story about how the best governance of city residents must embody the principle of Shalom (peace).
If you keep going with this type of thinking, what started as a puzzle becomes populated by meanings that have relationships with each other, almost like they are living things.
In the Western, Jewish, and Islamic magical traditions, there is a strong relationship between words and spirits in this way. In fact there are several systems, for instance, the Jewish Shem HaMephoransh, where angel names are constructed by the rearrangement of letters. It is implied that the creation of new words in this way creates new angels who can then be invoked as spirit helpers4.
By saturating the mind with a symbol set, the right side of the brain can then use the symbolic elements to ‘join the dots’ with phenomena out I the world. This seems to generate synchronistic events. Being events that stand out as being especially meaningful and sharing meaning with the spell. In this way the ordinary apparent laws of cause and effect appear to break down.
Causal reasoning vs linked meaning
Western culture has for centuries, been very preoccupied with left-brain thinking, especially cause and effect. One of the most powerful results of studying and practising magic for me, has been learning to overcome this left tendency and to instead see the world in a more associative, symbolic way. This in turn has allowed me to recognise a lot of practicality and pragmatism in more ‘right-brained’, spiritual, or magical modes of thought, including those of my ancestors or in other cultures.
I have come to the conclusion that results in magic are most dramatic when one entirely let’s go of ‘cause and effect’ and instead focuses on these linked meaningful events.
I believe this is what Carl Jung was proposing with his idea of synchronicities: events that impress on the psyche through meaning, rather than causality. We seem especially primed to notice these events, and magical practice is in part the increased ability to notice them.
I believe magic works better when you let go of the idea that a spell ‘causes’ anything, and instead embrace the idea spells result in uncanny meaningful events that line up with the symbolism of the ritual.
This way of thinking can be difficult at first for people educated with western values.
The thing is, once you embrace the idea, you will probably start to notice that a lot of false causality is attributed to things that are merely coincidental, and that preparing for synchronicities allows one to make predictions that are, weirdly, often just as accurate as those derived from causal thinking.
Put another way. The universe may not be as causal as the left brain would like to think. Causality is great for engineering, but not so great for relationships, ambition, communication, art, music, story-telling, identity, or persuasion. In this way magic can be said to an ‘art’ that uses our perception of reality as a ‘canvas’.
Though synchronistic thinking can result in superstitions and delusions, it has also been adaptive for our evolutionary ancestors. Despite the pitfalls, there’s a lot about it that works.
All thinking, whether left or right brained, causal or synchronistic, can be judged by its results (pragmatism). When practising magic, These results need not be causal. Even a ‘false causality’ can, for instance, produce great art, or persuasion, which is valuable and therefore adaptive.
A case in point would be a coca-cola advertisement where beautiful young people are partying in togs on a boat, swigging coke, and pouring it over themselves in ecstacy. Clearly purchasing coca-cola doesn’t cause these events! However depicting coke with imagery of sexiness, popularity and joy does breed familiarity and positive association which may cause more people to reach for coke at the supermarket aisle. This persuasion works even though everyone understands that the story told by the advertisement is false: a doesn’t cause b. The advert engages our sense of meaning, not our sense of causality. The product, through the right brain, becomes associated with positivity, but the important action for the advertiser, is simply laying down a brand in the memory, creating left brained familiarity. The left brain prefers what it knows.
Outside of advertising, many forces, even those that are natural, are manipulating and persuading you all the time. Practising magic is grabbing the steering wheel, and becoming responsible for your own conditioning. Being overly concerned with causality will generally not help you increase your own agency. Especially when so much ‘causality’ is inaccurate. It can be much faster to create your own associative/synchronistic thinking that alters your attention to get what you want.
Once you have figured that out, and start acting ‘as if’ meaning is that powerful, spooky results tend to follow. In part these anomalies, which really do occur, could be said to arise from the difficulty in consolidating the left and right-brain experience of the world.
It is my current position, that neither the left (causal) nor the right (synchronistic) views of reality are ‘correct’. Reality has other ideas! and we just do our best to understand reality that our ape brains allow us to. Practising the use of both sides, even when they don’t agree, will get you what you want faster.
Faculty X
In Colin Wilson’s seminal work The Occult (1971) ‘Faculty X’ is a concept coined to explore documented magical and psi phenomena produced by gifted individuals.
Rather than supposing a ‘sixth sense’ or an ‘extrasensory perception’, Wilson posits that we all have latent magical abilities, if only the rational mind, and memory would step out if the way.
These abilities happen when we are able to maintain a flow-state and they overlap with the abilities that skilful artists, actors, sportspeople, and musicians have when they are ‘in the zone’.
In this state we are able to grasp reality in a deeper, more intuitive way. We are also, like a dancing crowd, or two lovers having great sex, able to transcend our own individuality and seemingly share some of our consciousness. Wilson calls these moments ‘peak experiences’. These can happen alone, in pairs or in groups.
If the idea of telepathy, ESP and other psi phenomena trouble you, consider gamifying the situation. Which experiences are true believers counting as ‘hits’ or ‘evidence’?
Are you capable of achieving these same experiences, whether you believe in them or not?
Can you team up with a friend and play the game until you both agree that you might have shared a ‘telepathic’ moment?
To me, belief is less important than direct experience.
Once you have the ability to have these experiences, especially the shared ones, at will, that does not require that you throw away your skepticism, though it will certainly broaden your horizons about what is (subjectively) possible. A shared experience can be much more powerful than a private experience, as it decreases self-delusion. For this reason, I’ve attempted to share my magic as much as possible.
I call shared experience ‘intersubjectivity’. This is our standard mode of interaction, where we agree on reality. Pure objectivity, is by comparison not something we achieve, but rather a value we strive towards. This is understood by the scientific method, and is the reason that scientific results are delivered as probabilities with margins of error, and not as true/false dichotomies.
Irrational problem solving
“We get so out of touch, words take the place of meaning”
-Robert Wyatt, from the song Gharbzadegi
As I have written elsewhere, irrational, intuitive and ‘right-sided’ thinking is real cognition, despite not being easily explainable. The language centres are in the left hemisphere, so right-sided cognition is always going to be ‘felt’ more than it is explained.
Despite this difficulty, right-sided cognition generally works, and despite being more haphazard it has the enormous benefit of being much faster than logic or rationalisation.
This concept is explored in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and slow. As it turns out, patients with brain damage to their emotional centres, who can only rationalise, are barely able to make decisions at all. Asking them to ‘pick a number any number’ could take them twenty minutes or more! It turns out that when we need a fast decision, like those made by improvising jazz musicians, or riffing comedians, we need to go with the decision that ‘feels right’. Emotions are key to decision making.
This is backed up by my own observations with my guitar, bass and singing students, especially when I teach improvisation. Those who worry about justifying the ‘right decision’ can’t improvise at all, and I have to teach them to let go of ‘right and wrong’ (a left-brain dichotomy) and instead ‘go with the flow’, accepting whatever comes out as ‘let’s go with that’. The right notes are the ones you just played! If you are a quick enough musician, you can ‘correct’ ‘wrong’ notes by what you play afterwards, either by resolving the harmony or rhythm, or by simply repeating the mistake as if you meant it the first time!
When highly trained improvisors are able to tap into ‘the flow’, the results can seem telepathic even to the participants themselves.
I have performed many entirely improvised musical gigs with highly skilled band members and the reaction of the audience when they realise that the music is a moment in time, unprepared and never to be repeated, is frequently sheer amazement!
I have approached divination in the same manner5. While reading Tarot cards, the best and most magical moments happen usually about twenty minutes or more in, when the querent6 is giving you their undivided attention and you are giving them theirs. At this point sometimes I can forget about the cards entirely and receive images, ideas and explanations that can seem ‘telepathic’. I always gauge the efficacy of these ideas with how much the querent relates to them. These moments are always accompanied by a strong feeling of empathy.
When I have explained these moments to other fortune-tellers, and magicians, including those who identify as ‘psychic’, they have, so far, always agreed that is the stuff they would count as ‘hits’.
As Colin Wilson describes, these magical ‘Faculty X’ events always require being in the moment, with full attention and having the left side of the brain ‘get out of the way’.
The same feeling and internal phenomena happen in all the spirit experiences I have had.
Despite these experiences which I continue to seek out. I see no reason to identify as a ‘true believer’, a psychic, or a spirit-talker. It is enough for me to accept that the experiences are possible and that, when framed as a performance, be it musical, or divinatory the results are highly persuasive to the audience, be it one other person or a crowd7.
Results matter more than details and rules
The online occult community is full of arguments about genuine vs false magic, correct rituals vs incorrect and which methods are legit and which are false. I find this highly unfortunate, if magical results are the name of the game.
Experienced teachers of magic usually agree that beginners can achieve spectacular results despite not knowing what they are doing. This kind of ‘beginners luck’ is often punctuated by later a drop off in the efficacy of rituals during the intermediate period where one has become dedicated to studying a magical system and ‘getting it right’. This might be because the left brain takes over as the student becomes more familiar with the exercises, and more concerned about ‘doing them the right way’. Similarly, several masters who I respect, have related that the end outcome of extensive magical training, with results, is the eventual adoption of an approach that can seem ‘anything goes’ to the student.
The famous martial artist and actor Bruce Lee dedicated his life to finding the ultimate combat techniques. These included Wing-Chun kung fu, western boxing, fencing, judo, and karate.
After incorporating all these techniques until they were intuitive, Bruce Lee preached that the ultimate martial arts form was ‘formlessness’, and that his students should be ‘like water’, adapting to all situations like a puddle fills a hole. It seems to me apparent that he had discovered the experiences that Colin Wilson describes as ‘Faculty X’. His ‘formlessness’ was ‘peak experience’, in a flow-state, unlocking the quick-acting potential of the right side of the brain, beyond categories.
Thus there is a contradiction in our learning of skills, be it in martial arts, music, divination, art, or magic: We must learn the rules, incorporate them, internalise them, and then release ourselves from them, acting instead on feeling-in-the-moment.
We use the left brain to discern and differentiate concepts and actions, in order that we can incorporate them into our pattern recognition and then act purely by meaning.
Magic shows us that while the universe, as we perceive it, responds to rationality: via physical laws, it weirdly also responds to us with ‘a-causal’ synchronicities that seems irrational. This seems to penetrate down from the biggest to the smallest levels of reality Neither position appears resolvable to the other.
Perhaps both positions are flawed and an underlying ‘neutral’ reality becomes the ‘left’ or ‘right’ brained perception, through the filtering of our brains. In any case it seems that we must live in this tension, and that we will lose some of our agency if we only see one side as ‘true’ at the expense of the other.
Theory of mind: the ability to understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions that may differ from one’s own, and to use this understanding to predict or explain their behavior.
Memories tied to events.
This method will be outlined step by step in detail in my upcoming book Tarot Magic for the Reality Hacker (November 2025) Aeon Books.
The one being read for.
I have, for instance, done a lot of my tarot readings out in the open at parties.