In modern neuroscience and psychology, attention is often treated as a spotlight—something we aim and focus in order to think, learn, or act. But the quality of that attention—how we pay attention—may be just as crucial as the fact that we’re paying it at all, especially when it comes to healing.
Healing, it turns out, is not merely about fixing what’s broken. It is about integration, restoration, and wholeness. And to access this deeper level of transformation, we must look beyond the left brain’s analytical search for cure and open ourselves to the right brain’s capacity for connection, meaning, and presence.
Two Kinds of Attention
The brain does not process the world in a unified way. Rather, it offers us two distinct modes of attention, largely aligned with the functions of the left and right hemispheres.
- Left-brain attention is narrowly focused, goal-directed, and problem-solving. It dissects, categorizes, and examines. This mode of attention excels at diagnostics, surgical precision, and logical analysis. In this mode, we treat symptoms, isolate causes, and strive for control—this is the domain of curing.
- Right-brain attention, on the other hand, is broad, open, and relational. It takes in context, nuance, and the emotional tone of an experience. It doesn’t fixate; it witnesses. This is the mode of attention we enter when we hold space for another person’s story, when we listen without judgment, when we grieve, or when we sit quietly with our own pain. This is the domain of healing.
Neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, in his seminal work The Master and His Emissary, describes how the two hemispheres attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere grabs hold; the right hemisphere lets be. Healing often requires this letting be—an openness to what is implicit, unspeakable, or unresolved.
The Neuroscience of Healing
Healing engages networks beyond those involved in traditional problem-solving. The right hemisphere is more connected with the limbic system—the emotional and social brain. It is dominant in early development and deeply involved in attachment, affect regulation, and the bodily sense of self.
In trauma healing, for instance, the key is not simply “understanding what happened” (a left-brain activity), but learning how to safely feel what happened and integrate it at a somatic and emotional level—something that only the right brain can do.
NeuroSpinal Optimization (NSO) leverages this broader, right-brain mode of attention. NSO emphasizes the how of awareness—slow, receptive, nonjudgmental—not just what we’re paying attention to.
From Fragmentation to Integration
When we’re unwell, our default impulse is to look for a fix—to narrow our attention, search for causes, and control outcomes. This is often helpful and sometimes essential. But some wounds—emotional, existential, relational—cannot be fixed. They must be tended.
The path to healing, then, requires a shift in attentional style. It asks us to soften our gaze, to become curious rather than certain, to sense rather than scrutinize. Healing happens not only when we understand our wounds, but when we witness them—compassionately, patiently, and wholly.
This is not an either/or proposition. We need both hemispheres. Curing and healing are not opposites, but complements. The danger comes when we default exclusively to left-brain strategies—trying to manage our suffering with techniques, checklists, and cognitive fixes—when what is actually required is a different kind of presence.
Conclusion: The Healing Attention
True healing demands that we attend to ourselves and to others in a different way—not as problems to be solved, but as mysteries to be lived into. It is not only what we notice, but how we notice that matters.
The left brain might ask, “What’s wrong, and how do I fix it?”
The right brain asks, “What is here, and how can I be with it?”
To heal is to make room for the implicit—for what cannot be said, but only felt. And the beginning of this healing lies in a subtle but profound shift: not just in attention, but in how we attend.