4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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magnitudes of performance
BRAIN LATERALIZATION AND PERFORMANCE
But how can one specify the differences between performances that are
so only contextually and those that the performer is conscious of
manufacturing? Could the difference be in how the brain is used?
D’Aquili and his colleagues (1979) note that the left side of the brain is
ergotropic and the right side trophotropic. They say that
there is something about the repetitive or rhythmic emanation of signals
from a conspecific that generates a high degree of limbic arousal.
. . . There is something about repetitive rhythmic stimuli that may,
under proper conditions, bring about the unusual neural state of simultaneous
high discharge of both [the sympathetic and parasympathetic]
autonomic subsystems. . . . [The excited ANS] supersaturates
the ergotropic or energy-expending system . . . to the point that the
trophotropic system not only is simultaneously excited by a kind of
spillover but also on rare occasions may be maximally stimulated, so
that, briefly at least, both systems are intensely stimulated.
(d’Aquili, Laughlin, and McManus 1979: 157, 175)
Such maximal stimulation gives that feeling of the inexpressible which
sometimes accompanies not only religious ritual and solitary meditation
but large and small gatherings of many different kinds – from
football games to Samuel Beckett’s plays, from Nazi rallies to the soft
rhythmic panting-chanting I teach as part of a theater workshop.
In 1971 Roland Fischer devised what he called “a cartography of the
ecstatic and meditative states” (figure 8.4), wherein the spectrum of
arousal is outlined from trophotropic (hypoaroused) states such as
Yogic samadhi and Zen meditation through the normal “I” states of daily
routine, on to ergotropic (hyperaroused) states such as schizophrenia
and mystical ecstasy. Fischer, like d’Aquili, speaks of a “rebound” from
one extreme to another.
In spite of the mutually exclusive relation between the ergotropic and
trophotropic systems, however, there is a phenomenon called
“rebound to superactivity” or trophotropic rebound, which occurs in
response to intense sympathetic excitation, that is, at ecstasy, the peak