Right Brain / Left Brain?

[jouweleen]

Hello All,
I was interested to find out if any of you knew about the concept of right/left brain thinking.

Last week it occured to me that I "felt" differently when reading a really engaging FT forum. I was completely engrossed in the topic - so I was focused - and I was searching my mind for comparitive experiences or facts I had encountered.

This sensation is similar to how I feel when I'm painting. So engrossed in the detail, reasoning the colors & lines - etc. Its both envigorating & relaxing.

Now here's where my question/experience gets weird...when focusing on the sensation, I would say that I "felt" a sensation in my brain on the right side - toward the top.

Weirder still, when confronted with a difficult person who wants me to work through a difficult problem at my office - I often feel pain behind my eyes and near the front of my head. Related concept?

:?:

 

[Rrose_Selavy]

This concept was made popular by Betty Edwards in her book " Drawing on the Right Sid of the Brain" - I still use some of the exercises in the book in my own teaching of drawing to adults.

As an insight to the process of learning to draw it has become the standard - much imitated - the only"how to Draw" book I would recommend (although you can ignore her chapter on "beautiful handwriting") It seesm to hav ebecome somwhat of an mini- industry for Edwards but does make a start on putting the activity on a scientific basis albeit speculative in some areas.

Whether the modes of thinking are quite as localised as in two separate hemispheres may be debatable but Edwards refers to the Roger Sperry experiments with "split brain" patients.

Two Ways of Knowing

Betty Edwards has used the terms L-Mode and R-Mode to designate two ways of knowing and seeing - the verbal, analytic mode and the visual, perceptual mode - no matter where they are located in the individual brain. You are probably aware of these different characteristics. L-mode is a step-by-step style of thinking, using words, numbers and other symbols. L-mode strings things out in sequences, like words in a sentence. R-mode on the other hand, uses visual information and processes, not step-by-step, but all at once, like recognizing the face of a friend.



Most activities require both modes, each contributing its special functions, but a few activities require mainly one mode, without interference from the other. Drawing is one of these activities.

Learning to draw, then, turns out not to be "learning to draw." Paradoxically, "learning to draw" means learning to make a mental shift from L-mode to R-mode. That is what a person trained in drawing does, and that is what you can learn.

"You have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists now know that your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words… Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain; it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things,’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words."
From The Fabric of Mind, by the eminent scientist and neurosurgeon, Richard Bergland. Viking Penguin, Inc., New York 1985. pg.1

http://www.drawright.com/theory.htm


http://www.drawright.com/

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[mossy_sloth]

I seem to remember reading a study years ago that dealt with lobotomy patients whose left and right sides had ceased to function in accordance with each other and produced some odd behaviours; apparently one patient was unable to carry out simple tasks, such as buttoning up his shirt because the two sides of his brain were at odds - he would start to button up the shirt with one hand and the other hand would then systematically undo the buttons. I have no idea where I read this though. Might have been an old psych textbook.

But in answer to the original question, no I have never felt a sensation similar to what you describe.

 

[Rrose_Selavy]

Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his work on the "Split Brain" http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medi ... index.html

Important as his work on neurospecificity was, it was not this for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981, but his discoveries on split brains. Essentially, Sperry and his students showed that if the two hemispheres of the brain are separated by severing the corpus callosum (the large band of fibers that connects them), the transfer of information between the hemispheres ceases, and the coexistence in the same individual of two functionally different brains can be demonstrated. The findings contradicted the generally held view--again based on misinterpretation of evidence--that sectioning of the corpus callosum produced no definite behavioral effects. The probable explanation is that the two hemispheres, although separated from one another, are usually in agreement, so that no obvious conflict results. By means of ingenious tests, however, Sperry and his group showed that definite behavioral phenomena can be demonstrated following the brain-splitting operation.

Sperry started this investigation with cats and monkeys, but later extended it to human beings when patients became available whose hemispheres had been surgically separated in order to control intractable epilepsy. It was with these patients that he was able to show that a conscious mind exists in each hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the one with speech, as had been known, and it is dominant in all activities involving language, arithmetic, and analysis. The right hemisphere, although mute and capable only of simple addition (up to about 20) is superior to the left hemisphere in, among other things, spatial comprehension--in understanding maps, for example, or recognizing faces. Until these patients were studied, it had been doubted whether the right hemisphere was even conscious. By devising ways of communicating with the right hemisphere, Sperry could show that this hemisphere is, to quote him: "indeed a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting, all at a characteristically human level, and . . . both the left and the right hemisphere may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel."

As with his earlier work, the discovery of the duality of consciousness revealed in the split-brain experiments opened whole new fields of brain research, and these are now being worked by a new generation of biologists, and, of course, philosophers.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medi ... index.html