C. Right, Left, Forward March

C. Right, Left, Forward March

We have probably all heard about the left and right brain. Some of us might even share the common understanding of the right brain as being that of the freer artsy type of person and the left as being that of the more scientific kind of thinker or the numbers person, the accountant. Some of you might even be aware of certain supposed personality types that fit more with one side of the brain being dominant or not. The name escapes me now and I could not find the source on-line but the most recent one our work team learned was the red/green/blue where green is definitely left brain and blue is more right. 

The other thing we might also know is that our ‘handedness’, i.e., are we left or right handed, is related to which side of the brain is dominant. The nerves between our brain and our hands’ motor functions cross from one side of the brain to the opposite side of the body, as they do for all our eternal or skeletal muscle operations. Actually, this probably really relates to where our brain was in it development when our handedness was established. Anyway, if we are right-handed, which most of us are, we say we are left-brain dominant. If we are left-handed, we are right brain dominant. Stop and think about people you know who are left-handed. By and large, you will find most of them tend to be blue personalities, more of ‘people persons’, more creative. I believe I have observed a preponderance these also in the helping professions of which I would be seen to be a member. You might also have noticed that many gay men are left-handed, which goes along with the fact that many of these folks are creative and also often found in arts or helping professions.

So, back to my title as a segue into here I want to go from here. When I first thought of it I wrote ‘Left, right…’ Is that because I heard it like that back in the school days when we followed teacher’s instructions to do things like go from one schoolroom to the next? What do you remember? I only refer back to this bring to our attention to that as being the opposite of the sequence of our brain development. 

The right side of our brain develops first. When we are born we function entirely on our senses: touch, light, smell, sound, and taste.  To some extent that is also, I believe, the order of development of our senses. Think about it in comparison to lesser from of life? What senses do  amoebas and worms have. We know they all respond to touch. These functions are served by the lower and central parts of our brain that for some reason connect more to the right brain.  

These senses are also part of what we call primary processes. Sometimes we even talk about tapping into the ‘memories’ of these in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Impressions or representations of our earliest life experiences are bound up in these areas. We can only call them representations because they are created before we ‘think’ enough and know enough to put words around them.

It should not surprise us then when we also refer to primary processes as being important in the arts. If you have difficulty letting go of all that reason and logic have layered over the right brain as the left develops, you will have trouble being truly imaginative and creative in that sense. You might never be much of an abstract painter. You can understand better now why we talk of right-brained individuals as generally being more creative and artistic. They function closer to these primary processes than do those of us who are more left-brained. 

How many of you re ambidextrous, i.e., a mixture of right and left brain? I think I have some of that. I am somewhat of a scientist - I got into medicine after all! But I am certainly also an artist and musician of sorts. I remember as a junior high student first doing an exercise where we were asked to draw things with our left hand. I did not fare too badly. I think I would be worse now. Have you ever tried to write with your non-dominant hand? Since we do not normally use that had for that purpose we tend to really concentrate on what our hand is doing and our writing is not that good.  However, if you ‘let go’ and just think about the words you want to print you will do better. This brings us back to the concept of automaticity I brought up earlier. We, at least those of us who grew up before the computer age, have practiced writing so much that it is largely an automatic function. To further demonstrate that, really ‘let go,’ if you can, and write with your non-dominant hand in a way it almost seems to want to do. You will find that you can write in a mirror image of your normal writing with your dominant hand and the writing looks a lot better than when we focusing so hard on righting the ‘right’ way with our non-dominant hand.

All of this then relates to what we are exposed to in our environment growing up. Back to nature and nurture. We are born (nature) with a certain number of nerve cells and if we don’t ‘use’ them we literally lose their function (environment/nurture). We know, or can certainly realize if we have never given it much thought, that with our traditional educational emphasis on the 3 R’s (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic in case you’re so young you’ve never heard that) our primary process functions, our imagination, our creativity gets ‘the short end of the stick.’ The brain cells or neutrons in those parts of our brain that are ready to serve those functions lose many of their connections to other nerve cells. In our Western educational systems we are literally educating away our creativity. 

Sometimes I wonder if this is not also related to what happens with so many Asian/Chinese students. China in the past produced great paintings, exquisite sculptures and, of course, ‘china.’ There was also a flowering of poetry writing. What have seen in the last 200 years? We know how much Asians with the stereotypical ‘tiger mom’ push their kids to excel in science and math. To be sure, as we can tell by the number of Chinese classical musicians appearing on the scene, there are obviously now enlightened parents that have also pushed their kids to do things like learn to play piano and violin, for example. However, by and large, I think it’s fair to say that for some time the arts has not figure large in creative output from China.

I should remind the reader the that am not an expert or authority in much of what I write. Of course, some of it reflects my learning over the years. Some it is hypothetical thinking, guesswork, based on observation,  simply ‘wondering’ at what one observes. This is particularly true of language development, which is a field in itself. However, I have heard some interesting things about this area in recent years. It seems to me that even the very fact that Oriental, or at least Asian, languages were originally written in characters and Occidental ones are letter-based has something to do with which way our brain develops. That would make sense. A character is a word. A letter of an alphabet is usually nothing without one or more other letters combined with it. We would perceive characters differently than letters. Even writing them might to some extent use different processes than writing letter-based words. 

Even as I write this, my brain is ever associating - going to other ‘places’ where similar ideas have been stored. However, reality intervened (and maybe age-related forgetfulness) and I had to take a break so I forgot what I was associating to and going to add. Next time.