Cooperation: A No-Brainer

ProetryPlace Blog 25 Cooperation: A No-Brainer

    You have probably used the term “Right Brain” to refer to someone who may be a little absent minded, loves reading poetry and drinking tea in her silk pajamas and might be an accomplished musician, or you may have used the term “Left Brain” when describing your lawyer or accountant.

    Greatly oversimplified, the scientific theories of lateralization of brain functions between the cerebral hemispheres have been popularized to categorize distinctive personality types. Left brainers are described as objective critical thinkers whose brains excel at mathematics and language regarding the use of words and syntax. Right brain thinkers conversely are described as subjective, visual and creative with language abilities more associated with emotion and meaning than with rules.

    As a writer and especially as a poet, I wonder how or if these alleged brain machinations affect my writing and my reading and in retrospect, how they may have affected other activities of life. So, I Googled the subject and took a couple of the several online tests supposed to reveal brainedness.

    In high school I majored in math, science and English. I liked English best—loved reading the stories of Hawthorne, Poe and Shirley Jackson. Poetry not so much. In college, once I got past the day-long, class-cutting card games in the student union, I majored again in math plus chemistry and physics which left little time for the language, performing or visual arts. Then followed graduate school supported by a research fellowship in physical chemistry. The Right Brain/Left Brain theories had not yet been proposed. They helped Roger Sperry win the Nobel Prize in 1981.

    During my working career in industrial R&D at one of those peer interaction and evaluation activities, I was unanimously judged to be “analytical.” The majority of my thought processes were actually directed at designing highly innovative and exploratory research and experimentation with the invention of new materials and methods for producing them as a goal, but I also enjoyed manipulating and analyzing the experimental data to squeeze meaning from them. Right brain, Left brain or both?

    Then, abruptly, in retirement my word processor quickly took precedence over spreadsheet programs. I wrote short stories, memoir and nonfiction and dabbled in poetry. I replaced technical and scientific reading with reading the same genres that I wrote and books about creating them.

    Did this confuse my brain? Did it call into play parts of my brain that had lain largely dormant for decades? Could the brainedness tests clearly define what kind of thinker I am?

    I scored exactly 50% Right and 50% Left on the first test, a result that seemed to indicate and explain either everything or nothing. I found another, more comprehensive, test that was designed to enable students to improve their study habits. My results were skewed slightly Left at 53% versus 47% Right.

    My sister is a talented and creative painter, poet and cook. She earned a living for several years by writing the script for a daily radio show. She scored 41% Left, 59% right, somewhat more indicative possibly than my middle of the road results.

    New research results published just a few months ago recognize that certain brain functions take place primarily in one hemisphere of the brain or the other and yet found no evidence for greater use of either side of the brain versus the other in over 1000 subjects studied using MRI scans. The study further suggests that the brain works best when both halves work together, i.e. for Co-brainers.

    Albert Einstein was possibly the most creative and visionary thinker in history; at the same time he expressed himself with advanced, abstract mathematical concepts. Was he Left-brain or Right-brain?

    When he died nearly 60 years ago his brain was removed, preserved and studied. The most distinguishing feature of his brain did not relate to either left or right hemisphere but rather to the corpus callosum; this information pathway that communicates between the two halves was highly enlarged in Einstein’s brain compared to normal, average brains.

    The benefits of a cooperative approach, making the most of the best that both Left and Right can offer is not only intuitively pleasing but now has roots in scientific reality.

    Now, if only our politicians could be made to understand this.

Richard Allen Anderson http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com 28 October 2013