Right/Left Brain Cartoon

An animated cartoon showing how the right brain and the left brain put together a bicycle. The left brain needs to follow instructions, while the right brain doesn't think instructions are necessary.

For the book "i'm not stupid, I'm Right-Brained" by Evie Fishkin. Be sure to visit the website: www.rightbrainintelligence.com to take a free brain dominance test.

What is the difference between right-brain activities and left-brain activities?

Your right side of your brain controls the left side of your body. your left side of your brain controls the right side of you body.
Left brain function: number skills , written language , reasoning , spoken language , scientific skills, right side of body...
Right brain function: 3-D shapes, art awareness, imagination, music, left side of the body...

One way of looking at learning styles is to determine your hemispheric dominance. Are you more right brained or left brained?  We know that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that houses rational functions. It is divided into two hemispheres connected by a thick band of nerve fibers (the corpus callosum) which sends messages back and forth between the hemispheres. And while brain research confirms that both sides of the brain are involved in nearly every human activity, we do know that the left side of the brain is the seat of language and processes in a logical and sequential order. The right side is more visual and processes intuitively, holistically, and randomly. Most people seem to have a dominant side. A key word is that our dominance is a preference, not an absolute. When learning is new, difficult, or stressful we PREFER to learn in a certain way. It seems that our brain goes on autopilot to the preferred side. And while nothing is entirely isolated on one side of the brain or the other, the characteristics commonly attributed to each side of the brain serve as an appropriate guide for ways of learning things more efficiently and ways of reinforcing learning. Just as it was more important for our purposes to determine that memory is stored in many parts of the brain rather than learn the exact lobe for each part, likewise it is not so much that we are biologically right brain or left brain dominant, but that we are more comfortable with the learning strategies characteristics of one over the other. What you are doing is lengthening your list of strategies for learning how to learn and trying to determine what works best for you. You can and must use and develop both sides of the brain. But because the seat of our preferences probably has more neural connections, learning may occur faster. This section will look a t some differences between left and right brain preferences. Be on the look out for practical strategies that work for you.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE LEFT AND RIGHT SIDES OF THE BRAIN

In 1981 Roger Sperry received the Nobel Prize in Physiology "for his discoveries concerning the functional specialisation of the cerebral hemispheres". Sperry, his student Michael Gazzinga and the neurosurgeon Joseph Bogden, performed the first 'split brain operation', and can be credited with some of the most important insights we have of the physiology of the brain today. They found that the left side of the brain is concerned with language, words, analysis, and figures. The right side is concerned with patterns, relationships, art, and music.

The left brain is the clever part. The left brain is so clever it's taken us to the moon and developed our wonderful technologies. The trouble is it's so clever that if we're not careful it will kill us off. It's the part that has developed the nuclear bomb and is in the process of polluting the world.

It's the piece of the brain that's always scheming, it never stops. Its the bit that wakes you up in the middle of the night with this wonderful idea that in the morning never looks quite so good. This part of our brain is like a bossy manager who needs to be in control, demands to be heard and thinks he is the only one with any ideas. Indeed it so bossy that sometimes when it is scheming, worrying or thinking in the middle of the night, even the best strategies are insufficient to keep it under control and quiet. For example, sometimes I try to get back to sleep by counting down slowly from 20 to 0, relaxing more after each number, but unless I'm totally disciplined, in between the numbers my left brain will race off on to some new subject.

The left brain is a straight line calculator that deals in words and numbers, likes things in sequence and has a need to explain things rationally and a need to always be in control. It likes logic and things that are 100% correct. It has trouble dealing with ambiguity, partial truth and uncertainty. It needs to be right and it needs to be 100 percent right. If something is only partly right, even if it is only slightly wrong, the left brain is inclined to reject the whole notion rather than play with the idea and work with it to see what can be extracted from the good parts.

This is why it's so important to set up conditions and expectations in creativity sessions, so that things can be wrong or at least partly wrong, we need to change the inclination to reject the whole notion, by playing with ideas and using words like: "that's interesting".