I’ve been disturbed by certain conversations taking place in the American media lately — or should I say, both forms of media. There appear to be two different media communication channels in this country — one on the left, and one on the right — each professing to be sharing the “real truth” and dismissing the other media channel as misinformation, exaggeration, outright lies.
I’ve also been disturbed by certain conversations I’ve heard here in Pagosa Springs, equally polarized. How could our perceptions be so different?
I wrote yesterday about my experiences as an artist and art teacher, and my theory about how ‘words’ become problematic, when they intrude upon processes that are non-verbal. My hypothesis proposes that a realistic drawing or painting cannot be created, unless the artist disconnects from his or her ‘verbal description’ of the world, the words stored inside his or her mind, and tunes in to the non-verbal information we gather directly through our eyes.
I suppose some people will struggle to understand what I’m talking about, but I suspect most Daily Post readers are aware of the brain research that has identified the “left” and “right” sides of the brain as controlling different types of conscious processes. Neuroscience has suggested that we process verbal information in the brain’s left hemisphere… along with numbers, logic, facts and sequences.
The right hemisphere is where imagination, intuition, music, feelings, visualization and ‘holistic thinking’ takes place. Or so we are told.
If you want to put your faith in a Mercedes-Benz advertisement, you can read this description:
I am the left brain. I am a scientist. A mathematician. I love the familiar. I categorize. I am accurate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am practical. Always in control. A master of words and language. Realistic. I calculate equations and play with numbers. I am order. I am logic. I know exactly who I am.
I am the right brain. I am creativity.A free spirit. I am passion. Yearning. Sensuality I am the sound of roaring laughter. I am taste. the feeling of sand beneath bare feet. I am movement. Vivid colors. I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas. I am boundless imagination. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel. I am everything I wanted to be.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who was totally “left-brained” or totally “right-brained”. Everyone I know has some facility with verbal language, and with numbers and logic… and everyone I know has some measure of imagination, passion, feelings, intuition.
But do some people tend to “live” mostly on one side or the other? In other words, if a person seems to lack artistic talent, does that mean the right side of their brain is “weak”? This might be a logical conclusion.
If a person struggles with mathematics, does that mean they have trouble using the left side of their brain? Once again, a logical conclusion, perhaps.
How about… politics?
We have been watching a dramatic polarization unfold in the United States over the past 30 years or so, and the division been conservatives and progressives has never seemed so evident as it has in 2020. (Never, in recent memory, that is.)
Left-brained People vs Right-brained People?
Or are we all just, “We the People”?
On a February day in 1962, a 48-year-old military veteran named William Jenkins was wheeled into the operating room at White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles. Jenkins had been suffering grand mal epileptic seizures since surviving a bomb explosion during World War II — up to 10 seizures in a single day.
The surgeon, that day, was neuroscientist Roger Sperry, who had spent several years operating on cats and monkeys. Sperry and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology had been surgically separating the two hemispheres of animal brains, and then studying the resultant behaviors.
Jenkins, meanwhile, had learned of a radical operation performed by other doctors two decades earlier at a Rochester, New York, hospital, that had relieved the symptoms of extreme epilepsy. He was eager for the California surgeons to try it on him.
Sperry and his team were going to separate the two halves of Jenkins’ cerebral cortex.
From an article by Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller in Psychology Today, April 2014:
Unlike patients who underwent earlier versions of this operation, Mr. Jenkins made a deal with his doctors: Whether or not the surgery reduced his suffering, he agreed to work with Sperry, who would administer postoperative behavioral tests similar in principle to those given to the scientist’s experimental animals. Assuming that Mr. Jenkins’s higher cognitive functioning survived the surgery, his ability to respond on command and communicate with speech might give Sperry a quantum boost in his research.
“Even if it doesn’t help my seizures,” Mr. Jenkins said before meeting the scalpel, “if you learn something, it will be more worthwhile than anything I’ve been able to do for years…”
…The operation went according to plan and Mr. Jenkins recovered without incident; his convulsions were indeed gone, and, like Sperry’s monkeys and cats, on casual observation he seemed cognitively normal.
But Sperry’s testing revealed that such causal observations were misleading. Mr. Jenkins’ cognition was indeed changed, and the hemispheres were indeed revealed to have some distinct capabilities. What are those capabilities, and how do they align with the popular left brain/right brain narrative?
Science writers Kosslyn and Miller had written a related article, two months earlier in Psychology Today, wherein they firmly rejected the popular belief that people could be classified as “left-brain” or “right-brain”. Many of the functions that seem to occur on the right side — the perception of shapes, for example — have a related function that seems to happen in the left hemisphere — the perception of the details within a shape, for example.
They argued that, in fact, the human brain continues to function in a holistic fashion, even when the two “halves” are surgically separated.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.