In Two Minds - the Right and Left brain
The two sides of the brain are like an odd married couple who long ago fell into doing things according to a “his” ‘n’ “hers” division of labour. The partner that can communicate takes the dominant role, speaking and acting most of the time, for both and doing much of the day-to-day business of thinking, calculating , and dealing with the outside world. The other stays largely in the background, quietly doing its moment-by-moment chores and constantly using its singular talents to sniff and taste the social environment for signs of anything that may be a threat or of benefit.
They keep each other perfectly informed of what is going on in their own spheres through a continuous, intimate conversation. So natural to them is this pattern of working that they can carry out the most complex tasks together in a perfectly intergrated way.
Most of the time the marriage of our two brains is completely harmonious. Conscious decisions, although they may seem to be made by the dominant partner alone are in fact fully informed by the findings of both hemispheres. Sometimes, though the conversation between them falters. The dominant hemisphere may ignore the information supplied by its partner and make a decision based purely on what it thinks. The result may be an emotional disquiet that is difficult to explain. Conversely, the non-dominant partner sometimes bypasses the executive control of the other side and triggers an action based purely on instinct. These are the sort of things we look back on (usually with embarrassment) and say: “I didn’t mean to do it - I just couldn’t help myself“.
Sometimes, too, a hemisphere acts unilaterally because it does not receive all the incoming information. The corpus callosum (thick band of axons, 80 million or so - which connect the brain cells in one hemisphere to those in the other. The two sides keep up a continuous conversation via this neural bridge) can carry enormous amount of information from one side of the brain to the other in milliseconds, but sometimes there is a split second during which incoming data lingers in one hemisphere only. And some information - the sort for which one or other hemisphere has a strong preference - maybe registered only dimly by the other.
We all experience this half knowledge in sublte way. Odd remarks that just slip out, feelings we can’t explain, silly errors like mistaking one object for another , are traditionally seen as evidence of deep inner conflicts. In fact, many of these may be caused by faulty or incomplete inter-hemispheric communication. The giveaway signs are comments like: “There’s something about him I don’t like but I can’t put my finger on it“, or “I know something awful has happened but it hasn’t hit me yet“. In the first situation, the person’s right brain may have grasped something of which their left brain is only faintly aware, and in the second the left brain has acknowledged something but the right brain has not yet taken it in.
Source: Mapping the Mind by Rita Carter
Recent Comments