In the previous post I presented the modern dilemma as seen from the perspective of the left/right brain divide. It ended with the pessimistic statement "we are stuck where we are", which is the logical conclusion of the left brain.
I don't believe we are stuck. There are many leaps possible, and more people are understanding the need for leaping. If you are concerned about where we are heading, make your own leap. Encourage the leaps of others. If nothing else, refrain from keeping others from leaping.
More to come.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Cultural divide
In the previous post I described the balance between the use of the hemispheres in various creative endeavors. Nearly all creative acts require both hemispheres to work in concert, but different media can engage the two differently.
In this post I intend to show that how we think about and live in the world affects the world, and vice versa.
First, here is a very terse and over-simplified summary of the balance of left and right brain in various stages of western civilization as identified in Master and Emissary. Each stage has had a very different culture, based on the predominant thought patterns of the day.
How does culture affect our use of our brains? I described in a previous post how the brain "chooses" which of many thoughts to express. While the brain is not a blank slate, this "choosing" is subject to learning, and most of us learn to "choose" based on the dominant culture in effect when we grow up. The culture is expressed through parents, teachers, friends, media, and institutions, and we proceed to both express the culture and impress it on those around us, including our children. Thus culture is perpetuated in a reinforcing feedback loop.
Our "choosing" is a delicate balance: small changes can make big differences. Small changes away from the cultural norm generally elicit negative feedback from society, restoring the norm in almost Darwinian fashio. Small changes that support the cultural norm are often adopted, intensifying the norm. McGilchrist argues that the natural tendency of the human mind is to restore the left-right balance, as shown by the variations over history. But this tendency must contend with the restorative power of the cultural norm.
Our current culture is very left-brained. Technology is pervasive, and almost every interaction with it draws us into our left brain as our eyes parse the ever-changing abstract screens on our computers and cell phones, then make our fingers run an obstacle course through arbitrary numbers and words. Art challenges us with ever more abstract re-presentations of reality, taunting us with obsolescence if we can't analyze the latest deconstruction of the body and mind.
People aren't happy with the current state of the divide. Our personal lives are chopped up into tiny familial pieces when our right brains crave community. As part of my work I have seen studies of how people would prefer to relate to technology, but the cultural norm keeps those changes from happening. Young people immerse themselves in games that exercise the right brain. Yet complex games are now losing force to the imperfect forms of socialization and connection: Facebook and Twitter. The tyranny of the desktop computer interface is losing to the slightly less insulting smart phone. People vote with their feet and dollars, but they can only vote for what's on the ballot, and the choices are limited.
I will suggest that the energy engaged by the Tea Party movement is a reaction to the overly analytical world those people face. (Ironically, the effect of the Tea Party movement, as guided by its moneyed masters, is to reinforce the cultural norm, but that's another story.)
One effect of an unbalanced divide is that we don't think straight, either individually or as a culture. This means that when we are faced with difficult or catastrophic problems, we neither see them clearly nor respond to them effectively. In a left-brained world, when the problems continue or get worse, we will analyze them further, perhaps to death, when no amount of local optimization will improve things, and only a wild leap to another place will help. The left-brain will never leap, so we are stuck where we are.
In this post I intend to show that how we think about and live in the world affects the world, and vice versa.
First, here is a very terse and over-simplified summary of the balance of left and right brain in various stages of western civilization as identified in Master and Emissary. Each stage has had a very different culture, based on the predominant thought patterns of the day.
- Artistic expression started in pre-history as a left-brain phenomenon, though the rest of life was mostly right-brain.
- By the time of ancient Greece, artistic expression had been integrated into the right hemisphere.
- By the time of the Classical age, the left brain became dominant in areas outside of art.
- Rome in the Augustan era (~1AD) was notably right-brained.
- The rise of Roman state Christianity coincided with a shift to the left brain.
- The Middle Ages were marked by intense rationality (left-brain).
- The Renaissance marked a large swing to the right brain.
- The Enlightenment was a large swing back to the left brain.
- Romanticism was a swing back to the right brain.
- The Industrial Revolution required and nurtured the left brain.
- Modernism and Postmodernism reinforced the left brain.
How does culture affect our use of our brains? I described in a previous post how the brain "chooses" which of many thoughts to express. While the brain is not a blank slate, this "choosing" is subject to learning, and most of us learn to "choose" based on the dominant culture in effect when we grow up. The culture is expressed through parents, teachers, friends, media, and institutions, and we proceed to both express the culture and impress it on those around us, including our children. Thus culture is perpetuated in a reinforcing feedback loop.
Our "choosing" is a delicate balance: small changes can make big differences. Small changes away from the cultural norm generally elicit negative feedback from society, restoring the norm in almost Darwinian fashio. Small changes that support the cultural norm are often adopted, intensifying the norm. McGilchrist argues that the natural tendency of the human mind is to restore the left-right balance, as shown by the variations over history. But this tendency must contend with the restorative power of the cultural norm.
Our current culture is very left-brained. Technology is pervasive, and almost every interaction with it draws us into our left brain as our eyes parse the ever-changing abstract screens on our computers and cell phones, then make our fingers run an obstacle course through arbitrary numbers and words. Art challenges us with ever more abstract re-presentations of reality, taunting us with obsolescence if we can't analyze the latest deconstruction of the body and mind.
People aren't happy with the current state of the divide. Our personal lives are chopped up into tiny familial pieces when our right brains crave community. As part of my work I have seen studies of how people would prefer to relate to technology, but the cultural norm keeps those changes from happening. Young people immerse themselves in games that exercise the right brain. Yet complex games are now losing force to the imperfect forms of socialization and connection: Facebook and Twitter. The tyranny of the desktop computer interface is losing to the slightly less insulting smart phone. People vote with their feet and dollars, but they can only vote for what's on the ballot, and the choices are limited.
I will suggest that the energy engaged by the Tea Party movement is a reaction to the overly analytical world those people face. (Ironically, the effect of the Tea Party movement, as guided by its moneyed masters, is to reinforce the cultural norm, but that's another story.)
One effect of an unbalanced divide is that we don't think straight, either individually or as a culture. This means that when we are faced with difficult or catastrophic problems, we neither see them clearly nor respond to them effectively. In a left-brained world, when the problems continue or get worse, we will analyze them further, perhaps to death, when no amount of local optimization will improve things, and only a wild leap to another place will help. The left-brain will never leap, so we are stuck where we are.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
We all use both
When I first heard about "right brain", I wanted to be there. I thought living in my right brain would make me more creative. (I even use 'rightbrain' as my login some places.) Now I learn that we all use our right brain all the time, so I started to consider the issue in a different light.
If we all use both, what determines the balance, and what affects the balance? Master and Emissary has a very compelling description, which I will try to summarize in the next few posts. First, let's consider some perhaps counter-intuitive implications of the divide.
Are novelists and playwrights writing from their left or right brains? The written medium is all words, which would seem to be the province of the left brain. Furthermore, the works (novels and plays) are linear, and linearity is the hallmark of the left brain. The answer is that they use both in exquisite cooperation. The best novels and plays are about grounded reality, which only the right brain can provide. They evoke images in the reader's mind, and only the right brain can construct those images in words. They employ metaphor, which only the right brain understands. They offer humor, which is primarily a right brain function. The left brain works with the right to linearize the story and put it into words on paper.
When we read a novel or see a play, we are also using both brains. The left occupies itself with the words, leaving the right brain to immerse itself in the story. The right brain understands language, but in a different way than than the left. Language understanding in the left hemisphere is concentrated in Wernicke's area, which unpacks language in a manner similar to how the left hemisphere Broca's area packs it into speech. Language understanding in the right hemisphere is more diffuse, connected more to meaning than syntax. It is the simultaneous understandings of the left and right hemispheres that creates the rich and fulfilling response to a well written novel or play.
Non-fiction writing can have a different balance. Telling a true story can be as evocative and compelling as any novel or play and the effect will be as balanced as they are. However, much non-fiction writing concerns itself with how the world is constructed, and this appeals more to the left brain. Some non-fiction writing is really communication of left brain re-presentations from the writer to the reader, in which case the right brain is hardly involved. Most people find such writings hard to read.
Poetry can bypass the left brain entirely. Most poetry offers some balance to the left and right brains, but the preponderance of metaphor leaves the right brain somewhat confused. Some poetry offers no meaning to the left brain, in which case the left brain either shuts down or panics. The right brain doesn't demand meaning, so it is free to rest in the shape and evocation of such poetry. How we feel about a poem often depends on the ability of our left brain to disengage rather than rebel.
Creating and appreciating a piece of artistic pottery can also bypass the left brain. Creation requires only the free flow of expression from the right brain to the hands, and appreciation is often just as pure. But the picture is not so simple as it might seem. The best pottery involves a bit of invention, and that is done with the right-left-right paradigm, often in a series of "failures" that are destroyed before the end result is ever seen. So even the most pure artistic achievements are usually the result of the collaboration.
I write software for a living. This last year I wrote a CAD system that ran to many tens of thousands of lines of code. I carefully paid attention to the work in order to understand my own creative process. I couldn't keep track of all the individual pieces of the project, but I never lost my overall understanding. My head would ache while I puzzled some difficult problem, which I interpreted as my left brain being unable to cope. At such times I would often take a break or go home, and most of the time when I got back, I would have a solution. I interpreted that as my right brain working on the problem without my conscious involvement. Left brains, including mine, are only capable of handling a limited amount of complexity. Right brains have no such limitation. Even engineering can involve high levels of coordinated activity between the hemispheres.
In fact, just about every creative act involves substantial involvement from both our brains. Sometimes we just don't admit it. How we see our brains working together can influence how we treat ourselves. More importantly, it can affect how we treat others. If we see our own success as a result of our left-brain analytic abilities, we will encourage and reward others based on our perceptions of their analytic abilities, and we will teach them only analytic skills. If we see our own success as a result of our right-brain reasoning skills, we will encourage and reward others based on our perceptions of their reasoning abilities, and we will teach them only reasoning skills. All of us need both, and our prejudices and misunderstandings on this issue can determine the future, as we will see in the next post.
If we all use both, what determines the balance, and what affects the balance? Master and Emissary has a very compelling description, which I will try to summarize in the next few posts. First, let's consider some perhaps counter-intuitive implications of the divide.
Are novelists and playwrights writing from their left or right brains? The written medium is all words, which would seem to be the province of the left brain. Furthermore, the works (novels and plays) are linear, and linearity is the hallmark of the left brain. The answer is that they use both in exquisite cooperation. The best novels and plays are about grounded reality, which only the right brain can provide. They evoke images in the reader's mind, and only the right brain can construct those images in words. They employ metaphor, which only the right brain understands. They offer humor, which is primarily a right brain function. The left brain works with the right to linearize the story and put it into words on paper.
When we read a novel or see a play, we are also using both brains. The left occupies itself with the words, leaving the right brain to immerse itself in the story. The right brain understands language, but in a different way than than the left. Language understanding in the left hemisphere is concentrated in Wernicke's area, which unpacks language in a manner similar to how the left hemisphere Broca's area packs it into speech. Language understanding in the right hemisphere is more diffuse, connected more to meaning than syntax. It is the simultaneous understandings of the left and right hemispheres that creates the rich and fulfilling response to a well written novel or play.
Non-fiction writing can have a different balance. Telling a true story can be as evocative and compelling as any novel or play and the effect will be as balanced as they are. However, much non-fiction writing concerns itself with how the world is constructed, and this appeals more to the left brain. Some non-fiction writing is really communication of left brain re-presentations from the writer to the reader, in which case the right brain is hardly involved. Most people find such writings hard to read.
Poetry can bypass the left brain entirely. Most poetry offers some balance to the left and right brains, but the preponderance of metaphor leaves the right brain somewhat confused. Some poetry offers no meaning to the left brain, in which case the left brain either shuts down or panics. The right brain doesn't demand meaning, so it is free to rest in the shape and evocation of such poetry. How we feel about a poem often depends on the ability of our left brain to disengage rather than rebel.
Creating and appreciating a piece of artistic pottery can also bypass the left brain. Creation requires only the free flow of expression from the right brain to the hands, and appreciation is often just as pure. But the picture is not so simple as it might seem. The best pottery involves a bit of invention, and that is done with the right-left-right paradigm, often in a series of "failures" that are destroyed before the end result is ever seen. So even the most pure artistic achievements are usually the result of the collaboration.
I write software for a living. This last year I wrote a CAD system that ran to many tens of thousands of lines of code. I carefully paid attention to the work in order to understand my own creative process. I couldn't keep track of all the individual pieces of the project, but I never lost my overall understanding. My head would ache while I puzzled some difficult problem, which I interpreted as my left brain being unable to cope. At such times I would often take a break or go home, and most of the time when I got back, I would have a solution. I interpreted that as my right brain working on the problem without my conscious involvement. Left brains, including mine, are only capable of handling a limited amount of complexity. Right brains have no such limitation. Even engineering can involve high levels of coordinated activity between the hemispheres.
In fact, just about every creative act involves substantial involvement from both our brains. Sometimes we just don't admit it. How we see our brains working together can influence how we treat ourselves. More importantly, it can affect how we treat others. If we see our own success as a result of our left-brain analytic abilities, we will encourage and reward others based on our perceptions of their analytic abilities, and we will teach them only analytic skills. If we see our own success as a result of our right-brain reasoning skills, we will encourage and reward others based on our perceptions of their reasoning abilities, and we will teach them only reasoning skills. All of us need both, and our prejudices and misunderstandings on this issue can determine the future, as we will see in the next post.
Friday, March 18, 2011
How the left brain behaves
The left brain is easier to describe since it's all about words. The left brain has a narrower, more focused, and 2D view of the world. It only sees a small inner portion of the right visual field, corresponding to the small area of the cones.
The right brain is always finding things for the left brain to attend to. It mostly does this by turning the head and eyes to look at something. Whatever is inside the visual plane at the time of looking is either recognized or decomposed by the left brain into smaller bits until some bit is recognized. Left brain recognition consists of mapping the recognized bit(s) into a set of symbols. This is often done with context provided by the right brain.
The left brain carries a huge number of symbols, and it keeps track of a large number of relationships among the symbols. So the right brain is able to recognize a plant, but it might not be able to recognize what to do with a seldom- or never-seen plant without the left brain turning some of the details of the plant, like leaf shape or color, into symbol references and connecting them to symbolic references to other plants in memory. The left brain combines the recognized and referenced symbols to form a sense of the new plant and create a new symbol to represent the plant.
The left brain doesn't create a new symbol for everything new it encounters. If a new item is deemed to be very much like another, it will adapt the previous symbol to stand for both things. This involves making connections from the new bits it encountered to the adapted symbol and modifying the adapted symbol to include the new bits. Thus, every time we encounter a new tree, our symbolic understanding of 'tree' enlarges to include it. So while the right brain is busy remembering the true image of the new tree, the left brain is remembering the new bits of the new tree and generalizing 'tree' to be even less like any real tree than it was before.
Most of the left-brain symbols are associated with verbal terms. I say "terms" because the association may be with either a word or a phrase (or a collection of words or phrases.) When a symbol is activated by sensory input, the word(s) and phrase(s) are conjured along with the symbol.
The left brain operates at two levels. The previous paragraphs describe the first level, in which the limited sense inputs of the left brain activate symbols and create new ones. The second level 'plays' with this rich symbol collection, informed by the activation of symbols by the first level. This playing goes on all the time, sometimes directed by symbol activation ("I see the cat") and sometimes operating without sensory input (daydreaming.) And many parts of the left brain may be playing simultaneously with different sets of symbols.
The second level of left brain activity is what we normally think of as consciousness. It is a jumble of individual words, fleeting thoughts, story lines, planning, reviewing, judging, etc., all happening at once. The elements of the jumble typically involve words, lots of words, competing for attention.
The primary attribute of all these verbal mental processes in the left brain is that they are all based on the left brain symbols, not sensory input directly. McGilchrist in Master and Emissary calls this use of the symbols "re-presentation" in order to differentiate it from direct perception ("presentation" of the world). This is one of the attributes that makes the left brain so powerful: it can see and play with a world that doesn't exist. But it also separates the left brain from reality. The symbols are always approximations of reality, sometimes differing substantially from it, and this can lead to problems.
One of the ways the left brain connects its symbols is linearly, as if in time. I say "as if" because the left brain's concept of time is strictly "ordering", not flow. Time in the left brain is discrete and not continuous. Events unfolding over time in the world become in the left brain a discrete series of symbolic events. This (re)ordering of events is especially useful for planning and carrying out plans. The left brain can "play" with the ordering of events, even constructing orderings that it hasn't encountered before. Then it can step through such a series of events and carry out very precise processes that have never been seen before.
With all the verbal mayhem going on in the left brain, there has to be a way for attention to be focused. In a previous post I referred to this process as "choosing" without going into what it involves. In practical terms "choosing" involves activation levels of neural networks in the left brain. Each neural network corresponds to one of the elements in the verbal jumble referred to earlier. The activation level of a neural network depends on many factors: the strength and number of symbol activations, the emotional impact of the activations, and the state (mood) of the brain (meaning what other networks are activated.) Not least is habituation, in which activations that we experience more tend to happen more. Unless a network is continually reinforced, its activation decays with time, so it will likely be replaced by another network/thought/idea/concept. Thus our attention moves from thing to thing.
One of our many choices is to attend to the right brain view directly. When this happens, the words stop, we notice our peripheral vision, and other senses may report. We almost always then notice something interesting. The right brain will usually direct the eyes to it, which almost always activate a left-brain, verbal network enough to start some story ("That's a cumulus cloud".) So we tend not to attend directly to the right brain's view for very long before we find ourselves attending to one of the many neural patterns in the left brain.
One characteristic of left-brain activity is that it takes a bit of time. Sensory input has to activate symbols, which in turn activate multiple neural nets, which then have to be arbitrated among, each step of which takes time. While the right brain can mediate appropriate responses to stimuli in a handful of milliseconds ("duck!"), the left brain can take hundreds of milliseconds to appropriately attend. Thus, our normal lives (walking, driving, lovemaking, etc.) are mediated by the right brain. At the same time the right brain is performing these actions, the left brain is participating as a voyeur. This leaves it free to think about things that have nothing to do with the activity at hand or create stories about the activity that may not be entirely true. Even if it attends and doesn't prevaricate, its experience is at best a series of symbol activations.
This brings us to a central conundrum: the left brain lies. When you ask a person about an activity, it is the left brain that responds, because it controls speech. To answer the question the left brain will have to mediate among various activations that occurred during the activity, and the right brain view is only one of them. The choice of what activation to report is a complex consideration of survival, advantage, habit, time to respond, and myriad other factors. If the measure is objective reality, only the right brain view is true, and the left brain may not choose to report it.
The right brain is always finding things for the left brain to attend to. It mostly does this by turning the head and eyes to look at something. Whatever is inside the visual plane at the time of looking is either recognized or decomposed by the left brain into smaller bits until some bit is recognized. Left brain recognition consists of mapping the recognized bit(s) into a set of symbols. This is often done with context provided by the right brain.
The left brain carries a huge number of symbols, and it keeps track of a large number of relationships among the symbols. So the right brain is able to recognize a plant, but it might not be able to recognize what to do with a seldom- or never-seen plant without the left brain turning some of the details of the plant, like leaf shape or color, into symbol references and connecting them to symbolic references to other plants in memory. The left brain combines the recognized and referenced symbols to form a sense of the new plant and create a new symbol to represent the plant.
The left brain doesn't create a new symbol for everything new it encounters. If a new item is deemed to be very much like another, it will adapt the previous symbol to stand for both things. This involves making connections from the new bits it encountered to the adapted symbol and modifying the adapted symbol to include the new bits. Thus, every time we encounter a new tree, our symbolic understanding of 'tree' enlarges to include it. So while the right brain is busy remembering the true image of the new tree, the left brain is remembering the new bits of the new tree and generalizing 'tree' to be even less like any real tree than it was before.
Most of the left-brain symbols are associated with verbal terms. I say "terms" because the association may be with either a word or a phrase (or a collection of words or phrases.) When a symbol is activated by sensory input, the word(s) and phrase(s) are conjured along with the symbol.
The left brain operates at two levels. The previous paragraphs describe the first level, in which the limited sense inputs of the left brain activate symbols and create new ones. The second level 'plays' with this rich symbol collection, informed by the activation of symbols by the first level. This playing goes on all the time, sometimes directed by symbol activation ("I see the cat") and sometimes operating without sensory input (daydreaming.) And many parts of the left brain may be playing simultaneously with different sets of symbols.
The second level of left brain activity is what we normally think of as consciousness. It is a jumble of individual words, fleeting thoughts, story lines, planning, reviewing, judging, etc., all happening at once. The elements of the jumble typically involve words, lots of words, competing for attention.
The primary attribute of all these verbal mental processes in the left brain is that they are all based on the left brain symbols, not sensory input directly. McGilchrist in Master and Emissary calls this use of the symbols "re-presentation" in order to differentiate it from direct perception ("presentation" of the world). This is one of the attributes that makes the left brain so powerful: it can see and play with a world that doesn't exist. But it also separates the left brain from reality. The symbols are always approximations of reality, sometimes differing substantially from it, and this can lead to problems.
One of the ways the left brain connects its symbols is linearly, as if in time. I say "as if" because the left brain's concept of time is strictly "ordering", not flow. Time in the left brain is discrete and not continuous. Events unfolding over time in the world become in the left brain a discrete series of symbolic events. This (re)ordering of events is especially useful for planning and carrying out plans. The left brain can "play" with the ordering of events, even constructing orderings that it hasn't encountered before. Then it can step through such a series of events and carry out very precise processes that have never been seen before.
With all the verbal mayhem going on in the left brain, there has to be a way for attention to be focused. In a previous post I referred to this process as "choosing" without going into what it involves. In practical terms "choosing" involves activation levels of neural networks in the left brain. Each neural network corresponds to one of the elements in the verbal jumble referred to earlier. The activation level of a neural network depends on many factors: the strength and number of symbol activations, the emotional impact of the activations, and the state (mood) of the brain (meaning what other networks are activated.) Not least is habituation, in which activations that we experience more tend to happen more. Unless a network is continually reinforced, its activation decays with time, so it will likely be replaced by another network/thought/idea/concept. Thus our attention moves from thing to thing.
One of our many choices is to attend to the right brain view directly. When this happens, the words stop, we notice our peripheral vision, and other senses may report. We almost always then notice something interesting. The right brain will usually direct the eyes to it, which almost always activate a left-brain, verbal network enough to start some story ("That's a cumulus cloud".) So we tend not to attend directly to the right brain's view for very long before we find ourselves attending to one of the many neural patterns in the left brain.
One characteristic of left-brain activity is that it takes a bit of time. Sensory input has to activate symbols, which in turn activate multiple neural nets, which then have to be arbitrated among, each step of which takes time. While the right brain can mediate appropriate responses to stimuli in a handful of milliseconds ("duck!"), the left brain can take hundreds of milliseconds to appropriately attend. Thus, our normal lives (walking, driving, lovemaking, etc.) are mediated by the right brain. At the same time the right brain is performing these actions, the left brain is participating as a voyeur. This leaves it free to think about things that have nothing to do with the activity at hand or create stories about the activity that may not be entirely true. Even if it attends and doesn't prevaricate, its experience is at best a series of symbol activations.
This brings us to a central conundrum: the left brain lies. When you ask a person about an activity, it is the left brain that responds, because it controls speech. To answer the question the left brain will have to mediate among various activations that occurred during the activity, and the right brain view is only one of them. The choice of what activation to report is a complex consideration of survival, advantage, habit, time to respond, and myriad other factors. If the measure is objective reality, only the right brain view is true, and the left brain may not choose to report it.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
How the right brain abides
I wanted to provide a description of how the right brain resides in the world, but I failed. To put it in a post, I have to use words, and words immediately make it all sound like the left brain.
If you want to get an idea of what your right brain is like, read My Stroke of Insight, especially the chapter "Morning of the Stroke". At that point she was living entirely in her right brain, and she describes what she remembers it feeling like. Of course, anything she writes is suspect because she has the same problem I do, her thoughts must be translated by her (largely recovered) left brain. The description is also suspect because it is a description of a right brain that has just lost its lifelong partner, essentially a fraternal twin, and is both bereft and fighting for survival.
When you open your eyes, the right brain soaks in everything in the visual field. It connects to the world it sees, and knows where it is in the 3D world. It listens to the world. It knows where the sounds come from, and connects the sounds to the 3D world it sees. It feels every part of the world you are touching and adds that to its integrated understanding of the world. The same with smells. All this happens without any effort on your part, and it continues as long as you are awake.
The right brain craves sensory stimulation. The head turns. The eyes scan. The fingers explore. The body locomotes. The right brain wants more connection. It craves complexity. The right brain will often rest in fractal complexity, such as a tree or a mountain or a flock of birds flying or a rich work of art or clouds. The right brain sees a fully 3D world, with a full understanding of the concept of depth in all it perceives.
The right brain recognizes changes in the visual field. In the periphery it will notice small changes in luminosity and shift the eyes (and head if necessary) to more fully see it. It can recognize many things. Some things like snake-shapes and spider shapes may come from our genes. Others are learned (via the right-left-right paradigm). For some of those things the right brain initiates instinctive or learned responses. For others, it alerts the left brain. All the while soaking in the world and seeking more.
The most complex thing the right brain recognizes is the face. The right brain tries to find faces everywhere: human faces, pet faces, other animal faces, even insect faces, all turned at different angles. It not only finds them, it identifies them from the subtlest of cues. While it is identifying a face, it is also reading subtle (and not so subtle) emotional cues, so we can look at a face and instantly recognize what that being is feeling (though not flawlessly.) Then we can tell where the face's eyes are looking in the 3D space that surrounds us. Then we can read the dynamics of a face (and its body) to predict its behavior (again, not flawlessly), all before the name of the face owner pops into our conscious thought.
The same goes for all sensory fields. The healthy right brain wants to touch and be touched. It hears the environment. It pays attention to the brain's mental states. These things go on whether you are attending to them or not, and the right brain will try to get the attention of your consciousness when something interesting or important happens.
The primary effect of this robust connection with sensory input and attraction to complexity is that the right brain perceives connections with everything it surveys. It doesn't 'think' about the connections in any conventional sense: it resides in those connections. It a very real sense it is those connections. The right brain doesn't perceive boundaries between itself and the world of its senses. It doesn't even perceive boundaries between the various things it perceives. It perceives patterns in a unified landscape of sensual data.
The right brain lives in time as much as it lives in the 3D space of its senses. The right brain experiences time as a continuous flow of changing sensory input, reasonably calibrated with real time. Events not only happen in order, but intermediate events are experienced and remembered for just about every two events.
The right brains spends its time and energy resting in the continuity of the connections it has with the greater world as the world changes over time. It reports to the left brain many interesting patterns it recognizes, and it does this tirelessly, providing a reliable context for the more frenetic activity of the left brain.
If you want to get an idea of what your right brain is like, read My Stroke of Insight, especially the chapter "Morning of the Stroke". At that point she was living entirely in her right brain, and she describes what she remembers it feeling like. Of course, anything she writes is suspect because she has the same problem I do, her thoughts must be translated by her (largely recovered) left brain. The description is also suspect because it is a description of a right brain that has just lost its lifelong partner, essentially a fraternal twin, and is both bereft and fighting for survival.
When you open your eyes, the right brain soaks in everything in the visual field. It connects to the world it sees, and knows where it is in the 3D world. It listens to the world. It knows where the sounds come from, and connects the sounds to the 3D world it sees. It feels every part of the world you are touching and adds that to its integrated understanding of the world. The same with smells. All this happens without any effort on your part, and it continues as long as you are awake.
The right brain craves sensory stimulation. The head turns. The eyes scan. The fingers explore. The body locomotes. The right brain wants more connection. It craves complexity. The right brain will often rest in fractal complexity, such as a tree or a mountain or a flock of birds flying or a rich work of art or clouds. The right brain sees a fully 3D world, with a full understanding of the concept of depth in all it perceives.
The right brain recognizes changes in the visual field. In the periphery it will notice small changes in luminosity and shift the eyes (and head if necessary) to more fully see it. It can recognize many things. Some things like snake-shapes and spider shapes may come from our genes. Others are learned (via the right-left-right paradigm). For some of those things the right brain initiates instinctive or learned responses. For others, it alerts the left brain. All the while soaking in the world and seeking more.
The most complex thing the right brain recognizes is the face. The right brain tries to find faces everywhere: human faces, pet faces, other animal faces, even insect faces, all turned at different angles. It not only finds them, it identifies them from the subtlest of cues. While it is identifying a face, it is also reading subtle (and not so subtle) emotional cues, so we can look at a face and instantly recognize what that being is feeling (though not flawlessly.) Then we can tell where the face's eyes are looking in the 3D space that surrounds us. Then we can read the dynamics of a face (and its body) to predict its behavior (again, not flawlessly), all before the name of the face owner pops into our conscious thought.
The same goes for all sensory fields. The healthy right brain wants to touch and be touched. It hears the environment. It pays attention to the brain's mental states. These things go on whether you are attending to them or not, and the right brain will try to get the attention of your consciousness when something interesting or important happens.
The primary effect of this robust connection with sensory input and attraction to complexity is that the right brain perceives connections with everything it surveys. It doesn't 'think' about the connections in any conventional sense: it resides in those connections. It a very real sense it is those connections. The right brain doesn't perceive boundaries between itself and the world of its senses. It doesn't even perceive boundaries between the various things it perceives. It perceives patterns in a unified landscape of sensual data.
The right brain lives in time as much as it lives in the 3D space of its senses. The right brain experiences time as a continuous flow of changing sensory input, reasonably calibrated with real time. Events not only happen in order, but intermediate events are experienced and remembered for just about every two events.
The right brains spends its time and energy resting in the continuity of the connections it has with the greater world as the world changes over time. It reports to the left brain many interesting patterns it recognizes, and it does this tirelessly, providing a reliable context for the more frenetic activity of the left brain.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Drawing on the brain
My first experience with the left/right divide was a one-day course "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" at SIGCHI 98(?). Based on her book and a longer course, it was the first time Betty Edwards had tried to condense her originally multi-week course to a single day. It worked for me.
During the course she referred repeatedly to L-brain and R-brain as metaphors because at the time medicine and psychology were busy denigrating any reality of left/right brain differences and she had clearly been beaten up by the "experts". I haven't talked to her since then, but I'm sure the last decade's real research on the differences has gratified her.
There were two exercises that made an impression. I hadn't read the book before the course, and came into the class doubtful that I could learn to draw. The exercises had a profound impact on me. I was able to draw, and I felt the mental shifts she described as necessary to do it. I will briefly describe them here.
The first exercise was to copy Picasso's "Portrait of Igor Stravinsky". I have tried to copy other images in my life, so I was quite aware of my inadequacies in doing so. The second exercise was to draw my hand, and I also doubted that I could do that. But I was open to learning.
The trick is to copy Picasso's "Portrait" upside down so as to disengage the left brain. I started in, and was really happy with how well I was doing, both in speed and accuracy. Until I got to the hands. Without thinking about it, I watched my drawing turn to crap. I erased the crap and forced myself to look only at the individual lines. Drawing each line segment very slowly, I faithfully reproduced the hands. After that I relaxed into my previous speed and accuracy until I got to the head. I was ready that time and went into the slow, one-line-at-a-time mode and finished the head. Of course, this is all described in the book, which I looked at later.
The exercise allowed me to experience the switch between left and right hemispheres. Surprisingly, there wasn't any feeling of clumsiness in my drawing hand when the change occurred. Apparently the brain is well practiced at making the transition. One lesson was how subtle and natural the change is. A second lesson was how easy it is to induce the change once you know it can be done. The third lesson was, of course, what a dramatic difference it makes.
During the second exercise (drawing my hand), I played with the change and became comfortable with it. I became confident that I could do it in the future as need arises. I don't often draw, but the lessons I learned have benefited my work every since.
The lessons also opened me to thinking about left/right brain issues. The academic condescension that was rampant at the time in most cognitive literature kept me from reading more about it until recently. Now it seems that a corner has been turned, so I am immersing myself in the subject.
The overall lesson from the experience was that drawing is mostly seeing. Betty made the point that drawing isn't art, so learning to draw didn't mean we had become artists. She sees drawing as a basic skill that everyone should learn, like doing arithmetic or using a keyboard. This message is more subtle than you might think since many of our personal and social problems arise from not seeing clearly.
A corollary to the overall lesson is that most of us can really only draw well an actual (physical) object. Asked to draw a house, we would best draw an actual instance of a house. Asked to draw a person, we would best draw a real person. Drawing a generic house or person will usually lead to an uninteresting result. I don't know how artists draw things that are entirely in their heads.
During the course she referred repeatedly to L-brain and R-brain as metaphors because at the time medicine and psychology were busy denigrating any reality of left/right brain differences and she had clearly been beaten up by the "experts". I haven't talked to her since then, but I'm sure the last decade's real research on the differences has gratified her.
There were two exercises that made an impression. I hadn't read the book before the course, and came into the class doubtful that I could learn to draw. The exercises had a profound impact on me. I was able to draw, and I felt the mental shifts she described as necessary to do it. I will briefly describe them here.
The first exercise was to copy Picasso's "Portrait of Igor Stravinsky". I have tried to copy other images in my life, so I was quite aware of my inadequacies in doing so. The second exercise was to draw my hand, and I also doubted that I could do that. But I was open to learning.
The trick is to copy Picasso's "Portrait" upside down so as to disengage the left brain. I started in, and was really happy with how well I was doing, both in speed and accuracy. Until I got to the hands. Without thinking about it, I watched my drawing turn to crap. I erased the crap and forced myself to look only at the individual lines. Drawing each line segment very slowly, I faithfully reproduced the hands. After that I relaxed into my previous speed and accuracy until I got to the head. I was ready that time and went into the slow, one-line-at-a-time mode and finished the head. Of course, this is all described in the book, which I looked at later.
The exercise allowed me to experience the switch between left and right hemispheres. Surprisingly, there wasn't any feeling of clumsiness in my drawing hand when the change occurred. Apparently the brain is well practiced at making the transition. One lesson was how subtle and natural the change is. A second lesson was how easy it is to induce the change once you know it can be done. The third lesson was, of course, what a dramatic difference it makes.
During the second exercise (drawing my hand), I played with the change and became comfortable with it. I became confident that I could do it in the future as need arises. I don't often draw, but the lessons I learned have benefited my work every since.
The lessons also opened me to thinking about left/right brain issues. The academic condescension that was rampant at the time in most cognitive literature kept me from reading more about it until recently. Now it seems that a corner has been turned, so I am immersing myself in the subject.
The overall lesson from the experience was that drawing is mostly seeing. Betty made the point that drawing isn't art, so learning to draw didn't mean we had become artists. She sees drawing as a basic skill that everyone should learn, like doing arithmetic or using a keyboard. This message is more subtle than you might think since many of our personal and social problems arise from not seeing clearly.
A corollary to the overall lesson is that most of us can really only draw well an actual (physical) object. Asked to draw a house, we would best draw an actual instance of a house. Asked to draw a person, we would best draw a real person. Drawing a generic house or person will usually lead to an uninteresting result. I don't know how artists draw things that are entirely in their heads.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Playing with the world
The primary activity of the left brain is deconstructing the world and using the resulting pieces to construct new worlds. This is the primary method of all human creativity. It's sounds a lot like playing with Legos, and it is, but there are crucial differences. In this post I want to describe the world of the left brain, just as I described the world of the right brain in the preceding post.
People are playful. We tend to think of playfulness as some sort of icing on the cake of humanity, but I believe it is fundamental. Not everyone is playful all the time. Nor do our histories talk much about play; they tend to concentrate on the serious business of survival and power. That may be what history is about, but day-to-day life is about play.
This is not to say everyone's life is fun or even that most people's lives are fun. Fun isn't the reason we play. The reason we play is that we have no choice; it is our nature.
One primary activity of the left brain is exploring the world. The right brain typically starts this process by moving the head and eyes so the central right visual field encompasses something interesting. The first thing that happens is that the left brain finds boundaries in the visual field and interprets the space between and outside the boundaries as pieces of the world. The left brain carries around a lot of re-presentation of previously found objects. A re-presentation is a somewhat idealized memory of a class of objects, something akin to an icon. That is, the first time the left brain sees an object it remembers it much as it was first seen. After seeing additional versions of the object, it forms a more general image of the object that both represents the object and re-presents it in slightly altered form. If a first level object is not recognized, the left brain will typically, look for boundaries in it, and continue the decomposition. For example, the first time a person sees what might be a house in the distance, the left brain identifies the roof, walls, doors, windows, etc.
Once the visual field has been decomposed into recognized pieces, the left brain will hold the pieces in relation to one another and see if the pieces can be recognized as some reconstructed whole. The left brain also carries around a lot of reconstructed wholes. Again, these are re-presentations of classes of real objects. Continuing the example, the left brain that sees the erstwhile house will discover that an object with a roof on the top and walls on the side, with windows and doors, is likely a house. If the match is sufficiently decisive, the left brain will "decide" that it is a house and start deconstructing its constituent parts, discovering how the roof, walls, windows and door are constructed. If the match isn't decisive, it may continue looking for matches to a whole and find perhaps "barn".
We can see these re-presentations by asking people to draw something that is not present. "Draw a house". Most people will draw an image of their left brain re-presentation of a house rather than a specific house. This left-brain re-presentation will typically be recognizable to others, but won't be considered particularly artistic. In fact, the drawing may be a better picture than what they carry around in their head because during the drawing we will be fixing obvious deficiencies like "shouldn't the walls and the roof meet?"
These collections of re-presented parts and wholes are the Lego-like building blocks the left brain plays with. When the left brain isn't doing anything else, it creates new things from these pieces, and some of these new things are added to the collections of wholes that might be found during some later exploration.
Note that the re-presentations aren't really stored as parts and wholes. We continually deconstruct and construct so that most parts are really constructed of smaller parts, and wholes are often constituent parts of more grandiose wholes. Thus we understand that doors are really made of molecules, atoms, nuclei, quarks, fields, etc., and are parts of a house in a great city on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in one of many possible universes.
One form of creativity is seeing things that others don't see. This may result from a person having imagined (mentally constructed) something before others had actually seen it. Another form of creativity is making a physical representation of an imagined something that has never existed before, even if it just a little bit better than something that did.
The reality of a creation is perceived by the right brain and made an important part of our right-brain reality and that of others around us. Thus the creative process that started with the right-brain directing the visual field of the left brain to something "interesting" proceeds full circle to returning the fruits of creation to the right brain. This enables the right brain to find more "interesting" somethings to direct the left brain to play with.
Traditionally, creativity is ascribed to the right brain while I have described it as a playful partnership of both hemispheres. These observations are not really in conflict if you understand what artists and philosophers have been telling us forever: the foundation of all creativity is perceiving the world clearly. They tell us that by this they mean seeing the world without the veils that cloud our vision and distort reality. The right brain sees clearly, but few of us are brave enough to trust its view over that of the more familiar re-presentations that fill our minds. So for most of us, trusting the right brain is at once the most creative act we will perform and the basis of all further creation.
People are playful. We tend to think of playfulness as some sort of icing on the cake of humanity, but I believe it is fundamental. Not everyone is playful all the time. Nor do our histories talk much about play; they tend to concentrate on the serious business of survival and power. That may be what history is about, but day-to-day life is about play.
This is not to say everyone's life is fun or even that most people's lives are fun. Fun isn't the reason we play. The reason we play is that we have no choice; it is our nature.
One primary activity of the left brain is exploring the world. The right brain typically starts this process by moving the head and eyes so the central right visual field encompasses something interesting. The first thing that happens is that the left brain finds boundaries in the visual field and interprets the space between and outside the boundaries as pieces of the world. The left brain carries around a lot of re-presentation of previously found objects. A re-presentation is a somewhat idealized memory of a class of objects, something akin to an icon. That is, the first time the left brain sees an object it remembers it much as it was first seen. After seeing additional versions of the object, it forms a more general image of the object that both represents the object and re-presents it in slightly altered form. If a first level object is not recognized, the left brain will typically, look for boundaries in it, and continue the decomposition. For example, the first time a person sees what might be a house in the distance, the left brain identifies the roof, walls, doors, windows, etc.
Once the visual field has been decomposed into recognized pieces, the left brain will hold the pieces in relation to one another and see if the pieces can be recognized as some reconstructed whole. The left brain also carries around a lot of reconstructed wholes. Again, these are re-presentations of classes of real objects. Continuing the example, the left brain that sees the erstwhile house will discover that an object with a roof on the top and walls on the side, with windows and doors, is likely a house. If the match is sufficiently decisive, the left brain will "decide" that it is a house and start deconstructing its constituent parts, discovering how the roof, walls, windows and door are constructed. If the match isn't decisive, it may continue looking for matches to a whole and find perhaps "barn".
We can see these re-presentations by asking people to draw something that is not present. "Draw a house". Most people will draw an image of their left brain re-presentation of a house rather than a specific house. This left-brain re-presentation will typically be recognizable to others, but won't be considered particularly artistic. In fact, the drawing may be a better picture than what they carry around in their head because during the drawing we will be fixing obvious deficiencies like "shouldn't the walls and the roof meet?"
These collections of re-presented parts and wholes are the Lego-like building blocks the left brain plays with. When the left brain isn't doing anything else, it creates new things from these pieces, and some of these new things are added to the collections of wholes that might be found during some later exploration.
Note that the re-presentations aren't really stored as parts and wholes. We continually deconstruct and construct so that most parts are really constructed of smaller parts, and wholes are often constituent parts of more grandiose wholes. Thus we understand that doors are really made of molecules, atoms, nuclei, quarks, fields, etc., and are parts of a house in a great city on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in one of many possible universes.
One form of creativity is seeing things that others don't see. This may result from a person having imagined (mentally constructed) something before others had actually seen it. Another form of creativity is making a physical representation of an imagined something that has never existed before, even if it just a little bit better than something that did.
The reality of a creation is perceived by the right brain and made an important part of our right-brain reality and that of others around us. Thus the creative process that started with the right-brain directing the visual field of the left brain to something "interesting" proceeds full circle to returning the fruits of creation to the right brain. This enables the right brain to find more "interesting" somethings to direct the left brain to play with.
Traditionally, creativity is ascribed to the right brain while I have described it as a playful partnership of both hemispheres. These observations are not really in conflict if you understand what artists and philosophers have been telling us forever: the foundation of all creativity is perceiving the world clearly. They tell us that by this they mean seeing the world without the veils that cloud our vision and distort reality. The right brain sees clearly, but few of us are brave enough to trust its view over that of the more familiar re-presentations that fill our minds. So for most of us, trusting the right brain is at once the most creative act we will perform and the basis of all further creation.
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