Just-a-Pause : The War of the Brains

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Looking around us we come across all kinds of people… practical and impulsive, logical and illogical, creative to the point of eccentricity, emotional and detached. There is where the conflict lies… in our brains.

Read on to know the why and how of our warring left and right brains.

Have you observed how women usually hold babies on their left side and wondered why? It's to connect to the emotional half of the brain. So holding the baby on the left-hand side may help to direct the sight of emotionally charged information, such as tears or laughter, to the specialized right hemisphere for processing. Very interesting!!

No sweat guys…. it's nothing but a crossover theory. The left-brain gets inputs from the right side of the body and the right brain gets input from the left side. It is intriguing to note that the heart, the seat of emotions, happens to be on the left side of the body which is controlled by the right side of the brain that usually helps to process emotions.

Makes me wonder though – Let's say a person marries someone with opposite hemisphericity that would certainly allow them to walk arm-in-arm to keep track of the other's emotions. Now…that's a theory worth thinking about!

Jokes apart, this is an extremely captivating phenomenon that many people may not realize… each of us is really like two people. Nah! Not the usual good and bad stuff. I mean, we are literally two thinking beings residing in the same body.

Confused? Go look at your face in the mirror, first the right half and then the left. Observe the difference. Bang on! While a handful of people have symmetrical faces, a vast majority of us do not. Also, it raises a possibility that each side of our face could express different emotions at the same time. This could help us to understand our "other self". Facial expressions are nothing more than skin and muscle being pulled or flexed according to the control of the brain. Our facial nerves effectively divide our face into two separate sides, each controlled by the opposite side brain. What do ya know?!…Facial expressions are the earliest form of communication.

Here is a captivating concept…our personality can comes through as a result of the degree to which these left and right brains interact. Left-brain types are very analytical and orderly while the right brainers are more artistic, unpredictable and creative. But each of us draws upon specific sides of our brain for a variety of daily functions, depending on such criteria as our age, education and life experiences. Now what forges our personalities and determines our character is the choice of which side of the brain controls which situation.

Take children for instance: Experiments show that most children rank highly creative (right brain) before entering school. Because our educational systems place a higher value on left-brain skills such as mathematics, logic and language than it does on drawing or using our imagination, only ten percent of these same children will rank highly creative by age 7. By the time we are adults, high creativity remains in only 2 percent of the population.

For the more practical left brainers, emotions are a waste of time. Conflict arises as the two brains do not only see the world in vastly different ways, but in our current society, the left side just "doesn't get" what the right side is all about. It appears that most people will never reach their maximum potential because of compromises that have been made between these two governing bodies. Sometimes skills, which the right brain can perform, better are routinely handled, with less skill, by the left-brain.

It's like I wanted to just reach out to this friend of mine but did not know what to say and how. So in the end I sent a message done in "windings font". The message was deftly decoded using logic of the left-brain but unfortunately; the emotional undertone was not understood. What I mean to say is that the right side should step in to focus not on the "what" of an emotional message but rather on how it feels.

But with the world getting more contemporary in their thinking, this battle is almost always won by the left-brain, choosing logic, reasoning and details over imagination, emotion, holistic thinking and artistic talent.

During such activities as meditation, the logical left side is easily bored by lack of input and tends to "doze off". The right brain is then able to "sneak" in, filling our minds with emotional and visually freely associated images. But alas, all too quickly though, the left brain will assert itself and dispense with these irrational images, asserting its Spock-like logical dominance and the right brain will have to be content to find expressions in our dreams.