Brain hemispheres part 1
A few years ago while I was sitting in the back of a van on my way to a lake to go for a swim in the south of France, the van bumped into the back of a car and I hit the right side of my forehead on a metal ridge in the van. The result was that the top of my head on the right side was numb for half a day. An x-ray was taken, nothing showed, but ever since I have the feeling that I can synthesize information less well and get stuck on analysis too much from time to time. Especially switching from right to left brain activity and the other way around is more of a challenge now. This got me curious about the workings of the brain hemispheres and how to balance and connect them.
On my journey of trying to get to know my own brain, I concluded a funny thing. Our analytical left side of the brain is designated to calculate things. Yet it can never make a proper add up of things in life without help from the right side of the brain, as it does not know the value of the whole because it sees only the individual parts. The right side however sees the whole and therefore understands the interrelated value of things in life.
In our western society we are mostly left brainers, our left side of the brain is usually more developed and active then the right side of the brain. Simply put the left hemisphere works in an analytic way and thus handles information about the quantity of things and our right hemisphere processes things by syntheses, which creates an overview and supplies information about the quality of things. Being a western left brainer we get ourselves in a bit of a pickle when we start thinking about the meaning of life. We ask ourselves questions about the quality of things yet tend to get answers about quantity of things from our left-brain hemisphere. This is very confusing to say the least, it puts us totally on the wrong foot (that would be the right foot, which corresponds with the left brain hemisphere ;-) )
My conclusion is that I trust the left-brain less and less with things that have actual meaning. Purely practical quantity calculations is all it can do. It's no more then a calculator, a shape distinguisher and a practical sign-, smell-, vision-, audio-, touch- and language- interpreter. It is a computer, with more capacity then any Apple, yet a computer that can create nothing what so ever. The only thing it can do is process information.
Why would we trust our questions about the meaning of life and about right or wrong to our left-brain hemisphere? It doesn't have the faintest clue. But sadly, instead of saying 'error' or 'file not found' with the wrong input, it will try to come up with at least some kind of answer to our questions about life. It will say something like pears are more expensive then apples and therefore more important.
As it knows only about the quantity of things, it can only give quantity answers to whatever we ask. And we take these answers seriously, starting to believe life is about quantity. How 'much' did I achieve today? How 'many' friends do I have? How 'many' wrinkles do I have and is this 'normal' for my 'age'? How 'much' protein did I have today? How 'many' times this week did we have sex? How 'much' time is left before I die? How 'much' did my birthday present cost, does that mean my partner loves me?'
How on earth can we derive meaning from quantity? We can not! We have to stop abusing our poor left brain hemisphere the way we do. It tries to please us with answers because we ask, not really knowing what it is we want to know and how to provide the appropriate answer. Wouldn't it be helpful if we could find a way to activate our right brain hemisphere when we have questions about the meaning of life?
I will talk about ways I found to do this in 'Brain hemispheres part 2' which will appear on the ecoTrain here on Steemit the day after tomorrow. If you're curious, see you then!