.1 Left/Right, Girl/Boy, Thinking/Non-thinking Brains

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This left brain right brain stuff is driving everybody crazy. We use to think that the left brain (which is the sequential processing side of the brain) does language and stuff, and the right side which is the random processing side of the brain does visual stuff. We now learn it doesn't happen that way. We are finding so many things we can't understand. For example, in the U.S. about 10 % of the pop. is left handed, (like me) while 90% are right handed. It turns out that the world that these right handers have created is very prejudicial to us left handers. So prejudicial, in fact, that left handers are five times as likely as right handers to die an accidental death. The world is organized to protect you right handers, not organized to protect me.
The old idea was that music is a right brain activity, but when you have a musician listen to music, he/she will process music dominantly on the left side of the brain. Only musical novices process music in the right side of the brain. This is because when musicians hear music they analyze it. For a novice you just kind of lay back and randomly process.

There a sex differences, there seems to be pretty solid neurological evidence, that females brain process language and feelings at the same time, and more efficiently than male brains. Male brains tend to be more linear than female brains. Female brains can do more things at once than male brains. Mothers are not surprise at that, because when you turn the little kid over for the dad to take care of, dads tend to go crazy doing things that mothers do routinely, in balancing all the stuff to make it happen.

Then another thing is, when we get ideas, we just don't send the new idea to one part of the brain to be processed. That's the way we used to think, and early brain researchers use to really wonder where different ideas are sent. When we have certain kinds of feelings/threats/erotic arousal, where do we send them for processing? The new theory suggests the brain function a little like a sparkler; you light the sparkler and the sparks go everywhere. Often times in unpredictable ways.

Positive Electron Transmission, or PET is where you put your brain in a machine and that machine tracks what happens in your brain while you are doing different things. One of the things they found from PETs is that after the brain gets the right answer, it doesn't stop. We use to think that the brain would get the right answer and then shut down, like a computer when it is done calculating something. Ask a question, computer computes, brain thinks, then "Bing," when the answer is found the computing/thinking stops. No way. Brains don't work like that.

Even after the brain gets the right answer it isn't satisfied, and it continues to look for other alternatives. Those alternatives may be looked for either at a conscious or unconscious level. Our brains love alternatives, and hate narrowness. However, classes are designed for narrowness. We are designing our learning environment exactly opposite from the way our brain works.

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