Upon attempting some of the beginning exercises in DOTRSotB, I have started to wonder a bit about whether I am at all impaired on the right side of my brain. I never had a stroke or anything, so any problem I have now, I should have always had, right?
A long time ago, I was almost *too* imaginative – creativity was not lacking, in fact I’d say I was right-brain dominant. I excelled in art and music classes (but I did have trouble with math, organization, languages, and logical problems). I never had spacial perception issues, and as for visual memory, I still remember the layout of the house in which I went to day care until I was sixteen months old. As I understand it, one’s brain can not short circuit from being overworked.
The question, which arises is this, then: what happened to my brain, that it seems to have switched sides?
I have a few ideas.
- I struggled so hard with left brain tasks in school that all my energies went into those tasks, and as a result they atrophied.
- There has been no atrophy, but since creativity-based classes were out of the picture after age 12, the left brain has developed, and the right just fell behind.
- The expensive neuro-psychological tests which alerted me to a dire lack of right-brain function were faulty.
I, for one am greatly offended by the fact that our education system manages to kill every ounce of creative energies in most students by the time they reach high-school. I suppose it goes to show that the real purpose of schools is not to produce a more educated populous, but to quash any possibility that people will think for themselves; in doing so schools prevent any challenge to status quo. Sad, though, that despite the overwhelming focus on mathematical and otherwise analytic thought in American schools, those same schools are very poorly rated in comparison to other industrialized nations. I wonder whether this is because the Chinese still have music programs.
In any case, I am making progress in my brain retraining very, very quickly. I can feel the shift between left and right, and am becoming adept at causing that shift. I’d known how to do this for years, but I’d always written it off and suppressed it. I isolate right-brain function so thoroughly in that trance-like state that language ceases to be perceptible to me. All this time I’d thought that the right-brain mode of mindedness was the same thing as zoning out.
I supposedly have a few more years to salvage the function of that ill-fated cortex.
Maybe there is hope afterall.
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On second thought…
August 8, 2008 at 1:06 am (Journaling, Social Commentary) (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, education, mental health, psychology)
Upon attempting some of the beginning exercises in DOTRSotB, I have started to wonder a bit about whether I am at all impaired on the right side of my brain. I never had a stroke or anything, so any problem I have now, I should have always had, right?
A long time ago, I was almost *too* imaginative – creativity was not lacking, in fact I’d say I was right-brain dominant. I excelled in art and music classes (but I did have trouble with math, organization, languages, and logical problems). I never had spacial perception issues, and as for visual memory, I still remember the layout of the house in which I went to day care until I was sixteen months old. As I understand it, one’s brain can not short circuit from being overworked.
The question, which arises is this, then: what happened to my brain, that it seems to have switched sides?
I have a few ideas.
- I struggled so hard with left brain tasks in school that all my energies went into those tasks, and as a result they atrophied.
- There has been no atrophy, but since creativity-based classes were out of the picture after age 12, the left brain has developed, and the right just fell behind.
- The expensive neuro-psychological tests which alerted me to a dire lack of right-brain function were faulty.
I, for one am greatly offended by the fact that our education system manages to kill every ounce of creative energies in most students by the time they reach high-school. I suppose it goes to show that the real purpose of schools is not to produce a more educated populous, but to quash any possibility that people will think for themselves; in doing so schools prevent any challenge to status quo. Sad, though, that despite the overwhelming focus on mathematical and otherwise analytic thought in American schools, those same schools are very poorly rated in comparison to other industrialized nations. I wonder whether this is because the Chinese still have music programs.
In any case, I am making progress in my brain retraining very, very quickly. I can feel the shift between left and right, and am becoming adept at causing that shift. I’d known how to do this for years, but I’d always written it off and suppressed it. I isolate right-brain function so thoroughly in that trance-like state that language ceases to be perceptible to me. All this time I’d thought that the right-brain mode of mindedness was the same thing as zoning out.
I supposedly have a few more years to salvage the function of that ill-fated cortex.
Maybe there is hope afterall.
Like this: