IUBio

Right/Left brain

Todd I. Stark stark at dwovax.enet.dec.com
Thu Jul 22 19:45:10 EST 1993


insmathi at kraken.itc.gu.edu.au (Raymond Mathiesen) writes...
>as fantasy, creativity, non-linear thinking, could be generally discribed as
>Right brain functions, while others, such as mathematics, logic, linear
>thinking, could be described as Left brain functions.  I realize that both
>hemispheres are always involved in complex activity, however , can it still
>be said that one hemisphere predominates in different complex actrivities.
>The reason why I ask is that during a discussion in another news group
>someone informed me that this whole notion has gone out the window.  Is this
>correct?

As this seemingly refers to my comments to you in alt.self-improve, let
me suggest that you may have exaggerated my position and created a 
bit of a straw man here.  I explicitly recognized the differences in
cortical hemisphere activity, but downplayed the popular notion of
the 'non-dominant' being 'creative.'    I referenced Sperry's
work, and the popular summary in Springer and Deutsch as a curative
for the popular myth of the mystical right brain since 
there was gagging when I mentioned that the 'Skeptical Inquirer' had
done a piece on this issue.  :-)

The issue we discussed was actually even more specific than that, in fact.
What I said was very specifically that there is 
likely no good reason to assume that a right handed person using their 
left hand for writing is becoming 'more creative' because they are
somehow preferentially activating their 'creative hemisphere.'  Let's
get straight that this was the original question that we addressed,
not some abstract notion of what 'predominance' might mean in
terms of cortical hemispheres for 'fantasy' or 'imagination.'

Unless you can quantify 'predominance' and precisely define a task
to examine, you can't very well resolve this question definitively.

>Raymond N. Mathiesen
><r.mathiesen at ins.gu.edu.au>

My comments being represented more fairly, I'm very interested to hear
any comments.  

						kind regards,

						todd
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