Living in a left brained world

I know this subject has been discussed and written about until people are rather tired of it, but I still find it interesting so I decided to analyze my own life from the viewpoint of the right and left sides of my brain. My very first blog post was about my lack of math ability - which is certainly a left-brain related function. Not surprisingly, my math ability has not improved at all since I posted that blog entry.

I notice folks who are more right-brained by nature (at least in my case) tend to see things our left-brain dominant cousins do not. I see “things” - faces, objects, plants, for example - in the way a bunch of buttons are stacked in a glass jar. I take delight in the particular shade of blue in the sky on a particular day. I love the pattern of reflected car taillights on wet pavement.

Give me a choice between a coloring book and a book of Sudoku, I get a warm fuzzy, nostalgic feeling from the coloring book. The Sudoku book gives me indigestion. When I started downloading games to my computer, I very much delighted in the hidden-object games I discovered. These games challenge you to find things hidden in pattern-heavy images and I find it very relaxing. However, a lot of the game companies have been throwing in diabolical puzzles at certain points in these games which you have to solve in order to progress in the game. I work on a computer all day long at work. I don’t want to “think” in the traditional sense when I’m playing. Give me the visual stuff, please. I hate logic!

It’s almost painful to start a re-arrange project in my house. I’ve written before about my book hoard. My right brain actually likes the piles on the floor in my bedroom. It’s sort of organized clutter. But it is clutter due to the fact that the piles are overflow from my book cases. I would love for them to be more organized and all fit somewhere other than the floor, but when I switch on the left side of my brain to try to solve the issue, it’s like wearing one of those electric dog collars - my left brain sends out an electric shock and says “you have too many - they will not fit neatly in your house” and I retreat immediately back to the right side of my brain which allows me to take pleasure in having my favorite books near and accessible.

I recently cleaned out a closet upstairs, which was the subject of another blog post, and it was like watching one of those clown cars where way more clowns come out than could ever have gone in. To this day, I don’t know how all that stuff got in there. What to get rid of and what to keep wasn’t that difficult, but at the end of the process, there were several things left I could not just throw in the trash. My right brain just didn’t know what to do with this stuff, so it just went back in the closet for now. It was too labor intensive to turn on my left brain to figure out what to do with the overflow.

It amuses me to notice what category people fall into after I get to know them. My former boss is the most left-brained person I’ve ever met. He (by his own admission) cannot multi-task to save his life. He told me once he doesn’t read novels because he can’t picture in his mind what the author is describing. His excessive logic sometimes borders on the ridiculous, but any work he does is always error free.

My son, with a masters in computer science, is much the same way, but he does exercise his right brain with photography and music. He can’t draw at all, however.

My daughter, who has a degree in sculpture, struggled like I did through algebra, but is a wonderful artist and extremely intuitive.

Having a 40-hour job at which I must be organized, the left side of my brain does get a lot use, so when I come home, resting for me consists of being right-brained for the entire weekend. So, I’m going out later with my camera and the minute I step out of my car at my destination, I will be turning off the left side of my brain to let the right side run free.