Hemisphericity is a functional problem created through exhausting the brain’s energy resources in an unbalanced way. It creates one-sided problems or neurological manifestations, like OCD or speech deficits, that tend to have laterality in either the left or right hemisphere. Yet it’s a complex system not fully understood. The Divided Brain video below paints a wonderful description of how the left and right brain function in unison.
We have a whiteboard at Spinewave, and I often attempt to create a learning opportunity on the board for clients to participate in. This week I asked what attributes or functions the left and right hemispheres might have. Very few people knew anything beyond the left brain being more “logical” and the right brain being more “creative”. It is far more than that. But also, interestingly, people are still under the impression that an individual might be a very “left-brained” or “right-brained” person. This is not true. They work together. For imagination you need both hemispheres; for reason you need both hemispheres. For example an excellent accountant cannot be so without also being very creative (in a legal sense).
“The world of the left hemisphere, dependant on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, general in nature but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere by contrast yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings within the context of the lived world – but in the nature of things never fully graspable; never perfectly known.”
The brain is ultimately holographic, where information is distributed throughout, and normal function can resume even if it’s sliced, diced and swapped around. Success ultimately relies on its ability to reorganise itself. And this is what we aim to do.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.”
Albert Einstein