Right Brain, Left Brain, Whole Brain

By Karla J. Donohue


Some kids are right-brain dominant. They're creative. They think out of the box. They dance and do art. They usually don't like math.Other kids are left-brain dominant. They take things apart to figure out how they work. They like order. They think about things and ask lots of questions. Math is often their favorite subject.Nothing wrong with this, except that school is generally a left-brain dominant institution, especially as kids progress on to high school and then college. Although we're getting better at teaching to individual differences in grade school, left-brain teaching remains the norm in high school.

There are specific activities that may stimulate the right or left brain.Activities that stimulate the left brain are solving crossword or word search puzzles, performance of learned tasks, language usage, both comprehensive and expressive, analytical information, problem solving, and recalling new information. Geometric or spatial memory, hand gestures, writing one's name, classifications of pictures or words into categories, recalling complex narratives, recognizing someone you have met, and name recognition are also all left brain activities.

And teachers report more and more right-brain dominant kids in their classrooms. So how will these kids succeed in high school and college? And what if they want to go on to medical school, law school, maybe become engineers? How can we help them?Learning to use the whole brain solves the problem. Learning how to diminish right-brain or left-brain dominance so they're using both sides equally. So what does this mean? And how do you do it?

First, let's take a look first at how the frontal lobes of the brain's neocortex work. This is the part of the brain right behind your forehead. The left side and the right side are connected by a fibrous band in the middle called the "corpus callosum." In order to use both sides of the brain, neurons on the left side have to be connected to neurons on the right side. In other words, the electrical charge between brain cells has to pass across the corpus callosum. O.K. that's the theory part.

There are also specific treatment modalities that a clinician may utilize to increase function or activation of the right or left brain. One example is big letters made up of small letters. If you look at the small letters you will fire right cerebellum to left brain. If you look at the big letters you will fire left cerebellum to right brain.Auditory stimulation (listening to nature sounds, clicks of a metronome, or Mozart in a major key) in the left ear comes up through the brain stem over to the right brain and vice versa for the right ear.

he Nobel award winner of the year 1981, Roger W. Sperry revealed, we could lessen the effect of seizures by cutting the corpus, which is connects the two hemisphere. The right side of the brain is regarded as wonderful on creative tasks. Right brained people can very easily perform task like expressing emotions, playing musical instruments, recognizing images, faces, and colors, revealing strong intuitive, can read emotions and command on creativity. And the left brained are amazing in logical thinking, questioning, language and numerical subjects, and crucial thinking.

We usually think about why two people never think in a similar manner. Perceptions differ according to the individuals. The brain is in integral and crucial part of the human body. We all have got one brain, but even then why do we follow the concept of left brain and right brain? The different thinking between two people leads to the discovery of the left brain and right brain concept. Many researchers had come up with different theories, but they were unable to prove the concept.

Those who are 'left-brainers' can definitely use the relaxation that the rhythmic word can bring, and use it to unlock lateral thinking. And 'right-brainers' can harness the power of rhyme to trick their brains into remembering all kinds of things that they shy away from, like the periodic table, or the names of dead presidents. Our two brains WANT to work together, and poetry is the perfect bridge to make that possible.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment