Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Left brain vs. right brain

When we watched the video about the man who had his corpus callosum severed, I was astounded by his abilities and lack there of.  He was basically two different people.  He thought as one person on one side of his body, but he thought completely differently on his other side.  For example, if a word was flashed to the left hemisphere of his brain, he could eaily tell you what the word was.  But, if the word was flashed to the right hemisphere of his brain, he could not say the word.  Instead, he has to draw the word in picture form until he could see the picture in order to say it.  It was like one half of him could not read or say words, it could only draw the word.  The explanation in the movie said that since his left and right sides of the brain were not connected, he could not connect thoughts inside of his head.  Instead, he had to relate everything on the outside of his brain.  It was like watching two different people communicate.  This research and testing on split brained people was fundamental to finding the specific elements that are unique to the left and rights sides of the brain.

While I was finding information about split brain patients, I came across the term "dual brain theory".  This theory states that each side of the brain is independent and has distinct thoughts, personality, ideas, and memories.  As I read through the rest of the site, the theory sounded like a bunch of crap.  There was no evidence to back up the statements.  But, I started thinking about the left and right brains and how different they are.  The left brain is linear, sequential, symbolic, logical, verbal, and reality-based.  The right brain is holistic, random, concrete, intuitive, nonverbal, and fantasy-based.  Here's another short quiz on left vs. right brains.  http://web-us.com/brain/braindominance.htm

I got 13 for the left side of my brain and 5 for the right side of my brain.  What did you get??

3 comments:

  1. I found your post very enjoyable to read and i thought you had some excellent facts and theories that go along with the left or right side of the brain.

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  2. I thought this was very interesting. I think its awesome how he is almost two different people in one body. I took that quiz too and got 7 as a right brain and 11 as a left brain.

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  3. I thought both your blog and the video we saw in class were very interesting. When taking the quiz I got 8 as a right and 10 as a left which is strange because I was a right brain during the class activity.

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