Mar 27 2008
The myth of left brain superiority
Elizabeth A. Phelps of Yale University, Janet Metcalfe of Columbia University and Margaret Funnell, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth College, have found that the two hemispheres differ in their ability to process new data. When presented with new information, people usually remember much of what they experience. When questioned, they also usually claim to remember things that were not truly part of the experience. If split-brain patients are given such tests, the left hemisphere generates many false reports. But the right brain does not; it provides a much more veridical account.” (Gazzaniga, 1998: 54).
Alright so in my last blog post I had some things to say about a neuroanatomist’s interpretation of her trauma induced “right brain experience.” What happened basically was a stroke shut down “something’ in the left hemisphere. This “shut down” subsequently opened the scientist up to a rather dramatically different way of looking at things. The variation from the “normal” experience of the scientist was striking and while she went on and on in effusive terms about the “glory” of the experience, I suggested that it was inappropriate to view her experience as anything other than as a kind of “awakening inner child” experience. After years of left brain dominance and right atrophy, suddenly the censors were turned off and the “child” (the higher processing facilities of the right brain) where exposed to reality with obvious and predictable results, i.e., childlike apprehension of reality and childlike affect