Conference hydra::dejavu

927.0. "Can you tell your right from your left?" by 5540::COOPER (Topher Cooper) Wed Dec 07 1988 14:54

    A number of times the left-brain/right-brain distinction has been
    made use of in this conference.  Everytime it has been it grates on
    my nerves, because the distinction is not what the popular press
    has lead people to believe -- it is much more complex.  Frequently,
    the reasoning has been sound and the conclusions interesting, but they
    have been built on a bed of sand and so it is unclear how secure
    they are.

    We can distinguish surface-logical from surface-intuitional and make
    use of the disinction without recourse to misunderstood neurological
    ideas.

    The following is from the "Continuum" column in the current OMNI
    magazine (Vol. 11, #3, December 1988, p.45).  The tone is perhaps
    a bit "holier than thou" but the author manages to say much of what
    I've tried to say several times with a bit more detail, and perhaps
    more clarity, so I decided to copy it in.  This has been copied without
    permission -- I recommend this issue to people, by the way, there is a
    lot of good stuff in it.

				    Topher

			The Right (Left) Stuff

    James Garner is on TV pitching beef.  "Ya heard about the left
    brain/right brain stuff?"  The logical left brains understands
    nutrition, Garner explains, while the emotional right brain "just knows
    its good."  Puhleeeze.  Everyone knows that the left hemisphere is
    rational, logical, and Western while the right is creative, intuitive,
    and Eastern.  Everyone knows, that is, except the scientists who did
    the research on which the whole notion of left and right brains is
    based.  To them the idea that the brain's two hemispheres are split
    into two tidy sections -- one the center of creativity, the other of
    logical thinking -- is simplistic and wrongheaded. 

    Jerre Levy, a brain researcher at the University of Chicago, is perhaps
    the most prominent of those now trying to undo the "mythology" that has
    sprung up around right and left brains.  "No complex function -- music,
    art, or whatever -- can be assigned to one hemisphere or the other,"
    she sputters indignantly.  "Any high-level thinking in a normal person
    involves constant communication between the two sides of the brain." 

    Levy is funny and articulate, but her message has had as much impact as
    a newspaper correction rectifying a faulty story.  In part because the
    true tale is complex; and in part, it's because the left/right brain
    myth has a lot of pizzazz. 

    Unlike other myths, the left/right brain has its origins in science.
    In a series of landmark experiments for which he eventually won the
    Nobel prize, Caltech's Roger Sperry probed the minds of patients who
    had undergone surgery to sever the corpus callosum, the main fiber
    bridge linking the brain's two halves. The surgery, a treatment for
    intractable epilepsy, left the patients seemingly normal.  But Sperry
    and his colleagues showed that things were not so simple. When, for
    instance, an object was placed in the left hands of blindfolded
    split-brain patients, they would deny that the object existed.  But if
    the patients were asked to search through a collection of items for one
    that resembled the object they were told was in their left hands, they
    would inevitably make the right decision, even though they would say
    they were only guessing.  What seemed to be happening was that the
    tactile information (what was in the patients' left hands) had been
    transmitted to their brains' right hemisphere, which is incapable of
    verbal expression.  But the right halves did process the information
    nonverbally; thus the easy recognition by the left hemisphere of a
    similar item. 

    Sperry's split-brain patients were almost literally of two minds, and
    those two minds, he discovered, had different specializations.  As his
    findings made their way into popular accounts, the message became as
    garbled as a secret passed from person to person in the children's game
    Telephone.  In this case, the end message was a vastly exaggerated
    version of the original: When you worked on your novel, your left
    hemisphere was busy while the right idled. Switch to a watercolor and
    the right side takes over while the left slacks off. People were either
    right-brained (and therefore artistic) or left-brained (and logical).
    One well known writer summed up this new gospel in a headline: _Why
    Ralph Nadar Can't Dance_. 

    In fact Sperry did find that the left hemisphere is superior in the
    kind of logic used to prove theorems in geometry.  But in the logic of
    everyday life, where the problem is integrating information and drawing
    conclusions, the right hemisphere is crucial.  In almost all
    activities, there is constant interplay between the brain's two halves.
    In language, for example, the left hemisphere understands grammar and
    syntax, which the right does not.  But the right hemisphere is better
    at understanding intonation and interpreting emotion.  Read a story or
    engage in conversation, and the brain's halves are both involved in
    processing information. 

    The same is true for music and art.  Pop psychology assigns both to the
    right hemisphere.  In some musical skills, such as recognizing chords,
    the right hemisphere *is* superior.  In others, such as distinguishing
    which of two sounds came first, the left hemisphere is more important.
    Enjoying or creating music requires integrating both these skills and a
    myriad of others. 

    It should really come as no surprise to anyone that the halves of the
    brain are in constant communication.  The corpus callosum is the
    biggest bridge of nerve fibers in the brain.  It is found only in
    placental mammals, and the smarter the creature, the bigger the
    connection. 

    It would, of course, be nice if there were a simple and accurate way to
    characterize left brains and right brains.  But so far there's not,
    which isn't so surprising considering, as Levy puts it, that "we're
    trying to understand the most complex piece of matter in the known
    universe." -- EDWARD DOLNICK 

       
    	Well, according to the PBS series "The Brain", normal functioning
    requires activity throughout the whole brain, period.
    
    	I still think the "Western" society we live in favors the left
    brain specialties. For example, I can claim that we're rigorously
    taught syntax and grammar of the English language - heck, it's even
    known as "grammar school". When was the last time any public school
    taught something like: "Now listen to the melody and tell me how
    the musician is feeling". Have they ever? Nope. Feelings are something
    to be "stuffed" in this consensus reality. You cant expect a 4th
    grade teacher to contend with the feelings of each and every student
    - you'd never get though the curriculum! So, not only do they not
    teach "how to feel" they teach that if you do feel, you're bad for
    interrupting the class, or disobeying teacher, or dissappointing
    mama. Showing feelings is a crime! School is a rigorous place that
    if anything, gets as far away from anything to do with individual
    feelings and recognition of such, as possible! The right brain,
    and the individual that encases it, suffers.
                                                
    	(Probably the reason why everyone is so careless with the findings
    is because they're so excited about changing how warped things are.
    Personally, I see recognising and expressing feelings as the poorest 
    skill I have...Gee, I'm great with Math and have no problems writing
    with somewhat correct "grammar"!)
    
    	Sometimes, I run into someone who cannot comprehend why I listen
    to Jazz or instrumental music. "I dont understand why anyone would
    listen to music without words - it's just not music" To which I
    reply: "You really cant hear what they're saying *anyway*? I can!"
    Along the same lines, the solo violinist that was featured on the
    recent "The Brain" show stated that the piece she was performing,
    to her, contains *every* emotion/feeling that there is. How can this 
    be possible without verbage?
    
    	Granted, to play the piece, all parts of the brain are necessary.
    I can believe that timing comes from the "left" and tonal inflection
    comes from the "right" - both together, make sounds in time. Perhaps
    that's why music is so soothing, or, why *some* music is anyway
    - it occupies the whole brain.
    
    	Joe Jas

Thanks Topher.  Good article.  The current brain 'fad' of dividing folks
into categories is just another dualism.  For some reason we like to do
that.  The brain is a 'whole' and it functions that way.  

Terry

    re: last couple
    
         Here's a tidbit from the latest "Lazaris says" files:  he
    has stated that while people (scientists) say that only 10% of
    the brain is used, that is in error...the truth is that 100%
    of the brain is used; only 10% of the brain is understood.
    
    
    Frederick
    

RE: .3
    
    I think you would have a hard time finding a scientist with any
    competence in neurobiolgy who would repeat this old saw.  Roughly
    10% of the brain has a clear, fairly direct function (e.g., in charge
    of moving that finger); the rest, much of which is now somewhat
    understood, has more subtle function (e.g., the difference between
    the concepts (not the words) of "in" and "into").
    
    						Topher

    For someone with a desire to understand science's best guess right
    now as to how brains work, look up "Neural Networks" in an AI or
    Computer Science book. 
    
    Neural nets have the interesting property that they store and retrieve
    information and analogy without the information existing in any
    single part of the net.  The information itself is dispersed throughout
    the network.  Destroying a part of the net causes the net to forget
    something- but generally it forgets far less than the amount of
    network that was destroyed.
    
    In one experiment, a network was trained to recognize sonar echoes
    of oil drums versus drum-shaped rocks.  Then 10% of the network
    was destroyed.  The network only lost 2% of it's ability (degraded
    from around 97% accuracy to around 95% accuracy).
    
    This kind of dispersed information and processing is the same sort
    of thing we see in real (i.e. human) brains when injured in accident
    or violence.
                                                     
    	-Bill