The Human Brain Part 6: The Right Hemisphere

No one is totally right or left brained controlled, but certain characteristics are common to the hemisphere dominance. The right brain hemisphere, or gestalt, is involved with intuition, estimates, is fluid and spontaneous, remembers faces, pictures, postures and voices and has the capacity for simultaneous thinking. It’s the hemisphere that possesses diffuse boundary perception, prefers open-ended thinking, drawing and manipulation, is now oriented, with little sense of time, and prefers to participate instead of spectate. The right hemisphere is associated with feelings and is experience oriented, has a let it happen attitude, is self-activating, looks for similarities as opposed to opposites and is flexible and tolerant.

Areas that reside in the right hemisphere pertain to break, crush and dismantle, eat and eat more (two different sections), worry, forget, cry, ramble (physically and verbally), panic, stare off into space, moan, groan, whine and complain, sleep and self-destruction. So, if you want to eat while staring off into space during periods that you feel self-destructive but go to sleep instead, you know which of your hemispheres is most dominant.

Some of us learn languages and how to read more quickly than others. Hemisphere dominance makes a difference. Right hemisphere dominant people are more likely to comprehend spoken language by matching the acoustic sound patterns to known words. They can easily recognize words but not analyze them or figure out the meanings of new ones. They have a hard time spelling words but can recognize the correct spelling. They are able to comprehend what they read if the topic is familiar or emotionally loaded, but don’t do well with unfamiliar or ho-hum topics. Their poor short-term verbal memory requires that sentences are short and to the point and they have poor analytical skills for convoluted speeches. I’d guess that their eyes would gloss over more quickly during a political speech than a left-brainer.

People who are very right brain dominant don’t do well with rapid speech but can easily match pictures and meanings. They have a difficult time reading or understanding when there is a lot of background noise. They need repetition, familiar words, simple grammar and semantics. If they are in a situation that requires speed-reading or skimming, the end result will contain a high percentage of errors. Speaking and listening vocabulary is much higher than sight (reading) capability and they are able to comprehend the spoken word better than the written. The right brain converts written words directly to meaning where the left brain often changes written words to sound and then to meaning. The implication is: right brain dominance can match two identical pictures or two rhyming words but not a picture with a rhyming word. For instance, it would be difficult or impossible for a young right brain dominant child to match a picture of a “house” with the rhyming word “mouse.”

The right brain handles ambiguity well, often treating it as a paradox, works with probabilities, estimates or degrees where the left brain needs to have absolutes and must know exacts.

Right brain people are good at fixing mechanical things and are better at geometry than algebra. They excel in the physical areas and sports that take balance and hand to eye coordination like skating, windsurfing and juggling. Drawing, painting, making movies, in great depth (all with many images and in great visual depth as opposed to auditory depth), playing games like dungeons and dragons and figuring out jig-saw puzzles, all fall into the realm of the right brain.

If we were to ask a right brain person to look at a flower and then describe it to us they would most likely give information about size, color and the overall view. The left brain person would, in all probability, break the flower down into its individual pieces and then give us a blow by blow description of each and every part and how many of each. If you’d counted the parts and came up with a different amount, the right brainer could deal with the estimates where the left brainer would have to go back and count them.

Two things that straddle the line between both hemispheres are singing and playing video games. This can be a double-edged sword. On one side the person could be more balanced, on the other hand they may not be able to figure out that video games aren’t really life.

ADD (attention deficit disorder) may be exactly that. As parents and grandparents, if we were to give our children more personal attention, the kind they probably are craving from those who they love and look up to the most, maybe they wouldn’t suffer from ADD.

Copyright 2007 Larry R. Miller

No one is totally right or left brained controlled, but certain characteristics are common to the hemisphere dominance. The right brain hemisphere, or gestalt, is involved with intuition, estimates, is fluid and spontaneous, remembers faces, pictures, postures and voices and has the capacity for simultaneous thinking. It’s the hemisphere that possesses diffuse boundary perception, prefers open-ended thinking, drawing and manipulation, is now oriented, with little sense of time, and prefers to participate instead of spectate. The right hemisphere is associated with feelings and is experience oriented, has a let it happen attitude, is self-activating, looks for similarities as opposed to opposites and is flexible and tolerant.

Areas that reside in the right hemisphere pertain to break, crush and dismantle, eat and eat more (two different sections), worry, forget, cry, ramble (physically and verbally), panic, stare off into space, moan, groan, whine and complain, sleep and self-destruction. So, if you want to eat while staring off into space during periods that you feel self-destructive but go to sleep instead, you know which of your hemispheres is most dominant.

Some of us learn languages and how to read more quickly than others. Hemisphere dominance makes a difference. Right hemisphere dominant people are more likely to comprehend spoken language by matching the acoustic sound patterns to known words. They can easily recognize words but not analyze them or figure out the meanings of new ones. They have a hard time spelling words but can recognize the correct spelling. They are able to comprehend what they read if the topic is familiar or emotionally loaded, but don’t do well with unfamiliar or ho-hum topics. Their poor short-term verbal memory requires that sentences are short and to the point and they have poor analytical skills for convoluted speeches. I’d guess that their eyes would gloss over more quickly during a political speech than a left-brainer.

People who are very right brain dominant don’t do well with rapid speech but can easily match pictures and meanings. They have a difficult time reading or understanding when there is a lot of background noise. They need repetition, familiar words, simple grammar and semantics. If they are in a situation that requires speed-reading or skimming, the end result will contain a high percentage of errors. Speaking and listening vocabulary is much higher than sight (reading) capability and they are able to comprehend the spoken word better than the written. The right brain converts written words directly to meaning where the left brain often changes written words to sound and then to meaning. The implication is: right brain dominance can match two identical pictures or two rhyming words but not a picture with a rhyming word. For instance, it would be difficult or impossible for a young right brain dominant child to match a picture of a “house” with the rhyming word “mouse.”

The right brain handles ambiguity well, often treating it as a paradox, works with probabilities, estimates or degrees where the left brain needs to have absolutes and must know exacts.

Right brain people are good at fixing mechanical things and are better at geometry than algebra. They excel in the physical areas and sports that take balance and hand to eye coordination like skating, windsurfing and juggling. Drawing, painting, making movies, in great depth (all with many images and in great visual depth as opposed to auditory depth), playing games like dungeons and dragons and figuring out jig-saw puzzles, all fall into the realm of the right brain.

If we were to ask a right brain person to look at a flower and then describe it to us they would most likely give information about size, color and the overall view. The left brain person would, in all probability, break the flower down into its individual pieces and then give us a blow by blow description of each and every part and how many of each. If you’d counted the parts and came up with a different amount, the right brainer could deal with the estimates where the left brainer would have to go back and count them.

Two things that straddle the line between both hemispheres are singing and playing video games. This can be a double-edged sword. On one side the person could be more balanced, on the other hand they may not be able to figure out that video games aren’t really life.

ADD (attention deficit disorder) may be exactly that. As parents and grandparents, if we were to give our children more personal attention, the kind they probably are craving from those who they love and look up to the most, maybe they wouldn’t suffer from ADD.

Copyright 2007 Larry R. Miller