Let's Wrap Up Left-brain/Right-brain

Greetings everyone. I hope you've had a good week. Did you try solving the Cube puzzle from last time? Here's how the left brain and right brain might solve the problem. Many people may have used both sides of their brain to solve it.

Left Brain Solution

*A perfect cube sliced 3 ways will make 3 to the 3rd. power (3 cubed=3X3X3)       perfect small cubes totaling 27.
*A cube has 6 faces, 8 corners and 12 edges. 
*The corners have 3 surfaces exposed, thus there are 8 cubes painted on 3 sides.
*This leaves 12 edge cubes that have 2 exposed surfaces painted.
*6 center face cubes remain with 1 exposed surface painted.
*The only small cube left is in the center of the large cube and it has 
  no surfaces painted.

Right Brain Solution

The brain must know how to count and solve the problem visually:

*It notes that there are 9 small cubes on each surface. With 3 slices having 9 cubes it counts 27 total small cubes.

*The right brain sees there are 8 corners with 3 surfaces painted.

*Next it concludes there are 12 edge cubes with 2 surfaces painted.

*It now sees there are 6 face cubes with only 1 surface painted.

*Finally it surmises there's only 1 unpainted cube left at the center of the large cube.

So, which side of your brain did you use to solve the problem? Many people would probably use both sides of their brain and mostly likely one side more than the other. You can search on-line for brain dominance tests to further determine your brain dominance. 

This concludes coverage of the Right-brain/Left-brain Phenomenon. 
My next Blog will talk about "Full Moons, Sunsets and the Equinox".

Here's wishing you a Happy New Year 2013.    Reguards, Dick

How to Determine Your Brain Dominance

There are several different ways to help determine Brain Dominance.
This applies to you or anyone else. One simple way is to review how well a person does in school, especially high School. If a student does well in English, art, social studies, literature and the humanities, they're likely right-brain dominate. These same people will usually not fair as well in math and science classes, they may even dread taking those subjects. On the other hand, if they excel in math and science courses, but do not do as well in the classes listed above where the right-brain students do, they're probably left-brain dominate.

This will usually be true throughout their lives. The left-brain dominant people will more likely become engineers, scientists, mathematicians, technical and factual writers, and other types of professions that require paying attention to details and the facts (some call them "Bean Counters"). The right-brain dominant people are more likely to go into professions that require more imaginative thinking; artistic designers, fiction authors, media personnel, even politicians Most politicians are right-brain dominate. You can tell by the way most of them go about trying to solve problems - they use their imaginations a lot.

Now that you know the attributes of the left-brain versus the right-brain, you can probably think of other professions involving one or the other. Of course some people are more evenly balanced than others. As I admitted earlier, I'm 70% very left-brain dominant;
you can tell by my professional endeavors and how I try solving problems (usually from an engineering approach). One of my daughters says she doesn't have the patients to work on a problem like I do. And too, as mentioned before, my brother is very right-brain dominant; he's a terrific picture artist as well as being good at designing things like furniture, etc. I can't even draw a decent stick man.

Only a few people are evenly balanced. Most of us are dominant one way or the other.
Some might be 40% - 60% for instance, or 60% - 40%, or any other ratio. The following is a problem you can try to solve that can be done right-brained or left-brained or any combination of the two. The objective here is how you went about solving the problem more than if you get the right answers.

The Cube Problem. Start with a painted cube (all three dimensions the same) and make
3 even slices in all 3 directions as shown. Now solve the following:

A Perfect Cube

How many pieces result and what is their shape?
How many have 3 surfaces painted? How many have 2 surfaces painted?
How many have 1 surface painted? And how many have no surfaces painted?
Please let me know your answers and how you solved it. My Email is
the.explicitblogger@gmail.com

Good Luck with the problem.

The Left-brain/Right-brain Illusion Experiment

The Skull Illusion

Here's and interesting experiment 
I conducted in a writing class a few years ago. It involved an illusionary picture of a skull with a hidden scene. The class was told to look closely at the picture to see if they could see anything else. Here's the picture.

Interestingly some in the class saw the illusion quickly. Others took a while to see it. And some never saw it at all, even when it was pointed out to them and told what the hidden image was. One lady was quiet indignant about it because she couldn't see the hidden image. How did you do?

So what does this have to do with  Left-brain/Right-brain dominance? 
Apparently left-brain dominant people can see it more readily. Right-brain people have a harder time seeing the hidden image because they look at the overall picture and can not see the details as well that reveal the other image. This is strictly my own interpretation based on observing my fellow students during the course to learn which side of their brain seemed to be dominant. 

Is the Right brain Analog and the Left brain Digital?
Here's my own analogy on this if it's true, and I believe it is. Think about it, the right brain looks at the overall view as looking, for instance, at an analog clock. It sees  the overall face at first and then the position of the various hands to tell the time. There even are analog clocks that don't have numbers on them, just marks every 30 degrees to show the time. The left brain looks at the individual parts of the display as like looking at a digital clock. Here, individual numerals set side-by-side  tell the time in a digital form. This is not to say that some people can only tell time by one form or the other. But I do believe it's indicative of which side of the brain is involved when looking at either an analog clock or a digital clock for instance.

In my next blog I'll show you how you an test your own brain dominance.

The Left-brain/Right-brain Dominance Factor

Here's where the subject gets real interesting.

By now you should have a fairly good understanding of the differences exhibited by the left versus the right brain and some of the human traits that result. As mentioned in the previous blog, most people use one half of their brain more than the other and the side most used is called the "dominant" brain. Those who use each side of their brain equally are in deed gifted.

I'll talk about my own brain dominance first. I'm very left-brain dominant. 
Tests show I'm 70% left-brain dominant. This is not too surprising as I was an aerospace electronic equipment engineer. You need to be left-brain dominant to do that type of work. Probably most engineers, mathematicians and scientist are left-brain dominant. But my younger brother is right-brain dominant. He's an artist who paints pictures and designs furniture, etc. 

There's an interesting true story about my brother and I. When I was in high school I joined the Chess Club and started learning how to play the game. Once a number of us learned all the moves, etc., we started playing each other. After a while I was winning about as many as I lost. School was over for the summer and one day my brother and I were wondering what to do. I asked him if he'd like to learn to play chess, he said "Yes". I had a chess set at home so I started getting him acquainted with the rules and the different moves for each piece. Once he had a good sense of how to play the game, we started practice games. He caught on fairly fast, so we started to play against each other. He learned quickly and before long he was winning 3 out 4 games. I couldn't figure out why he was so good at it.

It wasn't until recently that I realized why he was able to beat me so quickly.
Because my brother is right-brain dominant, he could look at the entire board to determine what his next move should be. Me and my left brain had to look at each piece and figure out which one to move and to where. He was looking at the over all board while I was concentrating on the individual pieces. That was a real life demonstration on how a left-brain person and a right-brain person tried to solve the same problem using their respective dominant brain.  

Here's an example of Implicit versus Explicit . This is an actual event between a right-brain Wife (W:) and a left-brain Husband (H:).

W: "I'm leaving now". H: "Where are you going?". W: "I'm going on some errands". H: "When will you be back?". W: "Oh, I won't be long". 

H: "I'm leaving now to do some shopping". W: "Where are you going?" H: "I'm going to Home Depot and Sears to look for some tools". W: "When will you be back?". H: "I should be home by about 3:30".

I'll talk some more about brain dominance in my next blog.
Hope you're having a great week. Regards Dick

Human Traits Resulting from Left-brain/Right-brain Differences

Before I start, I hear some people can't make comments to my blog site. 
If you want, you can e-mail your comments to me at my Blogger address (the.explicitblogger@gmail.com).

In my last post I talked about Left-brain Vs. Right-brain attributes. There I listed
the corresponding differences of the two sides. Now I will cover the traits exhibited by people depending on which side of the brain is in use at the time. Actually they are numerous, but I'll cover some of the more significant ones here. Again, I will show the opposites in two columns.

                        Left-brain                               Right-brain
                  (The door to reality)       (The window on imagination)          

                       Calculates                               Estimates
                       Measures                                Guesses
                       Is explicit                                 Is implicit
                       Keeps track of time                Pays little attention to time
                       Deals in details                       Deals in generalities 
                       How well does it work?          How well does it look?
                      Good at solving math              Good at painting pictures
                      Looks at the different parts    Looks at the whole scene 
                      Conservative                            Liberal  
                      Plays it safe                              Takes chances
                      Processes in sequence          Processes randomly 
                      Is logical                                     Is intuitive
                      Deals in reality                          Deals in fantasies 
                      Processes ideas linearly         Processes ideas holistically
                      Decisive                                     Indecisive 
                      Makes decisions                        Procrastinates    

You're thinking "This looks a lot like the columns in the last blog" and you're right.
The difference is the earlier lists had to do with the brain. The above lists are about how people tend to act depending on which half of the brain they're using.

My next blog posting will deal with Left-brain/Right-brain Dominance. Most people tend to use one half of their brain more than the other. I'll site some real life
occurrences as examples. 

Best regards to all, Dick
                           

 

Left-brain Vesus Right-brain Attributes

First, some general characteristic differences between the left half and right half of the brain. The left brain is considered the logical brain that deals in details and reality. The right brain is thought of as the imaginative brain, dealing in generalities and artistic endeavors. Some types of people who use the left brain extensively are engineers, mathematicians and scientist. While those people that predominately use their right brain include artists, poets and philosophers. 

Here's a 2-column list of some of the Left-brain versus the Right-brain attributes:

                    Left-brain Functions                    Right-brain Functions

                    Uses logic                                     Uses feelings
                    Detail oriented                            "Big picture" oriented
                    Facts rule                                      Imagination rules
                    Words and language                   Symbols and images
                    Present and past                          Present and future
                    Math and science                         Philosophy and religion
                    Can comprehend                         Can kinda "get it" (i.e. meaning)
                    Knows                                            Believes
                    Reality based                                Fantasy based        
                    Forms strategies                          Presents possibilities
                    Practical                                        Impetuous
                    Safe                                               Risk taking 

These differences in brain functions affects on how we think and act, also how we view the world around us. Individuals exhibit traits associated with which side of the brain they primarily use. This leads to any number of interesting differences between how people act and process information. These contrasts will be covered at length in my next posting "Human Traits Left-brain Versus Right-brain".

Regards, Dick           


                   

Left-brain/Right-brain Basics

One of the earliest discoveries of the Left-brain/Right-brain phenomenon was made by a French doctor way back in 1860. He had a patient with a diseased left brain. The man could speak only a few words, one of them was "Tan" (believed to be the first few letters in his actual name). Some of the doctor's original notes shed some light on how this man was able to function as a result of his left brain condition.

Before I go any further, I need to say that there's a lot of controversy over how compartmentalized the behaviors discussed here are. Some say the phenomenon and the resulting characteristics are not  exclusively found in just one side of the brain or the other. What may be happening is one side is dominant while the other side plays a supporting roll, depending on the situation at the time. Others characterize the phenomenon as a metaphor used in an attempt to simplify the understanding of the results.

So now let's get down to basics. The left brain is said to be the logical brain, dealing in reality and details. The right brain is the artistic brain, the brain half where imagination rules and views the over all big picture. Here's a metaphor that tries to show the differences between the two brain halves: The left brain is like someone standing in the middle of a forest clearing where all the individual trees can be seen in detail. But that half of the brain can't see the overall forest canopy. The right brain is like someone stand on a hill overlooking the forest. Here it can see the canopy, but not the individual trees.

Next blog I'll cover a list of the different characteristics of the Left-brain versus the Right-brain. PS; it helps to scroll down to see my overall statement at the top.