Right Brain Left Brain

Today I had an interesting discussion with Prakash (I think he almost always has interesting stuff to talk about - when he is really in the mood to talk).

The left brain is the analytical center of our brain. It processes the logical and numerical parts of our perceptions and thoughts. On the other hand, the right brain is the overall perception center of our brain - it does not break things down into smaller components, but tries to understand the overall, bigger picture.

At first it is a little difficult to figure out why would someone not be interested into breaking down a picture into smaller components, and would want to see a bigger picture (that might not even make a lot of sense). I might be able to provide an example, thought it might be quite wrong - Two Hydrogen atoms, combine with one of Oxygen to create a molecule of water. The properties are drastically different. This shows that aggregates can not always represent the properties of the constituents.

Prakash mentioned that if someone shows us a picture and asks us to draw it, if we use our left brain, we would see the picture and draw the picture as we see it and not how it really is. This is profound, because this implies that if I see a garden and I recognise flower A and flower B, when I draw it back, I draw flower A and flower B as I have always known them to look like, and not as I saw them.

Interesting.

One way of force-using our right brain would be to put the picture upside-down so that our left-brain can't recognise the broken down parts. If we redraw that upside-down picture, we would need to repeatedly look at the original picture, because the left brain has failed to break it up into recognisable forms.

In other words, your right brain is working.