Is the right brain really right?

In the link I posted in my previous entry, a brain scientist describes her personal experience of having a stroke at the age of 37. In her case, the stroke took about four hours, and in the course of the event, she ping-ponged from one side of her brain to the other as the stroke shut down the opposite hemisphere completely. She had the rare opportunity of being entirely right-brained for a few minutes and then entirely left-brained, alternating back and forth several times. 

When her right brain shut down, her analytical, practical left brain made a quick objective reading of her symptoms, diagnosed a stroke and prompted her to take steps to get help. When her left brain was suppressed and her right brain took over, she slipped out of action mode and into being mode. She felt her oneness with the world. Indeed, in right-brain mode, she was unable to differentiate the molecules of her own body from those of the objects around her. The dissolution of self and the merging with her surroundings was blissful. Her experience as a right-brained being was clearly ecstatic, and her lecture is essentially a sales pitch for cultivating right-brain proclivities. Her presentation is fascinating and joyful and persuasive. It calls to mind rhapsodic accounts of meditation. Indeed, I believe she used the term nirvana. And I went to bed heartened that we all have an inborn ability to achieve a similar state. All we have to do is liberate ourselves from left-brain control and allow our right brain to do its stuff.

But this morning when I woke up, I began applauding the underdog left brain. After all, it was her left brain that saved her life by impelling her to respond to the realities of her plight.

Probably it's just my own nasty ("sinister!") left brain getting all defensive, but something about the singleminded veneration of the right brain sends up a red flag. Maybe it's pique that people prize something I haven't got. In my cranium, neither lobe seems to predominate. Indeed, at this stage of my life, both lobes seem a little atrophied. (The ultrasound tech who monitors me for ovarian cancer—I'm at higher-than-normal risk because I've had breast cancer—told me that my ovaries, once as plump as plums, have dwindled to the size of dried peas. My brain lobes seem to have suffered similar shrinkage and dessication.) At any rate, although I spend a good deal of my time on a yoga mat trying to shift into right-lobe mode, I feel fully appreciative of my oft-maligned left lobe. Indeed, it is my left-brain tendencies—alertness, organization, efficiency, determination—that get me out of bed and onto that mat several times a week. 

So I still think you should go to that link, but listen with your left brain as well as your right.