Tuesday, February 25, 2025

 Tuesday, February 25, 2025

    I met with Rob, the therapist. We continued talking about McGilchrist. While I enjoy our discussions, that's not why I'm doing this work. I told him I was concerned about the way the sessions were going. He asked me what I wanted from our work. I pondered the question, asking for an answer, which I expected from my unconscious mind. What came up not once but twice, I didn't trust him.  I shared that information with him.  He asked why I didn't trust him. I thought he was taking too much pleasure in our intellectual conversations.  I didn't tell him I also feared his right brain bias, following McGilchrist's theories. 

   The right and left brains are of equal importance. One should not be dominant over the other. Babies and young children are primarily right-brain. They are also mainly unconscious in their thinking. They have no capacity for judgment. They run into traffic. Does McGilchrist propose the right brain is the Master? While the modern world has overvalued left-brain thinking, they often don't know the difference.

  The right brain is primarily concerned with concrete thinking, and the left brain with abstract thinking. They can be in conflict and inhibit each other through the corpus callosum. They are at their best if they work together.

    I work with children who don't develop good left-brain thinking skills. I assure you, they are no more loving than anyone else and often less because they feel alienated because they can't perform well in school. McGilchrist suggests the right brain is belief, and the left brain is knowledge.  Since he feels the right brain should be the Master, I guess he feels all those folks who argue their beliefs are the only true ones are left-brain dominant.  Both the left and right brain are capable of perceiving details, the parts, and the whole. Can he truly argue that someone focused on the parts of a flower is left brain-driven? Can't one contemplate the parts of the flower with right brain perception as well as left? Can't we switch back and forth, at will?  And that brings me to another consideration, the difference between the unconscious and conscious minds.  The latter is linked to the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of executive function.

 

   I went through all the images on the Internet of the brain, listing the properties and skills of the left and right brain.

LEFT HEMISPHERE	RIGHT HEMISPHERE
Abstract/symbolic	Concrete/sensory
Imitative	Creative
Analytical/Logical /Rules/rational	Intuitive /Experiential/
Learn from	Discover on your own
Scripted	Improvisational
Top Down/concept-driven	Bottom-up/sensory
Contracts	Expands
Stability	Change
Interpretation	Images
Scripted	Improvisational
Focus	Free associative
2 D	3D-SPATIAL orientation/ motion detection
I am entitled/should	I want
Objective/covertly I centered because it denies it selects a framework	Subjective/ more overtly I centered/
Cautious stays with bounds	Adventurous, risk-taking, does not like to be confined by a set of rules that do not make sense
Systematic/strategic	Random/coincidental/causal/free
Sequential	simultaneous
Propositional	Imaginative
Loves the familiar	Enjoys the new
practical	impractical
plans	Responds
In control	Lacks control/ passion-driven
Bounded	Without boundaries
Values order	Values disorder/organized chaos
Objective reality	Unrealistic relates to I want
Objective reality	Subjective reality
Short-term memory	Long-term memory
Time-oriented structure	no sense of time, doesn’t work within structure
Intellect	Emotions
facts	concepts
Present & past	Present & future
What knows to be right	What feels right
Verbal	Visual/Sensory
Prefer T/F questions	Prefers multiple choice or open-ended questions
Asks how	Asks why
Likes parts before whole	Likes whole before parts
Looks for differences	Looks for similarities
Details	Shapes/ Patterns
Brain operates in a spiral pattern	Brain operates in a random pattern
Explicit input	Implicit input
Analysis	Synthesis (dialectal reasoning)
Single focus	Multi-tasking/parallel processing
Cerebral feel it in our heads	Visceral- feel it in our guts
Likes to be told what to do	Wants understanding before action
Prefers methodical and repetitive teaching	Likes coincidental teaching
Likes to follow the ideas of others	Comes up with original ideas
Learns through lectures	Prefers visual learning, slides, movies, etc
Processes new material exclusively auditorily	Uses imagination and vision when learning.
Passive listening	Active listening
Auditory recall	Photographic memory
Worries over decisions	Makes decisions easily from the gut
Digit	Analog
Does not like learning new things	Curiosity about the new
Will stay confined to a single part	Holistic, considers the part in the context of the whole
Precise	General
Academic intelligence	Social intelligence
Low tolerance for not knowing	High tolerance for not knowing
	Absent-mindedness/daydreaming
Prefers nonfiction	Prefers fiction
Knows object’s name/ character’s name	Knows object function/Knows relationship

 

  Both sides of the brain are, can, and should be involved in all mental actions. This may be a measure of intelligence. A person becomes good at something to the degree that both sides of their brain are engaged in the activity. 

   Other mental states can represent either side of the brain: Absolute versus relative thinking, conscious and unconscious processing, and focus on the part versus the whole, which fall into that category. Both sides of the brain can perform both activities.

    Most people are somewhere on the continuum between two extremes. Those at the extreme of one side or the other without the balance of the other side are probably dysfunctional.

   As I see it, McGilchrist is concerned about power and dominance, The Master or His Emissary. To assume we will always bequeath power to left-brain thinkers suggests Hitler was a left-brain thinker. Huh?  As I see it, people differ in their ability to deal with uncertainty.  Uncertainty means we're not in control.  The world is not going to behave according to our expectations. The world is not going to act in a way that favors them.  Both sides of the brain are capable of dealing with uncertainty or not. Religions try to deal with it. They call everything that happens to us God's will and, therefore, good by definition.

   It reminds me of something my uncle taught me through a story. He called it the Army's Clean Up Philosophy of Life: "Move everything you can move. What you can't move, paint green and call good." 

    The difference between people is where they fall on the scale of absolutism and relativism; one deals with absolutes, the other with statistical possibilities.  Hopefully, no one is absolutely absolute or absolutely relativistic.

  It was a Ulu Wini day. I started with third-grade KJ. Her problem was with vocabulary and syntax. Fluent readers can anticipate the next word as they read.  If not adept at a language, either because English is not their native language, because of linguistic impoverishment, or both, it's hard to read fluently.  Children from language-rich families speaking other languages rapidly pick up complex language structures in English.  The rich get richer. It's just the way it is.  I selected a third-grade passage from IXL for KJ.  She read it reasonably well, but her understanding of the story's facts wasn't good.  She was missing vocabulary. She didn't know what the word opposite meant. The story was incomprehensible without it.  

   The weight of what these kids don't know and can't do is huge. However, I don't despair because I heard an impactful lecture at a symposium on cognition at Princeton University. They had a Thursday lecture series, and I loved it.

    The speaker talked about programming information into a computer.  He said depth of information was more important than quantity, although the two intersected. If you take a simple sentence like, "The ball rolled down the hill," and thoroughly explain each concept the sentence contained, you would have included a tremendous amount of information.  All the concepts behind the word ball are breathtaking.  A ball is a solid sphere.  Solid versus liquid or gas. Sphere versus other geometric forms. A sphere can roll. Rolling is a process whereby the sphere moves. Moves means . . .   Etc, etc, etc.  You can catch the drift.  If something is explored in depth, there is a geometric increase in knowledge and understanding.

   Next, I worked with second-grade ST, KJ's sister. She struggles with basic word recognition. She still struggles with the first fifty words of the Fry Sight Word List. She was out of it. She has a 'stupid' look on her face. I get that every once in a while. Once she sees she can learn, the look disappears. However, I'm still not sure how to engage her.

    Then, I had third-grade TR. While her ability to recall the Fry Sight word list had greatly improved, her ability to read fluently was poor. We spent our time working on reading multiple-syllable words. She had trouble identifying the vowels in words, although she could name them perfectly. This was interesting. She has knowledge but doesn't think of applying it. For her, everything is learned in isolation.