The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Read online

  Don’t be too harsh on the neurologists of the day. They didn’t propagate the left-right myth; the press did. And don’t be too harsh on them either. Two ingredients go into misinformation: First, people overreact, it’s one certain assumption you can make about human behavior; and second, science progresses through incremental discoveries one layer of the ignorance onion at a time.

  The right brain does play a big role in creativity, but so does the left brain. The left brain breaks things down into little, understandable pieces, but the right brain makes sure that those pieces still fit a greater whole.

  The title of our book—I wrote it and you bought it, so we both own it—The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs—is a glaring example of a mythic oversimplification. In nineteen out of twenty right-handed and four out of five left-handed people, the left brain does the speech-production-and-recognition heavy lifting, and, without the right brain, your sense of humor is all but lobotomized. However, your left brain produces the actual hahahas of laughter. So our title serves as an example of mostly-but-not-completely false dichotomies. Just between the two of us, if you prefer, we can call it The Left Brain Tells the Joke, the Right Brain Gets It, and Then the Left Brain Laughs.

  1.2.1 A new and improved left-right oversimplification

  To update the roles of your left and right hemispheres, we begin with a guiding principle and then assemble a bunch of nuances. In the pages that follow, the roles will fit a larger pattern and make more sense.

  Through the miracle of fiction, please don a pith helmet, and the two of us can hike into the savannah of one hundred thousand years ago. We come upon a young man named Butch as he emerges from the cave he shares with his community of ten to thirty cave people— he doesn’t know how many because he can’t count past three.

  With his torn lion-skin loincloth and a plethora of scars across his torso, Butch emits quite an aggressive vibe, so we hide behind some reeds. You point out a bloat of hippos in the pond. I start to laugh at the word bloat, and you remind me that hippos are huge, gnarly critters and I shut up.

  Butch notices the hippos too and ducks behind a boulder. He looks down and finds a nice rock. He watches the hippos for several minutes and then stands, steadies his right foot, goes into a windup, and lets the rock fly. Wham! Right into the hippo’s eye and through its brain. We look at each other and agree that the kid’s got a hell of an arm. If he was left-handed and, you know, born one hundred thousand years later, he could have gone pro.

  Now let’s look at it in slow motion.

  Butch spots the herd. His left brain examines individual hippos, looking for one that appears sedentary enough so that it’s not likely to move, is meaty enough to feed the whole tribe, is standing in water shallow enough for him to retrieve it, and is close enough for him to get a good shot. Meanwhile, back in his right brain, someone’s keeping an eye out for trouble.

  In order to reproduce, Butch must both survive the hunt and eat. The left brain focuses on the task at hand. The right brain keeps a lookout for anything that might require attention. The left brain ferrets out the details, while the right brain keeps those details in check by making sure they don’t contradict the big picture. The right brain also tries to tell the left brain that Butch can’t carry a hippo back to camp, but his left brain suppresses that warning with a cheerful but delusional reply: “It’s okay, as soon as I kill the hippo, I’ll invent the wheel!” His right brain sighs.

  Your left brain is the one that takes you out on crazy fantasies, and your right brain reels you in. Your left brain can’t see the forest for the trees; your right brain can’t see the trees for the forest. Your right brain takes in the whole grand mystery, and your left brain sifts out the fine details. And when they come together, you create beauty and understanding. You can’t ring the bell without both, but sometimes, in their efforts to keep you alive and having sex, they suppress each other when you might prefer that they collaborate.

  Instead of thinking of your right brain as an underutilized creative genius and your left brain as an overworked analyzer, here are two choices for your new and improved oversimplification:

  (a)Your left brain is a fascinated child, and your right brain is an indulging parent.

  (b)Your left brain is a delusional idiot, and your right brain is a judgmental asshole.

  Like all oversimplifications, you can get some mileage out of the concept, but if you take it too seriously, you’ll make mistakes. So let’s dig down another couple of layers.

  1.2.2 Sorting out the left-right dichotomy

  Your neocortex, the wrinkly, pinkish-gray outer layer of your brain, is about a tenth of an inch thick (about three millimeters) when peeled off and spread out on a table. The left and right versions look pretty much the same, though the right side is a bit bigger and whiter. The color contrast occurs because the left side has lots of local processing centers, more gray neurons, and the right side has broader connectivity with longer, better-insulated wiring. The two hemispheres communicate through a cluster of nerve connections called the corpus callosum—don’t worry about all this jargon; I’ll remind you what it means when it comes up again.

  Figure 1: A brain.

  The interior of your brain, called the limbic system, is composed of a bunch of nodule-like things, each of which has both left and right versions, except for your pineal gland. The left and right sides of the interior are connected by the anterior commissure, another pack of nerve fibers.

  The point of this exercise in physiology is that the left and right lobes really are separate. Most of our left-right symmetries play both collaborative and redundant roles. You have two arms; if one gets cut off, you have a much better chance of survival with one than with none, even if you no longer have a fastball. It’s the same deal with your brain, sort of.

  The most pronounced effect of the two hemispheres is that if your right brain were somehow turned off, no one around you would notice for several hours, and you might not notice at all; but if your left brain were turned off, you’d seem like an imbecile, not just because you’d lose all command of spoken or written language, but also because you wouldn’t be able to care for yourself or others.

  To get an idea of how the left and right sides compete, collaborate, and provide a level of redundancy, I listed some distinctions in Table 1.

  I assembled Table 1 from everything I’ve read and the experts I’ve talked to, but please don’t take it verbatim. Instead, realize that these distinctions are just the layers of the ignorance onion beneath the one that insisted your right brain is creative and your left brain is analytical. If some of the entries make you uncomfortable, but you can’t figure out why, it’s because your right brain disagrees with my left brain.

  ATTRIBUTE RIGHT LEFT

  General How? What?

  Immediate hunches Deliberate predictions

  Problem identifier Problem solver

  Looks for inconsistencies Keeps grinding away into never-never land

  New experience Excited by novelty, new information, developing skills Integrates new information and skills into existing context

  Takes over when expectations break down Assumes expectations will play out

  All at once, “aha!” insight Gradual understanding

  Keeps explanations consistent with facts Concocts descriptions, rationalizes

  Attention Broad, flexible, easily distracted, literal Highly focused on parts, develops abstract context, can get obsessed

  Facial identification Facial identification with a mild racial bias Lesser facial identification but without the built-in bigotry

  Facial expression Involuntary, honest Voluntary, capable of deception

  Emotion Empathic, recognizes emotional responses of others Recognizes complex emotions but doesn’t take things as seriously

  Intense, tends toward pessimism, negativity, fear, mourning, grief Cheerful, optimistic, amused

  Symbolism and abstraction Sees “7” and gets the idea but can’
t make sense of “seven” Can deal with either numeric symbols or spelled-out numbers

  Mostly literal but tunes in to metaphors Removes concepts from context, makes them abstract, creates fantasies

  Overlays expectation of the whole Finds and separates common elements of the whole

  Table 1: Contrasts of the right and left brain hemispheres—use these as indicators, not absolutes. The science has a long way to go (notice how I put the right on the left and the left on the right so that your eyes associate the information in each column with the correct hemisphere).

  1.3 THE PICTURE WITHIN A PICTURE

  Using a mind to figure out how a mind works is nothing if not self-referential.

  In considering the Great Questions, philosophers tend to get caught in traps. Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (which is all the Latin I know and means something like “I think, therefore I am”), though fun to ponder with a rum buzz while staring at the stars on a late summer night (mojito ergo sum), doesn’t deliver the goods. Science, at least in the past two hundred years, delivers the goods by making a few simple assumptions and running with them.

  Philosophers from Lucretius to Sartre have debated whether the mind and the brain are the same thing. Is the mind a metaphysical object tenuously linked to the mass of white and gray wetware in your skull? Or is the mind something that the brain does?

  Isaac Newton laid down the bedrock of the scientific method in his first rule of reasoning: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” In other words, we make the simplest assumptions possible until they’re derailed by observable, repeatable contradictions. Assuming that the mind results from purely physical, material interactions within the brain begs fewer questions than positing a metaphysical mind in a physical body. Keep in mind that the whole point of experimental science is to trash reasonable-seeming assumptions. So if you favor a spiritually linked mind and body, keep a close eye on the data; if you’re right, the purely physical assumption will fail, and you can tweet “in your face, @ransomstephens!”

  In this book, we’ll make as few assumptions as we need to go forward, and we’ll tread carefully and consciously as we make them. For example, we’ll assume that the universe exists, that there is an external reality, that we know the difference between being asleep and being awake, beer is more desirable than wine, and that rock ‘n’ roll is superior to jazz.

  1.4 WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?

  …And why are we in this basket?

  I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I want to understand how brains work for the same reason that I want to know how anything works—for the buzz of understanding, and so I can put that understanding to work. By studying the neuroscience of why people value certain things, how talent and skill feed on each other, and how the whole emerges from the parts, we’ll develop intuitions for how to be better at everything we do.

  Okay, hold on a second.

  You’re not reading a self-help book. I’m not pretending to have all the answers; I don’t deal in secrets; and I have no interest in selling you anything other than fine reading material. The only answers you’ll find here come from a baby science that’s just starting to reveal how brains work. But when you understand how something works, you develop intuitions about what it can do well, what it can’t do well, and how to position it to be successful. You and I can be better: better partners, better friends, and better constituents of planet Earth. We face problems individually and together, and our brains are the only tools we have to create solutions. We only get a few decades of awareness; we should put our heads to work.

  That’s what we’re doing here, in the best-case scenario. In the worst case, we have a few laughs. So here’s to creating and appreciating, understanding and empathizing, more love and less fear, all that sort of crap.

  In The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs, we will pay a lot of attention to creativity because the brain itself is an instrument for creating.

  We’ll investigate the neuroscience processes that lead to amazing feats in the arts and sciences, what happens in the brain when we get those “aha!” lightbulb moments, as well as when we derive a solution/ invention/masterpiece through the deliberate process of hard work.

  We’ll keep the jargon to a minimum. Check the bibliography if you want maps of all the folds, grooves, and ridges in your brain—called sulci and gyri by the pros—functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI), positron-emission tomography (PET) scans, and so forth. That said, we won’t shy away from brain physiology when we need it, or when it’s too irresistibly fascinating (or funny) to pass up.

  My background is in experimental particle physics, technology development, and science and fiction writing. As a physicist, I’ll provide some scientific insight into how physical systems work. As a veteran researcher of a mature science I’ll try to see beyond the preliminary results of this brand-new science, I’ll try to provide guidance as to where neuroscience is probably headed, when we should be skeptical, and what’s not likely to change as the field matures. As a fan of neuroscience, I’ll sit next to you on this tour and, together, we’ll try to make sense of it.

  One last thing, instead of sequential info-dumps, we’re going to circle around concepts and build on them in subsequent chapters. It’s easier to learn when you encounter something more than once at increasing levels of complexity. Each time a subject returns, I’ll remind you what we already covered so you won’t need to look back. I hope this level of repetition will help more than it annoys.

  You’re about to meet my grandfather. Gird your loins!

  2

  ANIMALS & PEOPLE

  FRANK RANSOM’S MOTHER DIED IN 1893 WHEN HE was three years old. He was sent to an orphanage in Oakland that operated by providing children as free labor to families who agreed to train and feed them. The potential for abuse was, shall we say, insane.

  Frank Ransom never said a negative word about his childhood. He described a youthful paradise on ranches in the temperate hills of Northern California spent driving cattle, milking cows, and working the fields under the guidance of a series of extraordinarily generous patrons.

  Frank was nine years old when he went to apprentice with Mr. Smith on a ranch near Santa Rosa, about sixty miles north of San Francisco. He told stories about living in a barn and sleeping on hay in a stall with horses for roommates. When quizzed a bit, rather than admitting that the Smiths didn’t let him inside their house, he said that he never wanted to leave the horses.

  On Christmas Eve, Mr. Smith came out to the barn and gave Frank an orange. Frank described that orange as though it were the Holy Citrus Grail. His eyes lit up as he pantomimed peeling that orange. Its juice burst forth, ran down his chin, and made his straw bed sticky. He spoke with such sincere joy that his grandchildren—four middle-class kids growing up in the suburbs, including me—yearned to spend Christmas Eve in a drafty barn sleeping on muddy hay with an orange. An orange.

  Frank Ransom was the most positive man I’ve ever known. He never spoke ill of anyone.

  Armed with a third-grade education and confidence born of naïveté, Frank built a successful business during the Great Depression. Over the course of his life, he counted governors, presidents, professional athletes, and even a Supreme Court justice among his closest friends. Of course, he thought of everyone he knew as one of his closest friends. One could say that Frank Ransom had a positive outlook.

  One of his favorite sayings came from the first lines of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem: “Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone.” The world spent a great deal of time laughing with Frank, and the only time anyone saw him cry, he shed tears of joy.

  2.1 DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES ON REALITY

  That melancholy phrase packed with implications for human behavior, “Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep and you weep alone,” stuck with me. How often did Frank Ransom weep alone? How did such a happy man emerge fro
m that world?

  Frank’s positive outlook, wherever it came from, found the positive in every event and built on that positive, reinforcing it no matter what the conditions. He was a smiling lad digging through horse manure, positive that he’d find a pony, a positive pony.

  This chapter is about perspective.

  Frank Ransom maintained his positive perspective even when the chips were falling. When the Great Depression hit, he and his wife Grace had two children. He figured that rich folks would always have money to spend, but that they wouldn’t be spending quite as much on luxury items as they did in the Roaring Twenties. He reconfigured his business to provide less-pricey luxuries. His business improved during the Depression. Frank Ransom found a pony in the manure of the Depression.

  To see how Frank managed to grab the positive and toss the negative, we need to understand what gives us different perspectives, how we are plopped into different states of being and how our brains push and pull us before we have a chance to ponder how we’d like to respond. Since they’re our window on the world, our senses— touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight—set the stage for the variety of perspectives we can attain. Our senses and how we process them limit our perspectives just as they limit the perspectives of other animals. Every animal sees the world in a different way with a different physical perspective. We have a lot to learn from other animals. And I mean this in a purely selfish way.

  We have a great deal of control over our perspectives, but some perspectives are thrust upon us by the order and speed of the processes our brains use to understand the world around us. Visceral, emotional, and intellectual responses operate at different rates and plop us into certain perspectives that help us survive and get laid. But in the fifteen thousand-plus years since we started to think of ourselves as civilized, we’ve invented a world where a lot of those automatic responses work against us. Strangling your boss might seem like a good idea at the time, but it rarely gets you a raise.