Hack 69. Use Your Right Brainand Your Left, Too (3)
To show this in action, start tapping a regular beat with your left hand (1-2-3-4- etc.) and then start tapping a fancy beat at the same time with the right hand (jazzy, syncopated, like a melody line to accompany the regular beat). Now, try starting with the regular beat on the right hand (1-2-3-4- etc.), and after a measure or two, start the fancy beat on the left. See what happens. You should find it easier the first way round, with your left hemisphere controlling the more difficult rhythm (your right hand).
Many left-handers actually get the same result as right-handers on this test, so it is not just to do with mere handedness. It probably isn’t a coincidence that a piano keyboard is organized with the lower notes, which are used for simpler rhythms, on the left side where they can be delegated to the right hemisphere.
6.9.2. How It Works
By comparing the performance of normal people on tasks that give information to different hemispheres and by comparing responses controlled by different hemispheres, cognitive neuroscientists have uncovered a number of functions that are done differently by the different hemispheres, and some patterns are beginning to appear in the data.
The most obvious specialized function is language. Speech is controlled by the left brain, and understanding the literal meaning of words and sentence grammar is supported by the left brain in most people (but not all). But that doesn’t mean that the right brain has no role in language processing. Studies of people with right-brain damage, along with other evidence, have suggested that the right brain may support analyzing global features of language such as mood and implication. If I say, “Can you close the window?” I’m not asking if you are able, I’m asking if you will. A step more complex is to say, “It’s cold in here,” which is the same request, but more oblique (but maybe not as oblique as “Why are you so selfish?”). It is this kind of pragmatic reasoning in language that some researchers think is supported by the right brain.
The left-brain specialization for language carries over to an advantage in sequential ordering and symbolic, logical reasoning.
The right brain seems specialized for visual and spatial processing, such as mental rotation or remembering maps and faces, dealing with the appearance of things, and with understanding the overall pattern. We have a bias whereby we judge faces by their left side.4 You can see a demonstration of this at http://perception.st-and.ac.uk/hemispheric/explanation.html. The web site shows two faces, one looking more female than the other (see Figure 6-8). In fact, the faces are both equally male and female, but the one that looks female has the more female half on the left side (right-hemisphere processing) and the male half on the right side, where it doesn’t affect your judgment of gender. Test this now by covering the left sides of the faces in Figure 6-8 and looking again; you can now see that the face you first judged as female is half-male and the face you judged as male is half-female.
Taken from : Mind Hacks
