If I needed another reason for expanding the use of my right brain it is this; by its very nature the right hemisphere is a “free-thinker” compared to my left-brain which falls under the “I’ll go along with whatever is simpler” category. The left-brain linear mind just wants to maintain the status quo, avoid rocking the proverbial boat, it relishes in the idea of going along with the majority. Some may call it efficient but I’m going to call it lazy. It loves to predict what I’ll think and instead of letting me have a moment to decide – it literally is programmed to jump to conclusions.
Jill Bolte-Taylor in her book, My Stroke of Insight, puts it this way “Along with thinking in language, our left hemisphere thinks in patterned responses to incoming stimulation. It establishes neurological circuits that run relatively automatically to sensory information. These circuits allow us to process large volumes of information without having to spend much time focusing on the individual bits of data. From a neurological standpoint, every time a circuit of neurons is stimulated, it takes less external stimulation for that particular circuit to run. As a result of this type of reverberating circuitry, our left hemisphere creates what I call “loops of thought patterns” that it uses to rapidly interpret large volumes of incoming stimulation with minimal attention and calculation.
Because our left brain is filled with these ingrained programs of pattern recognition it is superb at predicting what we will think, how we will act, or what we will feel in the future – based upon our past experience…”
I don’t know about you – but I do not want to be that predictable. I want to be unique. I want to be in control of the decisions I make and opinions I have. The only way to do that is to encourage the use of my right mind. What are you doing to break the pattern of predictable responses? Are you just going along with whatever your left mind decides to do?
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
