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Example research essay topic: Left Brain Scientific Evidence - 1,038 words

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Left, right, left, right -- the marching song of the two-mind movement. To hear them talk, you'd think that everyone had a second mind, suppressed by the first. That the vocal left brain dominated the poor artistic right brain. Preventing it from getting a creative thought in edgewise. Soon there will be a consciousness raising movement: Stop referring to the left cerebral hemisphere as the "dominant" one.

Invent a more egalitarian term like co-chairperson. Co-chair hemisphere? Alas. Were cerebral physiology so simple! If there were strong dominating influences, it would make our research far easier. It is unfortunate that "dominance" is a word with two entirely different meanings, even within psychology.

When talking about pecking order, dominant refers to an animal that usually wins in a one-on-one encounter, the animal that can approach, threaten, and successfully displace another animal from food, mates, or the best nesting place. In talking about the cerebral hemispheres, however, dominant is merely a shortening of the technical term "language-dominant hemisphere. " It is the outcome of a test to find out where language lives in a person's brain, such as injecting anesthetics into the left and right carotid arteries and seeing when the patient stops talking (or the simpler, but not as accurate, test that merely involves having the subject look at a dot in the middle of a screen and then briefly flashing words to the left or right of the fixation point; people with left-brain language will have an easier time with right-sided words since the information goes first to left brain). Although a few percent of people have right brains that are language-dominant, about 93 percent of us use the left side. A few percent have "mixed dominance, " where both sides are used for language (that is, injecting anesthetics on either side will interfere with speech). But the term hardly refers to language dominating art or music: it's just which side is more essential for language than the other.

Shades of gray become black and white when the dichotomizes go into action. But the real problem is that most of the creativity arguments have about as much to do with the brain as does the English language. The structure of the brain probably has a lot to do with the capability for, even the "deep structure" of, language -- but brains hardly come in Chinese, Swahili, and English flavors. Like English per se, the creativity and holistic thinking influences probably lie more in the realm of culture than brain structure. And hardly on a particular side of the brain.

A few decades ago, similar suppressed-creativity arguments were floating around. It's just that they were then phrased in terms of contemplative Eastern thought versus authoritarian Western religious influences. More recently, the dichotomous rendition was holistic versus linear thinking. And now the mod metaphor is right brain versus left brain. Except that it is the worst of mixed metaphors, the kind that mixes up metaphor with reality. Being a neurophysiologies, I suppose I ought to feel that progress has been made: in no other age could it have taken a mere twenty years to shift from a predominantly religious metaphor to a semi-scientific one.

But the neurophysiologies and neuro psychologists who specialize in the human cerebral cortex are starting to view the left-righter's with something of the wariness which the astronomers reserve for astrology. In one sense, the picture of the mind painted by the left-righter's is rather like one of those magazine illustrations of the human brain and its convoluted surface -- one feels quite sure that the artist has never seen a real human brain, either a fresh one or a preserved one. The result of embroidering upon another artist's rendition bears even less fidelity to the original, an artistic version of the spread of a rumor. My favorite painting of the brain's convoluted surface is not the usual gray modeling-clay rendition but a red and purple rising-sun sphere whose "convolutions" come close to looking like the cracks in a parched mud flat. (It is my favorite only because it's on the cover of a paperback called Inside the Brain by Calvin and Ojemann; our publishers carefully avoided showing it to us until after the press run. ) If you try tracing some of the left-righter enthusiasms back to the scientific evidence, you " ll often wonder how the rumor even got started.

It is not that the scientific evidence contradicts their notions, though that sometimes happens. But they " ve gotten way out in front of the state of the scientific art, in about the way the phrenologists' maps (all those political subdivisions on the brain map marked love, acquisitiveness, compassion, etc. ) were premature, quite unsupported by any evidence at the time. Indeed, one has the suspicion that the nineteenth-century parlor game aspect of phrenology resulted in pinning functions onto a brain map, like pinning the tail on the donkey while blindfolded. The left-righter's' notions may have a base in a laudable know thyself effort, but their standards for evidence can sometimes be subservient to their aesthetic enthusiasms ("a nice symmetrical arrangement, isn't this?" ). To know thyself may be the most difficult of lessons; to know the brain is surely one of the most challenging of the sciences, one that does not lend itself to easy labels. Besides the usual human tendency to see things as either this or that, the dichotomizes' view of cerebral physiology tends to be biased by the special case of language.

Language in the human brain is almost totally located in one cerebral hemisphere. For every fourteen people suffering language difficulties after a stroke near the Sylvian fissure, only one will have suffered right-hemisphere damage. This 13 to 1 lateralization ratio for language is the strongest deviation from the usual vertebrate brain plan of about 1 to 1, namely doing most things pretty equally in the two halves of the brain. But nothing else has such odds. Take visual and spatial relationships, the function most often assigned to the right-brain convolutions opposite those occupied by language in left brain. While there is indeed a specialized area used for recognizing whether a friend's face is happy or sad located just above th...


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Research essay sample on Left Brain Scientific Evidence

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