Psychology (left-brain activity) - Essay Example

It is the seat of visual and spatial processing. The right brain controls driving in traffic. On the right, processing is rapid and non-linear. The right brain looks at the big picture and deals with complexity, ambiguity, and paradox. It is intuitive and the crucible of creativity (Pitek, 1998). For example, if you are right-brain dominant, it is your emotional right hemisphere that guides the decisions you make throughout the day. If you are left-brain dominant, it is your sequential, time-oriented left hemisphere which tells you how to think, what to believe, and what choices to make (Connell 2002).

Nearly 80% of people have a more developed left brain because the left is better at handling language and logical thinking. In many life situations, the left brain takes over, assembling a logical train of thought (Lee, 1999). Other factors are also detrimental to right brain development. Education has a big prejudice against the right brain with its emphasis on mathematics, language, logic and analysis, and its tendency to ignore the arts, music and creativity. In traditional methods, teaching uses charts, logic, and mathematical formulae.

Multiple choice, true/ false are much easier to grade and quantify (Pitek, 1998). There are parental pressures to become doctors and lawyers and scientists rather than poets and artists. And there is the world itself, which requires us to do more left-brain thinking than right. Under these circumstances, our left brains become more and more developed while our right brains shrink, metaphorically speaking, from under-use (Lee, 1999). In this age of education by test-taking, all our instructional efforts seem to help students master left-brain skills because that's what the tests measure.

But to what extent should we also be helping kids develop a sense of design, storytelling abilities, feelings for others, humor, and the ability to detect the importance of the information they learn The right brain thinks in wholes, so the student will understand math concepts but struggle with math facts or double-checking answers. Right brain children will use 'gut feeling' instead of pulling in multiple facts before arriving at a decision. They may prefer essay tests where they can present the whole picture (Craft, n.d.).

Eighty percent of struggling learners are right brained. Schools and schoolwork are set up to teach in left brain style. Workbooks, worksheets, rote memorization, timed tests, lectures, learning facts from a test, learning vocabulary by looking up meanings words in a dictionary and writing them out, these are all left-brain activities. A right brain child will have difficulty with them (Craft, n.d.). Right-brain students might shuffle through papers and have trouble finding correct pages.

They might daydream in class. Might dramatize a point instead of backing it with statistics. Homework and desktop might be messy. Some believe that the common syndrome, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) may result from cross-brain problems. Affected children are usually right-brain