Right Brain, Left Brain

By Julia A. Depp


The right brain controls the left side of the body and the left brain controls the right side of the body. The right brain is the more creative or emotional hemisphere and the left brain is the analytical and judgmental hemisphere. Anything that is new or not familiar to an individual is right brain dominant. Anything that is familiar is left brain dominant.Along with right and left brain there are different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe controls your personality, the temporal lobe deals with short and long term memory, the parietal lobe is the lobe of the hand, and the occipital lobe, the very back part of the head, controls vision.

But just in case you're asked that question about poetry any time soon, and you want to have something to say without spluttering in indignation, I thought I'd throw together a few little-know facts about the effect poetry has on children's brains (and ours, for that matter).

Activities that stimulate the right brain are emotional issues, the creative process, recalling memorized lists, any unfamiliar event or activity, and holding the attention span. Seeing or feeling different sizes, seeing different colors, attention exercises involving timing, seeing unfamiliar faces, and meeting someone new also stimulate the right brain..

First, let's take a look first at how the frontal lobes of the brain's neocortex work. This is the part of the brain right behind your forehead. The left side and the right side are connected by a fibrous band in the middle called the "corpus callosum." In order to use both sides of the brain, neurons on the left side have to be connected to neurons on the right side. In other words, the electrical charge between brain cells has to pass across the corpus callosum. O.K. that's the theory part.

There are also specific treatment modalities that a clinician may utilize to increase function or activation of the right or left brain. One example is big letters made up of small letters. If you look at the small letters you will fire right cerebellum to left brain. If you look at the big letters you will fire left cerebellum to right brain.Auditory stimulation (listening to nature sounds, clicks of a metronome, or Mozart in a major key) in the left ear comes up through the brain stem over to the right brain and vice versa for the right ear.

And beyond the obvious aid to memory, poetry also offers an enhanced understanding of language. It forces our brains to think laterally, to join together different sensory impressions and associations. That kind of layered thinking has been shown, in live MRI tests, to wake up multiple areas of the brain at once. For kids who struggle with language skills, poetry offers an engaging, memorable stealth technology, a way of getting past the brain's standard verbal filters to a deeper language network.

There are lot of difference between right brain and left brain. The right brained generally has specific characteristics such as,Concentrates more on images and visual,Act according to intuition,Use mind camera to remember,things or write down things,Checks the whole image and then turn to details,Lack of organization,Randomly makes plans,Difficulty in finding spelling or collecting word,No punctuality,Like more to touch and feel,Never follows instruction before handling any equipment,Express with hand gestures,Very creative brain

Those who are 'left-brainers' can definitely use the relaxation that the rhythmic word can bring, and use it to unlock lateral thinking. And 'right-brainers' can harness the power of rhyme to trick their brains into remembering all kinds of things that they shy away from, like the periodic table, or the names of dead presidents. Our two brains WANT to work together, and poetry is the perfect bridge to make that possible.




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