Left brain? Right brain? Change the paradigm
Technical excellence is important for all sorts of reasons, but at the most basic level it is important because it gives us power. It gives us power to speak with authority on our chosen area of excellence. It gives us power to get our foot in the door of that job we are seeking, it gives us power to earn reward and recognition, and it gives us power over other people.
Neuroscientists are technical experts. They have power over me. The power I assign to them means that I believe them when they talk to me about the way the brain works.
I have never seen a human brain, but I have faith in technical excellence and in what the experts tell me. Neuroscientists and other lauded professionals such behavioural psychologists tell me that that a person who is "left-brained" is often said to be more logical, analytical and objective, perhaps with a greater preference towards the development of technical skills, while a person who is "right-brained" is said to be more intuitive, thoughtful and subjective, and possibly more adept at the working of non-technical or 'soft' skills.
Fair enough, this can be a helpful way of understanding who we are. But when it comes to my assessment of my lived experience I have not experienced life to be as clear cut as 'left' and 'right' brained. After all, it's not as if I suddenly shift violently in my chair when someone asks me to perform a mathematical calculation whilst looking at an image of the Mona Lisa (well, actually I might), but the point is that, for most of us, in our lived experience we adopt a more complete 'whole brained' approach, experiencing a seamless reality of the world around us regardless of how our mind is working . Allowing ourselves to believe the left-right brain argument is a reinforcement of the power we ascribe to technical skills and technical thinking. And accepting that paradigm might be limiting our thinking.
Now suppose I told you your brain consisted of two parts. One part that you can fathom, and one part that you can't. I might have the authority and power of a neuroscientist but I'll bet that most of you agree with me. Neuroscientists are ardent reductionists, they will use their technical skills to understand, in the most miniscule detail imaginable and using hi tech imagery and nanotechnology, exactly how the chemical, physical and biological functions of the brain work. But I believe that most of us experience ourselves as being something more than just a series of chemical and physical reactions. No matter how much technical excellence and skill that is deployed, neuroscientists have never found that most elusive part of us - the Soul.
Now, fair enough, there's a few assumptions here. I am assuming - actually I prefer to use the word believe - that we have a soul and that I allow some of that Soul to exist within in my head. Ask me to point to my brain and I will point to my head, but ask me to point to my Soul and I might struggle. Nonetheless I know it to be there. Somewhere. Part of what I call me. Part of my brain too. But exactly how that works is something that our years of technical skills have, so far at least, failed to discover, yet we experience this as true.
So where does my Soul fit against this whole 'left brain', 'right brain' thing? The left brain, with it's apparent emphasis on logic, analysis, and objectivity might seem an unlikely place to find it. Turn your attention to the right side of the brain, with its apparent capacity for intuition, thoughtfulness and subjectivity then you reasonably expect to be find something nestling among the synapses.
So, using left brain logic, does that right brained people are more soulful? I can't buy that. In my experience - and my own experience is data that's every bit as valid as anything I have ever been told - the soul is no respecter of such boundaries. Left brained and right brained people have an equal capacity for Soul and soulfulness.
Which, in a rather roundabout way, brings me towards a conclusion. Soft skills, so easily ascribed as being more natural to people with a right brain bias, need not be catalogued as being of one side of the brain or the other. If, instead, we allow ourselves to ascribe the ownership of soft skills to our capacity for soulfulness, then we can allow and recognise our 'whole brain' capacity.
Experts tell us that, these days, we must use a 'whole brained' approach, that to achieve the best outcomes we must be 'authentic' to ourselves. I think I get what it is that they are trying to say, but I just think they've made it overcomplicated. They say this like it is some magical formula - a mental software programme technically created by all those equations and laws - that allows us to blend our 'technical' left brain with our 'soft skilled' right brain. Break the paradigm. Feel free. Is it really that difficult? Do we really need to bust our brains to balance the two? Is the exciting new concept of 'radical openness' some form of scientifically created nirvana that we can only aspire to if we train our brain in a certain way?
Or are we simply at our best when we follow what our Soul tells us?
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