Left Brain, Right Brain, And The Power Of Poetry

By Wendy G. Ostrander


Some kids are right-brain dominant. They're creative. They think out of the box. They dance and do art. They usually don't like math.Other kids are left-brain dominant. They take things apart to figure out how they work. They like order. They think about things and ask lots of questions. Math is often their favorite subject.Nothing wrong with this, except that school is generally a left-brain dominant institution, especially as kids progress on to high school and then college. Although we're getting better at teaching to individual differences in grade school, left-brain teaching remains the norm in high school.

There are specific activities that may stimulate the right or left brain.Activities that stimulate the left brain are solving crossword or word search puzzles, performance of learned tasks, language usage, both comprehensive and expressive, analytical information, problem solving, and recalling new information. Geometric or spatial memory, hand gestures, writing one's name, classifications of pictures or words into categories, recalling complex narratives, recognizing someone you have met, and name recognition are also all left brain activities.

And teachers report more and more right-brain dominant kids in their classrooms. So how will these kids succeed in high school and college? And what if they want to go on to medical school, law school, maybe become engineers? How can we help them?Learning to use the whole brain solves the problem. Learning how to diminish right-brain or left-brain dominance so they're using both sides equally. So what does this mean? And how do you do it?

You are not dead until your brain is dead. Your brain needs two things to survive: fuel and activation. Fuel comes in the form of oxygen and glucose. Glucose comes from the food you eat, and oxygen comes from the air you breathe. The normal inspiration/expiration ratio should be exhalation twice as long as inhalation. That is to say - breathe out twice as long as you breathe in.

Our memories, our verbal skills and our understanding of meaning are spread through different areas of our brains, a complex network that we draw on without even - well - thinking! And this is where poetry finds a remarkable niche. Why do children memorize far more easily when they are given information in rhyme? Why do YOU still remember songs and poems that you learned when you were small? You probably even still use some of those mnemonics, and you're definitely passing them on to your own children, helping them to learn nursery rhymes and the letters of the alphabet that way.

he Nobel award winner of the year 1981, Roger W. Sperry revealed, we could lessen the effect of seizures by cutting the corpus, which is connects the two hemisphere. The right side of the brain is regarded as wonderful on creative tasks. Right brained people can very easily perform task like expressing emotions, playing musical instruments, recognizing images, faces, and colors, revealing strong intuitive, can read emotions and command on creativity. And the left brained are amazing in logical thinking, questioning, language and numerical subjects, and crucial thinking.

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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