The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [25]
The French word for left—remember that the left hand is connected to the right hemisphere—is gauche, meaning “awkward,” from which comes our word “gawky.” The French word for right is droit, meaning “good,” “just,” or “proper.”
In English, left comes from the Anglo-Saxon lyft, meaning “weak” or “worthless.” The left hand of most right-handed people is in fact weaker than the right, but the original word also implied lack of moral strength. The derogatory meaning of left may reflect a prejudice of the right-handed majority against a minority of people who were different, that is, left-handed. Reinforcing this bias, the Anglo-Saxon word for right, reht (or riht), meant “straight” or “just.” From reht and its Latin cognate rectus we derived our words “correct” and “rectitude.”
These ideas are also reflected in our political vocabulary. The political right, for instance, admires national power, is conservative, and resists change. The political left, conversely, admires individual autonomy and promotes change, even radical change. At their extremes, the political right is fascist, the political left is anarchist.
In the context of cultural customs, the place of honor at a formal dinner is on the host’s right-hand side. The groom stands on the right in the marriage ceremony, the bride on the left—a nonverbal message of the relative status of the two participants. We shake hands with our right hands; it seems somehow wrong to shake hands with our left hands.
Under “left-handed,” the dictionary lists as synonyms “clumsy,” “awkward,” “insincere,” “malicious.” Synonyms for “right-handed,” however, are “correct,” “indispensable,” and “reliable.” Now, it’s important to remember that these terms were all made up, when languages began, by some persons’ left hemispheres—the left brain calling the right bad names! And the right brain—labeled, pinpointed, and buttonholed—was without a language of its own to defend itself.
Two ways of knowing
Along with the opposite connotations of left and right in our language, concepts of the duality, or two-sidedness, of human nature and thought have been postulated by philosophers, teachers, and scientists from many different times and cultures. The key idea is that there are two parallel “ways of knowing.”
You probably are familiar with these ideas. As with the left/right terms, they are embedded in our languages and cultures. The main divisions are, for example, between thinking and feeling, intellect and intuition, objective analysis and subjective insight. Political writers say that people generally analyze the good and bad points of an issue and then vote on their “gut” feelings. The history of science is replete with anecdotes about researchers who try repeatedly to figure out a problem and then have a dream in which the answer presents itself as a metaphor intuitively comprehended by the scientist. The statement on page 39 by Henri Poincaré is a vivid example of the process.
In another context, people occasionally say about someone, “The words sound okay, but something tells me not to trust him (or her).” Or “I can’t tell you in words exactly what it is, but there is something about that person that I like (or dislike).” These statements are intuitive observations that both sides of the brain are at work, processing the same information in two different ways.
Parallel Ways of Knowing
—J. E. Bogen
“Some Educational
Aspects of Hemisphere
Specialization” in UCLA
Educator, 1972
The Duality of Yin and Yang
— I Ching or Book of Changes,
a Chinese Taoist work
Dr. J. William Bergquist, a mathematician and specialist in the computer language known as APL, proposed in a paper given at Snow-mass, Colorado, in 1977 that we can look forward to computers that combine digital and analog functions in one machine. Dr. Bergquist dubbed his machine “The Bifurcated Computer.” He stated that such a computer would function similarly to the two halves of the human brain.
“The