RIGHT BRAINED: being more adept at spatial and nonverbal concepts and being more creative and emotional than logical and analytical.

I'm not good at math. I mean...I'm really not good at math. In undergraduate school they offered what one might call "Math for Dummies" in order to allow people like me to fulfill the math segment required for graduation. I liked the course so much that I took it three times. Finally I squeaked through.

It was frustrating for me. I was a good student, considered intelligent, and was able to accomplish at a reasonably respectable pace. But when it came to math I was abysmal. Nobody around me tried to explain it. They just said I needed to apply myself more. It took a psychobiologist, Roger W. Sperry, to explain it, when in the 1960's he published a series of papers identifying the phenomenon we now understand to be right brain/left brain dominance. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1981. For people like me who were annoyed and perplexed by this attribute, it was well-deserved.

Being identified as a right brain person helped me (and those around me) to understand that I am more inclined to see things with a global bias. I see the trees in the forest, but have to concentrate to focus on one tree. I have a horrible time finding a person in a crowd. I am more inclined to pay attention to one's manner and have a tough time remembering what they were wearing. Details escape me and require special effort to be recalled.

It also means that I'm inclined more toward fiction than non-fiction, biographies being the exception. I am easily engrossed in a novel, identifying myself early on as being present in the storyline. The characters are real. When we left the theater this week, having watched the wonderful film, Invictus, I was exhausted, having played rugby in my mind for the past two hours.

It amazes me that I have taken to the computer. My use of it is not without frustration and occasional outbursts of defeat. Trying to teach me how to use something like a linking capacity took weeks of practice before I mastered it. Most people in my class got it right away. I can spend hours at the computer writing a screenplay or a novel, but eliminating unnecessary cookies is still a mystery to me.

I am drawn to art like a magnet. Don't ask me the name of the artist, or the date when the piece was created. But I can stand for an hour and discuss with you the feelings I have in studying the piece.

I have great respect for left-brain thinkers. So much so that I am inclined to leave the calculations and explorations of science to them. I trust them. But it is only on occasion that I can understand what they have gone through to create a sophisticated piece of equipment. And, to be faithful to the findings of Sperry, it is clear that everyone has degrees of the opposite hemisphere in their experience. No one is exclusively right brained or exclusively left brained. The key is the word dominance. We find one hemisphere of the brain to be friendlier than the other, but...just in case...we stay on speaking terms with the other hemisphere. How's that for a right-brain explanation of a complicated idea?

Photo Credit: This illustration of famous novelists is found at www.novelguide.com/
Definition Credit: Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.