Left brained or right ?

BRAIN STRAIN

Did you know that most people use one side of the brain more than the other?

According to website www. aboutchildrenshealth.com, in most people the brain was designed to do this, that one side of the brain even grows much bigger than the other side.

In about 90 per cent of people it is the left side of the brain that is dominant and bigger. Others are right brained and that side is the bigger half. Yet other people have a mixed dominance and their brain grows larger on both sides..

More searches revealed that people use only around 10 to 20 per cent of their brain and that too only one side of it and they think that it is normal for them to do so.

There is a frightening statistic too. Every day around 100,000 cells of your brain atrophy or are sloughed away due to lack of use! Cells wasting away because we don't know how to use them!

Of course most people must be aware of the fact that right-handed people (or people who use more of their right limbs) tend to be dominated by the left side of the brain and left-handed people are controlled by the right side of the brain. The left side is set of logic and precision thinking, while the right side is what makes us creative and intuitive.

This is a very crude and simplistic difference, but it will suffice for our purposes. Incidentally around 90 per cent of the population are left brained since they tend to use the right of their body more than the left side.

There were no answers why this should be so - it is something still baffling all the experts. Of course, a small percentage of the population use their left hand for some function and the right for others so their brain dominance is mixed.

There are ways to identify whether you are left brained or right brained.

Ask your friend to approach you at the centre of your body and whisper.

Whether you turn your right ear or left ear to listen to the message will establish your brain dominance.

Which hand do you write with? What hand do you use to pick up anything, say a cup? While climbing a flight of stairs which foot do you use first?

Most of these functions are done by us without giving it a second thought, but all this gives us a clue to which part of our brain is dominant and probably our behaviour. Returning to the theme about mixed dominance, www.aboutchildrenshealth.com says: "A person with mixed dominance may have trouble learning things sometimes, this is because their brains have to work a bit differently from others. To interpret information in a brain with a mixed dominance it must travel back and forth between the hemispheres. But it doesn't always cause problems, Einstein and Leonardo Da Vinci both probably had a mixed dominance."

Another site gives some simple and interesting ways to increase the use of our brain and utilise both sides of it. It just involves varying our routine a bit - like changing our route of travel everyday, probably using a different mode of transport, rescheduling the way we always work and so on. These are the simplistic ways to jog our brains.

A slightly harder way is to learn new things. For instance, a software professional learning ballet, or a student of literature taking computer classes or just learning a new language are ways by which we can stimulate those cells into working for us.

Just like exercising our muscles makes them stronger and supple, exercising our brain by giving it new tasks to do makes them stronger and in the process we end up using those sides of the brain which we normally neglect.

So is the process of degeneration of our brains irreversible? Not really.

Once we start using our brains actively the brain cells start to re-generate. Probably we might be able to get back what we have lost, but we can use the existing cells more fully. So, stop there right now. Cease what you have been doing for the last 20 years and get on to something new, if you don't want your brain to waste away entirely.

THE LOBE ISSUE: There are ways to identify whether you are left brained or right brained. Ask your friend to approach you at the centre of your body and whisper. Whether you turn your right ear or left ear to listen to the message will establish your brain dominance. Which hand do you write with? What hand do you use to pick up anything, say a cup? While climbing a flight of stairs which foot do you use first?

USEFUL SITES: supercrawler.com, brain.web-us.com, aboutchildrenhealth.com, adline.com, & braincourse.com