In utero, our male and female brains distinguish. There is a wall of cells which die in the male brain, dividing the hemispheres. Not so in the female brain. Because of this, we process thoughts differently.
Also, in a hypothetical, tragic instance of an accident where a man and woman both loose their speech abilities, it is likely the woman's other hemisphere would take over and she would regain speech, while the man would probably remain dumb.
I remember meeting a brain research doctor in Central Park a dozen years ago when our children were very young. She was getting a Spanish nanny. I was told that if one learned a second language during the first 18 months of life, the two languages would map on different hemispheres. Introduction to multiple languages afterward would cause them to stack on one side of the brain only, no matter how many there were.
I was shocked a few years ago, when I saw that da Vinci, in one of his drawings displayed at the Met Museum, divided the brain and labeled the hemispheres into something like - the rational and the creative. Was he not brilliant? But then, even much earlier, at the inception of the modern Hebrew written alphabet (reflecting an even older tradition, I am sure), there was awareness that the brain divides into emotional and rational sides.
Isn't it curious that the backward R and the L in the main photo article look like Ralph Lauren's Double R ranch logo?
In the title of this article, why did I color the right, "Feminine," brain baby blue and the left, "Masculine," brain pink. Why? Earlier in America, blue was first used for girls and pink for boys, just the opposite of today.
It is most interesting to me that the left side includes both the emotional and the intuitive aspects of our thinking. A teacher of meditation, Stuart Wilde, used to emphasize that we first must quiet our emotions to be intuitive, to be connected to our feelings. Emotions being things like anger, fear, jealousy, aggression; feelings being what we notice non-analytically when we quiet our selves. Mr. Wilde suggested we go about our interactions with others, but just leave off the emotions.
And for those musicians among my readers - when a non-musician listens to music, the person processes it with her/his right, emotional hemisphere; if you then train that person in music, there will be a shift. Her/his left, intellectual half will then be the side used in listening to music.
The nice photo at the top of this article was found at project741.com/blog.
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