Right-Brain verus Left-Brain Test

Do you see the lady dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

Many amongst you would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise.  This means you use more of the left side of your brain.  If you do see her turning clockwise, then you use more of the right side of your brain.  By looking away, by re-focusing slightly, most of you would be able to change the direction irrespective of whether the dancer was initially turning clockwise or anti-clockwise.

Try it now before you read further.  Did you manage to change the direction?  Can you do it again?  And again?

You may notice that you can only focus on data from one brain at a time.  With practice, you can switch from one side to the other without affecting your corpus callosum (a broad band of nerve fibres joining the two hemispheres of the brain).  In today’s day and age, the left brain almost invariably wins.  That is because years of education has only focused on the left brain which includes logic, reasoning and detail-orientation.  Sadly, the right brain which presides over imagination, holistic thinking, creativity and artistic talent gets very little importance.

The left brain is emphatically dominant and unless it is shut off or slowed down, the right brain is unable to make way into our consciousness.  Meditation, hypnosis and Nirmiti Nidra ^TM  are essentially ways to shut off or slow down the left brain processes so as to kick-start the right brain with its vignettes of images, emotions and free imagination.  Otherwise, the only time the right brain finds expression is in dreams. 

To optimize the mental abilities, it is a no-brainer that both hemispheres should have their say and be able to coordinate with each other.  A spate of mid-brain activation workshops are now making waves in this country.  However, all that is required is that the left brain is slowed down or shut off so that the critical faculties are at a rest – logic, analysis, reasoning and judgement are notorious by their absence.  With repeated practice, accessing the right brain or subconscious levels becomes easy.

Creative writing, Creative problem-solving, Creative Visualization and a whole host of other techniques have to do with activating the right brain.