Being of two minds
I’ve recently discovered the most visceral demonstration I’ve ever experienced of right brain vs left brain processing. For the past five hours, I’ve been working away in photoshop while listening to archives of This American Life. TAL is a gem of a radio show from NPR/PRI that presents stories about the extraordinary and the completely ordinary in life. It’s purely verbal; strictly Left Brain. Editing photos in photoshop - color balancing, cropping, adjusting tonalities, etc - is almost entirely a Right Brain activity for me.
What fascinates me is the level of concentration I have on each task: I can give each task 100% concentration, as if it were the only task I’m doing. I’m normally a pretty one-track guy; I’ve run countless red lights and stop signs because I’d been busy talking while driving. When I listen to stories while doing photoshop, I listen to the stories with my full attention. Similarly, photoshop has my full concentration. Not only that, but it’s a sort of heightened consciousness - I’m better at photoshop when I’m paying attention to a book on CD. Stories are richer and more engaging when I’m doing photoshop. It’s like the occupation of one half of my brain allows the other to concentrate more fully on what it’s doing.
The proof, to me, that it’s a right/left brain thing is that whenever the work on the computer strays, even a little, into a “left brain” activity - someone IMs me, or even just having to deal with a filename - the spell breaks. I completely loose the story and become muddled in the computer. It’s like driving off the freeway into the gravel shoulder.
I wonder if others have noticed similar things. Meantime, I’ll keep experimenting with it.
