Right Brain, Left Brain

The right brain controls the left side of the body and the left brain controls the right side of the body. The right brain is the more creative or emotional hemisphere and the left brain is the analytical and judgmental hemisphere. Anything that is new or not familiar to an individual is right brain dominant. Anything that is familiar is left brain dominant.

Along with right and left brain there are different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe controls your personality, the temporal lobe deals with short and long term memory, the parietal lobe is the lobe of the hand, and the occipital lobe, the very back part of the head, controls vision.

There are specific activities that may stimulate the right or left brain.

Activities that stimulate the left brain are solving crossword or word search puzzles, performance of learned tasks, language usage, both comprehensive and expressive, analytical information, problem solving, and recalling new information. Geometric or spatial memory, hand gestures, writing one's name, classifications of pictures or words into categories, recalling complex narratives, recognizing someone you have met, and name recognition are also all left brain activities.

Activities that stimulate the right brain are emotional issues, the creative process, recalling memorized lists, any unfamiliar event or activity, and holding the attention span. Seeing or feeling different sizes, seeing different colors, attention exercises involving timing, seeing unfamiliar faces, and meeting someone new also stimulate the right brain..

You are not dead until your brain is dead. Your brain needs two things to survive: fuel and activation. Fuel comes in the form of oxygen and glucose. Glucose comes from the food you eat, and oxygen comes from the air you breathe. The normal inspiration/expiration ratio should be exhalation twice as long as inhalation. That is to say - breathe out twice as long as you breathe in.

There are also specific treatment modalities that a clinician may utilize to increase function or activation of the right or left brain. One example is big letters made up of small letters. If you look at the small letters you will fire right cerebellum to left brain. If you look at the big letters you will fire left cerebellum to right brain.

Auditory stimulation (listening to nature sounds, clicks of a metronome, or Mozart in a major key) in the left ear comes up through the brain stem over to the right brain and vice versa for the right ear.

Visual stimulation from the left side in a checkerboard pattern using different colors comes up through the optic pathway to the brain stem and up to the right brain. The T.E.N.S. unit set at subthreshold stimulates large diameter nerves which fire up to the cerebellum and to the opposite brain.

Dr. Michael L. Johnson is a Board Certified Chiropractic Neurologist, one of only 700 in the country, with over twenty years of experience in private practice. He has completed over 850 hours of neurological studies and 3800 hours of postgraduate education. His book "What Do You Do When the Medications Don't Work? - A Non-Drug Treatment of Dizziness, Migraine Headaches, Fibromyalgia, and Other Chronic Conditions" outlines his groundbreaking work in the treatment of chronic pain and is a national best-seller. It is available wherever books are sold.

© 2005 Michael L. Johnson, D.C., D.A.C.N.B.