Work, lipstick catastrophe, Mindsight...

[flexagon]

I didn't tell you all that I have a new director and she's a woman (!), and she's dumping an interesting amount of responsibility on me; testing me, or sponsoring me, or both. Work was both rough and exciting this week. Aside from having to turn tomorrow into a full workday in order to meet Tuesday deadlines, I'm feeling OK about it on balance. One of the things is that the big internal survey results came back, and my unruly horde of minions still likes me as a manager. That's really good.

Today I didn't work and I did do tons of chores, including installation of a shelf in my bathroom and assembling as much Elfa for my closet as I could (still missing the brackets). I was doing super well at everything until I ran a dark red lipstick through the washer/dryer, and, well, ugh. I've already spent over $100 replacing my best socks and panties. Thank goodness I was able to use dish soap to get the stains out of the two really nice things in that load (my favorite leggings and a good hoodie). Dish soap scrubbed into the fabric with an old toothbrush, followed by a wash with regular detergent and hot water, is the best for grease stains... it won't save socks though. SIGH.

I've been reading a book called Mindsight that I want to write a cogent summary of one day, but in the meantime: it feels to me like the missing second half of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis. Haidt concludes that "happiness comes from between", and Mindsight (though it uses the word "integration") is all about pairs and sets of things that need to be getting along well, so that their between is harmonious. It's really good. I haven't yet hit the chapter that discusses my particular mental steeplechase, but I know it's coming, and I already have had one useful insight about it.

One of the pairs of things is the left & right brain, which itself isn't a new concept to me. One bit I liked, though, is the notion that writing about feelings is itself a way to force left and right to work together: taking the stuff of right-brain experience and pushing it through the left-brain sieve of language. Maybe that integrative aspect is one reason it's so freaking useful... and maybe I should write about feelings more, here.

Comments

[drwex]

Um, you know that left-brain/right-brain pop-sci stuff is pretty thoroughly discredited, yes? Like, it doesn't actually match how brains work, kind of at all. It's OK as a figure of speech, but that's about it.

This is the basic paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0071275
And a really good plain-language discussion is here:
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/12/02/248089436/the-truth-about-the-left-brain-right-brain-relationship

[flexagon]

Huh? OK... thanks for the sources, but I read the plain-language article and it talks about plenty of hemispheric differences, including a lot of the usual stuff that I'd read about in countless places before, and nobody's claiming that Wernicke's area has moved (in most people) or there's no such thing as the corpus callosum. I get that maybe the figures of speech have gone too far afield when compared strictly to biology, but, between your comment and coraline's, this feels kind of like the latest thing that it's cool to be pedantic about.

Am I being overly cranky?

[drwex]

I would say no, you're not. It's your journal and you should feel free to write as you please. I apologize for speaking out of turn.

As to the science... I... hrm. I feel like there's a long history of glib pop-sci things ("we only use 10% of our brain! some people are right-brained and some are left-brained!") particularly applied to brains and cognition that not only exaggerate but are actively harmful. These myths lead people into false beliefs and actions, and I feel that they're particularly hard on non-neurotypical people. If somehow your brain doesn't conform to the pop stereotype then you're defective, or wrong.

It's the brain equivalent of saying "there are men, and there are women". Well, yes, that's true for a lot of people and it's not a bad general model to describe things at a very macro scale. But when you get down to it, that model is wrong, and propagating it is harmful to people who are not gender-conforming for whatever reason.

As a person who is both non-neurotypical and who is parenting non-neurotypical kids I'm perhaps more sensitive to this than other people, just as I object to people saying "boys and girls" as a shorthand for "all of you".

Does that make any sense?

[flexagon]

Huh. Yes, that makes sense. Apology accepted.

Weirdly, both you and the article I read talked about "some people are right-brained and some are left-brained", which is not a misconception I'd ever even encountered and certainly didn't allude to in my post. My post is just about integrating or aligning different portions of the same brain or person, the person being me.

I'd apologize in turn, but if I never spoke in generalities I'd never manage to post. I'll take it easier on brain talk next time I'm stereotyping pieces of myself though. :)

[coraline]

yay new female director!

i should add mindsight to my to-read list, although with the caveat of wex below, the L/R brain thing is a metaphor only (it may well be that integrating your feeling/sensing systems with your liguistic system is super useful, but that's not really about which side of the brain anything is located on.

[flexagon]

Hmmm, that's not what I got from the sources Wex cited -- there seem to typically still be plenty of hemispheric differences in most people. Let me know if I'm missing something, though, or if so many people are now having so much fun being pedantic about this that the L/R brain metaphor isn't safe in polite society anymore.