Center Brained People

 Words of Wisdom? There are times when we can hear thoughts that are real gems. We just know that those words emanate from a wellspring of deep wisdom, and the thoughts behind the words were founded on principled observation, experience, contemplation and conclusion. I love to sit quietly sometimes and contemplate the fissiparity of the human experience. One school of thought attributed to the "frog" says, "what is a joke to you is death to me!" Another, attributed to the "donkey," says, "This world is not level." These two sayings are particularly apt as I compare and contrast the existence of a well-oriented and navigationally savvy person, with that of someone like me, who just cannot get their coordinates right. What thoughts do the following quotations evoke in you? Oliver Wendell Holmes: "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimension." I agree. We must endeavor to learn at least one new thing...

IT TAKES A VILLAGE! Every journey begins with the first step. Every road trip begins with the first mile. Getting everyone to be fully cognizant of the  vicissitudes  of the directionally challenged will take some doing, but I have already taken the first steps. My book, Center Brained: Why you can't tell left from right, east from west or north from south gives a first-hand account of what it means to be directionally challenged. Not only that; it also gives some very plausible explanations about why some people are directionally challenged. It also supplies some practical strategies for mitigating the effects of directional challenge, as well as possible solutions for the problematic situation in which many directionally challenged individuals find themselves. I need to hear from you who also have difficulties navigating from one point to another, as well as you who never dreamed that such a situation exits, and, also from everyone else in between. Download a copy of the eb...

 Mirror, Mirror What happens when you try to fix your hair, or put make up on your face, using a mirror?  Is this job a cinch, or do you have severe difficulty touching the exact spot you want to, using the mirror as guide? Do you raise your right hand [if you know which is your right hand] and are totally confused when you see your reflection raise what appears to be its left hand? Directionally challenged people tend to be very confused by mirrors. Imagine wanting to fix your hair on the right side of your head, but every time you try to do so, your hand ends up on the left side of your head! Mirrors are tricky gadgets for us because we're already confused about what is left and what is right. Add to that confusion the fact that the mirror we're looking at will flip right to left and vice versa. Even if you know right from left, this can be confusing, but it is daunting for us, directionally challenged people. So, what can we do to combat this confusion? Here are a few tips ...

 Directional Challenge and Young Children I was about seven years old when I realized that I was not able to correctly identify left and right.  Even though convention says that by that age a child should be able, with some consistency, tell left from right on their own bodies, and begin applying that knowledge to the world around them, at that age, I was definitely at a loss about which side was my right and which was my left. It did not help that earlier, I showed signs of being ambidextrous, but my mother, only seeing me using my left hand particularly to write, freaked out at the prospect of having a "baff-handed" child. (I'll explain what it means to be baff-handed later on, but you can, study ahead, by looking it up on the internet.) I was strongly encouraged to write with my right hand, so all my inclination to write with my left hand evaporated.  My foray into ambidexterity was thus thwarted. What resulted was the fact I still use my left hand mainly to do some ta...

 The Half  Has Never Yet   Been Told I tried looking up "Center Brained" on the internet and got some interesting results.  This is what Google says:  Most search engines do not mention the concept  at all. I hope that that will change soon. I also hope that some brave neuroscientists will hastily take up the challenge to settle the debate about side dominance of the brain. I think I have a very good idea what the research will find, and I hope those who would swear that there is no such reality as side dominance will not only accept that one or the other (left or right) side of the brain can be dominant in an individual, but that endless posibilities exist that dominance can occur in the center as well!  I believe in side dominance of the brain because, from my years of observation and study, I know that when someone who experiences a stroke sustains damage to the right hemisphere of their brain, it's their left side that becomes non-functional. If th...