Left and Right Brain
Reiki Therapy helps harmonize and to deepen silence of the Mind
Reiki Therapy brings the Mind to the Present and at Peace
Right Brain oriented - you are going to have the tendency to be held in the Past (2nd Chakra, emotional), you can not let it go..., resentment, trauma, rejection or remembering the good times you lived, that now are gone for ever....
Left Brain oriented - you are going to have the tendency to be concerned or worry about the Future (3rd Chakra, intellectual), planning..., planning...., too much planning and many moments foreseeing things that are not going to workout...
Balanced Brain - neither left or right brain tendencies, Reiki Therapy dissolves the tendencies of the Mind, harmonizing both brains and quitting the mind to a state of serenity, peace and balance. The resulted awareness makes the Mind to be totally focus on the Present Moment (4th Chakra, where the Love is expressed) therefore, to live in the Present or to live in the Now is to be living in Love.
Find out which Brain are you, do the tests further down below.
Left / Right Brain Functions
Characteristics of Left Brain:
Logical, Sequential, Rational, Looks at parts,
Analytical, Objective, Detail oriented, Past and Future.
In addition, this part likes technicalities, numbers,
data, facts, logic and precision.
Characteristics of Right Brain:
Random, Intuitive, Subjective, Looks at wholes,
Holistic, Synthesizing, Big Picture Oriented, Present.
This part is more interested in challenge, risk,
new ideas, imagination, and whole picture.
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Left / Right Brain Conflict
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Left or Right Brain, which one is you? Do the Tests below!
Well, here's a fun left-right posting that has nothing to do with politics (and please don't comment with an argument that this, too, can be applied to politics). It's one of those brain teaser things that will tell the viewer if their left or right brain is dominant.
Here's how it works. When you look at the dancing figure, determine
if you see her spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise.
Even more fun, see if you can get her to reverse directions. The only way I found to do this was to watch her stationary foot and try to envision it turning the opposite direction. I found a blink or a quick glance away from the stationary foot and then back helped me achieve the reversal.
The traits which are associated with left and right brain individuals can be found in the table below the image.
1-Which direction is she turning: clockwise or counter-clockwise?
Click on the Image to do the test ----> 
If she's turning counter-clockwise ---> Left Brain
If you say clockwise ---> Right Brain
2- Hold your hands together, as if you were praying. Look at your hands, If you see:
Left thumb is below the right thumb ---> Left Brain
Right thumb is below the left thumb ---> Right Brain
3- Fold your arms in front of you (as if you were angry)
Right arm above left arm ---> Left Brain
Left arm above right arm ---> Right Brain
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Find out from 16 Personality Type, which is yours, and what carrier and relationship suits you the most.
http://www.personalitypage.com/home.html
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How the mantra "OM" effects the Mind
"Om" mantra creates a spiral vibration that circulates from one hemisphere of the brain to the other in the shape of a Torus, engulfing the brain, harmonizing and shutting down all five senses perceived by the mind. Resulting profound silence of the mind.
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Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
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At Extensor Limited, England
Leadership, Management and the Brain
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/leadership_brain/leadership_brain.html
Sir Martin Sorrell once said:
“I can’t remember which is which, whether it’s left brain or right
brain: but one is quantitative and one is qualitative and getting the
balance between the two is critically important.”
Alistair Schofield considers the question of whether organisations need to take a more balanced approach.
The brain is the most complex organ in the human body and one that, even today, we do not fully understand. An analogy that beautifully describes the complexity of the human brain is to imagine a huge forest that covers roughly a million square miles, the equivalent of half of the United States of America. In each square mile there would be roughly 10,000 trees and each tree would have roughly 100,000 leaves. The number of electrical connections in the brain is roughly equivalent to the total number of leaves in the forest. As long ago as the time of Hippocrates, around 400 years BC, it was known that the brain was divided into two halves with both halves performing different functions and being responsible for different types of thinking. At that time it was known that the left hemisphere of the brain was responsible for rational, analytical and logical thought and was considered to be the essential part of the brain. The right hemisphere of the brain was thought to be the lesser half - at best passive, at worst, a remnant of an earlier stage of human development. |
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This view of the brain persisted until the 1950’s, when the physician Roger Sperry discovered that the right half of the brain was responsible for different types of thinking. As a result of Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning work we learned that the left hemisphere reasoned sequentially, excelled at analysis and handled words. The right hemisphere reasoned holistically, recognised patterns and interpreted emotions and non-verbal expressions.
Since then we have learned how these hemispheres are
themselves divided into the cerebral and limbic (upper and lower)
sections, but for the purposes of this article, it is sufficient to
consider only the left and right halves.
So what has all this got to do with management and leadership?
In Daniel Pink’s thought provoking book ’A Whole New Mind’ (review by Extensor August 2006), he describes how left-brained thinking has dominated the growth of organisations since the Industrial Revolution. During most of that period, organisations have been wrestling with the logistics of achieving consistent production processes, developing economies of scale and implementing sophisticated control mechanisms. More recently they have been automating processes using computer systems, itself an intrinsically logical technology.
Pink argues that by making everything so logical, we run the risk of becoming victims of our own success, in that many people are employed to perform tasks that are readily automated or capable of being transferred to lower cost economies. In the future, the value that western economies can add will come from right-brained thinking.
Sir Martin Sorrell, the Chief Executive of WPP, made a similar point when he said:
“Intangible differentiations are becoming more and more important
as technological transfer is easier and as people can copy things much
more effectively.”
At Extensor we use tool called the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument to measure people’s preferences for different styles of thinking. The results provide a metaphorical indication as to which parts of their brain are more dominant than the others, and therefore which thinking styles the person concerned prefers to use. When the results are aggregated for large groups of people in commercial organisations, they tend to be relatively balanced with a slight left-brain dominance; 52% left and 48% right. However, when we profile senior management teams, the results tend to be more extreme, with a typical team profile showing a 60% dominance in left-brain thinking.
Moreover, we find that this is not a one-off bias affecting the Board, it is a trend within businesses that sees left-brained thinking becoming increasingly dominant at successively higher levels in the organisational hierarchy.
A question we frequently get asked is whether male and female thinking preferences differ. The answer is yes. It is a broad generalisation but women tend to be dominantly right-brained, thinking more emotionally and empathetically, while men tend to be more left brained, thinking in a more structured and logical fashion.
This is a point picked up by Joanna Krotz in her article ‘Do Women Make Better Managers’ (Extensor Newsletter September 2006). Krotz links the increasing need for right-brain thinking to the increasing success of women in business. Gregg Dyke, the former Director General of the BBC made a similar point when interviewed on Radio 4 in 2006; he said that right-brained thinking was becoming increasingly important and that of the people in the BBC he regarded as most suitable for promotion to senior management positions, 80% of them were women.
In our own work at Extensor we are frequently encouraging organisations to place greater emphasis on the development of leadership skills relative to management skills, so it is interesting to consider how this relates to the move towards more right-brained thinking described above.
One of the first people to draw a distinction between leadership and management was John Kotter, then Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School. According to Kotter, management is about planning, controlling, and putting appropriate structures and systems in place, whereas leadership has more to do with anticipating change, coping with change, and adopting a visionary stance.
To assist people in defining leadership for themselves, an exercise we frequently run during Extensor courses involves asking delegates to think of a number of people; a friend who helped them through a difficult time, a colleague who they regarded as a mentor or a teacher who helped them at school. We then ask them to write down a list of words that they could use to describe exactly what it was that these people did. The types of words and phrases that emerge are as follows:
| Advised | Had faith | |
| Believed in me | Helped | |
| Cared | Inspired | |
| Challenged | Listened | |
| Championed | Praised | |
| Didn't tell | Shared emotions | |
| Empowered | Showed faith | |
| Encouraged | Showed respect | |
| Focused on positives | Supported | |
| Gave confidence | Trusted | |
| Gave direction | Understood | |
| Gave me a sense of purpose | Valued | |
| Gave up their time |
Of all of the words and phrases that emerge, the most common ones by far are, in order of frequency of occurrence;
1- Believed in me
2- Listened
3- Encouraged
4- Trusted
5- Inspired
All of which are right-brained words. For comparison, typical left-brained words would be; ‘analytical’, ‘planned’, ‘structured’, ‘risk averse’. Leadership therefore tends to be a more right-brained activity, while management is more left-brained. As Kotter explained,
“where leadership is about knowing what to do,
management is about knowing how to do it.”
Both skills are important and both are necessary. The important thing for organisations is to possess both.
The challenge for organisations is therefore to be ‘whole-brained’. However, if the senior people tend to be more left-brained and the more junior people relatively more right-brained, doesn’t that provide the necessary balance?
Great customer service requires an emotional and empathetic relationship. As the writer and journalist Robert Heller wrote in his book The Fusion Manager; “All customer relationships rest on personal contact between the buyer and the seller.” Sir Martin Sorrell made a similar point when he said; “You build brands by not just creating tangible differences, but emotional differences.”
Almost without exception, the ‘private life’ profile is more right-brained than the ‘work profile’, suggesting that people alter their thinking style for work. In the organisations where we have profiled significant numbers of people, the shift from right to left-brained thinking tends to be between 2% and 4%. While this may not sound like much, it generally moves the sample from being balanced and ‘whole brained’ to being dominantly left-brained.
About the Author
Alistair Schofield is Managing Director of Extensor Limited.
References
A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, ISBN 1904879578
The Fusion Manager by Robert Heller, ISBN 186197646
What Leaders Really Do by John Kotter, Harvard Business Review, Article code R0111F
Do Women Make Better Managers? by Johanna Krotz, Microsoft Small Business Centre, Articles and Insights
© Extensor Limited 2006. All rights reserved.
No part of this site may be reproduced in any form without the prior
written permission of Extensor Limited.
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/leadership_brain/leadership_brain.html
A SAD BUT TRUE STORY
www.addpathfinders.com/Newsletter.htm
One way to see the differences in processing might just be to say the right brain has a separate way of knowing from the left brain. The following is a dramatic example showing hemispheric specialization at work. The following is a true story:
“’Billy was a sixth grader. His teacher, reviewing the previous day’s math lesson, called on him to define infinity…Billy squirmed in his seat and said nothing. “Come on Billy, what’s infinity?” His teacher insisted. He looked at the floor. Exasperated, she commanded him again to answer, whereupon he mumbled. “Well, infinity is kinda like a box of Cream of Wheat.” “Billy, don’t be silly,” she snapped, and called on Johnny, who was eager to share his learning. “Infinity is immeasurable, unbounded space, time or quantity,” he said. The teacher was pleased, since this was the only appropriate answer she could imagine.
Billy had verbalized a complex right-brain image and made a
non-literal statement. Literally, infinity is nothing like a box of Cream of
Wheat, and the teacher looking for a left-brain definition, understandably
ignored his answer. Later, Billy was able to explain his image to a more
receptive ear:
“You see, on a box of Cream of Wheat, there’s a picture of a man holding a box of Cream of Wheat, which shows a man holding a box of Cream of Wheat—and it goes on and on like that forever and ever, even if you can’t see it anymore. Isn’t that infinity?”
Billy had a rich right brain understanding of infinity. The literal definition meant so little he couldn’t reproduce it even though he wrote it down the day before.