podcastthings

[podcastthings]

Hidden Brain: One Head, Two Brains

You often hear people saying that the left and right hemispheres of your brain controls different functions in your life. This episode explains that indeed your left and right brain each serve different purposes, but they need to work in sync for you to be able to navigate the world.

To put it simply, your right brain is responsible for the "big picture", and your left brain is responsible for the details. This is definitely aligned with our impressions of each side of the brain. If you're a "left brained" person, you are more logical and organized, and if you're a "right brained" person, you are more communicative and creative.

They gave a famous example of the character Sheldon from Big Bang Theory who is a stereotypically left brained person, and he is unable to comprehend sarcasm.

Strictly my own assumption with no scientific basis or research: does that mean people with Asperger probably have some sort of a right brain deficiency? Asperger is characterized by "significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities". They are unable to read nonverbal cues from people, and they pay close attention to minute details in a restricted interest.

How about if you were left brain deficient? I think of people who cannot complete a series of tasks that require complicated steps, and who often have their heads in the clouds.

I wonder if these things can be trained. If you're someone who has a hard time organizing things, it seems like you should be able to write out some 5-step for yourself to follow so that some task that you may need to repeat in the future would be easier to you over time. I'm not sure how the opposite would work though. It often seems like it's difficult to get people who pay too much attention to detail to see the big picture.

The guest Iain McGilchrist mentions that our world is currently dominated by left-brain thinking, which seems to be true. Everything needs to have a precise rule or method, everything is black and white, no room for creativity or "thinking outside the box".

I think I've been guilty of that myself at the previous job, always trying to come up with solutions for the immediate problem, failing to construct a comprehensive outline of how the entire system could work. And then thinking that since this solution works for now, it is the only solution, not trying to come up with alternative ways to make things work. Or maybe I'm just too lazy to think of anything else, lawl.

There was an interesting example in this episode discussing music. What is music? It is the notes and the gaps (silences) between the notes that make up the rhythm and melody. If you simply look at a piece of music just by its individual notes, it means nothing. And how are you supposed to view the gaps, then? But if you don't have the gaps, it also makes for a weird piece of music. When you listen to music, you don't just listen to the individual notes, you listen the whole piece performed together as a whole. Ah, music is wonderful. But anyway, funny to think about how the "simple" things in our lives are so complicated. (By no means saying that making music is simple.)

[podcastthings]

Hidden Brain: Red Brain, Blue Brain

Hidden Brain is a show on NPR that "explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world."

This episode was about the theory that whether you're conservative or liberal could be attributed to nature, i.e. you were born with it. (They're saying that maybe it's 30-40% genetic, it is not absolute)

Most people would say that they grew up believing in what their parents believed, whether it'd be religion, or in this case, political stance. So I guess it's interesting to see this idea that perhaps we naturally gravitate towards certain ideologies, lifestyles, preferences, etc., which embodies our entire being, including politics, which would then define us as conservative or liberal or somewhere in between. Conservatives tend to gravitate towards more rules and order, and liberals tend to gravitate towards experiential things.

Looking at the people around me, I will say that it is at least 80% true, although it doesn't necessarily define what sort of stance they would take on particular political issues. For example, my college roommate Ashley is someone that I will say is very orderly and has clear rules for her surroundings and daily routines. However, she tends to lean towards liberal on issues such as abortion (women's rights to their own bodies) or gay marriage.

Arthur thinks that political beliefs tend to have more to do with your upbringing and basically your experiences growing up. His parents are very conservative, but he grew up becoming very liberal. He attributes it to books he read on the 228 incident (for example) and other things on Taiwanese history. It's funny because recently we watched an interview with Freddy Lim that said he became interested in these issues because when he was in school, he never understood why there was not much Taiwanese history, and what they learned were mostly Chinese history, and that is exactly what Arthur had thought as a child, which sparked his interest in finding out more.

You can argue that he formed his political beliefs due to his experiences or the books he read, but I think you could also say that his natural tendency to question things and rebel against the "norm" is what caused him to have interest in those materials in the first place.

In this episode they also discussed that sexual orientation didn't used to be considered biological, but now that it is, people are more tolerant of it. I suppose this is one step towards being tolerant of someone who holds opposing political beliefs as you, and working towards the greater good? Although I don't see this happening any time soon. It was recently the presidential elections in Taiwan, and all I really saw was the parties attacking each other on various issues, lawl. Will I live to see the day?

Then Arthur and I went off on a tangent of, what if political beliefs were indeed mostly genetic, then if you have a dictatorship, the leader could "cleanse" the race of rebelling beliefs to make sure that all of your people's beliefs would allign with that of the state. Then I mentioned that people who were too afraid to die would probably just pretend they held the same beliefs, which is something that already happens anyway, so there is no real way to "cleanse" the population of differing political beliefs. Anyway, just a thought.

[podcastthings]

Podcasts

So I've started listening to podcasts again, and decided that I would write some of my thoughts down on them (as notes to self, mainly), and also some ideas that came up while discussing it with others. Should be fun to look back on, I suppose. Here I go!