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On the Lateralization of Emotion and Inter-Hemispheric Communication
Recently, i was watching the World War II colour documentary series by Time. Having long been fascinated with pictures and stories from that period of our history, I have ploughed through dozens of documentaries about Hitler in utter amazement. The period interests me because fascism had never been seen on the scale the Nazis brought it to and i think we can learn a lot from how all that monstrous humanity came about. World War II is an historical event which I can come back to visually time after time, bewildered by the long tradition of human stupidity that is war. My consciousness seems to have an appetite for the horrible imagery because I can look with detachment as an observer who has not been personally traumatized by the events. In what follows, i am going to present my experience of consuming this visual information and how this experience led me to do a little reading on the neurology of emotion.
So my conclusion is that looking at information through a clinical lens with the intention of processing it analytically through words is no guarantee that another parallel emotional process is not taking place with its own set of parameters, causes and effects. Nothing too revolutionary about what i am proposing here but still kind of interesting when you consider the idea of two practically independent brains doing separate things for their own reasons. I think the age old conflict between the heart and the mind is really just a metaphor we use to help us understand the relationship between the right and left hemisphere respectively. The former serves as the functional location for most of those things we define as ''heart'' while the latter does most of the stuff we associate with mind of an intellectual. Let me ask you a question which has nothing to do with this post now: ''Which hemisphere has been dominant throughout history?''
Hi, tomartist your site about art therapy and neuroscience looks very interesting and perhaps could be qualified as CEREBRART.
Thanks Alex, I will have to check out that cerebrart you are refering to.