11/30/13 Creative Side of the Brain

 In my first blog post on Thanksgiving, I mentioned that it was a good day “when I start a blog and venture in the journey to exercise my left side of the brain to prepare for my third life journey.”  Lennox messaged me that the artistic side was actually the right side of the brain.  This prompted me to want to write something about the functions of the brain, which had  me interested for sometime before writing this blog.  I have been very interested in knowing more about the brain because of something that happened to me in my childhood that I believe affected my brain, and how it worked.  I decided to do a little research about it.

The concept of the functions of the right and left sides of the brain was the work of psychologist named Roger W. Sperry, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981.  Per About.com.Psychology website: http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/left-brain-right-brain.htm  there are more recent research works that indicate that both sides of the brain work together to perform a wide variety of tasks, and are linked together through the “corpus collosum”.  Some abilities that are popularly associated with the right brain include: recognizing faces, expressing emotions, music, reading emotions, color, images, intuition, and creativity.  For left-brain, the abilities include: Language, logic, critical thinking, numbers, and reasoning.

I think that I use the “left-brain” in conjunction with my “right-brain” for my work as a manager and chief accountant.  I need to consciously control my emotions when dealing with people at work, so that the work atmosphere will be normalized.  Since there are many people with different personalities and emotions to deal with, it is important to do so or one can be stressed out.  Being a manager and leader, I need also to be able to use my right-brain to read people’s emotions, and deal with difficult people so that work get done; in other words, I need to have "Emotional Intelligence".  In business, it requires logic, critical thinking, data analysis, and reasoning abilities from the left brain.  But in this changing world of business, we also need right brain’s creativity; “thinking outside the box” so to speak, to work in conjunction with left-brain in problem solving and making decisions.

Ok, I don’t want to sound like an expert in brain functioning and sound like I am very brainy.  On the contrary, I have to let you know actually I have been operating with less than perfect brain.  I noticed long time ago that my sister remembered everything back to when she was three years old whereas I cannot remember a thing that happened to me before I was about six or seven years old.

I was told me that after a time in Bangkok, my Mother was out of work because at the time, there was government restriction on teaching Chinese, and the school where my Mother taught Chinese to elementary school children was closed.  Living in the same house with my Father’s other household did not work out, and she was pregnant with my younger brother.  So she with her children moved to a little town out of Bangkok called Mueng Min or Minburi, where we could survive by eating vegetables that grew wild in the fields, and along the water way such as water crest; catching fish to eat from the canal.  She worked menial labor rolling flax, making it into string of ropes, and was paid by batch or piece work, which was not much.  It was a tough time for her with hard work, but it was good enough that she could work from home.

I was about two years old at the time, but my Mother was working, my eldest sister probably helped her babysit my new born baby brother or went to school in the village.  I would wander off, and often time got lost, and my mother and sister looked for me and found me in the police station singing and dancing the Li-kay, Thai folk opera style dance.  (To understand more, and see Li-kay, follow this link. http://www.demotix.com/photo/421340/li-kay-folk-opera-performance-bangkok

My brain at two years old was probably able to capture some of the Li-kay performances  when they came to the village.  I was performing the dance and singing in front of an audience of total strangers at the police station.  After hearing the story from my sister about my adventure, I often amused myself by thinking that I could have joined the folk opera group and traveled all over Thailand if my Mother did not find me, or joined the Minburi PD as moral booster singing and dancing away.

My little brilliant brain that helped me to remember things very well did not stay with me for long.

One day, I wondered off unsupervised again.  This time my little feet strolled along the bank of the canal; I might have strolled up the bridge, which was so very tall that it was very hard work for a little two-year-old. To these days, once in while, I still have dreams of climbing very tall bridge, which might be the result of the experience from a little girl’s point of view climbing a bridge like this.

I got to the other side of the bridge near the rice mill, and walked along the canal bank.  Suddenly, I was pushed by another big kid who was playing around there, and I fell off the bank of the canal (similar to the one in the picture my brother-in-law took during his recent visit to my brother’s birth place).  Fortunately, or not so fortunately depending on how we look at it, I fell into a boat and not into the water and drown.  As the result of the fall with bad concussion, I could not remember what went on during the first five or six years of my life.   I still have the liking for music though.  I found music and songs have helped me remember things.  An example is when I studied French grammar; I wrote a Thai poem with French vocabularies that identified male and female genders of some adjectives. This helped me pass the dreaded French exam.  To these days, music and poetry are big parts of my life that help me enjoy life through good and bad times.

During this Thanksgiving season, I want to acknowledge that God has preserved me, despite challenges, the Higher Power had helped me through these challenges. I managed to pass nationwide exams that made me one of the top 50 students at senior highschool level.  During and after high school years, I received scholarships to study in school and universities abroad.  After college education, I was able to work my way through to near the top in two major careers.  I'm thankful that my brain is still working all because of Him.  I would say as Psalmist (139: 14) had said, “I will give thanks to Thee, for I am fearfully, and wonderfully made”

I’m so excited to continue using both sides of my brain discovering what I can do as I continue this life journey.  See you again in my next post, may be on December 5th, the King's birthday.

Good night my friends!