Figure 8. Split-brain subjects showing sensory preference
Of course, there are quite a few differences between R-mode and L-mode beyond R-mode’s unpredictability.
If you’ve ever said, “I’m of two minds about that,” you were probably more literally correct than you thought at the time. You actually have a number of different processing modes in the brain. Each one has unique characteristics that can help you just when you need it most.
The fastest processing modes are the muscle-memory sorts of responses that don’t even travel up to the cortex itself.[36] Piano players don’t think about each and every note and chord in a fast passage; there isn’t time. Instead, the muscles involved more or less just tackle the problem on their own without much conscious involvement or direction.
Similarly, that instinctive slam on the brakes or quick dodge on the bicycle doesn’t involve any CPU processing—it’s all in the peripherals. Since lightning-fast typing and similar physical skills aren’t of too much interest to us as programmers, I’m not going to talk too much about these non-CPU modes and responses.
There is of course plenty to talk about with these two major modes of thinking and consciousness, R-mode and L-mode, and what they can do for you.
In the 1970s, psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry pioneered the famous “split-brain” studies, where he discovered that the left and right hemispheres process information quite differently from each other (and just to add a little street credibility, he won the Nobel Prize for this work in 1981).
First, here’s a little something to try. While seated, lift your right foot off the floor, and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this, draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.
Notice that your foot will change direction. It’s how you’re wired. Cut the wiring, and two things happen: you’ll have some very odd experiences, and famous researchers get a chance to learn a lot about the brain.
Sperry’s research took patients who had an operation such that their left and right hemispheres could no longer communicate or coordinate with each other. The connections were simply cut right out. This made it relatively easy to see which hemisphere was uniquely responsible for specific behaviors and capabilities.
For instance, in one experiment, these split-brain patients were shown images on one side of the retina in each eye. If asked to name the object they saw, they’d report the image seen in the right half of the visual field (using the primarily verbal left hemisphere). But if asked to identify it by touch, they’d report the image found in the left-half of the visual field (using the nonverbal right hemisphere). The following figure shows what was going on (thanks to Dr. Scott Steinman, Southern College of Optometry).
It was Sperry who originally assigned these different capabilities purely on a hemispheric basis and added the terms left brain and right brain to the modern lexicon. As it turns out, that’s not entirely true, as described in the sidebar Left Brain vs. Right Brain, so I’ll refer to these modes as linear mode (L-mode) and rich mode (R-mode).
Sperry, Jerre Levy, and subsequent researchers identified the following characteristics as being associated with each mode.[37]
L-mode processing is comfortable, familiar, geek turf. L-mode gives you these abilities:
Using words to name, describe, and define
Figuring things out step-by-step and part-by-part
Using a symbol to stand for something
Taking out a small bit of information and using it to represent the whole thing
Keeping track of time and sequencing one thing after another
Drawing conclusions based on reason and facts
Using numbers as in counting
Drawing conclusions based on logic (theorems, well-stated arguments)
Thinking in terms of linked ideas, one thought directly following another, often leading to a convergent conclusion
This is clearly the motherhood-and-apple-pie of the white-collar, information-worker, engineering kind of life. These are the abilities we are tested on in school, use on the job, and fit in nicely with the sort of computer systems we’ve enjoyed up to now.
But as Pablo Picasso famously observed, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” What would make him say such a heretical statement?
If “answers” are useless, then that would imply that the question is more important. In fact, that sort of opposite view of things seems to be a hallmark of R-mode thinking. To those of us firmly entrenched in the L-mode way, the R-mode traits may sound a little strange, fuzzy, or even acutely uncomfortable.
In comparison to L-mode, R-mode gives you the abilities shown in Figure 9, R-mode attributes. These are all important, as we’ll see, but note right off the bat that intuition—the hallmark of the expert—is over here.
This side of the house is nonverbal. It can retrieve language but can’t create it. It favors learning by synthesis: putting things together to form wholes. It’s very concrete, in the sense of relating to things just as they are, in the present moment. It uses analogies to evaluate relationships between things. It likes a good story and doesn’t bother with timekeeping. It’s not bound by rationality in that it does not require a basis of reason or known facts in order to process input—it’s perfectly willing to suspend judgment.
The R-mode is decidedly holistic and wants to see the whole thing at once, perceiving the overall patterns and structures. It works spatially and likes to see where things are in relation to other things and how parts go together to form a whole. Most important, it’s intuitive, making leaps of insight, often based on incomplete patterns, hunches, feelings, or visual images.
Overall, though, this is far less comfortable territory. These traits seem more appropriate for artists or other weirdos. Not engineers. Not us.[38]
And what about “nonrational”? That borders on insulting. Many programmers would rather be accused of murder than be accused of being anything less than completely rational.
But many very valid thought processes are not rational, including intuition, and that’s OK. Are you married? Was that a rational decision; that is, did you list the pros and cons or make a decision tree or matrix to make that decision in a logical, rational manner? Didn’t think so.
There’s nothing wrong with that; just because a thought process is nonrational or nonrepeatable doesn’t mean it is unscientific, irresponsible, or inappropriate in any way.
Did the discussion of the Dreyfus model make you uncomfortable because it’s not an event-style theory that can be proven? If so, that’s your L-mode bias showing.
There’s a lot of value in R-mode processes that we’re not using; a lot of power is going to waste. I don’t know about you, but frankly, I can use all the brain power I can get. And there’s a lot of interesting, underutilized power over on the R-mode.
Power is going to waste.
We want to use R-mode more than we have because the R-mode provides intuition, and that’s something we desperately need in order to become experts. We cannot be expert without it. The Dreyfus model emphasizes the expert’s reliance on tacit knowledge; that’s over here in the R-mode as well. Experts rely on seeing and discriminating patterns; pattern matching is here too.
R-mode’s analogic and holistic thinking styles are very valuable to software architecture and design—that’s the stuff that good designs are made of.
And you might already be reaching for synthetic learning more often than you think. When faced with a difficult design problem, or an elusive bug, good programmers generally have an urge to reach for code and build something that they can learn from. That’s R-mode synthesis, as opposed to the L-mode analysis. That’s why we like prototypes and independent unit tests. These give us the opportunity to learn by synthesis—by building.
In fact, synthesis is such a powerful learning technique that Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab suggested in Learning by Doing: Don’t Dissect the Frog, Build It [Neg94] that to really learn about a frog, traditional dissection is not the way to go. The better way to learn about a frog is to build one.
That is, task the students with building a being that has froglike characteristics. It’s a great way to really learn what makes a frog a frog and how frogs are adapted to their particular environment. It’s a perfect example of learning by synthesis.
| Recipe 9 | Learn by synthesis as well as by analysis. |
But embracing synthesis as a learning technique is just the beginning. In fact, you can do a lot of things to increase the amount of brain power you can bring to bear on a problem, by leveraging both modes of thinking as appropriate—from simple techniques such as fiddling with something with your hand while you think to doodling while on the phone to some really interesting—and exotic—techniques.
We’ll take a look at all of these as we see just how we can put you in your right mind (pun intended). But first, I’ll digress to point out a slightly bigger picture that’s afoot here and hint at why this R-mode thing might be even more important than you think.