86. Brain Hemisphere Integration
Arts Integrated Education involves both hemispheres of the head brain working in alternation and firing simultaneously!
Here is a good example of how it works:
If you have ever learned and become fluent in a foreign language, you have probably experienced the following.
Language is ultimately learned by assimilation and immersion. That’s when it truly switches on and you become naturalized to it. Getting there as an adult, is a process of loading the left brain hemisphere with language structure – identification and recognition by spelling, pronunciation, grammar, declensions, conjugations, expanding vocabulary etc.- and committing it all to memory by repetition.
But this is less than half the process of really becoming fluent, isn’t it?
The brain really gets it when we also immerse ourselves in the sound, rhythm, meter, melody, patterns and CONTEXT of the language. We may not comprehend much at first, but our right brain hemisphere is absorbing the soul of the language rather than its structure.
Both processes need to go on.
The insecurity of the left brain oriented learning is to constantly translate the new idiom to your native language. Getting over this insecurity is not even an issue for children, but for most adults, this is the biggest hurdle. Can you load the left brain and then let it go, allowing yourself to surrender to the right brain’s world for awhile?
What does that mean?
Stop trying to understand everything for starters! Allow yourself to be secure in being totally lost – without frustration. Let the need to control and ‘understand’ everything – go! Enter the non-linear, asymmetric, non-sequential world of the right brain. Try to listen to the “music” of the language, its rhythms and natural flow. Listen to the “song” of the language, its poetry and meaning. Listen to the “humanity’ of the language – what it expresses, its nuances and humor, for example. Let your eyes notice facial expressions and hand gestures. All this informs your right brain of the living life of the language. This is a process of surrender and immersion.
Once this happens and you are truly able to free yourself from the grip of the rational left brain, you not only can become fluent in the new language, you can also become fluent in left brain / right brain integration!
The bridge between the two brain hemispheres (the corpus callosum) is designed to handle a lot of traffic! Crossing that bridge often will expand your perception and consciousness of the world in ways only doing it will reveal.
~PAZ
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