“There are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” - Oscar Wilde
Having spent most of the day writing and then a little bit more time on Khan Academy (my dad wants me to work on it just so I can have the calculus unlocked when I need it and I can still do most of it in my head), I thought I'd do a post about left brainedness vs. right brainedness (yes, that's a word).
My main passion is writing, as you well know, and most of the rest of my time is spent with other right-brainy things, but I've also been known to read books on physics (specifically higher dimensional theory) in my free time and while I generally hate doing math, I like learning about it. While I act like a right-brained person, I've been told both by people and "what should your career be based on your personality" tests that I think like a left-brained person.
I took a quiz right before writing this (a quiz with more than just "yes" and "no" as answers) and scored 47% left brain and 53% right brain. Just like I thought: I'm straight down the middle. Each hemisphere is broken down into different characteristics, with my scores being pretty straight down the middle there too other than "nonverbal" (very low) and "concrete" (very high). According to the analysis, this means I'm good with words and always need/want to know why something is the way it is, or works/doesn't work, but can go both ways with pretty much everything else.
This is exactly what I expected. Personally, I'm happy to be right in the center, even if it means I can be terribly indecisive and paradoxical at times (which I definitely can). I don't think it's necessarily good or bad to be strongly one way or the other, and it would at this point be arrogant to say anything about the benefits of being in the middle. Although it probably means us middle people over-analyze too much (see: the entire archives of this blog).
An example of my contrariness: I took this test in order to analyze myself and then draw conclusions about related topics, but now that I have done so, I'd rather just go with the flow. To be myself and not worry about which box I fit in, as much as I like sorting things with accurate, useful classification systems.
It's a perpetual problem, and the more I think about it, the more examples within my life I can find. But then I don't want to think about it. **flings arms out dramatically** Oh, woe is me!
If you are one of those who likes this sort of thing, please take the quiz and leave your results in the comments if you are so inclined.
43% left brain, 57% right brain, for what it is worth ;)
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry over your result too much. As an article I recently read (maybe on Cracked, so take with a grain of salt) points out, most things we do involve brain functions located in both sides of our brain. So, in my opinion, "left-brained" and "right-brained" really are more likely to describe personality types than some underlying neurological truth behind them.
I was taking it more as a personality thing than as a neurological one in the first place.
ReplyDeleteThinking back, it turns out I score pretty much in the middle on most personality based tests. Introvert/extrovert, conflict resolution types (in fact, I tied three different ways on that one), this...although scoring within 10% of the middle is probably a fairly normal thing to do.
My best friend got 43/57 too.