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Left and Right Brain Thinking In a previous article I wrote about the relationship between the left-brain, which handles sequential thinking, and the right-brain, which handles holistic thinking. This relates to my previous post in that people who do not use their right-brain fully are unable to even perceive that there may be another way of looking at the world other than with sequential thinking. I am loath to call this logical thinking, as on examination many of these people are rather illogical. The brain is like a muscle in that if it is not exercised it atrophies. More to the point, though, is that if areas of the brain are not developed in childhood it is very difficult (though not impossible) to develop them later. Many people who are unable to see the world in other than a sequential way score well on IQ tests (after all, that is what IQ tests measure). However, you will often find that they did not play in their childhood. Playing, using imagination and fantasy are an important part of growing up. These practises develop the right side of the brain. If you have not developed the ability to see things laterally then even the concept of an analogy will be alien to you. It doesn’t strike a chord in your mind because, to use the vibrating string analogy, there is no string that can vibrate. Because all the thinking is done with the sequential left-brain, the person does not even perceive that there is a problem. He simply thinks other people are insane for not seeing the world in this ‘logical’ way. When we go through life we make assumptions in every moment. If we go to open a door we don’t have to think about how to turn the handle, even if it is a door we have never gone through before. We can make assumptions based on our experience with door handles. It is the essence of good design that something should be easy to use as the way it works follows on from other things that are familiar. Designers of computer interfaces know that it is important to get a consistent ‘look and feel’. That is, once someone has worked out to perform one task, other tasks follow the same pattern. This reflects how the brain works. However, these assumptions can cause us to link things together that do not belong together. For instance, if there is a flu epidemic and you went to a doctor and reported a fever, sore throat and general aches and pains he would simply tell you that you have the flu and there is a lot it around. If you also reported an ache in your left arm, many doctors would simply attribute that to the aches of the flu. They see a pattern and put your symptoms into that pattern. In fact, the aching left arm may be a symptom of a heart condition. Tests have consistently found that expert systems often perform better than most doctors do. The problem is that doctors (like many other people) think sequentially (left-brain) when they should be thinking laterally (right-brain). One problem with assumptions is that because they are assumptions we are not aware we are making them. Even when they are pointed out we might just say that they are obvious. Well, of course they are obvious to us because we are making the assumption. So if I ask ‘why should we assume that an experiment performed one day and repeated the next, should yield the same result’? A scientist may say that if nothing has changed then obviously it will yield the same result. But, equally obviously, something has changed: it is being done on a different day. The whole scientific method is based on assumptions that ‘seem obvious’, but assumptions can be questioned and so can the results of any scientific experiment. I have said before that the assumption that there is creator who acts in the world is, to me, an obvious assumption. And, in my experience, it stands up to scrutiny far better than many of the assumptions that scientists make. In this article an atheist attempts to argue against someone who says that if he hears a voice from God telling him to do something (write an article in this case) this is not empirically verifiable. In other words, we cannot use science to prove or disprove it. This is interesting as it is one of the very few articles by atheists where an atheist actually discusses a philosophical idea – most atheist sites simply go in for name calling, denigrating creationists or repeating the age-old question Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People. He doesn’t do a good job of it because he seems to lack the ability to escape out of sequential thinking. He says that if you hear a voice than this can be proven scientifically. Well, that depends on whether the voice was audible to others or not. Even if you could do brain scans while this is happening to see if the audio centre of the brain is activated it wouldn’t necessarily prove one thing or another. Suppose the brain scan shows nothing – does that mean it didn’t happen? Why should a voice from God work in the normal way? Even if someone said that they heard a voice but there was no one else there, it would probably be impossible to prove one way or another. We can’t disprove or prove it with science. It simply shows not only that there are some things that stand outside of science, but also in normal practice the vast bulk of what we believe stands outside of science. We get up, go to work, go shopping, eat food all the time making assumptions none of which we have proven scientifically.