YOUR AMAZING STORY-MAKER-UPPER

What a story and an experiment can tell us about our incredibly inventive left brain (Yes, you might have thought that was your right brain's perogative!), and how to check it out for yourself! First, the story.

The Lost Spade

A man lived with his daughter in a small house in the woods. He went out the back to the shed one morning to get his spade, but he couldn’t find it anywhere. When he came out of the shed he saw his neighbour walking down the path next to the house. The neighbour waved. The man frowned and didn’t wave back. He went inside and said to his daughter,

“I never did like our neighbour, he’s a shady one for sure. You should have seen the look in his eyes just now, I know he’s stolen it. He was only saying last week he must get a new one…”

His daughter laughed,

“Dad, it’s by the front door, I was using it earlier!”

A little later, the neighbour was walking back. The man and his daughter smiled and waved. The man turned to his daughter and said,

“Strange, he looks perfectly friendly now!

In the 1960s, Dr. Michael Gazzaniga was working with a ‘split-brain patient’, - i.e. someone who has had the bridge between their right and left brain severed to help with severe epilepsy. It suggested that our left brain, which has access to language, is our ‘interpreter’ of reality, and that it was often demonstrably wrong! To try and explain:

The important thing to know first is that the body is cross-wired to the brain: The right side of the body is led by left brain, and the left hand side of the body by the right brain

Gazzaniga showed a split brain patient a picture of a chicken’s foot to their right eye only (so processed by the left brain) and a picture of a snow scene to the left eye only (processed by the right brain - which doesn’t - in the case of this particular group - have access to language).

He then showed some images to them using both eyes and asked which one was most related to the images they were shown before. In each case, the person’s right brain used the left hand to point to a shovel and the right brain (with the right hand) to point to a chicken.

They were then asked the question: “Why is your left hand pointing to a snow shovel?” Because the person was using the left brain to answer because they were using language, the correct answer should have been something along the lines of, “I haven’t spoken to my right brain for ages so I’ve no idea why it’s using my left hand to point to that picture.” But instead, without hesitation, totally confident in the answer, the person said, “Oh, that’s simple, the chicken foot goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop.”

The left hand brain immediately came up with an understandable, but utterly incorrect, answer, using the evidence it did have.

At first glance this may seem fairly unremarkable, but the thing to notice is this: The person’s consciousness, their awareness in that moment, had no idea that their left brain had made anything up, and they would never have known if it hadn’t been pointed out to them. Let that sink in!!

So you see, your left brain, (yes yours too!) will make something up rather than shut up if it doesn’t have all the info it needs, even though your left and right brain do talk to each other!

My favourite aspect of “The Lost Spade” is that although as the reader we can see exactly what happened, the man himself at the end doesn’t even notice, he’s just straight moved on to ‘Strange, he looks really friendly now’, without questioning anything.

So, if we take the example of feeling really anxious in an interview, seeing a look on the other person’s face and interpreting it as “They don’t like me”, that is it, right there. But feels real as real doesn’t it? You’re in no doubt are you? And yet, and yet… if you prod it you will see that you really didn’t have enough information to know any such thing. Of course it looked like that precisely because your left brain was already biased to see anything that might just match your current story of yourself, or in the case of the lost spade, the man’s already existing opinion of his neighbour :)

How often do we find out later that our judgement of (story about) a situation was wrong, yet still not clock what really happened at the time ?!

If you want to play with these ideas further, you can get “The Cinderella Experiment” HERE It’s free.