Date: 2010-05-18 01:12 am (UTC)

the left/right brain dichotomy is far less pronounced than you have represented.

I didn't intend to represent it as a dichotemy at all. See my comment to [livejournal.com profile] easwaran. I probably should have elaborated more on what I meant by "left brained" and "right brained".

When composing a piece of music many of those same centers of activity in the "left brain" react.

Right. Because music involves a sequence of notes which must be processed sequentially, just like verbal words such as speech or logic. All are traditionally associated with the left brain. Of course, there may be other aspects of music that also involve the right brain, such as the overall quality of the music as a whole. Painting a picture is a right brained activity while composing a sequence of notes is more of a left brained activity.

Arithmetic and lower-level mathematics are more strongly left brained, while higher mathematics involves a bit of both. Hence why engineers are more likely to be Libertarian than professional mathematicians are. You only need left brained skills to do engineering or accounting, while you need more of a mixture for advanced math. Engineering involves following a recipe step by step. Mathematics is about trying to take something that feels intuitively true and guess what the deductive steps are to get there... that requires a lot of creativity.

Unless I've misread, however, the crux of your argument seems to lie in logic vs. empathy,

Empathy was not supposed to be the main part of it. And in fact, looking back on what I wrote, that's the one thing that perhaps should not be in the list. Although I do feel like it is somewhat related to the rest.

The main thing is to what degree you think in terms of symbols and signs being connected in a sort of associative web, versus connected in sequence from one step to the next. Linear versus non-linear, or broad versus narrowly focused.
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Domino Valdano

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