cally flips you over to the right brainBay says. "Any artistic endavour, like music or sculpture, will also doit." In her best-selling book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain(J.P. Tarcher Inc., 1979), Dr. Betty Edwards developed a series of exercisesdesigned to help people tap into the right brain, to actually see or processvisual information, differently. She cites techniques that are as old astime, and modern high-tech versions such as biofeedback. An increasing number of medical professionals beieve that being intouch with our brain, especially the right half, can help control medicalproblems. For examplem Dr. Eisenberg uses what he calls "imaginalthinking" to control everything from migranes to asthma, to high bloodpressure. "We have found," he says, "that by teaching someone to raise toraise their temperature - by imaging they are sunbathing or in a warm bath- they can control their circulatory system and terefore the migrane." Knowledge of our two-sided brain began in the mid-1800's whenFrench neurologist Paul Broca discovered that injuries to the left side ofthe brain resulted in the loss of speech. Damage to the right side,however did not. Doctors speculated over what this meant. Was the brainschizophrenically divided and non-communicative? In the early 1960s, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Roger Sperry proved thatpatients who had their corpus callosum severed to try and control epilepticseizures could no longer communicate between their hemispheres. Thestruggle can be seen quite clearly in the postoperative period whe thepatient is asked to do a simple block design. This is a visual, spacialtask that the left-hand (controlled by the right brain in most of us) cando very well but the right hand (controlled by the language-oriented leftbrain) does poorly. The right hand may even intervene to mix up thedesign. Some people with epilepsy can control their seizures by concentratingactivity on...
