The Culture Blogs: Left Brain vs Right Brain

“I am the left brain.  I am dependent on denotative language and abstraction.  I yield clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.  I love the familiar.  Principles.  Segregation.  I am black and white.  I am organized reality.  I am your world and your views.    Morals.  Hatred.  Values.  Love.  I am the rational mind.”

                                    Versus

“I am the right brain.  I yield a world of changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world.  I am Diversity.  An open mind.  Connection.  Intertextuality.  I am so many sounds you can't comprehend them all.  So many colors you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.  And more tastes than you can bear to examine.  I am boundless imagination.  I am everything and everyone.  Art.  Mathematics.  Music.  Noise.  Infinity.  I am the intuitive mind.”

You've probably seen this picture before.  If so you are likely saying that's not what the captions beside the picture say.  And you would be right.  But when I saw this picture I immediately decided to do a little bit of research on the matter.  What I found completely blew me away.  I discovered this RSA Animate on the Divided Brain and it sparked all sorts of new ideas for me.  From why we tend to polarize in politics, religions, and in education.  It has all to do with how our brains work and the society we have developed around ourselves.

It's kinda long, but I promise its worth it!

For those of you who didn’t watch it, I’ll give ya a short recap.  Basically it shares about how we have lost sight of what the mind actually does for us.  It is entirely designed to inhibit information from one side to the other so that we can correctly interpret it.  And as we have grown as a society we have begun to focus more on the power of the left side of the brain, the rational side as opposed to the intuitive side, and we effects of that in our society are interesting.

Here’s three examples of this culture that can be used in your writing:

1. Left Brain thinking in Politics

In politics there is a great deal of hero worship and demonizing that goes on.  I see it among my friends, neighbors, and those people that I try to ignore sometimes.  President Obama is a great example of these types of thoughts.  Those who support Obama think that he is amazing and that he has been good for America.  On the other hand those who don’t support him tend to say everything he has done has been bad, and there are even those who go as far as to call him the Anti-Christ.

Now is one end the truth or the other?  Personal opinion is that he’s probably somewhere in the middle.  But if you want to be able to write fiction that is balanced and referential to our current day, you wouldn’t go wrong by using this in your political climate. 

2. Left Brain thinking in War

As a soldier allow me to tell you that this is a crucial matter for a soldier.  I was trained to seek out and destroy the enemy back in basic training.  There were times I said kill as I performed an attack so much that I hated what I was doing.  But as a soldier I cannot have right brain thinking on the battlefield about the enemy’s family: their spouse, children, and pets.  I cannot afford to humanize them, or else when it comes down life or death I might hesitate.  And then the person dead is me.

However encompassing right brain thinking into the mourning process afterwards I think is important.  Because for me it forces me to recognize the importance of human life, and how people can be on opposite sides of a conflict and still fighting for the same basic values: Government, Freedom, Family, and Religion.

3. Left Brain thinking in Education

Math is the most hated class in high school and university classes hands down.  Often folks say that Math Teachers can’t teach.  Others say Math is useless.  And the iron gates of the Left Brain shut off to Math because it is hard.

Now I’m okay at Math, not great.  But I think it is because I approach it from the perspective of a Right Brained person.  Math is a language like Spanish, Russian, or German.  And so it requires me to study like it is a language.  Meaning I have to do study groups, find applications in everyday life, and spend copious amounts of time learning it.  I suffered from the Left Brain thinking for years before I realized that.  I passed Math once I discovered that.

If you spend some time thinking about it, I’m sure there are some plots or subplots to a novel you can use this concept in.  Or perhaps you can apply it to your own life, like I did to be able to get through my Math courses.  Either way using both sides of our brain to process what we are given each day is crucial to a correct understanding of the world around us.

Think about what issues you are decided on, and then spend time listening to the arguments of the other side.  Allow both sides of your brain a chance to use everything they have.  You may stay right where you are in your opinion, but you may experience a revolution of the mind where you discover not that you are wrong, but that there are other opinions that are just as valid and right as your own.

As we are drawing close to the end of February I would love for everyone who visits my blog to leave a comment.  For every person that comments on my blog this month I am putting an entry into a hat for an opportunity to win a copy of N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I plan on giving three of these away.  It was nominated last year for both a Hugo and a Nebula award.  And it has been a fascinating read thus far.

That’s all for now folks, my name is Jayrod Garrett and I am the First OG.  How do you use both your rational and intuitive minds together?

The Birth of the Diversity Blogs

This past weekend I spent at a writers symposium called, “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”  (Or LTUE for short.)  It is a wonderful program with many of the large names in Fantasy and Science Fiction who attend.  And each year that I attend I get so much out of it.  I learned about all sorts of subjects from “Plots, Subplots, and Foreshadowing,” to “Writing Humor.”  And I felt blessed for the opportunity to be there.  Only as I looked around I noticed something was missing.  I saw Tracy Hickman, L. E. Modesitt, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dave Farland, and various other standards in the industry.  I met them and enjoyed their company and for some reason I felt like I didn’t belong.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say I shouldn’t be writing, but I felt the same way I do when I go to church.  Like a speck of pepper in a sea of cream.  All of the big name authors there were white.  Most all of the folks I saw come to the symposium were white.  No hispanics, no asians, and no blacks were in attendance from what I saw.  Recognizing such a poor mixture of diversity in the group of people I aspire to join made me realize something.  This is part of the reason we see such a lack of diversity in the science fiction and fantasy markets.  It isn’t because the people are racist, or they are focused only on the tropes of elves, dwarves, and orcs, but because there isn’t enough diversity in the community.

Between this and a conversation with a man I met at the convention by the name of David Powers King (read his blog, its pretty solid), I realized that I need to start blogging not only how I feel about various things going on in our culture, but about diversity in the various cultures that we have in our world.  Talking about Gay Marriage, Being Black Enough, and what Freedom is are important aspects of the culture we live in and themes to approach in literature, but it isn’t enough.  I want to write about how the Native Americans known as the Inuit live from the perspective of one of their own, or about hispanic culture from those trying to get a college education who are living in it, and introduce people to the rich heritage of black spirituality.  We have so many opportunities to recognize the diversity around us, not only in terms of race, but sexuality, gender, morality, and religion.  And I want to be a voice for helping writers to begin to recognize that.

I heard back in high school that drama was the mirror of man.  Well writing fiction is a form of drama, and I want to see the diversity of the world that I live in reflected better.  Now I’ve been trying to build an audience of late, and I realize that my journey here to develop better fantasy and science fiction will not happen without a community effort of some sort.  I can write about these things all I want, but without you sharing your thoughts and feelings with me, this won’t ever really get started.  And offering you my opinion probably isn’t enough.  So I’ve started an excellent book called the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.  She is a black fantasy author who plays against the traditional methods by telling the story in first person and having a black female protagonist.  At the end of this month I plan on putting each person who comments on my blog into a hat and sending three of them a copy of this book.  Think of it as my way of saying thank you for having a conversation with me.

So my question to you is?  What do you want to hear about?  I have plans of talking about the hypocrisy in religion, sharing my own conversion story to becoming LDS, and about what it really is like to be an eskimo.  But I know there are a lot of other ideas out there for cultural diversity and thematic writing and rather than search all of them out by myself, I want to hear from you.  Lets become a team and discover the miracle of the diversity of the world we live in together.

What do I need to do to be Black Enough?

Perhaps you might think this blog comes a little late because Martin Luther King’s birthday was back on the 15^th of this month.  But unlike most folks I think about this man everyday of my life, because he is who I chose as one of my role models for blackhood and manhood.   Because I grew up without a father I wanted to find a person who represented the values that I thought were most important: Education, Spirituality, and Community.  And he has been a role model for civil rights activists the entire world over, having been inspired by the words of great men before him such as Christ, Thoreau, and Gandhi.  Through his example I learned that I couldn’t ever allow society to label me as lazy, stupid, or powerless and that I had to label myself diligent, intelligent, and powerful.  The light of his legacy lives on today in the celebrations we have today of his work, the LGBT rights movement, and even having a black president.  Though today my writing is inspired of the fear that we didn’t get one of the core aspects of his work here in our country: What it really means to be a black american.

I have heard for years the racist comment: "You are the whitest black man I’ve ever met."  I cannot tell you how much that offends me.  And I am not an easy person to offend.  I’ve been in the military for eleven years, lived in environments that care nothing for the sensitivity of their fellow man, been cussed out, abused emotionally from multiple sources, and watched as people look at my white wife and I in disgust.  And by and large none of that has offended me, except for that statement.  For you see the ones who have said it most often are also those who claim to be my closest friends.

However I know that I’m not alone in my feelings concerning how blackhood is defined.  One of my favorite actors Will Smith lyricized some of his own feelings about how black media felt about his music.

Even though the fans went out & bought enough

I guess they think Will ain't hard enough

Maybe I should just have a shoot out

Run up in the bank, bustin', grabbin' all the loot out

Whoop somebody ass, taking my boot out

Right on TV so ya'll can see me

Just ignorant, attacking, actin' rough

I mean, then will I be black enough?

Now Will Smith is a man who like me has chosen values similar to that of Martin Luther King Junior.  So what gives?  Why do people see Ice Cube or Fifty Cent as models of modern blackhood?  I love Biggie Smalls and Tupac, but they aren’t the only models of blackhood today.  Do I really need to be willing to act like a gangster or speak ebonics for people to think of me as a good model of blackhood?  Should I need to listen to rap music, instead of black gospel for folks to think I live within the bounds of my own culture?  Or perhaps this blog should be filled with F-bombs and indignant language to show how hard I am?   No.  I refuse.  I am worth more than that, and I believe my culture has more value than that.

I plan on being one of the few african american fantasy authors, which is entirely outside the realm of the ordinary for my culture, but that by no means means I am acting white.  It doesn’t mean I’m acting yellow like an asian, red like an indian, or green like a soldier either.  It means I am being myself.  A humble black man unafraid of sharing his opinion or his heart.  Recently I was asked the question of what I want my brand to be as a writer.  There was only one answer: Truth.  In what I write and  how I live I hope for that to be my guide.  I may fail that.  I’m certain that Martin Luther King failed that from time to time, because he wasn’t any more perfect than any of us.  But in the end I hope that nobody will say that I was anything less than a noble example of not only blackhood, but humanity.

Speaking of the goal of becoming an author my ROW80 goals for the upcoming week are as follows:

1. Finishing a single scene of “Crimes of the Umbramancer” each day.

     Last week I wanted to catch up, but time didn’t allow for it.  I have only managed to finish a scene each day since last Wednesday.

2. Comment on 10 different blogs in ROW80.

     This goal was modified from what I had before, because I found reading ten ROW80 blogs easy, but commenting a little more difficult.

3. Video games for only twelve hours for the week.

     I kept this goal last week, and I will this week too.  I won’t suffer a poor week due to gaming again.

I’ve failed at my goals in writing in the past because I was afraid, or I procrastinated, or I allowed addiction to run my life.  But no more.  If I am to follow in the footsteps of noble black men before me I have to let truth guide me and the values I’ve chosen to champion even my time management.  Because when I grow up I never want to hear again, “You’re the whitest black man I’ve ever met.”

Please leave your comments about my thoughts in the space below.  Tell me if there are things folks have said to you which have offended you?  What you want your brand as a writer to be?  Or if you totally disagree with what I’ve written tell me that too.  I love reading and responding to comments.  Thanks for reading!

Here are some links to other ROW80 blogs!  Enjoy!