The Right Mind: Making Sense of the Hemispheres - Hardcover

Ornstein, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151003246 ISBN 13: 9780151003242

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

The psychologist and author of the best-seller The Psychology of Consciousness discusses the different capacities of the right and left sides of the brain, shedding new light on the way the brain constructs a coherent life. 50,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Robert Evans Ornstein is a psychologist, writer, professor at Stanford University, and chairman of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK). Ornstein has been involved in promoting the modern Sufism of Idries Shah. Shah and Ornstein met in the 1960s. Realizing that Ornstein could be an ideal partner in propagating his teachings, translating them into the idiom of psychotherapy, Shah made him his deputy in the United States. Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness (1972) was enthusiastically received by the academic psychology community, as it coincided with new interests in the field, such as the study of biofeedback and other techniques designed to achieve shifts in mood and awareness. Ornstein's book The Right Mind deals with split-brain studies and other experiments or clinical evidence revealing the abilities of the right cerebral hemisphere.

Reviews

From the author of The Evolution of Consciousness (1991) and other popular works on the human mind, a revealing account of his own and others' prior misunderstandings about the right and left brains, a concise summary of current knowledge, and some provocative speculations about the development and functioning of the two hemispheres. The human brain is not unique in its asymmetry, psychologist Ornstein points out, for the divided cortex appeared with the first mammals. Further, fossil evidence from the pre-Jurassic period reveals creatures with right and left preferences, and even molecules have a directional orientation. But different we are, and he shows us how this has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Beginning in the 1970s, popular interest in the differences between the human brain's right and left hemispheres led to conflicting ideas, widespread misconceptions, misapplications by educators, and oversimplifications by social reformers. In a nutshell, the current view is that the right hemisphere gives us an overall view of the world, or the context, while the left provides the details, or the text. The loss of context seen in patients with right-brain damage leads Ornstein to reflect on the role of brain disequilibrium in such mental disorders as autism and schizophrenia. Noting that the human brain develops in response to its environment, he speculates that the differences in how the hemispheres operate may be traced to timing differences, i.e., the right hemisphere, maturing earlier, learns to handle low-frequency sounds, fuzzy images, and large movements, while the later-developing left hemisphere comes online when the baby is hearing spoken language and learning more precise movements. Ornstein, who illustrates his account with lots of quotes and stories, both sad and funny, is careful to distinguish between the research of others and his own freewheeling theorizing. Accessible and provocative, but surely not the last word. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The author of 25 books, including the best-selling The Psychology of Consciousness (LJ 5/1/73), Ornstein here sums up what we know about the brain today.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151003246
• ISBN 13: 9780151003242
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200