Have you ever heard a child utter the words ‘my dad could beat up your dad,’ followed by a retort of unorthodox sorts; ‘Yeah… well…My Dad is an alien!’ Unlikely and although we know little Jimmy is lying we can not punish him for wanting to express himself. “All kids tell stories,” “They are limited only by the boundaries of their vocabulary,” Professor Maxine Ruvinsky from McGill University stated within her lecture on the bicameral mind September 17 at Thompson Rivers University.
Story telling is a part of our nature, a part of our learning process, a part of our culture, yet it is ultimately a substantial part of the process leading to the development of the brain. Twenty years of brain research has brought us to the conclusion that the brain can be broken up into two separate hemispheres; the left, logical mathematical side, and the right, artistic design side. Writer Gabriele Lusser Rico’s book “Writing the Natural Way” goes on to say that these two sides need to work together in order for us to properly function.
Language is a vast part of our culture without the left hemisphere of our brains we would not be able to express ourselves, yet it is the raw nature of the right hemisphere that allows us to create a picture of what it is that needs to be expressed. In quoting Nom Chomsky, Ruvinsky stated that “Children learn language only by using it”, “No one, least of all the average mother, or father I would add, knows how to teach it to them.” It is our desire to express the stories or pictures in out heads that compels us to learn speech, to learn to express ourselves and in the end to learn to make use of the left side of the brain.