I have a friend. Let’s call her Ms Tiny. She really is erm… well, tiny. I oftentimes suspect that’s one of the many reasons people like her – you sort of feel like you can carry her around in your pocket. Ms Tiny is an avid entertainer, she is outright funny, always. She is way too loud for such a small person and sometimes it gets on my your nerves. This incredibly fascinating Belarussian species laughs unstoppably and comes up with all sorts of heresy on any given subject. Regardless, you gotta love Ms Tiny – the chick is as hot as a curling iron.

Ms Tiny lives with a boyfriend.  Let’s call him Sir Suslik.  Sir Suslik is a stand up guy, an enormously nice fella from the US of A who has cooked us both many a dinner.  He is handsome, a pleasure to be around, loves both Ms Tiny and her humble friend, alterismus, unconditionally.  He is family, so Ms Tiny and I decided – he has made it into the circle.

Ms Tiny & Sir Suslik, shamelessly, may I note, ditched me this weekend blaming it on an out-of-town job assignment, so me, being the good friend that I am, decided to get back at them by sharing one of their little shennanigans with the web crawlers.  Stay with me, all of this has a point.

This one day Sir Suslik calls Ms Tiny –

SS: Hey sweety, so I’m almost done here, should be in Huai Hai in about an hour. Where are you?

MT: I’m at home.

SS: Well, do you wanna meet me at the subway station in one hour then and we can figure out from there what we wanna do tonight?

MT: Sure.  I just made plans with Ms P to go get a mani/pedi, then we wanted to grab something to eat.  I’m meeting her in a few.  So, yes, I can meet you at the subway station in one hour, after I’m all done…

“Right” – thought Sir Suslik and hung up.  He’s been living with the girl long enough to know that she has absolutely No Concept of Time.  Just for fun, he did call her back an hour later only to hear her say, with honest, unsuspecting surprise in her voice – “Oh, already? Hmm, well, we are just finishing up the pedi here, and we haven’t eaten yet…”   “Of course” – replied Sir Suslik, laughing to himself.

You see, the problem is, Ms Tiny is a right brainer.

And I have valid reasons to suspect that both Sir Suslik and I are left brainers.

I love structure.  I am a fan of logic and reason, which makes me a pain in the butt to argue with, I’ll out-argue you each and every time.  I am neat.  Painfully.  I have folders within folders with subfolders at my office which are organized almost Monica style (‘Friends’?).  They make sense to me, they are like stairs – if you follow the system, everything you need is right at your fingertips.  My work emails never cause any follow up questions because they are full of bullet points and table matrixes.  In my home you are never, never allowed to move things – everything has its place and God forbid I notice my remote controls are not parallel.  And if you’ve eaten with me, well… my best friend’s husband once handed me a plate of spaghetti with these words: “Sorry Marina, I thought of straightening them all out, but they would’ve gone cold by the time I’d finish.”  Yes, I am widely known to organize food on my plate.  Think what you will, makes me enjoy my meal more.  To cut a long story short, if you’ve seen Mary and Max – I am Max.

Ms Tiny disrupts my temple when she comes over.  She is all over the place.  She doesn’t remember where her phone is and I call it so she can find it and go home already and leave me at peace.  If she is looking for something in her purse, most likely you’ll see her emptying its entire contents on the floor right after which she’ll be surprised to find stuff there she doesn’t remember taking, plus the thing she is looking for won’t be there.  There is no logic to anything she does.  She is the kind of person that will dance at the edge of a balcony of the Vue Bar only to have security nearly kick us out, you know, for the fun of it, is all.  She is entirely spontaneous and totally fluid.  How we ended up being this close and how we love each other and get along is beyond me.  But we do.  We balance each other out.

From what I’ve read, commonly accepted characteristics of left brainers are:

• Linear/Sequential manner of processing information – you draw conclusions based on logically organized sequences of information;
• Symbolic processing – symbols, especially academic ones such as letters, words and formulas, are easy to understand for a leftie;
• Logic – when you arrive to a solution, you know exactly what line up of logical bits brought you there;
• You are not verbally challenged, most of the time good at expressing your thoughts clearly;
• Reality-based thinking – you know and understand what the set up/rules are and for the most part follow them.

All the opposites of the above point to the dominance of your right hemisphere:

• Holistic processing – seeing the big picture first, not the details;
• Random approach – often not addressing priorities because something distracted you;
• Intuition – arriving at conclusions and answers through hunches, not through a built up logical sequence;
• Processing through imagery/color rather than symbols;
• Fantasy-oriented – rules and regulations don’t apply, not because you are a rebel, but because you sincerely did not know and thought that you were doing nothing wrong.

Now, if you imagine that our right and left hemispheres are two villages on different sides of the river, there is a bridge – corpus callosum, which fascilitates interhemispheric communication.  Apparently, even when we breathe, only one of our spheres is at work, which means only one of the nostrils opens up.  You have to put a bit of effort and concentration into this, but if you manage to breathe using both nostrils at equal pace simultaneously – that’s when it’s all happening in the corpus callosum, both hemispheres are equally engaged.  I honestly can’t recall how I came across this exercise, but I dare you to try it.  If you succeed in keeping focus on the mid-circle cross for 45 minutes straight, please let me know – I’ve been sitting cross eyed in front of my computer for two weeks now, only because those guys promise me a blissful state of mind if I can just focus on that damn cross.  Instead I think I’m getting a headache…

All over the world, in the majority of societies, educational systems and techniques were molded centuries ago to breed left brainers.  Our professional achievements are defined by logic, reason and organisation.  People like Ms Tiny don’t do well at school, university and are definitely not destined for cubicles.  Ms Tiny knows that.  Perhaps this dominance is not so much a preference by nature but rather one ingrained through nurture?