Right Brain, Left Brain

(NOTE: Clicking on the cartoon will enlarge it.)

I have a theory that ideas come to us in what I call "thought stacks," and we communicate them to others in "information streams." The stacks are comprised of information piled up instantaneously without syntax or grammar by the right brain. These ideas flash into our heads and then are transformed by the left brain into a stream of words, one after another, as a way of transferring our ideas to others' minds. For the listener, the incoming stream is just babble, until the left brain makes sense of the words and hands them over to the right brain to be fully grasped as complete thoughts. It's a flawed process, the best that nature could do for us at this stage in our evolutionary development (I'm hoping in favor of Darwinism over intelligent design, since I hate to think that humankind will never be able to improve). The problem is that as another person talks, the incoming stream of words fires off a series of thought stacks in our own mind, and before that person completes what they have to say we tend to either shut them out or listen for an opportunity to interrupt their information stream with our own. It explains why we misinterpret or miss entirely at least fifty percent of the information coming at us from other people (or, for that matter, from the various media). And by the way, I reject the notion that most people are left-brained, which is supposedly the more logical of the two cerebral hemispheres. If it were true, we wouldn't have religion, advertising, or politics.