I've been slow to respond to this issue because I have a high and
somewhat rueful respect for the power of a metaphor, and the right
brain/left brain metaphor is a powerful one that has swept through
education, the social sciences, and popular science writing.  In spite
of the fact that it's largely hooey.

A part of brain research up into the sixties involved research into
localization of function, and the study of hemispheric lateralization
and the consequences of hemispherectomy or of the surgical severing of
the corpus callosum led to interesting hypotheses about the functions of
the hemispheres and their behavior under pathological conditions.
Culturally, this research became something of the elephant in the
bathtub:  it spread quickly into the popular magazines and from there
into educational circles as the right/left brain metaphor.  However,
brain researchers were well aware, and cautioned others, that they were
studying abnormal phenomena that didn't necessarily shed light on the
functioning of the normal brain.

Once techniques like MRI and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) became
available, much subtler studies of brain function became possible, and
techniques have gotten even better since then.  One of the major
findings about language was that language activity in normal subjects,
subjects without a diagnosable neural pathology, activated areas all
over the brain and in both hemispheres.  Different activities, like
processing irregular vs. regular verbs, were distributed differently,
but they still involved areas all over the brain.  The same was true of
lexical storage, retrieval, and learning.

As a metaphor, the right brain/left brain dichotomy encapsulates some
very broad-brushed differences in learning styles, interests, abilities,
etc.  But the danger of taking the metaphor as scientific reality is
that we overlook the fact that differences like these are scalar and
multi-faceted in ways that a dichotomy simply can't capture.  Gordon and
others are entirely correct in their approach that we must consider
individual learning styles and not reduce them to a simple,
broad-brushed metaphor.

Herb

Dick -

I think that the issue goes beyond being "like us" (yes, I, too, admit
to an 
ancient attachment to diagramming!) and reaches to the heart of the
issue 
that we have with NCTE and their various attacks against grammar.

If we can move grammar away from the side of the writing process that
deals 
with error correction and more towards what classical rhetoric would
call 
"invention," then we can demonstrate that grammar can, indeed, play a
major 
role in creative ("right brain") part  the writing process.  In fact, I 
think that grammar can a more powerful creative tool than so-called 
"unstructure free-writing."

Students can use standard grammatical constructions to create original, 
powerful sentences, paragraphs, and even entire essays starting with
little 
more than simple subject-predicate combinations.  There truly is a
grammar 
for the right brain, and as you indicated, it doesn't need to be
separated 
from the left brain.  In fact, it is the structure of grammar that
allows 
both halves to work so well together!

Grammar is an "all brain" subject!

Geoff Layton

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