Free The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards

control—somehow bad, immoral, and dangerous.
    Nasrudin was sitting with a friend as dusk fell. “Light a candle,” the man said, “because it is dark now. There is one just by your left side.” “How can I tell my right from my left in the dark, you fool?” asked the Mulla.
    —Indries Shah
The Exploits of the
Incomparable Mulla
Nasrudin
    Until very recently, the ancient bias against the left hand/ right hemisphere sometimes even led parents and teachers of left-handed children to try to force the children to use their right hands for writing, eating, and so on—a practice that often caused problems lasting into adulthood.
    Throughout human history, terms with connotations of good for the right hand/left hemisphere and connotations of bad for the left hand/right hemisphere appear in most languages around the world. The Latin word for left is sinister, meaning “bad,” “ominous,” “treacherous.” The Latin word for right is dexter, from which comes our word “dexterity,” meaning “skill” or “adroitness.”
    The French word for left—remember that the left hand is connected to the right hemisphere—is gauche, meaning “awkward,” from which comes our word “gawky.” The French word for right is droit, meaning “good,” “just,” or “proper.”
    In English, left comes from the Anglo-Saxon lyft, meaning “weak” or “worthless.” The left hand of most right-handed people is in fact weaker than the right, but the original word also implied lack of moral strength. The derogatory meaning of left may reflect a prejudice of the right-handed majority against a minority of people who were different, that is, left-handed. Reinforcing this bias, the Anglo-Saxon word for right, reht (or riht ), meant “straight” or “just.” From reht and its Latin cognate rectus we derived our words “correct” and “rectitude.”
    These ideas are also reflected in our political vocabulary. The political right, for instance, admires national power, is conservative, and resists change. The political left, conversely, admires individual autonomy and promotes change, even radical change. At their extremes, the political right is fascist, the political left is anarchist.
    In the context of cultural customs, the place of honor at a formal dinner is on the host’s right-hand side. The groom stands on the right in the marriage ceremony, the bride on the left—a nonverbal message of the relative status of the two participants. We shake hands with our right hands; it seems somehow wrong to shake hands with our left hands.
    Under “left-handed,” the dictionary lists as synonyms “clumsy,” “awkward,” “insincere,” “malicious.” Synonyms for “right-handed,” however, are “correct,” “indispensable,” and “reliable.” Now, it’s important to remember that these terms were all made up, when languages began, by some persons’ left hemispheres—the left brain calling the right bad names! And the right brain—labeled, pinpointed, and buttonholed—was without a language of its own to defend itself.

Two ways of knowing
    Along with the opposite connotations of left and right in our language, concepts of the duality, or two-sidedness, of human nature and thought have been postulated by philosophers, teachers, and scientists from many different times and cultures. The key idea is that there are two parallel “ways of knowing.”
    You probably are familiar with these ideas. As with the left/right terms, they are embedded in our languages and cultures. The main divisions are, for example, between thinking and feeling, intellect and intuition, objective analysis and subjective insight. Political writers say that people generally analyze the good and bad points of an issue and then vote on their “gut” feelings. The history of science is replete with anecdotes about researchers who try repeatedly to figure out a problem and then have a dream in which the answer presents itself as a metaphor