Another interesting thing about right and left brain (hemisphere) functions is the
interesting relationship with speech problems as compared to poetry or music.  For
example, my daughter once dated a young man who had a terribly difficult time
speaking because of stuttering.  Well, my daughter also ran a band for a while and
the young man loved music and would sing along.  It turned out that he could sing
like an angel, never a stutter, and this is fairly common.  There is another
professional singer who stutters when speaking but nary a bobble when singing.  He
does ads and his quaint speech with the stutter attracts ones attention.  Then he
sings briefly and one sees the contrast.  You remember Mel Tillis?  Carly Simon, the
pop singer, and Robert Merrill, the opera singer are both stutters who don't stutter
when singing.   Music and verse comes from the right hemisphere and regular speech
mainly from the left.  I think that this discrepancy is related to the fact that in
oral history days, before the printed word, history was sung by bards.  Everything
the social group wanted to maintain was sung or recited in rhyme.  Later the romans
were used for history and records of battles, etc.  When royal folk were
particularly embarrassed by something ignoble, they would quietly concentrate on
getting the song or poem changed.  The American Indians  and other aborigines did
the same thing.  We noticed this quite quickly when comparing the spoken history
with the written counterparts.  The natives simply and quietly changed the facts
into what was more "comfortable."  Very difficult to do with written books!  Again,
this is fairly common among aborigine groups who only have oral history.  It was
also their way of time binding prior to written language.  With written language it
is obvious that man doesn't have to reinvent the wheel every generation.  He starts
off, relatively, from where the previous generation left off, and continues to add
to the written history and sciences, etc.  That is hard to do when one is limited to
oral history...

Well, these are some interesting things related to that subject that interested me
and helped me understand folks and the subject matter...  Memetics is closely
related to all of this although we are not at all entirely sure how it is and there
is great disagreement. But most do think that memes are the equivalent of "social
genes" and are responsible for a great deal of the formation of our cultures.  It is
tempting to attribute similar properties to memes as we do genes, this was the
manner in which Richard Dawkins first described them in 1976, as sort of purveyors
of culture that evolved and reproduced, spreading themselves amongst folks and
causing changes in beliefs and behavior, etc.  Religions might be thought of as meme
complexes, etc.

It also provides additional nomenclature for mental constructs of varying types and
their interactions.

Tresy Kilbourne wrote:

> Snipped for brevity...
> Not to go completely off-topic right off the bat, but memes seem to relate
> intuitively to the buzzword du jour, namely the "tipping point." You know
> Malcolm Gladwell's book? I have only read some of the installments when they
> appeared in the New Yorker. I think Pinker may deal with memes but I don't
> have his books beside me at the moment.

Snipped for brevity
--
Bob Grimes

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Jacksonville, Florida
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Man is not in control, but the man who knows he is not in control is more
in control...

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore....."