our stories ourselves

John Bickle and Sean Keating have a nifty little article in the New Scientist packaging together the many wonders of the left brain. I'm a right-brainer, so it's hard to admit that the left-brain is at the core of our humanness; it makes the stories that make us.

You may be familiar with that inner voice in your head. According to Bickle and Keating, it's helping to place your daily encounters into the grand epic of your life. (Bickle captured our brains on MRI not only talking to ourselves - but also "listening".) Those narratives add up to our "identity" - the notion that you are a unique, unified, intentional being, rather than a sac of cells pinballing through life.

The authors also conjecture what might happen to our inner stories as digital media breaks up traditional narrative. Their answer: not much. Not even haiku texting can keep us from our sagas.

But the left brain is not all self-involved soap opera. A big piece of making up stories is making up causal relations ("I didn't get the promotion because I bungled the project" or "He left me because I'm a bad cook"). That instinct to look for cause and effect is also what makes us handy at spinning out theories to explain the world around us. Luckily, our left brain has the right brain to help it figure out which of those cockamamie theories are true.