How do I understand Gil Taylor's phrase: "The right hemisphere works like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere works like a serial processor"?

One Answer

1. Jill Bolte Taylor (not Gene Bolte) is a neuroanatomist (not a neurophysiologist) who talks about the properties of left – and right-brain thinking at one of the TED talks. As she herself says, her brother's schizophrenia pushed her to make these thoughts.: she wondered why the same structure — the brain – could produce healthy dreams in a healthy body, but only delusions in a diseased body, and she devoted her life and career to answering this question.

   I will not go into the details of that speech, I will only say about the meaning of the statement:

   The right hemisphere works like a parallel processor, while left hemisphere works like a serial processor.

   This can be roughly translated as:”The right hemisphere behaves like a parallel processor, while the left hemisphere behaves like a serial processor.” What does it mean?

   A parallel processor synchronously processes a large amount of heterogeneous information. The right hemisphere, according to Jill, processes all organoleptic information, sensing the present moment. The right hemisphere is synthetic.

   A serial processor monotonically processes a small amount of homogeneous information. The left hemisphere, according to Jill, processes the collage of information received by the right hemisphere to predict the future. The left hemisphere is analytical.

   In conclusion, not all neuroscientists share Taylor's hypotheses — if only because she is not a neuroscientist herself — and some even consider her freaky and her ideas divergent. However, this is normal for science.

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