My Soapbox About Texting

Over the years, I have tried to teach my children that communicating with their boyfriends/ girlfriends through texting is not always good. It is easy to misinterpret something that is being communicated to you if you cannot hear emotion in a persons voice or see the expression on their face.

The reason is that the left side of the brain is primarily concerned with logical thinking...words, numbers, language structure (texting), while the right side is expert on physical matters and creative thinking...sports, dancing, singing, making love, feelings (emotions).

In other words, the right brain FEELS and the left brain TELLS.

It is helpful to understand which side of the brain does what. For example, if you are dancing, playing a sport or making love, you have to let the right-brain do the work and keep the left-brain out of it. (If you let the logical left-brain get involved in sex you are on a sure path to disaster. Just sayin'.)



Too much logical left-brain activity is not good. It is important to have balance and use our creative right-brains regularly by engaging in sports, dance, etc. and showing our emotions. Yet I wonder if, over time, the social networking our generation is caught up in (facebook, twitter, instant messaging, texting...) will cause instability within our brains?
 
I think it would serve us well to communicate by talking into the phone whenever possible instead of always texting. When we speak into a phone, the person on the other end can hear emotion in our voice (cheerfulness, anger, frustration, disappointment, regret, etc.) and misunderstandings that come from written words can be avoided. 

Roger Sperry, a neurobiologist, received the Noble Prize in Medicine in 1981 for discovering the aforementioned "split brain" functions. He said it best when he concluded his speech by saying, “The great pleasure and feeling in my right brain is more than my left brain can find the words to tell you."     (nobleprize.org) 

Ponder on that for awhile. :)