Hemispheres Quotes & Sayings

Hawai'i is the only place in the fifty states where you can see the stars of the entire northern and southern hemispheres. Here, stars that can't be seen from the mainland are visible, along with stars that aren't visible from Australia. — John Richard Stephens

The main theme to emerge ... is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres respectively and that our education system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

It is always the psychic and social grounds, brought into play by each medium or technology, that readjust the balance of the hemispheres and of human sensibilities into equilibrium with those grounds. — Marshall McLuhan

Men standing in opposite hemispheres will converse and deride each other and embrace each other, and understand each other's language. — Leonardo Da Vinci

[Narratives] serve as powerful tools for high-level neural network integration. The combination of linear storyline and visual imagery woven together with verbal and nonverbal expressions of emotion activates and utilizes dedicated circuitry of both left and right hemispheres, cortical and subcortical networks, the various regions of the frontal lobes, and the hippocampus and amygdala. The cooperative and interactive activation involved in stories may be precisely what is required for scultpting and maintaining neural network integration while allowing us to combine sensations, feelings, and behaviors with conscious awareness. Further, stories link individuals into families, tribes, and nations and into a group mind linking each individual brain. It is likely that our brains have been able to become as complex as they are precisely because of the power of narratives and the group to support neural integration — Louis Cozolino

And they were all agreed that it was Eros who held the world together, since Love made the world go round. And the universe was thus perceived as an enormous egg, held together by Love. And this primordial egg consisted of two hemispheres, the Sky[Uranus] & the Earth[Gaea] held together by Eros[Love]& if they were not thus held together, both halves would spring apart & hell would break loose.
And that was exactly what happened when it all began. Eros laxed his hold for a moment & the universe sprang apart with a Big Bang. — Nicholas Chong

I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great. — Carl Sagan

When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental prostitutes wear on the sides of their heads ... But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. — John Updike

The hammer and the anvil are the two hemispheres of every true reformer's character. — J.G. Holland

A poem is a windy city, has broad shoulders
and insistent industry,
barrels into your brain, sticking
its steam-filled, swarmy head
into the delicate, empty bird cages
propped in the rooms of your imagination.
A poem can be rude, downright ignorant
of what you had been thinking about
and holding onto for too much of the day.
More than a city, a poem pushes its hemispheres
against your thoughts, knocking them out
of the windows of your ears.
Every good poem screams, 'Read me
because you're going to die someday! — B.J. Ward

Biological evidence indicates that man, evolving with his food plants, developed horticulture and agriculture in both hemispheres at a time which may well have reached far back into the Pleistocene. — Russell Lord

The two hemispheres of the brain are two very different places and they don't share any cell bodies. They are completely separate entities. — Jill Bolte Taylor

Try, before taking off for distant hemispheres to notice what we have already seen. — Alain De Botton

What is the matter with these people, these people who won't stop fighting, won't stop hurting each other long enough to see that a body is a thing of beauty, is a miracle of rivers and oceans and islands and continents contained within itself? That the brain is divided into two hemispheres, each symmetrical, each perfect, each with its own system of waterways. These people of war should be shown an x-ray of an intraparenchymal hemorrhage, of a hemorrhage in an eighteen-year-old girl's brain, a girl named Ivy. Take a look at that, people of war. See, you should not hurt each other, and this is why. Without you ever even trying, this is what can happen to your body, your beautiful body, and your brain, your beautiful symmetrical brain, and your heart, and your soul. — Alison McGhee

Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler's brain were two dogs stuck together. — Thomas Harris

Seasonal flu is now a pandemic that lasts for years and years because you've got so many people that it's jumping back between northern and southern hemispheres and moving itself around the world. By the time it gets back to where it started, it's changed sufficiently so that people are no longer immune. — Nathan Wolfe

I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for. — Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

I believe that the more we understand about how our hemispheres work together to create our perception of reality, then the more successful we will be in understanding the natural gifts of our own brains, as well as more effectively help people recover from neurological trauma. — Jill Bolte Taylor

The woman's brain has two hemispheres," she slurred. "One for loving, one for hating. They can operate quite competently at the same time. — Colin Cotterill

Besides the simple logic involved in trying to find the next move, Go deals with shapes, so some scientists think the artistic power of our right brain is called in to help make decisions when we can't read out all the possibilities (see page 160). This sets up a possible conflict between the hemispheres so that what looks or feels good to one might not be what the other thinks. Thus, besides the sheer excitement of competition and the basic inability for humans to ever be able to completely read out long sequences, this ongoing debate between the two halves of our brain can bring our emotions into play to a high degree. — Peter Shotwell

Men's brains may be bigger, but women's contain more brain cells. Also, male and female brains work differently. When men and women perform identical tasks, different areas of their brains light up in response. In addition, females use both hemispheres, while male brain activity is restricted to one side. (21) — Kevin Leman

This is an extraordinary book of unique psychological power. It reveals not only scholarship and sophistication of the author, but deep and intimate knowledge of the recesses of the human psyche. By masterful juxtaposition of evocative images, poetry, and selected quotes from scholars, Flesh and Blood seems to engage both the right and left hemispheres in an unprecedented dialogue. The result is a multi-dimensional, almost holographic picture of the primordial foundations of the human mind. — Stanislav Grof

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write. — Chris Van Allsburg

The new politicians resembled hyenas and foxes. In both hemispheres, the people quickly forgot. Compassion and rage shared the fate of autumn flowers, upon which settles hoarfrost: they had faded, withered, then died under the weight of rent, prices, inflation, soap operas and talk shows, family life, victories and defeats in stadiums. — Filip Florian

You have two hemispheres in your brain - a left and a right side. The left side controls the right side of your body and right controls the left half. It's a fact. Therefore, left-handers are the only people in their right minds. — Bill Lee

Images are so prevalent that we get most of our information from them. We receive multiple layers of meaning within a very short compact picture, and that is what the right brain does best. Indeed, as our culture becomes more image-based, we're balancing our hemispheres. Through this new re-wiring, we're becoming a much gentler and kinder society. — Leonard Shlain

I could set from memory a replica of the perfect Still Life she laid out on the table each morning: the carefully folded Advertiser, the two canary yellow hemispheres of grapefruit in their bowls, separated by a more richly yellowed cube of butter; the sky blue milk-jug and matching sugar bowl filled to the brim with their differently textured whitenesses; the pot of tea snug in its knitted navy blue cosy, the steam that rose invisibly from its spout suddenly rendered visible, swirling, where it entered the slanting morning light. — Peter Goldsworthy

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared
they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected
it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. — Lydia Millet

Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant
the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past
imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world
despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb
a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture. — Hakim Bey

I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was trying to learn what I suspect Mom had learned already: that there were journeys we all make alone that take us far away from one another. — Scott Bradfield

All travel is circular. I had been jerked through Asia, making a parabola on one of the planet's hemispheres. After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. — Paul Theroux

I'm a huge fan of Canadian rock-and-roll. When I was growing up, Rush came out with a record called Hemispheres, and I must have listened to that record for two years straight. Even when I was asleep I had it on. So, yeah, whenever I hear a Rush tune, the first thing I think of is Toronto. — Kiefer Sutherland

Of all the Christbitten places in the two hemispheres, (Los Angeles) is the last curly kink in the pig's tail. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Can we think more than one thought at the same time? Most of us know we can't do that. Both hemispheres are always working all of the time. But one of them is always dominant. — Jill Bolte Taylor

From the Battle of Trenton to the Argonne, Marines have won foremost honors in war, and in the long eras of tranquility at home, generation after generation of Marines have grown gray in war in both hemispheres and in every corner of the seven seas, that our country and its citizens might enjoy peace and security. — John A. Lejeune

This means that the two hemispheres may even have different beliefs. For example, the neurologist V. S. Ramanchandran describes one split-brain patient who, when asked if he was a believer or not, said he was an atheist, but his right brain declared he was a believer. Apparently, it is possible to have two opposing religious beliefs residing in the same brain. Ramachandran continues: "If that person dies, what happens? Does one hemisphere go to heaven and the other go to hell? I don't know the answer to that." (It — Michio Kaku

THE SPLIT-BRAIN PARADOX One way in which this picture, based on the corporate hierarchy of a company, deviates from the actual structure of the brain can be seen in the curious case of split-brain patients. One unusual feature of the brain is that it has two nearly identical halves, or hemispheres, the left and right. Scientists have long wondered why the brain has this unnecessary redundancy, since the brain can operate even if one entire hemisphere is completely removed. No normal corporate hierarchy has this strange feature. Furthermore, if each hemisphere has consciousness, does this mean that we have two separate centers of consciousness inside one skull? — Michio Kaku

The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing. — Alberto Manguel

Fancifully, I had thought I would feel the exact moment if anything ever happened to Scarlett, even if she wasn't nearby. Some kind of immense magnetic disturbance as our two hemispheres divided and went their separate ways. — Keith Houghton

When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres. — Roger Wolcott Sperry

No physiologist who calmly considers the question in connection with the general truths of his science, can long resist the conviction that different parts of the cerebrum subserve different kinds of mental action. Localization of function is the law of all organization whatever: separateness of duty is universally accompanied with separateness of structure: and it would be marvellous were an exception to exist in the cerebral hemispheres. — Herbert Spencer

On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum. — Carl Sagan

Did we not look out together upon the dark waters of the lake
And behold there the constellations
Of both hemispheres at once?

-Love Songs of the Cinnamon Wastes — Ian C. Esslemont

Reading, she tells me, is what she does best. She loves it because it uses the whole of her, the right and the left, the hemispheres of reason and imagination. She discovered as a child that a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control. — Jenny Hubbard

I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. — Jill Bolte Taylor

If my brain were surgically divided by callosotomy tomorrow, this would create at least two independent conscious minds, both of which would be psychologically continuous with the person who is now writing this paragraph. If my linguistic abilities happened to be distributed across both hemispheres, each of these minds might remember having written this sentence. The question of whether I would land in the left hemisphere or the right doesn't make sense - being based, as it is, on the illusion that there is a self bobbing on the stream of consciousness — Sam Harris

The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don't know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joan of Arcs, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharine the Seconds, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamour, and desperation. If they can't agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they'll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills; and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they'll quarrel with Mrs Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maid-servant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the nosier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. — Mary Elizabeth Braddon

I suppose it seems ignoble to you that a great oak of a man should go about the world like a blind man about an empty house merely because a chit of a girl has been withdrawn from it. No, no, you cannot understand this, my adored one, but I understand and grow pale ... You will laugh at me, but I think he goes about the hemispheres to pass the time between now and his old age. — Thorton Wilder