paint, neuropsychology, and goldberg

i wish to discover the left -> right neurological shift in my music performance.

i have already found it for my art; have learnt to switch off the left brain's obsession with identity, with 'what-an-object-is, and how-it-should-look' top-down processing, to tap into the right brain's 'shape/contour/what-it-actually-looks-like' bottom-up processing.

i read this in the book 'Drawing With The Right Brain'.

very generally, the right brain deals with new infomation, and the left brain deals with familiar information.* the right brain deals with what it sees, and the left brain stereotypes it. if you draw with the left brain you will end up with a picture of what you think you should see, not what you actually see.

anyway, both of them are art. but if you're trying to copy something from real life, only the first way will satisfy.

they say the left brain is dominant, which is why they do surgery largely on the right side, and why they remove parts of the right hemisphere for intractable epilepsy, but to say that it is dominant, is, i think, misleading. they both have different equal roles. right side damage seems to impair learning. new information is stressful. I have neurosurgery on my right hemisphere every so often.

so how do you do this 'drawing with the right brain'? turn the model upside down and then recreate what you see, on the page. this will confuse the left brain's attempts to categorize it.

what i want to know is how can i do this for my music performance? how can i play flexibly, intuitively, improvise, and jam with other muso's, who are also improvising? at the moment i play with the left brain; i play Chopin as i read it, and i have memorized my contemporary performance songs. i dont know how to switch off the top-down processing of it, the this-is-what-it-is and this-is-how-it's-played and this-is-what-it-is-to-sound-like.
i dont' know how to invert music. i don't know how to do what i can't even imagine. i think i will make another cocoa.







*i read this in Elkhonon Goldberg's "Frontal Lobes And The Civilized Mind". It doesn't seem that anyone else, or popular neuroscience, has read this book; there' still a lot of the old-fashioned 'left=language' and 'right=creativity' labelling around.