Doing a little bit of reading about the right-left hemispheres of the brain, and traits of dominance of each side. There seems to be a lot of poor quality information about this out there, but once in a while you find an interesting nugget. This one comes from a page about learning strategies for students, based on which hemisphere is dominant:

When left brain students are affected by the environment, they usually adjust to it. Not so with right brain students. They try to change the environment! Left brain people want to know the rules and follow them. In fact, if there are no rules for situations, they will probably make up rules to follow! Left brain students know the consequences of not turning in papers on time or of failing a test. But right brain students are sometimes not aware that there is anything wrong.

The first thing that immediately leaps into my right-brain dominant mind is systems of social control. No matter how shitty these online resources about hemispheric dominance seem to be, they all are very forthright about the fact that our educational systems are almost wholly left-brain dominant.

From an institutional standpoint, this makes a certain degree of sense when coupled with the above quote. The natural tendency of the left brain to find, respond to and act our systems of rules is quite in tune with the goal of institutions: namely, self-perpetuation. Left-brain people in turn make the perfect obedient roboticized citizens (which is the real agenda of public education). Even when they can’t find any rules, they make them up! How many times have you stopped at a traffic light in the middle of nowhere, when there was noone around, simply because “it’s the law”?

Viewed in this way, it makes tremendous sense that schools increasingly are cutting back on funding for creative right-brained non-rational programs of art and music, and other stuff. The last thing an institution or society wants is people who are going to rock the boat - activists who are going to try to change the way something works, rather than adapt to it’s laws and conditions.

[Also check out this follow up post about left brain bias.]