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Very interesting about the brain.
The brain
First, a quick overview of hemispheric differences in the brain — this will be review for some people. The cerebrum, the “intelligence” part of our brain, is divided into two halves: the left & right hemisphere. These control all the sensation & muscular movements on the opposite side of the body — if you want to move your left leg, it’s the right half of your brain that oversees this task. The two hemispheres also process information very differently. Here is a brief overview of hemispheric difference: notice which set of skills feels more comfortable, more natural to you.
The left hemisphere is about logic, organization, precision, and detail management. It specializes in differentiation, that is, telling the exact difference between closely related things. It’s very good at following clear rules, recipes, formulas, and procedures in a step-by-step logical way. The left brain controls the grammar and syntax of language, the formal, almost “mathematical”, side of language. If I were to say, “I are happy,” it would be your left brain that recognizes this as wrong.
The right hemisphere is intuition and pattern-matching. It specializes in integration, that is, seeing the underlying similarity or unity behind seemingly distinct things. We dream in the right brain. The right brain is responsible for myth, poetry, analogy and metaphor. It is often called the “artistic” side of the brain. It is good at information presented as symbols or images. It is good at facial recognition and voice recognition (notoriously hard problems for computers!) The left brain does grammar and syntax, but the right brain controls a very different side of language: emotional inflection, body language, innuendo and implication. If person A says “Today is a great day!” in a completely bright and bubbly way in all sincerity, and then person B says “Today is a great day!” in way that is absolutely dripping with bitter sarcasm — then, according to the left brain, exactly the same thing was said twice (same grammar, same syntax, etc.); it’s only the right brain that senses the profound emotional difference between those two statements.
Most folks are naturally dominant in one of the two hemispheres. There is some association with handedness and hemispheric dominance: left-handed people are slightly more likely to be right-brain dominant. The extreme left-brain folks are hyper-organized and methodical, for example, an accountant. The extreme right-brain people are the wild artsy folks, or folks who live from one leaps of intuition to the next.
Math and the brain
Which hemisphere is better for math? Well, the detail-management and organization and precision of the left-brain are a huge help in arithmetic and algebra. Geometry is the only branch of math in which the right-brain pattern-matching skills can play some role. In general, left brain folks usually feel reasonably comfortable with math, and certainly can follow the methodical procedures with ease. Typically, the right brain folks tend to have a difficult time keeping all the details straight, although many times they tune into the “big picture” ideas faster.
Those are tendencies, but success is math — and in fact, success in almost anything that challenges our intelligence — involves developing both sides of the brain. One of the reasons Leonardo de Vinci is often regarded as one of the smartest people ever to walk the earth is because he demonstrated strong skills of both hemispheres.
What does this mean for your GRE Quant performance? Well, if you are a typical right brain person, you probably need to sharpen your understanding of all the rules and all the details, and learn to manage details with precision. That’s something that comes with practice, practice, practice. You may find this GMAT blog article useful, because it talks about learning math rules in a holistic way.
The magic of right brain thinking
Now, for the left-brain folks: you probably know the rules reasonably well. You probably were generally a “good-at-math” kind of student. Probably, faced with most GRE Quant questions, you could figure out the right answer, given enough time. The catch, of course, is that you don’t have unlimited time on the GRE: just 40 minutes for 25 questions, or a little more than 90 seconds per question.
An overwhelming number of GRE Quant are designed specifically to punishing someone who is overly left-brained. In other words, they are designed so that if you take the methodical, step-by-step plodding approach, then yes, you would eventually reach the answer, but it would take you a very long time. Whenever that’s the case in a question, there’s always a way to reframe the question, so that the solution becomes very quick, sometimes almost immediate.
Whenever you see yourself starting out on a very straightforward, step-by-step, long haul calculation, stop yourself. This is always the challenge for right brain folks, but you have to re-frame the question, to understand the task from a different angle. You are looking for the “Leonardo da Vinci” solution to the problem.
