brain meme

[cellio]

I don't know whether the questions or evaluation techniques are at all credible; cognitive psych was a long time ago for me. But I found an odd mix of resonance and surprise in the results of the "brain profile" meme that's going around, so what the heck.

Caution (for the ~5 people on my friends list who haven't seen this yet): because I had seen others' results and knew approximately what the test set out to measure, I was a little more aware of meta-issues than was probably ideal. The test is here.

Monica, you are balanced in your hemispheric dominance and a pre- dominantly auditory learner. This combination suggests that you are flexible in your perceptions and view of the world, while you prefer to learn in a deliberate and orderly fashion.

You have the capability to tolerate ambiguity well without surrendering the equally important ability to have strongly held views of your own.

Your perceptions balance between "the bigger picture" and the "details," which allows you to be flexible in your organization. You can work logically or skip from subject to subject with equanimity.

In much the same way, you have achieved balance between the abstract and the concrete, the symbolic and the functional. This permits you to focus on the concrete tasks which need to be completed in the present with a clear understanding of how they relate to the future.

The preeminence of your auditory mode of processing suggests that you orient towards processing materially in a sequential fashion. This may slow you down at times, and you might feel that you could do or learn things faster, causing some frustration.

What will generally be most important to you in learning and living is the "pace" or "rhythm" that you experience. More so than others, you will vary that rhythm in order to more effectively use the balance that you possess.

In the overall scheme of things, you will find yourself to be consistent in a wide range of activities. Your own artistic skills may well be more oriented to the theater or writing or even in music. If you have a sense of incompleteness, it could be attributed to the undeveloped visual learning and visual skills which are inherent in your development and you may be well-advised to pursue activities which would contribute to your growth in that way.

Auditory : 90%
Visual : 9%
Left : 47%
Right : 52%

The big surprise to me is the visual/auditory thing. Now I don't know what psychologists mean by those terms, but my (colloquial) perception is that I'm very much a visual person. That is, I absorb information more easily if I read it than if I hear it; if I hear it, writing it down helps me immensely even if I never look at that piece of paper again. Similarly, I can more easily spot patterns (for example, in sequences of numbers) if things are written down; if someone asks me to find a pattern in a sequence presented verbally, I visualize that sequence in written form. (I even have consistent color associations for some letters and numbers, though I don't know if that's related to any of this.)

So to be told that I'm 90% auditory comes as a surprise. On the other hand, the analysis is pretty much spot-on. Yeah, I definitely prefer an orderly approach to learning, though note that it doesn't have to be a conventional definition of orderly. For example, I'm quite comfortable with the tangents-upon-tangents style of discourse in the talmud; so long as paths exist, I'm fine with braching. (In fact, sometimes my web-browsing is similar: I'll mentally model the structure of a site that doesn't provide a "home" link, so I know that I can get back to that page over there by going back three and then traversing the previous link and... that sort of thing.)

I'm not really sure what they mean about varying pace and rhythm of learning.

"Your own artistic skills may well be more oriented to the theater or writing or even in music." Two out of three, yeah. :-)

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Auditory : 52%
Visual : 47%
Left : 47%
Right : 52%

Okay...
I think they seem to be using "auditory" as "sequential". So, verbal stuff, being sequential, would count as auditory, but big graphs of lots of things with arrows going every which way would count as visual, or something.