Cool Books

In our newest project I'm doing a piece of printed publicity. Our tutor Ben Richards bought in this book 'the production manual' to show us some images and it's got great information on technical stuff like folds, printing, finishes etc. I thought I'd buy one for myself because it'll be handy throughout my career I would imagine. I also bought Alan Fletcher's 'The art of looking sideways', which was recommended to me by another tutor. It's brilliant; a huge collection of stuff he's used or found interesting, some of it completely random! The 'Heart' page is a really interesting section about the right and left sides to our brain- which relates well to my previous post about us naturally using one hand to draw because our brains are designed to do some actions using just the left or right side. So it says:

'Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left concentrates on analytical, logical and verbal activities, the right on the emotional, musical, spatial and intuitive. Simplistically the left is a doer and the right a dreamer. Our actions and responses are handled by a cross-over system. The left hemisphere is linked to the right eye, right ear and right hand. And the right hemisphere vice versa. People who have suffered brain damage on one side or the other end up only being able to draw with their left hand and write words with their right. The right hemisphere knows no words. In an experiment with patients, who for some ghastly reason had had the two halves separated, the word HEART was flashed on a screen. The HE was positioned to the left of the patient's nose and ART to the right. Normally anyone asked what they saw would respond 'Heart'. However, when asked what they saw these patients responded 'Art'- the section of the word seen by the right eye and interpreted as a word by the left and vocal side of the brain. They were then offered two cards. One carried the HE, the other ART. Asked to point with the left hand to one of the cards which corresponded to what they had just seen on the screen, they invariably pointed to the HE- a response by the right spatial side of the brain. Paradoxically, if both hemispheres are all right life can be twice as complicated, as we're unaware of which half is upstaging the other.'

I just thought this was quite interesting to know, I feel like I don't know enough about our clever system. Although it scares me slightly that experiments like this show just how planned out and designed we are, like a gadget someone's put together so we work properly.