Framing the Brain

While listening to a recording of the speech Marshall McLuhan made at John Hopkins University, I could not help but notice how he was always talking about either people as a whole or communications; or both. The talks of the differences between how the right and left hemispheres of the brain process information most interesting because he is able to tie in communications and people as a whole on a simple, personal level. He is also able to talk about differences between cultures and the differences in communication. For example, because the Greeks and Romans had a more lineal language, it created more of a left-hemisphere way of thinking. However, with the introduction of electronic communications, starting with the telegram, the right-hemisphere started taking dominance. The right-hemisphere is also the hemisphere that deals with interpretation of facial expressions. Marshall McLuhan then talks about a Chinese man who had suffered a stroke on the left side of his brain. Despite this, he was still able to read, write, and speak Chinese due to the non-lineal manner of the language.

This was interesting to me because it made me think about how dependent we are on both the written language and facial expressions to convey ourselves in daily life and how saying something and writing the same thing can have drastically different effects on the audience. Further pursuing this, I thought of how different the same poem can be when it's read as opposed to when it's spoken. The perfect example of this would be Taylor Mali's "The the impotence of proofreading." (Warning: Fairly frequent and strong language) This poem, while it can be done as a spoken word poem, doesn't have the same effect as when it is read (Video). Granted, Taylor Mali is able to pull it off to a certain extent, that poem is still better read as opposed to spoken. The same is true with many poems, as many are written to be either only be read or only be spoken. It is rare that there is one that works well in both mediums.

This alone is in contrast with Walter Ong stating that our oral and written languages are merging. However, poetry is one of the few areas where that is not true, and even there it is starting to take place. I agree with him when he states our writing is much more akin to our speaking than it used to be, even to the point where a "formal" paper isn't at all that formal anymore. When I have to write a formal paper, I find it very hard to write without using contractions simply because I talk using contractions.

---Dan Woods