On Increasing Right-Hemispheric Intelligence

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Many of us with Asperger's syndrome have a significant deficit in performance IQ compared to verbal IQ, possibly indicating neurodevelopmental impairment of the right hemisphere. It may be encouraging knowing victims of stroke and brain trauma sometimes recover lost abilities. Research has shown that, even in adults, the brain is malleable and adaptive. Children and adults who played Tetris showed an increase in performance IQ.

I hypothesize that we aspies can improve our performance IQ, or right hemispheric functioning, by doing more things that rely on it and improve our quality of life by doing this.

The right hemisphere of the brain is linked with these descriptors:

• Visuospatial reasoning
• Lateral thinking (creative thinking, neither inductive nor deductive)
• Generalization
• Bodily awareness
• Relationships (e.g., judging the distance between oneself and an object in space)
• Emotional awareness

Right-brained people are generally better at social functioning, more creative, and so on. I am not suggesting any of us abandon our special interests or give up what makes us aspie, but what I am suggesting is expanding our abilities.

• Take up drawing or painting. This will develop your visuospatial acuity.
• Visualize things in your mind rather than thinking about things auditorily only. If you're reading a novel and it's giving a physical description of one of the characters, try to visualize that description instead of just skimming over it, being lazy about making your mind do some hard work.
• Take up a sport or physical activity of some kind: jogging, swimming, running, bicycling, baseball, soccer, basketball, tennis, racquetball, karate, or whatever seems most appealing to you. This will build your bodily awareness, hand-eye coordination, and spatial perception.
• Continue slogging through all the awful mathematics and physics. Elementary algebra is left brained: simple rules that can be applied recursively to produce the expected result. Geometry and higher-level mathematics require more activity from the right hemisphere of the brain, though.
• Be more spontaneous and expose yourself to anxiety-inducing circumstances. Left-brained people tend to rely more on their powerful rote memories to handle situations based off familiarity with situations they already know. Of course, with a relative weakness in their performance IQ (ability to handle novel situations well), they can be expected to develop anxiety more easily and in more situations.
• Socialize more. Try not to focus so much on your worries about how the other person might react to you; instead, focus on what they're saying, the tone of voice as they say it, the expression on their face as they're speaking and as you're speaking, etc. Learn to recognize how what they might be thinking and feeling. You'll become more comfortable in social situations, less shy (habituating yourself and thus reducing social anxiety), and better skilled socially.

I'm not saying we have to turn ourselves into the stereotypical right brainer, but achieving greater balance may just improve our lives.

sounds great to me, neanthumain. i went through your checklist, and i think that's what i've been doing for most of my life (even though it wasn't with the conscious aim of developing my right hemisphere).

it also explains why i can do number and number theory and algebra and differentiation like nobody's business, until they inroduced me to calculus... ( i have every intention of teaching myself calculus, some time soon - it can't be THAT difficult...)

It's my left brain that's the problem. I also have problems with some of the stuff you associated with right brain.. I think they're pretty generalised because my right brain is definetly the dominent.

NeantHumain said:

With myself, I have some of these traits:

-I am an artist and very visually-based
-I am an exceptionally creative thinker

However, 1) I have noted that also my spatial reasoning, as in 3-D not 2-D, is incredibly poor; 2) my generalization capabilities are horrendous when giving a summation on something I have read; 3) my bodily awareness could use improvement; and 4) my emotional awareness requires the intervention of logic to label it and understand it.

Thus my point is by saying these things, that while all of these might/probably are right-hemispheric dysfunction, they are individual aspects of the dysfunction. And working to improve one, might not necessarily lead to improvement of all. And so dividing these and working on them separately is probably a more productive choice. Because as I said: I am an excellent artist and a very creative thinker, but as for spatial reasoning, generalization capabilities, and bodily and emotional awareness, these are sorely lacking and do not seem to be aided by my other endeavors of creativity and artistry.

1 Visuospatial reasoning
2 Lateral thinking (creative thinking, neither inductive nor deductive)
3 Generalization
4 Bodily awareness
5 Relationships (e.g., judging the distance between oneself and an object in space)
6 Emotional awareness

1,2 and 3 I am good at. I am also somewhat good at 5. I can't range something directly, but pass me something with a range adjustment system (sniper rifle) and if I can hit what I'm aiming at (PC games here, but I suspect it would apply in real life, I can judge time to reach an object pritty much the same way) then I always know what range to adjust for.