Perfectionism, part 1

[477150n]

For a long time now, I've been trying to overcome perfectionism. In the perfectionistic world view, a person is either good at something or bad at it. Success is something you are, not something you do. If you do well at something, it is because you were simply good at it to begin with. Pride in any accomplishment is therefore hubris, since your

Comments

[maggiedacatt]

Don't be too hard on left-brain/right-brain. Hemispheric specialization is real.

[flwyd]

It's real, but it's also really easy to overemphasize.

[maggiedacatt]

Depends on the processing task, really. :)

[477150n]

I'll take your word for it :) Definitely over popular science books from the late 70s. I don't really have a firm grasp on what is real anatomy versus what is culturally believed to be true.

Actually I think I do have a bias against left brain/right brain, because I think oversimplification of what it means lead into the "good at/bad at" fallacy, as well as some other badness. (For example, I was good at math as a kid, so expected to be bad at art; people think that science isn't a creative endeavor, etc.)

[flwyd]

To me, left brain seems like the slow side. Right brain processing is "all at once" like looking at a picture or understanding a facial expression. Left brain processing is serial like hearing one word at a time or figuring out what's going on in a picture by looking at each individual piece. I think of the learning process as starting in the left brain where you're switching focus from one element of a task to another. Once you've gotten good at it, the task shifts to your right brain where you can see everything come together at once. (Good examples are games like go and driving a car.)

Brain surgeon, author, and popular Conference on World Affairs participant Leonard Shlain gets really into metaphorical left brain/right brain thinking, particularly in The Alphabet vs. The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image ( my review). He gives a lot of fun stuff to think about, but it's important to keep the left/right metaphorical status in mind.

[477150n]

Hm. I may have remembered Saks backwards. Now I'm not sure.

The way it's described in the drawing book is that the left brain sees the thing-as-symbol, while the right sees the thing-as-is. So the left is the fast one- for instance in reading, you can process a whole bunch of letters quickly because each "a" is symbolic, but something novel, like a different typographic system, requires the creativity of the right brain. (The application to drawing being to convince your right brain to draw things as they are, instead of the symbols for things.)

Really I should probably just think about "novice/slow/seeing brain" and "expert/fast/categorizing brain," since too much other stuff is wrapped up in right/left, including, well, actual neurobiology that may or may not go along with the categories I'm trying to impose on it.

[flwyd]

In your native language, you can read words all-at-once. When you're reading in English as a fluent literate adult, you often don't go through the symbolic "c stands for cuh, a stands for ah, t stands for tuh, so if you put them together it becomes cat." Rather, you can read words with typoes, fill in missing words, and may to be oblivious to extra occurrences of certain words. So reading words in your native language written in your native orthography can be a gestalt "right brain" process once you're good at it. But processing and understanding the words as they make up sentences and ideas is (in most people) lateralized to the left side and requires serial one-at-a-time "left brain" thought

[womaninphysics]

being a perfectionist is probably a good thing in physics. except that it's nearly impossible to be perfect at everything on the first try. but it's really fun to start a new activity and spend years working to improve and get better.

the best talk i saw at nist was about music and the brain, but, an interesting factoid he gave in that talk is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master of anything. So, like, 20 hours a week for 10 years. just was interesting to know. So, if you want to become a master of art and you don't start out awesome, just dedicate that time and commit yourself and you will become a master eventually.

[477150n]

It is a profession that rewards striving for perfection. But I've been trying to learn the difference between wanting to do things well and needing to be perfect in order to be an okay person. The latter is counter-productive, because it's just a huge, huge energy drain.

Sure, 20 hours a week for 10 years... or 60 hours a week for 3! Sounds like a post-doc!