ABSTRACT
The left hemisphere is about 90 percent better than the right hemisphere at recognizing words and about 70 percent better at identifying meaningless syllables or backward speech. A sloppy and chaotic desktop may indicate right hemisphere dominance. One costly effect of modern society is the predominance of the left hemisphere. Stocks, ledgers, money, computers, machinery, and language all demand a heavy reliance on the left hemisphere. Music is ordered sequentially for the left hemisphere, with rhythm and lyrics, and ordered simultaneously for the right hemisphere, with continuously evolving relationships and situations, including the performance of different instruments, sounds, and dynamics, harmonies over time, and melodies. Finally, studies have discovered that the corpus callosum is generally thicker in musicians than in non-musicians. Musicians may be processing melodies in a more analytic, “language-like” manner than non-musicians.
