Top Brain, Bottom Brain by PhD Stephen M. Kosslyn & G. Wayne Miller

Author:PhD Stephen M. Kosslyn & G. Wayne Miller [Stephen M. Kosslyn, PhD]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Perceiver Mode

The nineteenth-century poet Emily Dickinson illustrates well the characteristics of operating in Perceiver Mode—the mode of thinking and behaving in which people deeply engage in observing and analyzing their surroundings and circumstances (using the bottom-brain system) but tend not to implement complex or detailed plans (using the top-brain system).

Born into a well-to-do family in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson was a conscientious student who had talent in music and art. She received a classical education and was exposed to the works of poets Wordsworth, Longfellow, Emerson, and Thoreau. Sickness periodically interrupted Dickinson’s studies. After a few months in college, she retreated to the family home. She had no career ambitions and essentially lived day to day, occasionally entertaining friends but mostly reading and writing poems that she made little effort to have published. As the years passed, Dickinson became increasingly reclusive, although she did correspond with a number of people. Her life unfolded with little outward drama—but with a surplus of time, a gift for those who are prone to reflection.

According to the Theory of Cognitive Modes, people who habitually rely on Perceiver Mode are most comfortable when they are in positions that require them to be sensitive observers, advisers, or evaluators, and thus it was with Dickinson. She appears as if she did not utilize the top-brain system as much as she could have for devising complex and detailed plans (although she did use it, clearly, for formulating poetic narratives to describe and explain what she encountered). And when she did rely on the top-brain system for planning, such as when the day-to-day care of her chronically sick mother fell to her, she did not formulate elaborate multistep plans and did not adjust her plans based on her observations. She apparently got up every day and did what she felt required to do. Except for those duties, her time was her own.

Dickinson was a devoted gardener, and she treasured her hours with her flowers, bees, and butterflies, from which she drew insights that informed her poetry. Solitude suited her writing, but she was never a true hermit. Even at the point in her life when she rarely welcomed visitors, she kept contact with the outside world—and sought the counsel of certain trusted friends, notably writer Sarah Huntington Gilbert, who married her brother. Dickinson and Gilbert maintained a long correspondence, and Gilbert wrote the poet’s obituary in 1886.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given her voracious reading, Dickinson wrote poems about the brain, which had become of great interest to nineteenth-century Americans, in part because of the publicity surrounding Phineas Gage and the great popularity of phrenology. In poem number 632 (Dickinson did not title her works), she writes lyrically of its power:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As Sponges—Buckets—do—

But science was not Dickinson’s abiding passion; she found her greatest themes in observing nature, in the changes of season and day, in the cycles of life and death.

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