Leftward and Magical Thinking

What if all of the beauty of the arts could be boiled down to a tendency to turn left? I’m not kidding, and I’m not making a political statement. I’m talking about the real thing: physical orientation.

So where to start?

There is a remarkable literature on the relationship between magical thinking and schizophrenic behavior. Not surprisingly, schizotypic ideation (delusional psychotic thoughts) correlates with magical thinking indexes. So, if you believe in mystical connections throughout the universe, you might also believe that forces are communicating with you.

But the connections are more interesting, still. If you ask people to grade the relationship between different words on a 1-5 scale, with 1 indicating the words are unrelated and 5 meaning they are nearly identical, people who rate highly on magical thinking indexes also tend to rate unrelated words more related than those with low index ratings.

The theory is as follows: semantic memory is tied to right-brain functioning and dopamine activity is abnormally high in both schizotypic and magical thinking people in the right hemisphere. Specifically, spreading activation is enhanced by dopamine. We slur ideas together when we have high levels of dopamine. We believe things are mystically connected and, at the extreme, we even get semantic relationships gated into perceptual memory and turned into hallucinations. But at lower levels of activation, we get the insanity of artistry.

And it is the right hemisphere action that results in the tendency to turn left because the right hemisphere controls left motor functions. So those with schizophrenia, those who damage their brains with amphetamines, and those with magical thinking tendencies will veer a bit left when asked to mark the center of a piece of paper. At the extreme, Parkinson’s patients with extreme dopamine issues will wander in leftward arcs. So will rats.

Leftward, always leftward. The artists all lingered to the left while finding patterns where the rest of us found only randomness. It is the source of gurus and mystics, artists and poets, and, perhaps, NASCAR drivers.