Read through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s booklet “Understanding Drug Therapy and Managing Side Effects. I was struck by how unemotional and cold the section “Social and Emotional Effects of Drug Therapy” was. Why should it matter, and what is this emotion thing anyway?

The answers are found, I think, in the left brain/right brain thing.

What is it emotion? For me, good emotions are the pleasure that I get from Mo and Miranda and the wider family. Looking at art and listening to music. Friends. Touch. I think of my walks with Diggory in the town forest, enjoying the current season, whatever it may be. The forest has a special but restrained beauty to me, because I also have in my head what it looked like last month, whether it be seeing the first lady-slipper of the year, or because the first fall of pine needles laid a golden carpet that will last only for a few days before dulling.

In my blog entry earlier [day 13] on atheism and prayer, I referenced Paul Bloom’s article in the Atlantic Monthly. His thesis is that belief in God comes from an overshoot of the perception of a mind/body split. We are pre-wired to be dualists. Once you accept that the spirit (or soul) is different from the physical body then it’s but a short step to God, the creation, and the afterlife.

Scientists broadly reject these three notions, or at least, reject them as science. Theists allow for the existence of all three beliefs (God, Creation, and the Afterlife). There are eight different possible combinations of beliefs and it would be interesting to find out the number of folks that fall into each bucket. Let’s call the following the GCA model. (It’s probably not original but I have not come across it in this way before – and not that I’ve been looking particularly hard.

	GOD	CREATION	AFTERLIFE
YES	a	b	c
NO	d	e	f

Intelligent Design folks, for example, would hold that condition d, b, any is possible, i.e., Creation by an agent other than God. I have met people who believe that condition d, e, c is possible, i.e., there is no God or Creation, but there is some form of Afterlife. And I think that Orthodox Judaism may hold that conditions a and b are true, but not c.

But this model is all red-herring. I think the questions surrounding warmth and caring have to do with the different roles of the left-brain and right brain. It would be interesting to integrate the L/R brain model with the GCA model, but this may prove difficult since the L/R brain model is not a yes/no thing.

I wrote earlier [day 11] about how the mind is involved in the healing process, and in particular, in the reduction of medical error. This is obviously a left-brain thing. When most folks are talking about mind they are talking about a right-brain thing. Monica wrote me afterward about the role of music therapy. She’s right. In my eagerness to play up the rational aspects of mind in the healing process, I downplayed the role of faith and omitted any reference to the role of creativity. It seems a little odd to label creativity as a science, even though recent advances in understanding it have come from scientific research. Betty Edwards talks about research into the corpus callosum and its role in communicating between the left and right hemispheres, and this is a book published in 1970. I would suspect that there have been other advances made since.

Science is often thought of as being analytic, with little or no role for creativity. The biographies of influential scientists show that this is far from true. One of my favorites is Dick Feynman, familiar to physics student for his three classic books, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics.” Non physicists know him better as the member of the Rogers Commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger accident, who, during the hearings on Capitol Hill immersed an O-ring in a cup of iced-water and showed how it became less flexible. He had widespread and curious creative passions, such as his love for Tuvan throat singing. Top doctors are often accomplished in playing classical music. But most of us are not top scientists, and the population at large views science as having no heart.

I don’t know much about music therapy, but I find in my present condition that listening to music helps me in various ways. First, it helps to center me when my mind starts to wander for whatever reason. Secondly, and classical music in its broadest sense, is particularly useful here. Following the story of the music exercises the mind.