"Closure" for Lefties

My sister, drLove, and I had an interesting conversation about "closures". She believes like she hasn't experienced a complete closure of her painful exepriences. Instead of as a zero-sum, on-off, "ditigal" phenomenon, she experiences closure as a matter of continuous, "analog", smooth decreases. Hope I got that right.

If so, then the above dichotomy woud dovetail nicely with the brain research about how the left brain processes reality versus how the right brain does. Digital vs. analog is one way to characetrize this difference. Parts in sequence versus holistic is another.

The basic idea is that the left brain parses reality into symbols that represent aspects of reality. Then these symbols can be arranged, re-arranged, dropped, added, whatever -- thereby changing the perception of reality.

In contrast, the right brain deals with reality directly. 

For example, with a piece of music, the right would record the continuous sounds of the music being performed; to an expert musician, the left brain would process that same music as a sequence of symbols (e.g. musical notes).

Realize that the "space" needed to record the music as it is being performed, versus that needed to store the score of the same music is very different. In the same space needed to store one performance, a great many scores for different pieces of music could be stored. 

This means that for a particular event, the recording of that event for the left brain will take a fraction of the space that the right brain will use for its recording of the same event. This means that right brain recordings store way more information about a particular event than does the left.

How does this apply to this closure disucssion? Well, for closure, all the left brain needs to do is to re-arrange, add, and/or drop the symbols that make up its sparse understanding of that painful event.

The right brain, on the other hand, needs to wipe out one rich and detailed memory and replace it with another. That's probbaly impossible. 

What probably happens is that, for closure, right-brainers collect additional memories that lean toward the feeling of closure. But the earlier memories don't just go away. Together, these collective memories result in an overall feeling. Over time, that feeling can tend toward closure -- but maybe never quite get there.

This is not to say that left dominant people don't use their right brain at all; or that righties don't use their left. Both use both sides.  But each just tends to overuse one side.

This means that, for example, a lefty whose right brain records some event at the same time his left side is doing so might find it difficult to find closure for those events. Even though this person can "rationalize" the symbol representation of reality into a closed state, the right brain memories are still there.

An example for me -- a lefty -- concerns my mother's death. I feel, from a left/symbolic understanding of that, I've pretty much achieved closure. But the instant I smell something that has the aroma of mom, or otherwise perceive some sensation that evokes a right brain, direct sensation memory of her, I might well exeprience a pang of pain, before the left side comes in to subdue that response.

A good test for me will be when I next visit my dad at his house. He still keeps mom's old dresses in the bedroom closet. I'm interested to see what I will feel opening that closet, and looking through and smelling the dresses. That might be a good test for these ideas above.

(Sorry to bore the vast majority of you.)