It is often said that we use only 3% of our brain's potential capability. The remaining 97% is hidden in the right brain. Dr Joseph E. Bogen of the California Institute of Technology points out that people fail to use their right brain, ignoring its potential. He claims that, so far, education has been concerned with the left hemisphere of the brain, which is analogous to a child not being allowed to attend school since his brain which has the possibility of achieving the higher level, is left untouched.
Why has the left brain, and not the right, been central in education up to now? This is because people have taken for granted that the left brain, whose functions are linguistic, is the "single pivot" of the brain, and thus have made no attempt to recognise the faculties of the right brain at all. It is important to understand that, as the left and right brains have distinctive operational mechanisms, each brain has different types of memory circuits.
The present educational system is left brain-oriented, which helps "to foster intelligence" but not "to bring out intelligence itself." Hence, those children who have poor left-brain memory face a dilemma: they are unable to memorize and thus are unable to improve their intelligence. But, the fact is that these children have poor memory only in terms of left brain memory, which is most utilized in customary education. Once their right brain memory is activated, however, these children will display the memory power of a genius, which now lies dormant, and will become superior in terms of intelligence.
There has been a scarcity of literature that explains right brain memory. The right brain has a special memory faculty called “Image Memory? which enables it to memorize things after only one glimpse, like photographing. This faculty is different from the left brain memory, which interprets linguistically. Once the right brain memory faculty is developed, even children with brain disorders or with learning disabilities, whose memories are said to barely function, will be able to develop excellent memory.
There was a child of three years and four months of whom his doctor declared: "This boy has little memory ability, and will have to stay in hospital for life." Instead, the child took right brain memory training, and, after only two months, his memory improved to an amazing degree. He was able to memorize the contents of books after his mother read them to him only once. He also memorized Chinese characters after he saw them once, and mastered the eighty characters, which are required to be learnt in the first grade of elementary school, in only one month. But, this is not a rare example. Children who have taken the right brain training have displayed similar results in many places throughout Japan.
