The title comes from an old popular song, about a man ored with commuting to work along the same old route every day and tempted to escape into unknown adventures by exploring the other side of life.

However, I use it to denote the left brain and the right brain’s role in our daily routines, in the light of theories expounded by Michael Gazzaniga, in “The Mind’s Past”( University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, 201 pp.). According to the author, the left brain interpreter is what makes us distinctively human. It enables us to use syllogisms and sYmbols (cf. Terrence W.Deacon, “The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain”, W.W. Norton, New Yotk, 1997, 527 pp.). It also enables us to form hypotheses (“inductive” thinking) and grasp non-Goedelian truths (cf. Roger Penrose, “The Shadows of the Mind”). That is why the left hemisphere of the brain also controls language.

However, some of the brain interpreter’s interpretations may be wrong, mere confabulations. The brain interpreter works by filling in gaps in sense data, or in any data, to make a consistent picture or theory; and then we don’t know which came from the data and which from the filling in. The result may be false memories or false ideologies. There is too much imagination and too little grounding in reality.

This facility may give rise to our religious experiences (Theodore Roszak, “The Unfinished Animal”) and the theologies we weave around them. These could be non-Goedelian truths (which cannot be proved), or they may be the left brain interpreter’s made-up stories to quickly satisfy our curiosity, our hunger for quick and easy knowledge. Our minds differ from both computers and animals by being able to jump to conclusions in this way, grasping for truth but risking to be wrong.

The right brain hemisphere, on the other hand, has no interpreter. It can only do indexical thinking (cf. Deacon), i.e. Correlational learning through conditioned reflexes, like animals. (In fact, in certain tasks rats have obtained better scores than humans.) Its world is one of pure phenomenology, without language. But an important virtue of the right hemisphere is that it is more truthful, never fabricates false memories that can confuse court trials.

This is not the usual conception of the tasks of the left and right hemispheres. New Age thinkers usually call the left brain logical, linear, and narrowly rational, wh~le the right is the seat of compassion, lateral thinking, and imagination. Some of these traits may check out, but not imagination; the wildest imagination must be ascribed to the left brain interpreter.

So which is left or right at Oak Street? Routine or adventure? Take your choice – each and every morning.