Lorena broke her previous personal record on a Concept 2 rowing machine. She was trying to get to 10,000 meters in less than 60 minutes. Actually, the numbers you see to the left are her second best effort. I did not have the best one to put up here which was slightly more. I checked into this and the world record for a light weight woman in her age group is over 15,000 meters and the U.S. record is over 14, 000 meters. Her achievement is an amazing one and she has decided to continue to try to improve on up to 12,000 meters in an hour. Rowing on a Concept 2 rowing machine was my preferred cardiovascular training mode when I was in my mid-thirties. What Lorena has done already is no mean achievement. She started out rowing for around five minutes per session a couple of years ago. I think she will be able to make it to 12,000.
Day: June 14, 2016
It appears the idea that right-brain people are more intuitive, thoughtful and subjective while left-brain people are more logical, analytical and objective is just wrong. It is a complete myth that came out of work performed by Robert Sperry, a Nobel prize winning neuropsycologist who got his undergraduate degree in English and his PhD in Zoology. I think Sperry probably did some pretty good work in his day, but we also got saddled with this left-brain/right-brain meme and a gazillion pop psychology books that are based on a premise that is almost completely misplaced. It seems like Neuropsychology might be a lot like Evolutionary Psychology and much of what passes for Neuroscience (see here and here) where it is OK to just make stuff up. At any rate, here is a great article on the subject from the Wall Street Journal. The following is an excerpt from another article titled Left Brain vs. Right Brain, Understanding the Myth of Left Brain and Right Brain Dominance:
In psychology, the theory is based on the lateralization of brain function. The brain contains two hemispheres that each performs a number of different roles. The two sides of the brain communicate with one another via corpus callosum.
The left hemisphere controls the muscles on the right side of the body while the right hemisphere controls those on the left. This is why damage to the left side of the brain, for example, might have an effect on the left side of the body.
So does one side of the brain control specific functions? Are people either left-brained or right-brained? Like many popular psychology myths, this one grew out of observations of the human brain that were then dramatically distorted and exaggerated.