Brain workout from folk tales

By DIANE KNICH
WASHINGTON POST
Psychologist Robert Ornstein, director of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge, says listening to certain folk tales can exercise the brain and improve thinking.
Ornstein has been looking into how the human brain's two hemispheres work for the past 30 years. In 1978, he found that the brain's electrical response was greater on the left side when people read factual material like newspapers and greater on the right side when they read stories that made them think abstractly.
Ornstein -- thinking that hearing stories that contained improbable events, jokes, twists, subtleties and figures of speech enhanced critical thinking -- began collecting stories he thought did this particularly well. Some of the best examples he found were folk tales commonly told in Afghanistan, Central Asia and the Middle East, many of which are adaptations of ancient Sufi stories.
One of the stories, "Neem the Half-Boy," tells of a boy who must get medicine from the cave of a fire-breathing dragon to become whole. The dragon's fiery breath is harming and scaring the villagers. Neem goes to the cave to reason with the dragon. The dragon tells Neem that he is breathing fire to cook his food. The dragon gives the medicine to Neem, who becomes whole. Neem then brings the dragon a stove so he can cook his food without hurting anyone.
Ornstein thinks this story and others like it enhance activity in the brain's right hemisphere because they involve not only bravery but cleverness, compromise and compassion.