Right brain, left brain
I just figured something out:
Roughly half of my dissertation was about how people mentally organize and store information; the other half was about what it means to talk about poetic form and how poetry seeps into our heads and stays there. (Actually, the proportions are off. Another big part was making the argument that there’s even a connection between point A and point B. One of the questions at my defense, if I recall correctly, was whether I wanted the Magnum Opus to be primarily about A or B.)
Right now my interests are shifting toward LIS-related topics (representation of knowledge! topic mapping! how people develop classification systems! classification in general!) and at the same time I’m trying to start up my creative writing again. I’m having simultaneous urges to write cycles of poems and cook up something long and research-y about the intellectual history of information management. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; I think I’ve always been fascinated by both systems and metaphors.
I suspect it’s a matter of left-brain/right-brain balance: I feel most intellectually alive when both hemispheres are working and, ideally, talking to each other. Which might partially explain the "you’re right in the middle" result I got when I took the What gender is your brain? quiz.
You, dear reader, probably didn’t need to know all that, but I’m glad I’ve hashed it out.
I’ve always thought it was a good thing to be “in the middle” on these things, as it was an indication that you were balanced, the golden rule, and all that, but I began to question that when these quizes constantly began to suggest that I had a “feminine” brain and wrote like a “woman.”
If it makes you feel any better, Loren, the Gender Genie always tells me I write like a guy, and the Gender Test says I’m “definitely a man.”