COMMITMENTS : Crossed Wires : Puzzled by your partner’s logic--or lack of it? It could just be that your brains work differently.

Hanging up a few pictures seemed easy enough. But only when Cathy Pitt and her fiance, Bill Kapsalis, stood with nails and hammer in hands did they realize how differently they approached this basic task.

Her plan was to eyeball the wall and pound in nails where she thought the Ansel Adams photographs would look best.

He wanted to use a tape measure and to find the stud in the wall to be sure the photos would be straight and secure.

The Great Computer Hunt was further evidence that the West Hills couple looks at the world from different perspectives. Bill’s plan was to buy a family computer, with features to please Cathy and him, along with her sons--Michael, 10, and Ryan, 8.

“I made a chart,” he says. There were columns for the amount of memory, whether the computer was expandable, whether it had CD drive and other data. He photocopied the chart and filled in the data on a fresh copy as he looked at more than 10 models.

Cathy’s reaction to the chart?

“She laughed,” Bill says. Then she threw up her hands and left the decision to him.

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These scenarios sound all too familiar to San Diego therapist Rebecca Cutter, who not only has lived and researched them but has written about them in her new book, “When Opposites Attract” (Dutton).

Her subtitle says it all: “Right Brain/Left Brain Relationships and How to Make Them Work.”

Differences such as those experienced by Pitt and Kapsalis, Cutter contends, are not always due to gender, as couples often believe, but to basic “brain wiring.” A partner who is right-brain dominant, valuing intuition and emotions, sees the world differently from one who is left-brain dominant, valuing logic and familiar routines.

Everyone exhibits behaviors that are both right-brain and left-brain, but some people fall closer to one end of the continuum than to the middle. When a very left-brain dominant person hooks up with a very right-brain partner, different views of the world--and the relationship--are inevitable, Cutter says.

While the lefty balances the checkbook to the penny, her right-brained partner estimates the balance--or doesn’t worry about it at all. A right-brainer often wants to spend leisure time partying, while a left-brainer often prefers to devote the time to her hobby.

The differences, while daunting, don’t have to doom a relationship, Cutter says, a self-described right-brainer happily married to computer specialist Rick Johnson, who she says leans to the left. Some critics say Cutter is oversimplifying the problem, but she contends that making an effort to understand how an oppositely wired partner thinks and feels can go a long way toward relationship harmony.

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For starters, she suggests each partner ask the other: “What’s it like being in a relationship with me?”

Often, a left-brain dominant person will say to the right-brain dominant partner: “You are not predictable. You’re off the wall. You hurt me in ways you don’t know.”

One source of hurt feelings, Cutter has found during counseling sessions, springs from the sense of failure a left-brainer can feel when a right-brainer is always pressing to know her feelings--instantly.

A right-brain dominant person is likely to respond, “You’re not romantic enough. You’re boring. Sometimes I feel alone. You become preoccupied.”

The incredible ability of a left-brainer to focus on a single task and to be very practical can leave a right-brain spouse feeling isolated and unloved, Cutter explains.

Like many other therapists, Cutter began thinking about brain dominance differences two decades ago. In the early ‘80s, she happened upon a paperback written for the spouses of engineers and computer programmers, aimed at helping them understand their “logical” partners.

“It was gender-biased,” Cutter says. “All the partners were female, all the computer scientists were male.”

The more couples she counseled, the more she began to believe that brain wiring differences sparked many disputes. When she noticed the patterns in both straight and gay relationships--and then married a left-brainer--she was convinced. Of course, gender differences can be at the root of many disagreements, she says. But she thinks they have gotten too much blame.

Brain-wiring differences often surface during arguments, Cutter says. A right-brainer spews out all her feelings, looking for a thread or a connection that might solve the argument. A left-brainer prefers to sit and think things through before talking. The left-brainer feels bombarded; the right-brainer feels ignored.

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Gift-giving occasions can be ticklish too. For their first Valentine’s Day together, Cutter’s beloved presented her with road flares. Cathy Pitt had hoped for a piece of jewelry on the first Christmas she shared with Kapsalis. But on Christmas morn, it was a VCR she unwrapped.

“I was grateful for the VCR, because we did need one,” she says. So she thanked him and added that jewelry wouldn’t have been a bad present either.

Cutter suggests couples look beyond what seem like unromantic motives. The road flares, she knows now, reflected Johnson’s love and a genuine concern for her safety. After some thought, Pitt decided that the VCR represented “his desire to spend more time with me--to sit and watch movies at my place.”

Respecting each other’s thought processes can often lead to compromise. Cutter has gone through the same picture-hanging experience as Pitt. Today, she and her mate would do things differently, she says.

“He would listen to my input,” she says. “And I would not make fun of him.” When the couple assembled a set of bunk beds, Pitt was content to measure just one post. But Kapsalis persuaded her to measure all four. In their newlywed days, she recalls, her spouse would be likely to say something like, “ ‘OK, this picture should be hung 27 and 22/23 inches from that one’--and I would be rolling on the floor.”

For her part, Cutter no longer gives her husband presents like the South American poncho, a gift she considered exotic but he obviously did not. It has hung in the closet for several years. As she puts it now: “He’s not Juan Valdez.”

Gradually, as one partner understands where the other is coming from, they might even exhibit uncharacteristic behaviors. After “The Year of the Road Flares,” Cutter received a garden hose--wrapped around crystal wine glasses. Cathy Pitt recently received a ring.

Some couples learn to value input from their opposite partner. Steve Parks, a hospital publications editor, has been married for six years to Kathy, a compensation and benefits administrator at another hospital. When they searched for a day-care center for their daughter, Trina, now 20 months, he says both approaches proved valuable.

“I went from gut feeling,” he says. As they toured the centers, he took note of how happy the children seemed and whether he got a warm feeling from the place. “My wife got references, checked them, called around. She went unannounced one day (to visit).”

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While other therapists call Cutter’s approach oversimplified, they also say she is making some valid points.

“She is certainly picking up on a critical area of misunderstanding among couples--that is, a fundamental difference in wiring,” says Steven Goldstein, a psychologist at Kaiser Permanente in Woodland Hills who specializes in brief psychotherapy and has read Cutter’s book.

What Cutter calls hemispherical differences Goldstein sometimes considers temperamental differences. Arguing styles, in his view, are temperamental differences. One partner likes to mull things over; another wants to discuss everything out loud immediately. Arguing over which approach is best, Goldstein says, is like trying to answer the question: “Which is better, to be a zebra or a tiger?”

Save the arguments, he tells couples, over solvable concerns like whether to buy a house or a condo. With temperamental differences, he says, the fight can go on and on--”because there is really no problem to be resolved.” The solution, he says, is to respect the differences.

Cutter’s views beg the question: Wouldn’t it be simpler if right-brainers paired up with right-brainers and the lefties did the same?

In some ways, sure. When two right-brainers hook up, Cutter says, “it’s probably the easiest relationship to be in for connectedness and companionship.” But it is also “like two kids at home without a parent,” she says, especially if neither wants to take responsibility for finances and other logical, left-brain tasks.

Two left-brainers often lack passion and spontaneity. “From the outside it could look like a cold relationship, but not to them.”

But it’s when opposites hook up, Cutter says, that the real sparks often fly.

“The chemistry comes from being very different.”

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Are You Right or Left?

Everyone uses both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. But under certain situations, the right hemisphere (involved in intuition and emotions) will be dominant over the left (involved in facts and logic) or vice-versa.

Over time, some people tend to become more left-brain or right-brain dominant, while others remain flexible, exhibiting left-brain or right-brain dominance as situations dictate.

In her book “When Opposites Attract,” San Diego therapist Rebecca Cutter includes a quiz to help determine how you’re wired. Here are three questions from that quiz:

A. I am good at remembering names.

B. I have trouble remembering names.

A. I speak in monitored, carefully thought-out phrases.

B. I speak spontaneously, not thinking about what I’m saying.

A. I am told that I am very predictable.

B. I am told that I am often unpredictable.

Results: If you answered quickly, you are more likely to be right-brain dominant, according to Cutter. If you gave it some thought before answering, you are more likely left-brain dominant.

If all your answers are A, you tend to be left-brain dominant.

If all your answers are B, you tend to be right-brain dominant.

If you could answer yes to both A and B, depending on the situation, it might indicate that you fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum.

Source: “When Opposites Attract: Right Brain/Left Brain Relationships and How to Make Them Work” (Dutton, 1994).