Once upon a time it was considered that our beautiful brains operated in halves, or hemispheres. To break it down to it’s simplest form – the left is predominantly the rational, analytic, logical, detail loving side. The Right non-linear and instinctive – interpreting emotions and non-verbal cues etc. – it’s speciality is context & the big picture – the creative approach.
More recently science is pointing to the fact that the hemispheres are not as cut and dried as first thought, and further that our brains are also capable of retraining if necessary, known as ‘neuroplasticity’.
But for now it is enough to know that our brain is an amazing machine. While logic, reasoning and linear functions can be replicated by machines, the part that is still not able to be imitated to any truly consistent effectiveness is the creative, contextual, non-verbal right brain.
As us right brainers sing out in delight for our skills shall not be usurped by machines (side note: if you are interested in this topic you simply must read…. Daniel Pink’s wonderful tome “A Whole New Mind – Why Right Brainers Shall Rule the Future” which quite eloquently explains the six fundamentally human abilities that are essential for professional success and personal fulfillment and reveals how to master them….I digress), it is important to note that even the ‘right brain’ would be lost without it’s siamese twin ‘left brain’ which is required to help us in our daily functioning and making sense of the, well, sensory information that we are bombarded with.
So whilst many people with a tendency towards creativity have traditionally done the “I’m not so good at maths, I’m a right brainer” and vice versa…”I can’t do art, I’m too analytical” blah blah blah…we find that one cannot exist without the other, and whilst many people do demonstrate a preference towards creative thinking or analytical type thinking – they are both in there, and both can be trained, developed and nurtured.
And importantly if push came to shove, the right brain, as we have seen in instances of brain injury, can be trained to perform ‘left brain’ functions and the left to take over some traditional right brain tasks as required.
Oh yes, those necktop computers* we carry around are very sophisticated and still full of mysteries to be unravelled, or not! But mark my words…they are trainable…so I don’t want to hear anybody moaning that they are too left brained to be creative. We are all creative, we all have the capacity to have new and creative thoughts…you are artful…embrace your artful genius!
It is my mission to help you as parents, help your children, embrace their artful genius too…welcome aboard the AG Train to Crea-town! Woo woooooooooo.
The Art Institute of Vancouver has a fantastic little Right Brain V’s Left Brain test you can do here… as they say on the site “Being creative or artistic doesn’t mean you know how to draw or play an instrument. Being creative is a way of thinking, a way of viewing the world.” Bravo sirs! Bravo indeed!
* a phrase coined by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson in the 80’s