The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [26]
—Jerre Levy
“Psychobiological
Implications of Bilateral
Asymmetry,” 1974
“Every creative act involves . . . a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.”
—Arthur Koestler
The Sleepwalkers, 1959
The two modes of information processing
Inside each of our skulls, therefore, we have a double brain with two ways of knowing. The dualities and differing characteristics of the two halves of the brain and body, intuitively expressed in our language, have a real basis in the physiology of the human brain. Because the connecting fibers are intact in normal brains, we rarely experience at a conscious level conflicts revealed by the tests on split-brain patients.
Nevertheless, as each of our hemispheres gathers in the same sensory information, each half of our brains may handle the information in different ways: The task may be divided between the hemispheres, each handling the part suited to its style. Or one hemisphere, often the dominant left, will “take over” and inhibit the other half. The left hemisphere analyzes, abstracts, counts, marks time, plans step-by-step procedures, verbalizes, and makes rational statements based on logic. For example, “Given numbers a, b, and c—we can say that if a is greater than b, and b is greater than c, then a is necessarily greater than c.” This statement illustrates the left-hemisphere mode: the analytic, verbal, figuring-out, sequential, symbolic, linear, objective mode.
On the other hand, we have a second way of knowing: the right-hemisphere mode. We “see” things in this mode that may be imaginary—existing only in the mind’s eye. In the example given just above, did you perhaps visualize the “a, b, c” relationship? In visual mode, we see how things exist in space and how the parts go together to make up the whole. Using the right hemisphere, we understand metaphors, we dream, we create new combinations of ideas. When something is too complex to describe, we can make gestures that communicate. Psychologist David Galin has a favorite example: try to describe a spiral staircase without making a spiral gesture. And using the right-hemisphere mode, we are able to draw pictures of our perceptions.
My students report that learning to draw makes them feel more “artistic” and therefore more creative. One definition of a creative person is someone who can process in new ways information directly at hand—the ordinary sensory data available to all of us. A writer uses words, a musician notes, an artist visual perceptions, and all need some knowledge of the techniques of their crafts. But a creative individual intuitively sees possibilities for transforming ordinary data into a new creation, transcendent over the mere raw materials.
Time and again, creative individuals have recognized the differences between the two processes of gathering data and transforming those data creatively. Neuroscience is now illuminating that dual process. I propose that getting to know both sides of your brain is an important step in liberating your creative potential.
The Ah-ha! response
In the right-hemisphere mode of information processing, we use intuition and have leaps of insight—moments when “everything seems to fall into place” without figuring things out in a logical order. When this occurs, people often spontaneously exclaim, “I’ve got it” or “Ah, yes, now I see the picture.” The classic example of this kind of exclamation is the exultant cry, “Eureka!” (I have found it!) attributed to Archimedes. According to the story, Archimedes experienced a flash of insight while bathing that enabled him to use the weight of displaced water to determine whether a certain crown was pure gold or alloyed with silver.
This, then, is the right-hemisphere mode: the intuitive, subjective, relational, holistic, time-free mode. This is also the disdained, weak, left-handed mode that in our culture has been generally ignored. For example, most of our educational system has been designed