The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [28]
Fortunately, such development often does occur almost in spite of the school system—a tribute to the survival capacity of creative abilities. But the emphasis of our culture is so strongly slanted toward rewarding left-brain skills that we are surely losing a very large proportion of the potential ability of the other halves of our children’s brains. Scientist Jerre Levy has said—only partly humorously—that American scientific training through graduate school may entirely destroy the right hemisphere. We certainly are aware of the effects of inadequate training in verbal, computational skills. The verbal left hemisphere never seems to recover fully, and the effects may handicap students for life. What happens, then, to the right hemisphere that is hardly trained at all?
Perhaps now that neuroscientists have provided a conceptual base for right-brain training, we can begin to build a school system that will teach the whole brain. Such a system will surely include training in drawing skills—an efficient, effective way to teach thinking strategies suited to the right brain.
Handedness, left or right
Students ask many questions about left- and right-handedness. This is a good place to address the subject, before we begin instruction in the basic skills of drawing. I will attempt to clarify only a few points, because the extensive research on handedness is difficult and complicated.
First, classifying people as strictly left-handed or right-handed is not quite accurate. People range from being completely left-handed or completely right-handed to being completely ambidextrous—that is, able to do many things with either hand, without a decided preference. Most of us fall somewhere on a continuum, with about 90 percent of humans preferring, more or less strongly, the right hand, and 10 percent preferring the left.
The percentage of individuals with left-hand preference for handwriting seems to be rising, from about 2 percent in 1932 to about 11 percent in the 1980s. The main reason for this rise is probably that teachers and parents have learned to tolerate left handed writing and no longer force children to use the right hand. This relatively new tolerance is fortunate, because forcible change can cause a child to have serious problems, such as stuttering, right/left directional confusion, and difficulty in learning to read.
“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.”
—Aldous Huxley
The Doors of Perception
Some famous individuals usually classified as left-handers:
Charlie Chaplin
Judy Garland
Ted Williams
Robert McNamara
George Burns
Lewis Carroll
King George VI of Britain
W. C. Fields
Albert Einstein
Billy the Kid
Queen Victoria
Harry S. Truman
Casey Stengel
Charlemagne
Paul McCartney
Pharoah Rameses II
Cole Porter
Gerald Ford
Cary Grant
Ringo Starr
Prince Charles
Benjamin Franklin
Julius Caesar
Marilyn Monroe
George Bush
Mirror writing reverses the shape of every letter and is written from right to left—that is, backwards. Only when held up to a mirror does it become legible for most readers:
The most famous mirror-writer in history is the Italian artist, inventor, and left-hander Leonardo da Vinci. Another is Lewis Carroll, left-handed author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, whose mirror-written poem is shown above.
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