The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain - Betty Edwards [8]
Clearly, for educators like myself, the precise location of these modes in the individual brain is not an important issue. What is important is that incoming information can be handled in two fundamentally different ways and that the two modes can apparently work together in a vast array of combinations. Since the late 1970s, I have used the terms L-mode and R-mode to try to avoid the location controversy. The terms are intended to differentiate the major modes of cognition, regardless of where they are located in the individual brain.
Over the past decade or so, a new interdisciplinary field of brain-function study has become formally known as cognitive neuroscience. In addition to the traditional discipline of neurology, cognitive neuroscience encompasses study of other higher cognitive processes such as language, memory, and perception. Computer scientists, linguists, neuroimaging scientists, cognitive psychologists, and neurobiologists are all contributing to a growing understanding of how the human brain functions.
In a conversation with his friend André Marchand, the French artist Henri Matisse described the process of passing perceptions from one way of looking to another:
“Do you know that a man has only one eye which sees and registers everything; this eye, like a superb camera which takes minute pictures, very sharp, tiny—and with that picture man tells himself: ‘This time I know the reality of things,’ and he is calm for a moment. Then, slowly superimposing itself on the picture, another eye makes its appearance, invisibly, which makes an entirely different picture for him.
“Then our man no longer sees clearly, a struggle begins between the first and second eye, the fight is fierce, finally the second eye has the upper hand, takes over and that’s the end of it. Now it has command of the situation, the second eye can then continue its work alone and elaborate its own picture according to the laws of interior vision. This very special eye is found here,” says Matisse, pointing to his brain.
Marchand didn’t mention which side of his brain Matisse pointed to.
—J. Flam
Matisse on Art, 1973
Interest in “right brain, left brain” research has subsided somewhat among educators and the general public since Roger Sperry first published his research findings. Nevertheless, the fact of the profound asymmetry of human brain functions remains, becoming ever more central, for example, among computer scientists trying to emulate human mental processes. Facial recognition, a function ascribed to the right hemisphere, has been sought for decades and is still beyond the capabilities of most computers. Ray Kurzweil, in his recent book The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, 1999) contrasted human and computer capability in pattern seeking (as in facial recognition) and sequential processing (as in calculation):
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation. That’s rather massive parallel processing, and one key to the strength of human thinking. A profound weakness, however, is the excruciatingly slow speed of neural circuitry, only 200 calculations per second. For problems that benefit from massive parallelism, such a neural-net-based pattern recognition, the human brain does a great job. For problems that require extensive sequential thinking, the human brain is only mediocre. (p. 103)
In 1979, I proposed that drawing required a cognitive shift to R-mode, now postulated