The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (10 page)

Words and phrases concerning concepts of left and right permeate our language and thinking. The right hand (meaning also the left hemisphere) is strongly connected with what is good, just, moral, and proper. The left hand (therefore the right hemisphere) is strongly linked with concepts of anarchy and feelings that are out of conscious control—somehow bad, immoral, and dangerous.

Until very recently, the ancient bias against the left hand/ right hemisphere sometimes even led parents and teachers of left-handed children to try to force the children to use their right hands for writing, eating, and so on—a practice that often caused problems lasting into adulthood.

Throughout human history, terms with connotations of good for the right hand/left hemisphere and connotations of bad for the left hand/right hemisphere appear in most languages around the world. The Latin word for left is
sinister,
meaning “bad,” “ominous,” “treacherous.” The Latin word for right is
dexter,
from which comes our word “dexterity,” meaning “skill” or “adroitness.”

The French word for left—remember that the left hand is connected to the right hemisphere—is
gauche,
meaning “awkward,” from which comes our word “gawky.” The French word for right is
droit,
meaning “good,” “just,” or “proper.”

In English, left comes from the Anglo-Saxon
lyft,
meaning “weak” or “worthless.” The left hand of most right-handed people is in fact weaker than the right, but the original word also implied lack of moral strength. The derogatory meaning of left may reflect a prejudice of the right-handed majority against a minority of people who were different, that is, left-handed. Reinforcing this bias, the Anglo-Saxon word for right,
reht
(or
riht
), meant “straight” or “just.” From
reht
and its Latin cognate
rectus
we derived our words “correct” and “rectitude.”

These ideas are also reflected in our political vocabulary. The political right, for instance, admires national power, is conservative, and resists change. The political left, conversely, admires individual autonomy and promotes change, even radical change. At their extremes, the political right is fascist, the political left is anarchist.

In the context of cultural customs, the place of honor at a formal dinner is on the host’s right-hand side. The groom stands on the right in the marriage ceremony, the bride on the left—a nonverbal message of the relative status of the two participants. We shake hands with our right hands; it seems somehow wrong to shake hands with our left hands.

Under “left-handed,” the dictionary lists as synonyms “clumsy,” “awkward,” “insincere,” “malicious.” Synonyms for “right-handed,” however, are “correct,” “indispensable,” and “reliable.” Now, it’s important to remember that these terms were all made up, when languages began, by some persons’ left hemispheres—the left brain calling the right bad names! And the right brain—labeled, pinpointed, and buttonholed—was without a language of its own to defend itself.

Along with the opposite connotations of left and right in our language, concepts of the duality, or two-sidedness, of human nature and thought have been postulated by philosophers, teachers, and scientists from many different times and cultures. The key idea is that there are two parallel “ways of knowing.”

You probably are familiar with these ideas. As with the left/right terms, they are embedded in our languages and cultures. The main divisions are, for example, between thinking and feeling, intellect and intuition, objective analysis and subjective insight. Political writers say that people generally analyze the good and bad points of an issue and then vote on their “gut” feelings. The history of science is replete with anecdotes about researchers who try repeatedly to figure out a problem and then have a dream in which the answer presents itself as a metaphor intuitively comprehended by the scientist. The statement on page 39 by Henri Poincaré is a vivid example of the process.

In another context, people occasionally say about someone, “The words sound okay, but something tells me not to trust him (or her).” Or “I can’t tell you in words exactly what it is, but there is something about that person that I like (or dislike).” These statements are intuitive observations that both sides of the brain are at work, processing the same information in two different ways.

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.

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 to cultivate the verbal, rational, on-time left hemisphere, while half of the brain of every student is virtually neglected.

With their sequenced verbal and numerical classes, the schools you and I attended were not equipped to teach the right-hemisphere mode. The right hemisphere is not, after all, under very good verbal control. You can’t reason with it. You can’t get it to make logical propositions such as “This is good and that is bad, for a, b, and c reasons.” It is metaphorically left-handed, with all the ancient connotations of that characteristic. The right hemisphere is not good at sequencing—doing the first thing first, taking the next step, then the next. It may start anywhere, or take everything at once. Furthermore, the right hemisphere hasn’t a good sense of time and doesn’t seem to comprehend what is meant by the term “wasting time,” as does the good, sensible left hemisphere. The right brain is not good at categorizing and naming. It seems to regard the thing as-it-is, at the present moment of the present; seeing things for what they simply are, in all of their awesome, fascinating complexity. It is not good at analyzing and abstracting salient characteristics.