The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (11 page)

Today, educators are increasingly concerned with the importance of intuitive and creative thought. Nevertheless, school systems in general are still structured in the left-hemisphere mode. Teaching is sequenced: Students progress through grades one, two, three, etc., in a linear direction. The main subjects learners study are verbal and numerical: reading, writing, arithmetic. Nowadays, however, seats often are set circles rather than in rows. Time schedules are more flexible. But learners still converge on “correct” answers to often-ambiguous questions. Teachers still give out grades that often are tied to the “bell curve,” which guarantees that one-third of every group will be judged “below average,” regardless of achievement. And everyone senses that something is amiss.

The right brain—the dreamer, the artificer, and the artist—is lost in our school system and goes largely untaught. We might find a few art classes, a few shop classes, something called “creative writing,” and perhaps courses in music; but it’s unlikely that we would find courses in imagination, in visualization, in perceptual or spatial skills, in creativity as a separate subject, in intuition, in inventiveness. Yet educators value these skills and have apparently hoped that students would develop imagination, perception, and intuition as natural consequences of training in verbal, analytic skills.

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.

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.

A useful way to regard handedness is to recognize that hand preference is the most visible outward sign of how an individual’s brain is organized. There are other outward signs: eyedness (everyone has a dominant eye, used in sighting along an edge, for example) and footedness (the foot used to step off a curb or to start a dance step). The key reason for not forcing a child to use the nonpreferred hand is that brain organization is probably genetically determined, and forcing a change works against this natural organization. Natural preference is so strong that past efforts to change left-handers often resulted in ambidexterity: children capitulated to pressure (in the old days, even punishment) and learned to use the right hand for writing but continued to use the left for everything else.

Moreover, there is no acceptable reason for teachers or parents to force a change. Reasons proffered run from “Writing with the left hand looks so uncomfortable,” to “The world is set up for right-handers and my left-handed child would be at a disadvantage.” These are not good reasons, and I believe they often mask an inherent prejudice against left-handedness—a prejudice now rapidly disappearing, I’m happy to report.

Putting prejudice aside, there are important differences between left-handers and right-handers. Left-handers are generally less lateralized than right-handers. Lateralization means the degree to which specific functions are carried out almost exclusively by one hemisphere. For example, left-handers more frequently process language in both hemispheres and process spatial information in both hemispheres than do right-handers. Specifically, language is mediated in the left hemisphere in 90 percent of right-handers and 70 percent of left-handers. Of the remaining 10 percent of right-handers, about 2 percent have language located in the right brain, and about 8 percent mediate language in both hemispheres. Of the remaining 30 percent of left-handers, about 15 percent have language located in the right brain, and about 15 percent mediate language in both hemispheres. Note that individuals with right-hemisphere language location—termed right-hemisphere dominance, since language dominates—often write in the “hooked” position that seems to cause teachers so much dismay. Scientist Jerre Levy has proposed that hand position in writing is another outward sign of brain organization.

Do these differences matter? Individuals vary so much that generalizations are risky. Nevertheless, experts agree in general that a mixture of functions in both hemispheres (that is, a lesser degree of lateralization) creates the potential for conflict or interference. It is true that left-handers statistically are more prone to stutter and to experience the reading difficulty called dyslexia. However, other experts suggest that bilateral distribution of functions may produce superior mental abilities. Left-handers excel in mathematics, music, and chess. And the history of art certainly gives evidence of an advantage for left-handedness: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were all left-handed.