This probably won`t come as welcome news to your verbal, analytical left brain, but the truth is it can`t be very creative, on the job or in any other realm, strictly on its own. It tends to think in limited, familiar ruts.
But its silent partner, the visual, perceptual right brain, has the capacity to envision a problem in its parts and as a whole, to search for patterns and to make that final, glorious leap to ”Eureka!”
In the statements, letters and journals of creative people throughout history, the moments of invention and discovery nearly always are described in terms of vision: ”All at once I saw the answer.”
Cognitive scientists have produced books full of tantalizing bits and pieces about the creative process, but the concept of creativity has remained elusive.
TAPPING CREATIVITY
Betty Edwards, a very creative thinker and a professor of art at California State University at Long Beach, believes that learning to draw, using the artist`s visual, perceptual mode of thinking, can lead to greater creativity.
Years ago, through a series of sudden insights and a lucky break, Edwards discovered that anyone can learn to draw if they are taught how to tune out the dominant left hemisphere of the brain and to shift into the right-brain mode.
Edwards` best-selling 1979 book, ”Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” detailed a series of exercises designed to cause the brain to shift gears.
In her early days as an art teacher, Edwards noticed that every so often a few students suddenly progressed from crude sketches to very fine work. Upon questioning, they could only say they were ”seeing things differently.”
One day, when some students were having a particularly difficult time with figure drawing, Edwards distributed a reproduction of a master drawing and on impulse told them to turn the image upside down and draw it. To everyone`s surprise, the drawings were excellent.
Edwards pondered the matter and connected her experiences with the
”split brain” studies carried out in the late 1950s and early 1960s at the California Institute of Technology by Nobel laureate Dr. Roger W. Sperry and his associates. Those studies proved that perceptual cognition is a vastly different kind of thought, one that the verbal left brain is not well-suited to describe.
BRAIN TRICKS
The upside-down drawing, it turned out, tricks the left brain into bowing out so that the right brain can work without interference from the left brain, which names and categorizes visual information.
Again and again students reported that their everyday lives seemed richer after they learned to draw, that they looked at people differently, not in the verbal way of naming–old, young, pretty, ugly–and dismissing.
That led Edwards to pursue her intuitive belief that creativity can be taught through drawing skills.
Based on the latest research on dual brain function, Edwards` new book,
”Drawing on the Artist Within” (Simon & Schuster, $17.95), provides a step-by-step series of drawing exercises to stimulate the ability to think creatively.
”The ability to draw is inborn,” Edwards contends. ”It`s there in the brain. A person with a normal brain who has learned other subjects is equally capable of learning visual, perceptual skills–that is, learning to draw.
”The problem is we`ve got this deterrent concept that some kind of God-given gift is necessary. You can imagine what would happen if we had that idea about reading.
”What if we thought that only a person whose specific gift included reading would be able to learn to read? The upshot would be that only one or two people in a class of 30 would catch on to reading skills and those persons would be designated as `talented for reading.` The remark might be made:
`Billy`s mother reads, so it must be in the family genes.` ”
TAKING SIDES
People sometimes walked out in a huff during Edwards` earliest lectures about her right-mode/left-mode art theories, an occurrence she attributed to rejection on the part of the dominant left brain.
Nowadays, she lectures widely and has conducted creativity seminars for leading businesses, including IBM and General Electric.
”Indeed, business people are left-brained,” Edwards said, ”but they are receptive to all kinds of ideas these days because they are faced with such challenges, really creative things going on overseas in terms of business.
”Also, I think the advance of computers has to do with this. Computers now can do the left-brain processes faster than the human brain. (Computer scientists) are making a conscious effort to understand the workings of the other half of the brain which computers are not going to be able to emulate for at least two decades, to try to tap into those brain functions for the good of the company.”
In business seminars, Edwards works with what she calls ”analog drawings” to ”dredge up” the inner life of the mind by using an
alternative, visual language (drawings) to give it tangible form. Just as the left brain has a verbal language, the right brain has its own way of making subjective thought objective, Edwards says.
Analog drawings use only the language of line–flowing or broken, thick or thin, dark or light–no symbols or pictures whatsoever.
Students typically are asked to draw analogs of their thoughts on concepts, such as anger, for example. The directions: ”Think back to the last time you were angry. Without using words at all, even to label the event or reason for your anger, feel within yourself what that anger was like. Imagine you are feeling the emotion again, that it flows first from deep inside, then into your arm, down into your hand and into the pencil, where it emerges from the point of the pencil to record itself in marks that are equivalent to the feeling, marks that look like the felt emotion.”
The drawings seem to produce information that`s unexpected and sometimes unwelcome, Edwards said.
”I think what happens is that the left brain`s guard gates are bypassed. The language system doesn`t know this stuff is going to come pouring out. And, therefore, this becomes a way to access what`s going on in the subconscious brain.”
GETTING IN TOUCH
Edwards flipped to a student`s analog drawing, ”Portrait of JMB,”
reproduced in her book. ”The woman wrote on the back of it that she discovered she felt that way about this person and didn`t know it,” she said. ”You tend to reject it. This ephemeral, fragile part of the brain sees this person as he really is, not what you hope, what you think, what you`ve decided.”
For problem-solving, analog drawing can be used ”to get subconscious thinking out on a piece of paper where you can look at it and get it transferred back to the verbal system where it becomes real.”
Edwards points out that group brainstorming has not paid off, and research upholds that individual brainstorming would be better, and can be aided by analog drawing.
”We take a look at these drawings,” Edwards explained. ”We can turn them upside down. We can ask: `If we look at it from a different point of view, what are its possibilities?` The word for a concept can never be as rich as the images of it.”
Interestingly, the Japanese, who have made so many inroads in electronics and in management methods, have two languages, a phonetic language processed in the left hemisphere and a pictographic language processed in the right hemisphere.
”The Japanese culture also emphasizes negative space,” Edwards noted.
”The Japanese, for example, often leave sentences unfinished and the listener is supposed to provide the negative space. (Americans want them to finish their sentences.)
LESSON FROM JAPAN
”Spatial concepts are deeply embedded in Japanese culture. For these reasons, I think they have grasped our technology, superimposed it on their cultural way of thinking and have pushed ahead very fast.
”The Japanese, curiously, have felt a lack of creativity in their own culture–that is, there are many rigid aspects of Japanese cultural training. Typically, they do not see this as anything permanent and they`ve got a huge government-supported program to promote creative thinking.”
Edwards, who calls drawing ”the silent twin to reading,” wishes that our schools would provide parallel training for the two modes of thinking of the human brain, instead of dismissing art as a useless frill.
”Learning to draw is truly a wonderful experience, very difficult to put into words,” she says. ”Drawing gives one a feeling of power–not power over things or people, but some strange power of understanding or knowing or insight.” —
