In second grade, I was selected for a research project at Long Beach State. Twice a week, a bus would pick up Howard Dyke and me from David Burcham Elementary School and take us to campus. There was a math room and an art room, and we’d go back and forth between the rooms completing projects, and the adults would ask us lots of questions. I was annoyed. I wanted to be left to play with the metallic papers Hallmark had donated to the art room.
In my mid-thirties, I attended the Seattle American Society of Landscape Architects conference mainly because Betty Edwards was the keynote speaker. I was interested in her right/left brain work (the research with kids like me – who were considered both right and left-brained, resulted in this book: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She started by describing her research decades earlier at Long Beach State. I was stunned as she recounted precisely what I remembered and realized she was talking about me. In a room with about 2000 other people, I spontaneously stood up.
While she was on the right track, further research has debunked the theory that “artistic people” work out of their right brain and “analytical people” work out of their left brain. Ms. Edwards chose Howard and me because we were both right and left-brained, according to the tests used at the time. Boiled down to mean good at both art and math.
We now know ALL of us use both our right and left brains to do both art and math. The hemispheres are better at different things, but they work collaboratively to help us do the work.
According to Mark Beeman, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s, “the world is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time,” Beeman says. “it needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.” “While the left hemisphere handles denotation – it stores the literal meaning of words – the right hemisphere deals with connotation or all the meanings that can’t be looked up in the dictionary. When you read a poem or laugh at the punch line of a joke, you are relying in large part on the right hemisphere and its ability to uncover linguistic associations.”1
Beeman and his research partner, psychologist John Kounios attempted to deconstruct an “epiphany” or what I call a seedbop with MRI and EEG testing. Seedbops seem like they appear out of nowhere, unbidden. But in the lab, they found that the brain lays “the groundwork for a breakthrough.” It starts with an intense mental search on the left side, looking for the right answer in all the known places. If nothing fits, it gets tired. “What happens next is the stumped phase of creativity. … this phase isn’t very much fun.” Even in studies, subjects felt frustrated and complained about the difficulty of problems. (Sounds like me ) They even threatened to quit the experiment!2
But what Beeman and Kounios found is that “These negative feelings are actually an essential part of the process because they signal that it’s time to try a new search strategy.” Instead of relying on finding an answer, the brain shifts to the right side and starts to make “unexpected associations” – connecting the frustrating dots to map out solutions previously unknown to the solver. A seedbop arrives. “The suddenness of the insight is preceded by an equally sudden burst of brain activity.”3
“And then, just when we’re about to give up, the answer is whispered into consciousness. “An insight is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Beeman says. “there are a trillion possible connections in the brain, and we have to find the exact right one. Just think of the odds!”4
So don’t let the frustration get you down. It means your brain parts are talking to each other and getting ready to send you that incredible idea. Trust the process, embrace the discomfort, and sally forth.
1 1 Jonah Lehrer. Imagine: How Creativity Works. Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. pg 9 Note: Subsequent to the publishing of this book, Mr. Lehrer was found to have fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan. In my opinion, the information he researched and used in this book still has great value and is replicated in creativity research of other authors. I do not include any Bob Dylan quotes Lehrer wrote.
2 Ibid. pg 16
3 Ibid. pg 16-17
4 Ibid. pg 18
