BRAIN, that is.
Left-brain / Right-brain and the interplay between the two.
I vow to never flood your inbox with political rantings. I’ll leave that to the rest of the internet and the 50/50 split of 100% certain people out there. Back to our brains, an infinitely fascinating topic. Our team took in a super cool workshop in Toronto this month, delivered by Elizabeth Gilbert and Martha Beck. The topic: Accessing our creative selves.
First, creativity isn’t just for the artists, it’s for everyone. It’s the open, expansive, problem-solving, ideating side of ourselves needed so badly in almost every aspect of life. It’s responsible for:
- Visual-spatial processing
- Pattern recognition
- Holistic thinking (big picture)
For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll call it the right brain.
Now for the left. As I understand it, the left side of the brain is where we learn, plan, reflect to avoid danger and promote survival. It is the side of ourselves that has absolutes, like right and wrong, true and false.
It’s responsible for:
- Language processing and production
- Logical and analytical thinking
- Sequential processing (step-by-step)
Modern life plays favourites with our brain, and left is winning big time. We’re swimming in spreadsheets, drowning in data, and living by our calendar alerts. Great for efficiency? Sure. But we’re starving our creative right brain – that free-wheeling, big-picture-seeing, emotionally-intelligent side that helps us connect, create, and find meaning in what we do.
This means we have to be more intentional about cultivating that side of our thinking. Bring back finger painting (metaphorically speaking… or not), unstructured exploration, face-to-face conversations that wander off topic, and those moments when we let our minds play instead of produce.
One quick Martha Beck hack for getting on the right track:
Choose 3 smells you love. Then, 3 tastes. 3 textures. 3 sounds. 3 sights.
Close your eyes and imagine them one at a time and then all together. Soak in that feeling for a minute. Then, tackle your next brainstorm.
I could go on and on and on… but my calendar just pinged. Let’s schedule a time to be random and spontaneous.
A note to all the neuroscientists in my life (I actually don’t have any). I recognize referring to the left and right brain is a fairly blunt instrument and the interplay between them is greater than once thought, but it’s a simple way to think about our thinking styles, so I did it anyway.
