Thousands of years ago Socrates told us, “Know Thyself.” But this turns out to be much harder than we might have thought. If we look at the brain, it doesn’t appear to be just one, but two brains. And ourselves too, are we really just one person? Or multiple personalities all fighting for control over this one person moving through space called you?
My name is Shaun McMillan and this is the Best Class Ever.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
I first became interested in left and right brain thinking when I read the book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” This book was interesting because it was able to discern why people have such a hard time learning to draw better than kindergarteners. It argued that students were using the parts of the brain we use in all of our other classes, the parts of the brain that process language, listening, reading, and writing. Language takes very complicated concepts and turns them into a library of very simple symbols. Letters and words, icons, symbols, and stick figures take an extraordinarily sophisticated idea and turn it into something you can draw abstractly as three to four lines. These parts of the brain that become active when we use language are typically found on the left side of the brain.
But a large part of the brain is dedicated to processing visuals. In fact when we participate in activities that deal with spatial reasoning like drawing, these parts of the brain are typically active on the right side of the brain. Exploring the world and taking in all of the insane amount of visual data to find which parts we should focus on and how it relates to everything else we see is a very important skill. We use these skills to navigate the world, to drive, to move through the world, and to map out the world.
Help, I Still Draw like a Kindergartener
As an art teacher I found my students weren’t able to really look at the world and draw it as they actually saw it. They would look at a cardboard three dimensional box, and draw it as a simple square. A 3D box has six sides, three of which you can see at any given time. But in kindergarten we learned to label and memorize these sophisticated images as simple graphic representations. Think of those simple alphabet flash cards. A is for apple. And you see an apple as a flat irregular red circle with a stem and maybe a dark green leaf.
The problem is when I show my high school students a real apple, they don’t even look at the apple. They just draw a symbol representation of an apple, and then they are embarrassed because they don’t draw any better than they did when they were in kindergarten.
Shut Up Left Brain
This is the left side of your brain saying, “oh I got this. This is easy. I know a simple shortcut for drawing apples.” But art is not about seeing without knowing. I tell my art students over and over again, “Draw what you see. Not what you know. What you actually see. Not what you think you know.”
So how do we shut up that left part of your brain that knows? How do I force my students to draw using the right part of the brain that sees? I put up complicated images and ask my students to draw them, but first I turn the image upside down. This way your brain can’t easily label something. Labels are language. Language, symbols, and labels over simplify things.
Observational drawing is the art of appreciating all of nature’s beautiful complications and recording your own unique perception of it. It is the art of seeing the world afresh, and inspiring others to see it in a new way. When you see a painting of a flower, it’s so much more than just a flower. It’s a combination of color, form, light, shadow, and an interplay of shapes. It’s the details the artist chose to render, and the lack of details in the parts of the image the artist chose to ignore. A unique filter of perception.
What if we fully separate the two brains?
But there is an even crazier aspect of having two separate hemispheres of the brain. These two brains are connected through the corpus callosum, a large, C-shaped nerve fiber bundle found beneath the cerebral cortex. In some extreme cases where patients were having constant epileptic seizures, doctors found that they could reduce the number of seizures by cutting the corpus callosum. In these cases there was absolutely no connection between the patients’ left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Now remember, the parts of your brain that light up when you speak in complicated sentences are all contained within the left hemisphere of the brain. You should also know that the left side of your body is controlled by the right hemisphere, and the right side of your body is controlled by the left hemisphere. Since this is the case we can close the left eye and show something only to the right brain. We can also close your right eye and show something only to your left brain.
In the patients with no corpus callosum to pass information from one side of the brain to the other, we could show the word “B-a-l-l, Ball” to the right brain and then ask the patient about it. The patient would respond that they did not see anything at all. This response of course came from the left brain which hadn’t seen the word. But then if we give the patient several objects to choose from, and ask them to choose which item they had seen, they would reach for and grab the ball. So the right brain can read the word “ball,” but it can’t express this using complicated sentences.
They showed these patients one image to the left brain and a different image to the right brain. For instance we might show a photo of a house covered in snow to the right brain, and a chicken’s foot to their left brain. Then they asked the patient to point to the image related to what they saw. The hand controlled by the right brain would point to the snow shovel, while the hand controlled by the left brain would simultaneously point to the chicken.
Now it gets interesting. They would ask the patient why they pointed to the snow shovel. Remember that the left brain never saw the snow related image, and because their two brains are disconnected it really can’t know why the left hand (controlled by the right brain) pointed at the image of a snow shovel. But only the left brain is able to express itself using full sentences.
The patients all came up with reasons for why they pointed at the image of snow shovel. “I think because maybe you use a shovel to clean a chicken house?” The left brain really didn’t know why, but it never admitted this. Instead it just made up a plausible story to explain it away. While this may seem surprising, I’m sure if you think about it, you have probably done this a thousand times. We don’t really know why we do what we do, but that doesn’t make us any less likely to make up some logic and justify it afterwards.
These patients could also draw two totally different images with each hand simultaneously. A form of multitasking that most of us are incapable of.
For the most part these patients were able to function totally normally, but there were certain instances where their daily behaviors became really weird. Sometimes when trying to choose what to wear they would grab a shirt with one hand, and then the other hand would discard it. There were times when a person’s arms were totally in conflict with one another. And when asked to explain why the person would always just make up a reason to explain any behavior that only their right brain had participated in.
CGP Grey has a great video that illustrates this experiment really well.
Chaos & Order, Yin & Yang
In the ancient philosophy of Daoism the world is seen abstractly as divided up into Yin & Yang, Chaos and Order. This is represented by the black and white circular symbol found in the center of the Korean flag. These two curved tear-drop shapes, one black with a white dot at its center, and the other white with a black dot in its center. These two dance around each other compelled by a centrifugal force. It’s really an amazing graphic with deep psychological and philosophical significance. It represents the duality of the world and the balance between its two forces.
Duality
The world is often divided up into two counter-balancing forces. Male and Female, dark and light, war and peace, tension and release. There is a time to gather, and a time to scatter. A time to sew and a time to reap. In the west we often tend to think in terms of good and evil, labeling one side as good and the other as bad but daoism focuses more on the necessity of both. Again it comes down to chaos and order.
Right=Chaos
Broadly speaking, the two hemispheres could be seen as correlated with chaos and order. The right brain, which is good at exploring large visual data sets and charting new pathways can be seen as good at handling chaos.
Left=Order
Once this new path is tread over and over again it can be categorized, simplified, and reduced to a simple pattern of muscle memory, word, or symbol, it becomes easy to store away into our library of language. This is order. Like a library of books, language, sentences, words, letters, and symbols all perfectly placed onto shelves where every subject has its place.
We need both
Too much chaos is not good as we could easily get lost and overwhelmed. But too much order is also not good. At first we find comfort in the familiar but eventually it becomes boring and possibly even obsolete as the world changes around us. So we need both. We need a time to adventure out and discover something new, and time to retreat and synthesize it.
Learning to Draw
Even if you are not artistically inclined or interested in becoming an artist, I highly recommend drawing lessons as a way to quiet your inner voice. It has a very calming effect that allows you to focus for long periods of time. It’s almost like the perfect distraction. Like playing a game, doing a puzzle, or filling in a coloring book, it allows you to lose track of time and get into a zone which is very satisfying while also developing your visual-spatial intelligence.
For anyone who would like to try the drawing exercises I mentioned earlier, I have a free lesson which I will provide in the show notes on www.BestClassEver.org.
