Brain Self-check
Would you find it virtually impossible (almost genetically impossible) to calculate quickly and accurately, the proportion of interest to capital still owing on your mortgage, for example, or the area of your garden as a proportion of the total area of your house and garden? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to draw portraits that looked like the person being drawn, to paint landscapes, master dimension and perspective, understand the history of art and make realistic and abstract sculptures? YES/NO
Would you find it virtually impossible to compose music and songs, identify different classical composers by just a few notes from their works, dance to music in time, and sing songs where every note you sang was the note as it should have been sung? YES/NO
You will probably be relieved to know that over 90 per cent of people surveyed were confident that they were genetically incapable of accomplishments in these three vital areas of numerical, artistic and musical skills.
You will hopefully be pleased and encouraged to know that they were all wrong!
Subsequent research discovered that when people were trained – by good teachers – in those areas of skill that they had assumed to be weak, they suddenly became much stronger in those areas. It was very much like identifying a weak muscle group that was weak not because the muscles themselves were fundamentally incapable, but simply because they had not been used for a long time.
This was not all: in addition to everyone being able to develop areas that they had previously considered weak, another amazing finding soon began to emerge. With the new ‘mental muscle’ now in place, the other ‘mental muscles’ all began to improve their performance.
Thus, for example, if people who had been weak in imagery and art, were trained to be competent in that field, they suddenly became more skilled with words, more able to manipulate numbers and, generally, more creative. Similarly, if people who had been weak in numerical ability were trained to strengthen this area, their imagination and musical abilities also improved.
What appeared to be happening was that the left and right sides of the brain were having ‘conversations’ with each other. The left brain would receive information and send it over to the right brain, which would process the information in its own way, and then send it back to the left side, and so on. By this process the brain was synergetically building up information, and adding to its own intellectual and creative power by combining the different elements. By the early 1980s, the left/right brain paradigm was becoming known around the globe, and books were beginning to be written about this extraordinary discovery.
Then came the difficulties.
problem number 1
You may have heard that the left-brain activities were generally labelled as ‘intellectual’, ‘academic’, or ‘business’ activities, and that the right-brain activities were correspondingly labelled the ‘artistic’, ‘creative’, and ‘emotional’ activities.
However, if all this research is true, and if by using both sides of our brains our overall intelligence and creativity rises, then by definition the great creative geniuses must have been using the same mental process – and their whole brains. But if the above labelling of the right and left activities of the brain is correct, then academics and intellectuals such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would have been ‘left brained’, and musicians and artists such as Beethoven and Michelangelo would have been ‘right brained’ – in other words, they would not have been using all of their brains at all!
More research was obviously required to shed light on this growing controversy. I and a number of other passionately curious individuals began to gather data on the great creative geniuses, and to relate it to the left/right brain model.
What do you think we found? We discovered this about ‘left-brained’ Einstein:
Case History – Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was nominated as the greatest creative genius of the 20th century. However, he was a poor student, preferring daydreaming to studying, and was eventually expelled from school for being a ‘disruptive influence’.
As a teenager he became inspired by the imaginative side of mathematics and physics, and was equally interested by the work of Michelangelo, whom he studied in depth. These mutual interests encouraged him to play even further with his imagination, and he developed his now-famous ‘Creative Mind Games’ in which he posed himself an intriguing question, and then allowed his imagination to run riot.
In one of his most famous Creative Mind Games, Einstein imagined that he was on the surface of the sun, grabbing a sunbeam, and travelling directly away from the sun at the speed of light, to the very ends of the universe.
When he came to the ‘end’ of his journey, he noticed to his astonishment that he was roughly back where he had started. This was logically impossible: you don’t go in a straight line forever and end up where you started!
Einstein therefore took another imaginary sunbeam ride from another part of the sun’s surface, and again went on a straight-line journey to the end of the universe. Once again he ended up relatively near where he had started.
Slowly the truth dawned on him: his imagination had told him more truths than his logic. If you travel in straight lines ‘forever’ and continually return to the vicinity of where you started, then ‘forever’ must be at least two things: curved in some way, and possessing a boundary.
This was how Einstein came to one of his most profound insights: our universe is a curved and finite universe. He did not come to this giant creative realization by left-brain thinking alone, but by combining his knowledge of number, word, order, logic and analysis with his massive imagination, spatial awareness and ability to see the whole picture.
His insight was a perfect blending and conversation between both sides of his brain. It was a perfect ‘whole-brained’ creative realization.
The same turned out to be true, in reverse, for the ‘right-brained’ creative geniuses. Let us take, for example, the ‘ultimate’ right-brainer, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Case History – Ludwig van Beethoven
Beethoven is known for his turbulent, questioning and passionate spirit, for his desire for freedom from tyranny and censorship and for his ongoing fight for freedom of artistic expression. He is generally accepted as the ‘perfect’ example of the wild and untamed model of genius.
All of this is true, and fits in with the traditional interpretation of the right-brained creative genius. However, what has escaped most people’s attention is that Beethoven, like all other musicians, was also incredibly left-brained!
Consider the nature of music: it is written on lines, in sequence; it follows its own logic; and it is based on numbers. Music has often been described as the most pure form of mathematics there is (and it is interesting to note that many of the great mathematicians had music as their main hobby, and vice-versa).
As well as being passionately imaginative and rhythmical, Beethoven was also passionately meticulous. It was Beethoven who pioneered the use of the musical metronome, stating that it was a Godsend to him because it would now mean that every musician and conductor in the future would
