The Creativity Post: At the fictional Hogwarts school for witchcraft and wizardry in the Harry Potter series, students are sorted into different school houses by a magic hat based on their personalities. Similarly, in elementary school, a teacher may have declared one side of your brain stronger than the other based on your personality. If you’re a creative or artistic type, you would have been identified as right-brained. If you’re an analytical or mathematical type, you would have been identified as left-brained.
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Coming at this from a more figurative way tan a literal one, I agree with this article completely. I know almost nothing about the neuroscience that they are talking about but it makes sense. Trying to split people into any dichotomy is tricky and the creative v mathy dichotomy is just as slippery. It is almost impossible to separate people into these two categories. Take me for instance. Two months before I accepted my CMU offer for theatre, I thought I was going to go into engineering because I was always more inclined to math and science and I liked building things, but then I realized that I really needed to access the creative side of my being more, because I was lacking in that. That is why I decided on theatre because I will be able to still utilize the very analytical side of my personality that likes very logical processes while also making art.
Even the title of this article was pretty shocking to me-- I was one of the kids mentioned in the article that grew up religiously believing that the creative side of my brain was stronger than the analytical side. Funnily enough, I always identified it as being the left side of my brain that’s more artistic and therefore “stronger” than the right rather than the other way around, which just proves further that this concept is entirely a myth. I understand the argument this author is making in that we use all parts of our brain to function normally as human beings, and that our modern idea of the dichotomy of being “right brained” or “left brained” stemmed from studies of epilepsy patients in the 50s. However, I think it can be somewhat beneficial to acknowledge what areas we are more competent with, just perhaps not in the falsely scientific sense of dividing our brains into only two separate sides. Yet as a kid it was a largely important for me to identify as artistic, and this is something that I’ve carried with me all the way through college.
This was funny video and article. I never took the whole left vs. right brain logic as a literal division, but more like "glass half full" like a metaphor. I did find it amusing that they burst that bubble. I thought the history behind the idea of left vs. right brain was intriguing. Science in the 1950s was so weird. I would love to learn more about the bizarre and freaky studies that took place then. This idea of being a creative or an analytic type is very prevalent though. It's a very primal coke/pepsi question that is ubiquitously recognizable for people we know. However, it does not make it scientific. Professor Dave said it best when he referred to it as pop psychology. It is truly an idea that is more fascinating to discuss and decide without knowing the fallacies of the science behind it. To that I say choose away between your Gryffindors and Ravenclaws!
I find this very interesting as a contrast to the conventional teachings of people being left or right brained. In grade school, I did brain training sessions that were meant to help foster greater connections between the spheres of my brain. This was due to the fact that I have dysgraphia, which causes a disconnect between what I think and how efficiently I am able to put it into written words. Even then, because of how close this issue was to me, I had a higher understanding at the time that the left or right division wasn't an all or nothing but a favoring of one side over the other. I found the clarification they said interesting "But this does not justify the pop psychology concept of “left-brained” or “right-brained.” The two hemispheres are different, yet brain imaging technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggest that, on average, we use both sides of our brain equally. We are all “brain-ambidextrous.”" However, they never clarify to say that the brain favors sides depending upon the task at hand.
I am not surprised to find out the "left brain, right brain" dichotomy is a fallacy. I'm don't know a lot about neuroscience, but I feel like breaking down all of human mental and creative functions into "right and left" is a vast oversimplification. Personally, I have encountered a decent amount of this type of categorization in public school, and never really found it useful. Now that I am studying here, I find myself being forced to use attributes associated with both "sides" of the brain in tandem, which only displays to me further that the brain is not split in two, but one complex entity. Even in drawing, which is traditionally linked to "right brain" creative functions, would be impossible without "left brain" analytical and spatial reasoning. I believe that there may be some dichotomy, but the two parts working together is far more prevalent than being split one or the other way.
This semester, I decided to take a class on the biological foundations of behavior, and our teacher spent the first day dispelling myths and misconceptions about the brain. Among those myths was the idea that people are left or right brained. Our teacher said that the main reason that this myth is reinforced is that a child will show an inclination towards what is perceived as the “left” or “right”, and the people around them will push them towards further exploration of those traits, therefore making it seem as though the child is calibrated in a certain way. I think that this perceived biological split reinforces the split between the creative skills and the analytical skills. In the real world, these two things work in tandem, but, especially in school, there is a perceived separation between them. As shown by initiatives in so many educational environments to merge these two spheres, the world advances so much faster and more productively, when all of our minds work together, using all of our strengths, to move forward.
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